A series of "progressive" Jewish organizations are setting up prayer groups for Tisha B'Av demanding that immigration camps in the US be shut down and, presumably, the migrants be given opportunities to become full US citizens or at least to have more rights given to them.
One wonders, though, how come they are silent on how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries for over seventy years?
They've been in camps for seven decades. They've been discriminated against. They have been stopped from becoming citizens of their host countries. And most of them want very badly to be offered citizenship.
Why aren't these supposedly progressive groups advocating for Palestinian human rights in Arab countries? Why do they care more about people from Central America than Palestinians?
(h/t Irene)
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From an early age, I was aware of the ancestral scars I inherited at birth, and growing up, I often heard stories about how my relatives lost their homes and happy lives.
My illiterate grandparents, Ahmad and Amni Fakhoury, had worked hard to establish a thriving farm in the village of Irtah, Palestine. But their good life ended in the aftermath of World War II, when the British military stripped away my family’s land and belongings—even killing some of my relatives—to make way for Jewish settlers from Europe. They became unable to support themselves in their own homeland.
Because the Palestinian schools were shut down, my father and his eight siblings were spread across the globe so that they could continue their education, all the while enduring poverty and discrimination in foreign countries.
Remaining Palestinians were not so fortunate. Those who resisted losing their homes were killed or imprisoned, and others were sent to live in inhumane encampments.
The author, Ronya Fakhoury Banks, goes on to describe how her parents moved from Kuwait to the US where she rejected her Palestinian heritage, became a mess, learned about meditation and got her act together.
Even though she ends off her article "May we stop living in fear and begin living in peace and love, and see how we are all one in heart," the quoted piece above shows that she is not exactly practicing what she preaches.
Irtah was a small village south of Tulkarem. Jews never lived there. The British never kicked Arabs out of their houses to make way for Jews. If Ahmad and Amni Fakhoury lived there before World War II, they could have stayed after WWII and after 1948 when Jordan annexed it.
They would have become Jordanian citizens. There was no reason for "Palestinian schools" to have been shut down from Israeli or British actions/
It is possible that her family's land was turned into a no-man's zone in 1948, as Irtah is very close to the 1949 armistice lines. It is more likely that with the influx of refugees, resources became harder to come by and her family decided to move elsewhere in the Arab world voluntarily, as Arabs have for centuries.
Or Banks' family has been lying to her about why they left Palestine/Jordan.
Tulkarem grew and now contains Irtah as a neighborhood.
Palestinians were not "killed or imprisoned" for resisting losing their homes on either side of the Green Line.
This story is nothing less than an attempt to inject anti-Israel hate in an otherwise harmless article about meditation.
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Thousands of Israelis on Thursday evening attended the funeral for a yeshiva student killed in a West Bank terror attack, with mourners remembering him for his “light and love.”
The body of Dvir Sorek was found early Thursday with stab wounds outside the Migdal Oz settlement, where he studied at a seminary as part of a program combining religious study and military service. He was last seen Wednesday leaving Migdal Oz for Jerusalem to buy a book for a teacher.
“Dear precious, beloved Dvir, in a few days we were supposed to celebrate your 19th birthday,” Yoav Sorek, Dvir’s father, said at the funeral in the Ofra settlement. “I think of these 19 years and I can’t avoid smiling because your memory reminds me of a bright face, positive thought, innocence and love for humanity.
Yoav Sorek described his son as a “gift” that his family was privileged to enjoy for nearly 19 years and said his murder in no way tainted his “innocence.”
“A gift that spread light and goodness inside the family and outside of it. Without pretension and without cynicism. For this gift I have said and I will say again: God giveth and God taketh away,” he said.
“Evil lovers of death took your life, my Dvir, but they did not harm your innocence, light and love. You left us pure, and we will try to bring about light and goodness, to strengthen our family despite the pain and to choose life,” Yoav Sorek added.
As the funeral began, those in attendance sang songs in Sorek’s honor.
Fireworks being fired in Silwad, an Arab village near Ofra, during the funeral of Dvir Sorek the Yeshiva bochur/Soldier who was murdered last night in Gush Etzion. pic.twitter.com/eHFbjOeKAn
The father of Dvir Sorek, the yeshiva student found stabbed to death in a terror attack in the West Bank on Thursday, said he hopes that his son died quickly and without a prolonged struggle with his killers.
“I very much hope that it happened the way that I’m imagining it: That he was attacked from behind and wasn’t face to face with evil when he left this world,” Yoav Sorek told reporters outside his home on Friday.
“I [hope] he left the world purely,” he said. “I hope that he didn’t leave this world after an unsuccessful struggle with those that ambushed him.”
Yoav Sorek said the family was waiting to hear the conclusions of the initial investigation into his son’s killing.
“There’s nothing new about Jews being the targets of Arab terrorism,” said Sorek, who is the editor of the influential Tikvah Fund’s Shiloach Journal. “This is something that has accompanied us a long time.”
The body of Dvir Sorek was found early Thursday riddled with stab wounds outside the Migdal Oz settlement, where he studied at a seminary as part of a program combining religious study and military service.
Grandfather and grandson.
They were both murdered by terrorists just because they were born Jewish.
The grandfather, Rabbi Benyamin Herling, was murdered in October 2000. His grandson, Dvir Yehuda Sorek, was murdered early this morning.
Mari Cohen: You write news, and you also write opinions. Is it traditional in Israel for journalists to do both?
Amira Hass: At Haaretz it has developed like this, rejecting this very American view that journalists should be “objective.” Nonsense, we all have opinions. And we all have a background. An Israeli journalist who served in the army is full of opinions, only he doesn’t claim to have them. You express your opinions by your choice of words. I know in other Israeli media—on the radio for example—they will never report on the issues I report on. There is an opinion that the land belongs to us Jews, so we don’t have to report about all the tricks that Israel has in order to take Palestinian land. There is an opinion [expressed] in the very choice of what to write about and what not to write about. Haaretz has freed itself from this artificial distinction, this deceptive notion that an op-ed is only for columnists and a piece of news is only for journalists.
Hass is claiming that objectivity in journalism is somehow a strange American idea. In fact, of course, it is the bedrock of journalism altogether. The International Federation of Journalists' first two paragraphs in its Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists state:
1. Respect for the facts and for the right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist.
2. In pursuance of this duty, the journalist shall at all times defend the principles of freedom in the honest collection and publication of news, and of the right of fair comment and criticism. He/she will make sure to clearly distinguish factual information from commentary and criticism.
Hass and Haaretz are explicitly violating the basic ethics of journalism.
To be sure, Hass has a point. No journalist is truly objective. Editors do choose which stories to publish, which to ignore, which to put on page 1.
But by agreeing to the basics of journalistic ethics, these media agree that they will issue corrections and not engage in histrionics inside a news article. They agree to strive for objectivity. They try to keep biased language out of news articles.
Hass in this interview states, and is quoted in the Jewish Currents (which clearly subscribes to her philosophy) headline, as saying "Apartheid Is Israel’s 'Desired Reality'”.This is how she writes. If people think that Haaretz is a newspaper, they believe these opinions as facts.
Haaretz can tell the world that it is not in the news business, and that would be fine. But when they claim to be a newspaper, that means that they adhere to basic standards.
Instead, they actually ridicule such standards.
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This year Tisha B'Av, the Jewish fast day that commemorates the destruction of both Temples, comes out on the same day as the first day of the Islamic feast of Eid al Adha - this Sunday.
Jewish organizations that support Jews visiting the Temple Mount are pushing for large numbers of Jews to ascend the Mount on that most appropriate day.
Muslim leaders are very upset over the possibility of Jews visiting the Temple Mount on Eid, and they are trying to force all Jerusalem Muslims to go to the Al Aqsa Mosque to block the Jews:
The Higher Islamic Commission (HIC) in Occupied Jerusalem, the Council for Waqf and Islamic Affairs, and the Supreme Council of Fatwa, an Islamic body based in eastern Jerusalem, called on all mosques around the city to close on Eid al-Adha, and for Muslims to head toward al-Aqsa mosque compound to perform the Eid prayer.
The three Islamic bodies in a statement issued today stressed the need for Muslims to head toward al-Aqsa mosque, Islam's third holiest site, on Sunday, first day of Eid, in response to calls made by Jewish groups, known as 'Temple Mount’ organizations, to prevent Muslims from entering the mosque and allow the intrusion of settlers to mark the so-called Tisha B’Av, which coincides with Eid al-Adha, to mourn the destruction of the biblical temples.
These organizations are even telling Muslims to delay slaughtering cattle, one of the main customs on Eid al Adha, until Monday in order to maximize the number of Muslims on the site on Tisha B'Av.
Notice the blatant politicization of Eid by these Muslim groups, calling to stop people from praying in local mosques to force them to make a political protest.
There are early reports that Israeli police will not allow Jews to enter the Temple Mount on Tisha B'Av, but sometimes they change their minds as they did on the last days of Ramadan when originally Jews were barred but an assessment was made to allow Jews to ascend before Jerusalem Day that coincided with Ramadan.
Jews will not be allowed to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron on Sunday because that is one of the holidays that Muslims have exclusive access to the divided holy site. In response, organizations are organizing prayers immediately outside the site in tents.
(I will not be posting from Saturday night through Sunday morning because of Tisha B'Av, so any news about the Temple Mount that day will be delayed.)
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BDS Egypt, part of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement against Israel, called for a boycott of Jennifer Lopez’s first concert in Egypt in New Alamein City in response to her recent gig in Israel, which she referred to as ‘mother land’ on her social media.
In an open letter to the organisers, BDS Egypt called for the show to be cancelled.
“This concert will take place after her previous concert in occupied Palestine days ago, which she insisted on carrying out despite many calls to boycott Israel and cancel the concert,” the group wrote.
In another post, the organization noted that the Egyptian company’s plans to organize the concert attempts to “normalize the Zionist enemy and those involved in supporting its crimes,” and that Lopez’s photos on social media “with occupied Palestine behind her” is “provocation.”
Though Jennifer Lopez refused to respond to calls to boycott Israel, BDS Egypt calls for every Egyptian to “boycott this concert in response to the previous positions of the American singer” and reject any “normalization attempts”.
First the haters try to get J. Lo. to boycott Israel.
They fail, miserably.
Now they are saying that any performace by her will result in "normalization" with Israel.
Apparently, Jennifer Lopez now has Zionist cooties. How else could her performance imply normalization with Israel?
Notice, however, that no one of the "human rights" community is calling on J. Lo. to cancel her concert in Egypt due to Egypt's poor human rights record.
For some reason, the "human rights" crowd only calls for artists to boycott one country.
By the way, the concert is this evening in New Alamein City in Egypt. The Egyptian BDSers did not choose their battle wisely.
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Jews today are caught between competing definitions of who we are and who we must be. We are not convenient. According to taste we are colonizers and liberators, belligerents and victims, a religion and a state. The post-war obsession with the Nazis has inevitably corralled Jews into a place of significance that flatters us but that we cannot ultimately bear. That significance turns Israel-Palestine into the struggle, an object of fascination, horror and support across the world. The world can pick and choose the Jewish state that it imagines: Israel as the symbol of Western oppression, the symbol of resistance to Islamic supremacy, the symbol of redemption, the symbol of irredeemable violence.
However much the world wants to settle on the image of the Jew of their choice, something always escapes control. Some or all of us refuse to be what is required of us, causing frustration and disappointment. And that means that we have inevitably ruined anti-Semitism too, building on the Nazi’s sterling work in doing the same.
We ruined anti-Semitism for consensus anti-Semites by seeking to take control of our existence, by building up worldly power.
We ruined anti-Semitism for those who do not wish to be consensus anti-Semites by ceasing to be defensible.
We ruined anti-Semitism for Jews, by not taking the easy route, by refusing to be “Jews.”
Given the now inescapable fact that Jews as an entirety cannot be assimilated into narratives about what anti-Semitism is, non-Jews are increasingly being selective: choosing the Jews they damn and the ones they save. And we are playing along, telling the world who the real Jews are, the Jews that are worth defending. This has not only contributed to the ruination of any kind of understanding that can encompass Jews as a whole, it has contributed to our own fragmentation as a people.
This year’s August congressional trip to Israel is different from previous years, as so much attention is focused on who is not joining, specifically the members of the pro-BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) “Squad,” Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
However, most members who come to Israel do have an open mind and can grasp the difficulties that have thwarted decades of efforts at resolution of the conflict between Israel and its enemies, some who will not be satisfied until there is no Jewish state and no Western-oriented presence in the region.
Some say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about the occupation, and Israel for its own good should unilaterally withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, and that the Jews of all peoples, after centuries of oppression, should not be occupying another people’s land.
Yet if there is to be created an autonomous Palestinian state adjacent to Israel, is it reasonable to expect that missiles won’t be exploding in Tel Aviv, or that they won’t have to run their children into bomb shelters all the time everywhere in Israel?
Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005. Its reward was three wars launched from the coastal enclave and plenty of indignant international condemnation for Israel defending itself against forces launching missiles from school yards and hospitals, and digging tunnels under borders to sneak across and murder civilians.
A Reuters article yesterday about a Palestinian-developed app to help West Bank drivers avoid traffic caused by Israeli checkpoints covers up select forbidden West Bank roads — those prohibited to Israeli drivers (“Palestinian app helps drivers avoid Israel checkpoint bottlenecks“).
Correspondent Rami Ayyub asserts: Around 3 million Palestinians live in the territory along with some 450,000 settlers, who can generally drive in the area without major restriction using so-called “bypass roads” built to avoid Palestinian towns.
The notion that Israeli settlers “generally drive in the area without major restriction” is belied by the fact that West Bank roads are heavily restricted to Israeli drivers. In fact, Israeli drivers are prohibited from entering at all in Area A of the West Bank, which constitutes more than 10 percent of the territory. In other words, Israeli drivers are kept off entire roads in the areas under full Palestinian control.
As a result, Israeli drivers must take a much more circuitous, time-consuming routes to avoid forbidden Palestinian locales. So while there are surely bypass roads, their existence is not tantamount to driving “without major restriction.” Bypass roads exist precisely because of the major restrictions.
Have you ever seen a sign in Israel that says "Palestinians are not allowed to enter"?
They can enter my city, and no one will hurt them, I can not enter their city, and they call Israel an apartheid state?
Jerusalem, August 8 - Parties hoping to gain positions in any anticipated coalition to emerge from next month's parliamentary elections reached accord on one of the chief issues facing any such development: that those whose demands contradict theirs should demonstrate flexibility for the sake of coalition stability and integrity.
Prominent members of parties whose requirements for membership in a coalition conflict with those of other parties competing for reelection agreed today that the other ones should compromise on those demands, lest negotiations to form a coalition break down once again and the country face a third round of elections and face a constitutional crisis.
Yisrael Beiteinu chief Avigdor Liberman told reporters that despite their fundamental differences with Haredi parties on such contentious issues as the universal military draft, his group and the Haredim see eye to eye on the need for the other to bend. "We have vastly different assumptions governing our worldviews," he acknowledged in a telephone interview Thursday, "but that does not prevent us from knowing there are certain points where our positions overlap, where we might even come together. In this case, each us of knows the other must give in if we are to make any progress for the public good."
United Torah Judaism leader Yaakov Litzman, currently the Deputy Minister of Health, concurred. "To the casual observer we and Yisrael Beiteinu - or Blue and White, for that matter - have so little in common that the thought of us finding any shared elements in our respective Weltanschauungs would be ridiculous," he observed. "Still, on one crucial point there isn't the slightest daylight between us: we insist they compromise on the points that for us are non-negotiable, and vice versa."
Even parties that have declared they would not sit together in any possible coalition agreed on this point. "Things would have to change drastically for us to be able to share positions in a government with the religious parties," conceded Meretz chairwoman Tamar Zandberg. "Obviously that's a hypothetical scenario, given all the poll numbers that foresee a right-wing majority getting elected, but still, should that shift the other way in the next six weeks, we can definitely see ourselves dovetailing with UTJ and even Shas on this. Even though we hold polar-opposite positions on such questions as the role of religion in public life and the extent to which the government should accommodate religion, if at all. It's one of those rare instances of unity in a fractured polity, and we should savor it."
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An expert in ecotourism and natural and cultural heritage, Professor Ahmad Al-Malaabeh said in a lecture held by the Al-Hayat Party entitled "Mount Haroun [Aaron], the myth of the alleged tomb and the purpose of building the Mamluk Mosque", said that there is no evidence that Prophet Aaron was buried in it.
He pointed out that there are attempts to Judaize the site through the visit of the Jews to the site, such as the last visit of 320 Jews to the Mamluk Mosque in Mount Haroun.
He pointed to the absence of any archaeological or historical evidence that the Prophet Aaron was buried in the region, especially as the crossing of the Israelites was from Egypt towards the south and not north.
He stressed that no ancient Hebrew inscription in the area dating back to the 16th or 15th century BC has been discovered, and that Jews are trying to falsify history by placing Hebrew coins and newly manufactured copies of the Torah as archaeological artifacts in the region to support their claims and lies.
He cited research carried out by Jewish archaeologists, including the father of the world famous archaeologist Professor Israel Finkelstein, who works at the University of Tel Aviv and five other scientists, in which they denied the relationship of Jews with the region and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and refuted biblical texts claiming that there was any connection.
After losing the Sinai, where one of the shrines they claim belonged to the prophet Aaron, the Jews returned to try to establish their relationship with Wadi Musa and the so-called Aaron shrine.
He explained that the rituals practiced by Jews at the site, including blowing in the horn of the ram was used by Jews historically to declare war and intimidate the tribes.
He warned against Zionist propaganda trying to market Petra and the site of the Mamluk mosque as Jewish sites.
The Secretary-General of the Party of Life, Dr. Abdul Fattah al-Kilani has pointed in his welcoming speech, to the Zionist ambitions that extend from the Euphrates to the Nile.
For his part, Director of Dialogue Zahir Amr pointed to the need to pay attention to archeology by disproving the Zionist narrative and proving the Arab-Islamic narrative.
During the lecture, there was a dialogue in which speakers linked the visit of the last Jewish group to the attempt to impose the deal of the century.
They considered that the demolition of the tomb as the best response to the attempt to Judaize the site.
He is correct that there is little evidence that Aaron is actually buried at the site. And that ancient Hebrews used to blow the shofar before a war.
Everything else is pretty much fiction.
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The body of a yeshiva student who had been stabbed to death was discovered outside a settlement in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank in the predawn hours of Thursday morning, prompting a massive manhunt for the killer.
The victim, who was later identified Dvir Sorek of the Ofra settlement, was studying at the Machanayim religious seminary in the Migdal Oz settlement, and had joined the military while continuing his studies, in a program known in Hebrew as hesder. Though formally a soldier, he was unarmed and not in uniform at the time of the attack, nor had he undergone military training.
Authorities were treating the killing as a terror attack. As of Thursday morning, no Palestinian terror group took responsibility for the killing.
The 19-year-old had been missing since Wednesday evening. His family and people at the yeshiva where he was studying told authorities that they’d lost contact with Sorek as he was returning to the seminary after a trip to Jerusalem. Sorek’s body was found at approximately 3 a.m. along a road leading to Migdal Oz, a settlement south of Bethlehem.
“He went to Jerusalem to buy gifts for his rabbis and on the way back there was an attack. He was found clutching the books that he’d bought,” the principal of his seminary, Rabbi Shlomo Wilk, told Army Radio.
The father of a yeshiva student found stabbed to death in the West Bank on Thursday remembered his son as “a kid with light in his eyes,” and said whoever killed him had “murder in his eyes.”
Dvir Sorek, who was enrolled in a program combining military service with Torah study, set out Wednesday from the Migdal Oz settlement, where he was studying, to buy a gift for a teacher in Jerusalem. His body was found with stab wounds early Thursday on the road leading to the settlement, in what authorities were treating as a terror attack.
“Whoever didn’t know him missed out; he used to help the weak around him who were in need of a friend,” a tearful Yoav Sorek told reporters outside his home.
“Our Dvir was sweet,” Sorek, editor of the conservative HaShiloach journal, said of his 19-year-old son. “Two months ago he had a karate exam and he didn’t get a high grade because his teacher said he performs the movements well, but lacks ‘murder’ in his eyes. That’s right. He had light in his eyes. Now someone with murder in his eyes has taken him.
“We received a gift for almost 19 years — for that gift we are grateful, we will carry the pain from now on,” he said.
Dvir Sorek, a yeshiva student enrolled in a program combining Torah study with military service, left his seminary in the West Bank settlement of Migdal Oz Wednesday to head to Jerusalem to buy books — a gift for a teacher.
The 19-year-old never returned.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, his body was discovered on the side of a road leading into the settlement, riddled with stab wounds. He was not in uniform at the time of his death, the army said. Authorities were treating the killing as a terror attack.
“He was found clutching the books that he’d bought,” Rabbi Shlomo Wilk, the head of the Migdal Oz seminary Machanayim, said Thursday morning, as word of Sorek’s murder was met with shock and sadness by those who knew him.
“He was an amazing man, very sensitive, smart, modest, who fused wisdom and quiet… This is a man who at the beginning of the year saw an Arab walking around the area with a donkey that looked unwell, sick, so he offered to buy the donkey. He bought it, treated it, and sent it away,” Rabbi Sarel Rosenblatt, who taught Sorek, told Channel 12 news.
“I wanted him to be a man of standing in Israel, who would contribute a lot of his light to Israeli society, and his light was taken from us,” he added, describing him as a “sensitive man with a heart of gold.”
Another teacher, Rabbi Yossi Fruman, said his trip to Jerusalem to buy a gift for his teacher “very much defined him.”
“He always thought about how he can express his gratitude. He returned to Jerusalem with the books on him,” he told the Kan public broadcaster. Some media outlets identified the book as Israeli author David Grossman’s latest novel.
A Conservative Jewish summer camp is denying that it makes personnel decisions based on politics after a senior staff member claimed she was removed from her position because of her left-wing views on Israel.
Sylvie Rosen, 22, who has served on staff at Camp Ramah in the Rockies for five summers, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she was removed from her job as a counselor for incoming high school juniors after she clashed with her supervisor over Israel education.
She said she was prohibited from attending future Israel programming and removed from the role in early July after she talked with campers and told them she opposed Israel’s West Bank occupation and wanted to include critical perspectives in Israel programming.
Rosen said she had also clashed with her supervisor on other issues unrelated to Israel. She was offered another job at camp that would have lasted the rest of the summer, but chose to become a liaison to parents of younger campers. She left camp when that role ended this week.
The conversation that preceded her removal was initiated by campers, Rosen said. It came the day after the age group took part in a pro-Israel program. Rosen said the campers who approached her were uncomfortable with the program’s tone.
“It became clear really early on that my rosh, my supervisor, wanted our campers to form only really positive relationships with Israel, and I was interested in also talking about the occupation and critical views on Israel-Palestine,” she said.
Asked if she was intentionally testing Ramah’s policy on Israel, she said, “No, I wanted to give my campers the education I think they deserve.”
So Rosen admits that she clashed with her "rosh" on many issues, but she is claiming that her talking to campers about her hatred of Israel's policies is the only reason she was reassigned.
I have news for Rosen: Even if that was the only reason, her refusal to adhere to the camp's philosophy of instilling positive feelings towards Israel is more than enough reason to take her off of counselor duty. Ramah has a specific vision of how campers should learn about Israel and Zionism, and Rosen made her own decision to refuse to adhere to that vision. as an employee, of course she should lose her position. It is not up to her to teach anti-Zionism to her campers in a Zionist camp, just as it would be inappropriate for her to extol Christianity in a Jewish camp.
This wouldn't really be a big deal except for the fact that JTA waited until paragraph 12 to tell us that Sylvie Rosen is a member of IfNotNow.
Suddenly, this isn't a story about a counselor having a different pedagogical philosophy than her employer. Now this looks far more like a publicity stunt where Rosen is trying to embarrass Ramah the way IfNotNow tries to shame all Jewish Zionist organizations.
There is a bigger point to be made here, though.
IfNotNow chooses targets that it claims do not teach kids about "occupation." That may or may not be true, but the fact is that Israel's policies can and should be taught to everyone, in an age appropriate manner.
In 2013 I gave a lecture called "Know How to Answer" where I discuss the top twenty anti-Israel arguments, and I serialized it on this blog earlier this year. Difficult topics can be answered, but most Zionists don't know the arguments as well as they should.
Camp Ramah, and Birthright leaders, and everyone else should become familiar with what the other side claims and learn how to respond. Don't hide things that appear problematic - be assertive and act with pride rather than as if Israel has something to hide.
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"Progressive Jews" were very upset at a recent article in The Forward by Seffi Kogen, the Global Director of Young Leadership for the American Jewish Committee, where he said that anti-Israel group IfNotNow is not representative of American Jews.
To back up his point, Kogen relied on a single survey, from which he extrapolated that most Jews either do not support the anti-occupation work done by IfNotNow or the organization itself.
Mr. Kogen is wrong on the first fact, and likely wrong on the second.
The survey found that 92% of American Jews call themselves “generally pro-Israel.” But this same survey found that two-thirds of all respondents are also either critical of “some” or of “many” of the Israeli government’s policies.
But Mr. Kogen concludes from this survey that the majority of American-Jewish voters who are openly critical of the Israeli government’s actions can’t possibly be supportive of IfNotNow — which draws its support from those respondents who call themselves “generally not pro-Israel.”
Kogen was accurate. There is no honest way to claim that IfNotNow members are supportive of Israel as a whole. To claim that Jews, who will disagree with anyone and everyone, are on the same page as IfNotNow because they oppose some of the policies of the Israeli is ridiculous. Hell, I don't support 100% of Israeli policies.
Note also Nelson's sleight of hand to change the 59% of American Jews who are "pro-Israel but critical of at least some Israeli government policies" into "openly critical of Israeli government actions." There is a huge difference between not agreeing with everything the government of Israel does and being openly critical.
Also, the survey mentioned said that only 3% of American Jews are "generally not pro-Israel." Nelson adds to them the 5% who didn't answer to make it appear that they are 7%.
But 3% is indeed fringe, and every person who joins IfNotNow is a small subset of that 3% that actually hates Israel enough to be actively against it.
IfNotNow, by its own language, merely “seeks to end American Jewish support for the occupation.” That’s it.
This is as disingenuous as it gets. IfNotNow's members are anti-Zionist, even if the organization claims that it has no official position on BDS and Israel as a Jewish state. Jewish Voice for Peace maintained that same fiction until this year but everyone knew from reading tweets and articles from their leaders that they were never remotely pro-Israel, and IfNotNow is the same.
For example, AJC’s own survey from 2019 found that nearly two-thirds of American Jews supported an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank. In other words, they oppose the occupation.
More deception from Nelson. I am quite Zionist and I oppose "occupation." I don't believe that area A or Gaza are legally occupied, Area C should be annexed to Israel and Area B is a disputed area. No Zionist wants to control millions of hostile Arabs. You could say that the late Meir Kahane was against "occupation," too, by wanting to expel the Arabs.
I don't have a problem with a demilitarized Palestinian state that doesn't threaten Israel as long as the borders are defensible. To say that someone who wants a two-state solution, no matter how far fetched the possibility, is opposed to a Jewish presence in the territories altogether - which is IfNotNow's position - is dishonest.
He goes further:
Furthermore, more than two-thirds surveyed answered that either some or all of the settlements should be evacuated when a Palestinian state is established. The transfer of civilians from one territory to another is one element of the legal wrong of the occupation, and this survey makes clear that most American Jews agree that even beyond the purely military aspect, other aspects of the occupation need to be resolved, contrary to the Israeli government’s current position.
Put a different way, they agree that the transfer and settlement issue needs to be resolved roughly in line with IfNotNow’s position of conclusively “ending” all aspects of the occupation.
Not even close. There are settlements that are illegal under Israeli law - wanting Israel to uphold its own laws is not evidence of being "anti-occupation," as Nelson implies. Similarly, if a Palestinian leadership should emerge that is not actively seeking the destruction of all of Israel (via "right of return," for example) then, yes, other Jewish communities would either have to be dismantled or become part of the Arab majority state. This is again not at all close to IfNotNow's positions.
And just like Nelson can look at this question on the survey and conclude "more than two-thirds surveyed answered that either some or all of the settlements should be evacuated when a Palestinian state is established" one can also say that 74% of those who responded believe that a Jewish presence must remain on some of the territories even after a peace agreement.
Put it this way: IfNotNow's position is that even the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and the Kotel are Palestinian territory. If someone would poll American Jews as to whether Israel should control those "settlements," it would be crystal clear that IfNotNow doesn't represent American Jews in any sense.
Nelson, for whatever reason, is trying to mainstream a group that is indeed fringe. The Forward, for whatever reason, thinks that his deceptive arguments have merit.
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Islamic Jihad said, "The heroic operation is a natural reaction to the terrorism of the occupation and its crimes against our people, our land and our sanctities."
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine said, "The heroic operation this morning in the Gush Etzion settlement...is a legitimate right of the Palestinian people to respond to the ongoing crimes of the Israeli occupation."
Tamer Awadallah, a member of the Central Committee of the DFLP, praised the operation as "a natural response in reaction to the ongoing Israeli crimes."
The Popular Resistance Movement in Palestine "blessed the heroic operation" and said "the operation was a natural response to Israeli crimes in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip."
Everyone seems to agree that, for Palestinians, stabbing a random person is completely "natural" and "heroic."
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I’m not a terminology freak. Sometimes you have to use words or phrases whose connotations are ideologically impure, so that people will understand you. But I draw the line at “West Bank,” “Israel-Palestine,” and “Arab Jew.”
I don’t think I need to remind my readers that there was no “West Bank” before the illegal Jordanian invasion and annexation of Judea and Samaria. With the exception of those 19 years between 1948 and its liberation in 1967, the area was always Judea and Samaria. There is no reason for anyone to call it anything else; but unfortunately the media, even most of the Israeli media, can’t seem to stop.
“Israel-Palestine,” of course, implies that there is a place called “Palestine,” and that it is as legitimate as the place called “Israel.” In reality, there is a State of Israel, there is an area that Israel seems to have ceded to Hamas, and there is the autonomous but non-sovereign Palestinian Authority. Hamas has never declared Gaza a state, because it insists that all the land between the river and the sea is “Palestine.” The PA has declared a state which encompasses all of the land Israel conquered in 1967, but does not effectively control it, so it isn’t really a state. Israel is a state; “Palestine” is a word.
But I think the one that bothers me the most is the last, “Arab Jew.” It is used to refer to Mizrahim, Jews whose last exilic homes were in Arab countries. It suggests – see, for example, this 2003 essay by Ella Shohat – that Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries were culturally more connected to their Arab neighbors than to an abstract historical Jewish people on the one hand, or to the Ashkenazi Jews that discriminated against them so harshly (and stupidly) in Israel on the other. Indeed, she sees a deliberate, even malign, attempt by Zionism to “dismember” their Arab culture and inject a false historical consciousness of being part of a Jewish nation, as part of creating the “new Jew” that was supposed to be superior in every respect to the despicable Palestinian Arabs – and also to the Arab Jews.
Except in the matter of religion, she suggests, Mizrahi Jews are Arabs, Arabs who were cruelly robbed of their true culture so they could be used as soldiers in Israel’s wars and workers in her fields and industries. Rather than “a return home,” Shohat calls their aliyah (she would disdain this word) “a new form of exile.” In this, she agrees with Mahmoud Abbas, who – in order to deny our connection to the land – has always insisted that Jewishness is simply a religion, not a nationality (Abbas, of course, believes that “Palestinians” are a nation, despite their disparate origins and lack of historical connection to “Palestine”).
This fits in with the Arab and extreme leftist understanding of Israel as an Arab territory colonized by “European” Ashkenazi Jews. All this is part of the loaded meaning of the term “Arab Jew.”
Some pro-Palestinian writers even suggest that Mizrahi Jews actually have a common interest with Palestinian Arabs, their “brown” brothers, to overthrow the hegemony of “white” Ashkenazi settler-colonialists.
But there are plenty of testimonies from Jews that came to Israel from Arab countries showing that they did see themselves as fulfilling the biblical promise of ingathering of the exiles; this wasn’t just a Zionist myth to manipulate them. Most Israelis of Mizrahi origin do see themselves as part of the great Jewish people, the people whose history and provenance in Eretz Yisrael is becoming better illuminated from day to day by archaeological and historical evidence. While they recall ill-treatment by earlier arrivals, that is a far cry from pining for their “stolen” “Arab culture.” Indeed, from a political perspective, they are more nationalistic than the descendants of Ashkenazi “pioneers.”
It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that neither Shohat nor the early Zionist social engineers understood what was happening in Eretz Yisrael, when Ashkenazi Jews from pre-revolutionary Russia and Poland, Holocaust survivors, Jews from the disparate cultures of North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, India, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union, and numerous other diasporic populations, were thrown together to experience a historical process impossible to control by any social engineering. Unlike the idea that Mizrachim could be forced to assimilate to a dominant Ashkenazi culture, what actually happened was quite different. A new culture, but with ancient roots, came into being.
Ella Shohat is proud of her Iraqi heritage. But except for having spoken Arabic, her ancestors, who came from a highly developed and relatively modern culture, had little in common with the parents of my son’s wife, who immigrated to Israel from North Africa, and even less with the Yemenite Jews who had never seen indoor plumbing until they were brought here “with wings, as Eagles.” Or the Ethiopians, who came from an even more primitive culture. For that matter, how similar are the cultural origins of Ashkenazis from the former Soviet Union to the academic and media leftists of North Tel Aviv?
According to Shmuel Rosner and the Jewish People Policy Institute, the belief system of most Jewish Israelis is a mixture of Israeli nationalism and Jewish religion which is not found anywhere else but Israel. Israel is experiencing a natural process of developing her own unique culture, a process that those who consciously wanted to create a New Jew had no power to control. It’s a modern culture, although grounded religiously and linguistically in antiquity. My son’s children don’t speak either the Arabic of their mother’s ancestors or the Yiddish of their father’s. They do speak a language that is similar enough to that of the Torah that they can read and mostly understand it.
This isn’t assimilation into a dominant culture, but the creation of a new one – or better, the creation of a modern form of a very ancient one. And it is happening by the reunification of the fragments of the once unified but then scattered Jewish people.
The idea that Mizrahim are “Arab Jews” is wrong. It is also insulting, suggesting that they lost sight of their ancient heritage during their time in exile, and assimilated to the surrounding culture. And it is pernicious, implying that Jewishness is only a religion, and not also a nationality – not membership in the Jewish nation which traces itself back to ancient times in Eretz Yisrael.
***
So yes, I will use the word “Palestinians,” although I’ll add the caveat that no Arab Palestinians existed before the mid-1960s. But I will never refer to Judea and Samaria as anything else, nor will I say “Israel-Palestine” or “occupied territories” or “pre-67 borders.” And I will never, ever, say “Arab Jews.”
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The US State Department has updated its definition of antisemitism to include "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as an example of antisemitism in public life.
In 2018, According to pro-Israel philanthropist Adam Milstein, the State Department adopted the definition of antisemitism set by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Milstein disseminated a release about the change on Wednesday morning Israel time:
Most of the examples presented by IHRA were included in the State Department’s definition, except for comparisons of Israeli policies to Nazi Germany. The State Department, under the leadership of Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and Elan Carr, the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, determined that comparisons of Israeli policies to those of the Nazis constitute antisemitism and have added it to the definition.
The working definition of antisemitism also includes the understanding that “antisemitic acts are criminal when they are so defined by law. Criminal acts are antisemitic when the targets of attacks, whether they are people or property – such as buildings, schools, places of worship and cemeteries – are selected because they are, or are perceived to be, Jewish or linked to Jews,” according to the US government’s website. In addition, “Antisemitic discrimination is the denial to Jews of opportunities or services available to others and is illegal in many countries.”
The move comes only weeks after US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) compared the anti-Israel BDS movement to previous boycotts of Nazi Germany in a resolution supporting the right to boycott Israel.
Never missing an opportunity to politicize a tragedy, Rashida Tlaib has joined all of the Democratic presidential candidates in spinning the mass shootings of this past weekend. And while many of the candidates were vile in their accusations (Beto O'Rourke's lovely expletive-filled rant blaming Trump ending with "What the f---?," for instance), Tlaib is particularly hateful and dishonest due to her obsession with (and dual loyalty to) "her people."
To be clear, Palestinians have been committing mass murder with guns, cars, knives, and bombs since Israel's founding. While I abhor Jake Tapper's underhanded comparison of Donald Trump's rhetoric to the very real and clear incitement to violence of Palestinian leadership from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas, he did infuriate Tlaib, so there's that.
In typical disingenuous fashion, the Palestinian congresswoman responded to Tapper attempting to distinguish the terrorists she supports from white supremacists by claiming that Palestinian jihadists are actually "human rights advocates." Yeah, right — in her sick mind, it's okay to kill innocent Jews when your goals are "equality, human dignity & to stop the imprisonment of children." Because that's worked out so well for Palestinians over the decades. In Tlaib's terrorist circles, killing Jewish children is a moral human rights crusade if your goal is to stop the imprisonment of stone-throwing, gun-toting, knife-wielding child terrorists. It is truly difficult for sane people to get their heads around this analysis from a sitting member of the United States Congress. And yet there are Americans who actually voted this hater into office.
But how do we know that Palestinian children who are arrested in Israel are a threat to Jews who live in that country? Here is where the real irony and Tlaib's abhorrent hypocrisy come in. Tlaib once again took to Twitter Tuesday to comment on bulletproof backpacks being sold in Walmart: "This gave me chills. I can't believe this is what we have become."
The anti-Zionist left is trying to get Jake Tapper, one of the most consistent opponents of bigotry across the media landscape, fired. CNN should stand by him 100%, as should the rest of us https://t.co/9DhnccDaHe
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Elder of Ziyon
One wonders, though, how come they are silent on how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries for over seventy years?
