No matter what atrocities are happening in the world, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch feels compelled to post at least one anti-Israel tweet a day.
Here's today's:
UN expert is "deeply troubled" by the Israeli government's latest settlement expansion plan--a "highly disturbing development." Netanyahu's plan to add 8,000 settlement housing units is “a significant breach of international law” that must be opposed. https://t.co/9gXQVQq1rxpic.twitter.com/buO16P7Hus
The UN "expert" is Michael Lynk, the UNHRC's "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967."
Although we've seen Lynk's bias before, I just found out that in 2009, he claimed Israel was guilty of "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians and havily implied that Israel itself is a mistake that must be erased.
In a report called "Peace, Human Rights, and the Rule of Law: Canada's Role in the Middle East" issued by the Group of 78 Annual Policy Conference, September 25-27, 2009," Lynk's presentation is paraphrased:
He used to think the critical date in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was 1967, the start of the occupation. Now he thinks the solution to the problem must go back to 1948, the date of partition and the start of ethnic cleansing. Canada’s role in partition was pivotal with Justice Ivan Rand, Lester Pearson and Elizabeth MacCallum (though she privately warned against it). What followed from this point needs review and needs to inform Canadian foreign policy going forward. Many increasingly feel that partition was a mistake.
Sure, it makes sense for the UN to hire an "expert" on Israel who thinks Israel shouldn't exist and never should have existed.
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A number of columnists and tweeters are upset that Bibi Netanyahu said, via satellite at the AIPAC conference, that Palestinians are “the pampered children of the international community.”
But by any measure, that is an accurate statement.
The latest numbers I have, from 2017, show that "Palestine" still gets more aid per capita than any other nation - and every other nation on the list is more deserving of aid than "Palestine:"
Things might change in 2019 after the US stopped direct aid to the PA and UNRWA, but maybe not.
However, according to all available statistics, Palestinians are indeed pampered, pretending to be more needy than nations that are far more deserving of humanitarian aid.
UPDATE: Adin found a really nice chart of the same issue:
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From Ian: Israelophobia and the West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It
The new Jerusalem Center publication Israelophobia and the West exposes and evaluates the parallel phenomena of unprecedented anti-Semitic assaults against Jews in the West while simultaneously demonizing the Jewish State. It further exposes the deceptive representation of anti-Semitic rhetoric as legitimate political criticism of Israel. A special dialogue: Prof. Alan Dershowitz - Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School; Ben-Dror Yemini - Israeli journalist at Yediot Ahronot; Moderated by Dan Diker.
A 2014 survey of antisemitism by the US Anti-Defamation League (ADL) covered 100 countries. It found that all the countries in the top 10 most antisemitic locations were in the Middle East or north Africa region, with an overall figure of 73%. The West Bank and Gaza came at the top, with 93% of Palestinians expressing antisemitic views.
A smaller survey of 19 countries published by the ADL in the following year found that Muslim populations in general had the highest levels of antisemitism in Europe: For the first time, the ADL poll measured Muslim attitudes in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. An average of 55 percent of Western European Muslims harbored anti-Semitic attitudes. Acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes by Muslims in these countries was substantially higher than among the national population in each country, though lower than corresponding figures of 75 percent in 2014 for Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
In the United States, a 2017 report on antisemitism in general, identified much of the hatred as coming from the Muslim community, notably on college campuses: It is particularly disturbing that anti-Semitism appears to be relatively common in the American Muslim community, including among its leaders.
Muslim expression of anti-Semitic views has become especially common on American college campuses.
Several Muslim attacks on Jews, synagogues and more are listed in the report. Here, anti-Jewish prejudice is, as often as not, conflated with anti-zionist ideology and activism. Again, that distortion, in turn, leads many people, most often on the left, to indulge Muslim antisemitism, to join Islamic protests, and even, as Britain's Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn did for many years, to call Muslim terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah "friends".
Some anti-zionism is bolstered by the widespread rationalization that Palestinian resistance to Israel is in harmony with one's own secular political convictions. Palestinians and their supporters across the Islamic world are thought to be protesting and fighting for nationalistic, anti-colonial, and economic motives combined with an anti-apartheid pro-refugee set of priorities. Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization's leading party, for example, is proclaimed as a "secular, nationalist" entity. The first article in the PLO's 1964 Covenant reads: "Palestine is an Arab homeland bound by strong Arab national ties to the rest of the Arab Countries and which together form the great Arab homeland."
According to all elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, information received from the Israelis was unique in its detail and the subjects it shed light on, areas that for years were obscured from the West. Based on the intelligence provided, Washington was able to draw a detailed and fairly accurate picture of the structure and deployment of a substantial part of the Soviet Union's strategic missile divisions.[26]
How did the Israelis pull it off? Retracing the exact steps of clandestine activities is difficult, but one can reconstruct what likely transpired based on information made public after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Israeli agents who understood the Soviet bureaucracy in Eastern Europe became keenly aware of a major flaw in the system. The tendency to hoard information—itself a symptom of an obsession with secrecy—created an information glut in which untold numbers of paper-form military records were filed and stored. The more this information multiplied, the harder it became to keep track of. At the same time, Israeli spies managed to obtain the identities of several former members of the Soviet military and security establishments who had intimate knowledge of their government's missile capabilities. When these people were no longer in their positions—which undoubtedly meant the authorities paid less attention to them—it was easier for Israeli agents to convince them to share their technical knowledge. This was where Israeli intelligence reached its Cold War peak and aligned most closely with the intelligence goals of the West.
Conclusion
For many years, the Soviet ballistic missile threat was relatively low on the list of Israel's immediate security priorities. After all, Moscow's weapons were not aimed at Jerusalem or Tel Aviv but at New York and Washington. Israel had always been more interested in the MiG fighter's maneuverability and the T-class tank's endurance. So the effort to collect data on Soviet missile capabilities marked an important shift. Israeli intelligence moved from tactical concerns to a broader strategic narrative as Jerusalem understood that its long-term security interests were achieved not by narrow intelligence collection but by undermining the country that acted as the patron and arms supplier of its enemies.
And while the Cold War is over, and Israel no longer finds itself trapped between two rival superpower blocs, it continues to provide first hand and invaluable lessons on waging war and preserving national defense.
Hollywood mustered its creative forces in the 1940s when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany sought to conquer the world, with Humphrey Bogart standing up to the fascist regime in “Casablanca” and director Ernst Lubitsch mocking it and its dictator in “To Be or Not to Be.”
More than 70 years later, an increase in hate crimes, emboldened white supremacists and political upheaval have prompted TV and film makers to revisit Nazism. The works are varied and their receptions mixed, but they share a goal: to use fiction to learn from 20th-century totalitarianism and its horrors, including the Holocaust that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.
In Amazon’s “Hunters,” an unlikely group of 1970s New Yorkers target German Nazis who have brought their genocidal quest to America. HBO’s “The Plot Against America” is based on Philip Roth’s novel that posits a repressive early 1940s US government led by Charles Lindbergh, the real-life aviation hero and anti-Semitic isolationist. The Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit” is in Lubitsch’s satirical mode, deepened by tragedy.
Preceding them was “The Man in the High Castle,” the 2015-19 Amazon series based on Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel of the same name about a fallen America ruled by WWII victors Germany and Japan.
The war has had other screen comebacks. During the political and social turmoil of the mid- to late-1960s, cynical and irreverent films including “King Rat” and “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” were released alongside traditional battle epics such as the star-laden “Battle of the Bulge.”
“We seem to have waves of interest in both the Holocaust and World War II, not always at the same time,” said Sharon Willis, a film scholar and professor at the University of Rochester in New York. “I feel that, collectively, we return to these terrains when we have some kind of problem to work out that we think is related to them.”
Here is the abstract of the academic article "Was Jerusalem Part of Palestine? The Forgotten City of Ramla, 900–1900" by Zachary J. Foster of Princeton University, published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies in 2016:
When the Muslims conquered the Levant in the seventh century they at times changed the meaning of ‘Palestine’. They preserved its erstwhile sense as a region but also came to see Palestine as synonymous with the city of Ramla. From the tenth to the early twentieth century, dozens of Muslim exegetes, travellers and chroniclers explained that Ramla and Palestine were the same place. Others thought Palestine was a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem, or that Palestine had much more to do with Ramla than it did Jerusalem. The association had much to do with the cultural tendency in the Arab Middle East to conflate cities and regions as well as the critical role Ramla played in Palestine for much of its history: it served as the capital of the District of Palestine for more than three centuries, its economic hub for many more and its imagined geographical centre up until the early nineteenth century.
The article brings large amounts of evidence from Arab geographers and writers that what they considered "Palestine" was really Ramla or the region around it, and Jerusalem was a completely separate place.
Most cities never came to mean the same thing as their parent regions. But Ramla was not like most cities. Ramla become the seat of the most powerful empire in the world when the seventh-century Umayyad Caliph, Sulayman ‘Abd al-Malik (d.717) moved the seat of Islamic power from Damascus to Ramla. Soon enough, the city emerged as the political, geographic and economic centre of the District of Palestine during the Umayyad (661–750) and most of the Abbasid (750–1258) periods, for it lay at the crossroads of the key trading routes within the District of Palestine as well as the route connecting Damascus and Cairo. Although a massive earthquake in 1068 left some 15,000 people dead and the city in total ruins, Ramla recovered during the Crusader (1095–1291), Fatimid (909–1171) and Ayyubid (1171–1260) periods and remained the most important regional trading hub well into the Mamluk period (1250–1517). The town recorded steady population growth even after the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century. (Jerusalem, by comparison, was a small and sleepy town for most of Islamic history. It had never been located on any major trading routes and its defensive walls were destroyed by an Ayyubid ruler in the early thirteenth century and only rebuilt in the 1530s by Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’.) And so even though Ramla’s population size, economic prosperity and political relevance diminished significantly from the late sixteenth century onwards, names have never been so easy to change. And so the city continued to be associated with Palestine; indeed, it continued to be known as Palestine as late as the eighteenth century if not later.
The Persian traveller Nasr Khusraw (d.1088) was the very first Muslim to say it explicitly. ‘The city of Ramla is called Palestine in both Sham and the Maghreb’, he wrote...
Soon enough, a slew of other writers across the lands of Islam embraced the nickname. The Andalusian geographer and historian al-Bakri (d.1094) noted that Ramla was known as Palestine; the high official in Mamluk Syria Ibn Fadl Allah al-‘Umari (d.1349) claimed that Filastin was also called Ramla in his definition of the Holy Land and commented elsewhere that Sulayman bin ‘Abd al-Malik bin Marwan (d.717) founded the city (madina) of Filastin; the famous Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta (d.1369) also explained after his visit to Jerusalem and Ashkelon that he ‘traveled to the city of Ramla (madinat al-Ramla), which is Filastin (wa hiyya Filastin)’.
...But we have more explicit evidence that Palestine may have been considered a small region based around Ramla, one that did not include Jerusalem. Consider that the great historian al-Waqidi (d.822) consistently listed Jerusalem and the Land of Palestine separately in his account of the conquest of the Levant as if they were separate places. ...
Similarly, a number of other Muslims from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, including the famous biographer Ibn Khallikan (d.1282), Egyptian historian Ibn al-Furat (d.1405) and the Jerusalemite scholar and judge al-Din al-‘Ulaymi (d.1522), described the Kingdom of the Kurdish Ayyubid Sultan al-Mu‘azzam in the early thirteenth century as ‘expansive, from Homs to al-‘Arish, including the Islamic coasts, bilad al-Ghawr, Palestine and Jerusalem’. In this instance, there is no reason to assume that these writers meant Ramla only when they wrote Palestine, as this list included both cities and regions, leaving us with the impression that Palestine may have been considered a region based around Ramla that did not include Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was not even a part of "historic Palestine." It was Christian pilgrims who consistently associated Jerusalem as the most important city of what Christians considered Palestine, and that idea eventually influenced Muslims.
Finally, Foster notes that Palestinians consciously wanted to change history to de-emphasize Ramla and emphasize Jerusalem in the 20th century for purely political reasons:
In other cases there may have been wilful intent to delete Ramla from memory. The historian Muhammad al-Husayni wrote in his 1946 history book about Palestine that ‘we have chosen to focus on Jerusalem (Bayt al-Maqdis) because it has been, and remains, the political and religious capital of this Arab country since the Arabs and Muslims first arrived, save for a brief moment (burha wajiza) in which it was transferred to Ramla’. Whether or not we define the three and a half centuries that Ramla was the political capital of Palestine as brief, or the seven or eight centuries that Ramla was the most important regional economic hub as ephemeral, or the millennium of the linguistic and cultural role that Ramla played in Palestine as fleeting, al-Husayni probably wanted us to believe in Jerusalem’s time-immemorial importance and Ramla’s time immemorial irrelevance. But the record suggests that Ramla was a central part of Palestine’s history...
...And Jerusalem was not.
This is not to say that Jerusalem was not considered part of the Muslim world - of course it was. But it was not part of what Muslims - even colloquially - called "Palestine" for most of the history of Islam. Jerusalem was not a place of pilgrimage and it was not treated as important by most Muslims throughout history.
The claim that Jerusalem is the "eternal capital of Palestine" is complete fiction.
Zachary J. Foster is not a Zionist by any measure - his Twitter account is quite anti-Israel and he even throws in a gratuitous and irrelevant anti-Israel comment in a footnote of this paper. Which makes his research in this area even more compelling - he has completely ripped apart any historic claims that Palestinians have for Jerusalem as their traditional capital.
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Sometimes people believe something so much that even once the belief is no longer viable, they can’t quite let go of it, because it is now indistinguishable from their own sense of self. Case in point: I once asked a leader in the American Jewish community, a liberal Zionist, what he would think if the two-state solution were no longer possible. After a long pause, he responded, “That would be the end of my Zionism.” And so, he continued, he could not give up on the two-state solution.
This may be where liberal Zionists are today. As a University of Pennsylvania political scientist and longtime scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Ian Lustick writes in his excellent and provocative new book, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality: “Two states for two peoples was a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it is not a solution today.” For many liberal Zionists, this is a hard pill to swallow. But it also might be true.
In many Jewish circles, when talk of two states commences, it often very quickly devolves into: “If only we had a partner for peace!” It is imagined that Israelis are generally willing, but the other side is not. Lustick wants us to shelve that reflexive, and convenient, abdication of responsibility, and look at the situation from a different direction. Whatever the foibles of the Palestinian side, he wants to explore this notion of two states solely from within the structures of Israeli governments and society from the 1970s until today. What he concludes is that the possibility of two states was never really viable on the Israeli side, not because Israelis weren’t willing to try it—many were—but because the very structures of government and societal reactions to changes on the ground made sure it would not happen. In short, once the two-state solution emerged as a possibility in the early 1970s, it very quickly became obsolete.
Lustick begins his argument by suggesting that “two-state solution” or “one-state solution” are mistaken and obfuscating terms. Instead of “two-state solution,” he wants us to understand the “two-state paradigm.” And instead of “one-state solution,” he suggests the “one-state reality.” There is no one-state solution; but there is, from the river to the sea, one state. And that state is called Israel.
The United Kingdom has just passed emergency legislation that will stop the early release of convicted terrorists from prison. This decisive action comes on the heels of two recent terror attacks in London by jihadists who were released from prison earlier than the end of their sentences for terror-related crimes.
In November, Usman Khan, who had served eight years in prison before being granted an early release, killed two people and wounded three others in an attack near London Bridge. Khan was wearing a fake suicide vest when he committed the attack. Khan participated in a de-radicalization program. Clearly, the program did not guarantee that Khan was genuinely rehabilitated or would not re-offend.
The second attack came in February, when Sudesh Amman, 20, stabbed two people in the Streatham section of South London. Amman had been released from prison just a week earlier, after he had served about half of his 40-month prison sentence for a 2018 terror conviction.
Undercover police were watching Amman, but they were not able to stop his stabbing spree. He was shot and killed by police within a minute.
The legislation enacted Wednesday blocks early release for about 50 imprisoned extremists, a statement from the UK Ministry of Justice said. It requires that any inmate convicted of a terror-related crime, such as training for terrorism, membership in a terror organization, or disseminating terrorist literature, must complete at least two-thirds of his or her sentence before being considered for release. Even then, the release is not guaranteed.
“No terrorist should be released early only to kill and maim on our streets,” said Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland. “Protecting the public is Government’s first duty and our message is clear — enough is enough.”
Sanders surrogate Amer Zahr has never tried to hide his hatred for Israel, and like most anti-Zionists, he thinks it’s perfectly fine to talk about the Jewish state pretty much like the Nazis talked about Jews. But in order to illustrate how fanatic Zahr is, a
few pictures are worth a thousand words.
Zahr isn’t shy about announcing his agenda: getting rid of the world’s only Jewish state.
While Zahr will usually proclaim that his Palestine from the river to the sea should be democratic,
secular and open, his current Facebook cover photo reflects a different vision: Palestine is
Muslim and Christian, Judaism is erased.
Another photo Zahr used as his Facebook cover reveals his support for
terrorism: it shows him serenading convicted supermarket bomber and US immigration fraudster Rasmea Odeh. (Here is
another photo of Zahr and Odeh
having a jolly good time together; and last year, Zahr posted a photo of notorious terrorist Leila Khaled for International Women’s Day. He
also seems to be an admirer of the Tamimis, whose most celebrated family member is Sbarro massacre mastermind and
facilitator Ahlam Tamimi.)
Given Zahr’s intense hatred for Israel, it’s hard to describe how stunned I was when the awesome kweansmom recently found out that Zahr has Israeli citizenship. Inevitably, this
discovery also trains a spotlight on the truly breathtaking hypocrisy of Zahr’s
anti-Israel activism, and it’s hardly surprising that the stories he likes to
tell about the bitter “refugee” background of his family turn out to be not
particularly truthful.
Since this post is based primarily on material shared on Facebook, it
should be noted that all cited material is freely accessible at the time of
this writing; the links I provide are to archived copies of Facebook posts so
that I cannot be accused of making stuff up in case anything is deleted or
access is restricted.
Let’s first look at how the Jordanian-born Zahr got
Israeli citizenship. Ususally, Zahr claims that his parents were Palestinian “refugees” who were “driven from their birthplaces of Yafa and Akka by Israel.” Yet, as Zahr told TheJerusalem Post in
an interview four years ago, he “comes to the Palestinian
territories and Israel between one and three times annually” to perform his
“comedic routines” – which also means
that his BDS advocacy takes the form
of “do as I say, not as I do.”
During one of his visits to Israel in 2015, Zahr boasted on Facebook: “At Tel Aviv airport, Israeli security asked me, “What is the purpose of your visit?” I said, “What is the purpose of yours?” #colonizers”. Naturally, some of his followers then
wondered why the evil Zionist entity would let him enter the country – after
all, it would probably not be advisable to respond like this to a US border
security official.
Zahr then explained: “i hold their passport.” When asked how he got
“their passport,” Zahr responded: “israeli laws allow for the children of “israeli”
mothers to be “naturalized” even if they are born abroad. my palestinian mother
was born as an israeli citizen in akka after 1948. so even though i was born in
jordan, i could get the passport.” He added sarcastically: “i’m sure that law
was meant for cases like mine of course.” To which I’d like to add: I’m sure
that Amer Zahr realizes that his relentless demonization of Israel is
undermined by the fact that he could get an Israeli passport as the
Jordanian-born son of an Arab-Israeli mother who left Israel as a child.
And obviously enough, if Zahr’s “palestinian mother” was “born as an
israeli citizen in akka [Akko/Acre] after 1948,” and he was able to get an
Israeli passport because of his mother’s Israeli citizenship, it’s doubtful
that his claims about her being a “refugee” who was “driven” out by Israel are
true.
This apparent lie prompted kweansmom and me to dig a little deeper.
After all, Zahr is not only a surrogate who might remain influential if Sanders
becomes the Democrats’ presidential candidate or even wins the election, but
his anti-Israel activism will arguably benefit in the long run from the
visibility he now enjoys as a Sanders surrogate.
As is so often the case with anti-Israel activists, Zahr seems resolved
not to let facts ruin his demonization of the world’s only Jewish state. So
let’s try to find out how Zahr’s “palestinian mother” became a “refugee” who
was “driven” out by Israel while retaining her Israeli citizenship.
Zahr repeats the claim that his mother and her family “were
forced out of their homeland” in a
Facebook post from February 2018
that includes a photo which, according to Zahr, was taken in “Akka,
Palestine in the 1960s,” showing his mother
as a child along with one of her sisters and a cousin.
In another post that Zahr wrote when his maternal grandmother passed away in December
2016, he shares some further details: “In 1965, Laila [Zahr’s grandmother], Muhammad [Laila’s husband, i.e. Zahr’s maternal
grandfather], and their four daughters [incl. Zahr’s mother] embarked on a boat ride from Haifa to New
York, then a bus ride from New York to California, where Muhammad planned to
educate himself for two years and then return with his family to Palestine. In
1967, the Israeli state took the opportunity of this short absence to exile
Laila, Muhammad, and their children from their ancestral homes. The six became
refugees in California.”
Zahr seems to keep his story intentionally vague, but it is not
particularly credible for several reasons. From what Zahr writes in this post about
his grandmother, it is clear that she married in 1950, when she was just 16.
However, it is reasonable to assume that the man she married was at least a few
years older. If her husband was just 20 when they got married, he would have
been 35 in 1965 – which, at the time, was considered middle-aged. It would have
been rather unusual for a middle-aged man with a wife and four children to
decide to uproot the whole family to travel half around the world just “to
educate himself for two years.” Needless
to say, it would also have required considerable financial resources.
But there is another, much more credible version of this story that was
posted by Amer Zahr’s aunt, i.e. his mother’s sister (whom he had identified
and tagged in the previously cited post from February 2018). In August 2015, Zahr’s aunt posted an old family photo and wrote: “August
8, 1965, fifty years ago, my father, Mohammad Jardali, and my mother, Leila Hawari
Jardali, made a life changing decision to move the whole family to the U.S. I
am amazed by my parents’
courageous and bold move which encouraged many from our home town in Acca, and
family members from Nazareth to follow suit.”
There’s no denying that in 1965, it made a lot of sense for Israeli
Arabs to emigrate to the US in search of a better life. Israel was still a
fledgling state, surrounded by hostile neighbors bent on its destruction, and
the assumption that the Arab minority would be sympathetic to efforts to
eliminate the re-established Jewish state meant that until 1966, martial law
was imposed on Israeli Arabs. But the perhaps most compelling reason to
contemplate emigration was economic: when Israel was founded, its standard of living was just 30 percent of the US standard of living,
and particularly in its first decade, the country was still reeling from the
War of Independence and strained almost to the breaking point by the challenges
of absorbing hundreds of thousands of destitute refugees from all over the
Arab-Muslim Middle East.
Zahr proudly describes his grandfather Muhammad as “smart
and industrious,” and obviously, his
decision to emigrate turned out well: Muhammad “was able to find work
and made a respectable and comfortable life for himself, Laila, and his four
daughters.” And as we know from the post
of Zahr’s aunt, this American success story “encouraged many” from Akko, as well as “family members
from Nazareth to follow suit.”
Perhaps Zahr would like us to pity them all as “refugees” and blame
Israel for their decision to emigrate to the US?
But it was interesting to find out that there was at least one member of
Zahr’s family who apparently reconciled himself early on with Israel’s
existence – even though his motivation might have been that he simply hated the
Arab regimes more than the new Jewish state: meet Amer Zahr’s maternal
great-grandfather Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari.
I chanced upon Muhammad Nimr al-Hawari when I noticed a comment on the post Zahr had written about his maternal grandmother in December 2016. Zahr
mentioned that his grandmother Laila Muhammad Hawari was the daughter of “Muhammad … a well-known judge and lawyer in
mandate and post-mandate Palestine, hailing from a well-known family in
Nazareth.” A man named Faisal Saleh, who describes himself as “Founder
and Executive Director of Palestine Museum US”, posted the following response [emphasis added]:
“Our deepest condolences to the Jardali
and Hawari families for their loss. It is a small world but I have a
connection, though by friendship not blood, to the Howari [Hawari] family. My father […] was best friends with Muhammad
Hawari senior - the lawyer and judge - both of them were active members of
the Najjadeh movement in pre-1948 Palestine. Muhammad was the commander and
overall head of the organization headquartered in Yaffa and my father was the
commander of the Salameh area (5 km East of Yaffa). After the 1948 Nakba, Muhammad
returned to his native Nazareth choosing to live there rather [than] under the corrupt Arab regimes.
[…] Muhammad Hawari wrote a book
called سر النكبة The Secret of Nakba
covering the events and circumstances that lead to the loss of Palestine. A
copy of the book was donated to the @palestine Museum US […]. The book, on exhibit at the
Museum, was banned in most of the Arab countries.”
One might think that Zahr is bursting with pride that his
great-grandfather was among the first to devote a whole book to the “nakba” –
so wouldn’t it be a great idea for a committed anti-Israel activist like Zahr
to translate the book and use it in his activism?
Well, maybe not. The fact that “The Secret of Nakba” was “banned in most
of the Arab countries,” and even more the fact that its author preferred to
live in Israel rather than “under the corrupt Arab regimes” indicates that
Zahr’s great-grandfather blamed the plight of the Palestinians primarily on the
Arab leadership. (See also e.g. here: “Hawari, whose writing is very emotional, concentrates his efforts and
energy on attacking the corrupt Arab leadership, particularly the Mufti”.)
The biographicalinformation on Muhammad Hawari’s that
is available in English also suggests that he was a complex figure whose story
might not go well with his great-grandson’s simplistic anti-Israel activism.
For Zahr, the perhaps most uncomfortable aspect of his
great-grandfather’s remarkable story is that, due to his political pragmatism,
he was regarded as a “collaborator” in some circles. A very interesting article entitled “The Intimate History of Collaboration – Arab Citizens and the State of Israel” discusses Hillel Cohen’s book “Good Arabs” and claims that Israeli officials admired Hawari’s “charisma” and
sponsored him, hoping he would be able to establish a new anti-communist Arab
party:
“In the higher echelons of collaborative
politics, the state sponsored public figures such as Archbishop George Hakim as
anti-communist leaders. Another sponsored anti-communist was Muhammad Nimr
al-Hawari, founder before 1948 of the al-Najjada paramilitary brigades. Because
al-Najjada participated in the fighting against the Zionist militias, but also
because Hawari negotiated with Haganah to avoid fighting in Jaffa, by the end
of the war he became a refugee in Lebanon. Admiring his charisma, Israeli
intelligence decided to allow his return to Israel in 1950 as an alternative
anti-communist leader. The idea was that Hawari would establish a new Arab
popular party. Based on reports of collaborators from within Maki [Israeli Communist Party], Cohen covers the fascinating struggle
between Hawari and the communist organization, which ended with the former’s
defeat. When politics failed, Hawari became a judge in the municipal circuit
court in Nazareth.”
As a judge and public figure, Hawari was apparently greatly respected: a
1969 photograph from Israel’s National Library shows him as one of the prominent
members of a council that was established to investigate the devastating fire
that was set by a mentally ill Australian tourist at the Al-Aqsa mosque.
If Amer Zahr wasn’t a bigoted anti-Israel activist, he could be very
proud of his great-grandfather.
[…to be continued with
a post exploring why Zahr was born in Jordan, even though his mother had
emigrated from Israel to the US]
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Last week, Matti Friedman wrote an amazing article in the New York Times about Israel's number one pop star, an Arab convert to Judaism who sings modern Mizrahi music.
In China it’s the Year of the Rat, but here in Israel it’s the year of Nasrin Kadry, who began life on rough Arab streets near the docks in Haifa and has now, at 33 years old, ascended to the pinnacle of pop in the Jewish state. The biggest concert venues, the judging dais of “The Voice,” A-list duets — all belong to Nasrin. Her improbable rise has much to say about this society and specifically about the way it operates in the places where highbrow experts don’t look.
In a similar vein, here is a video showing a gay Tel Aviv Arab who hates the "Joint Arab List" and will vote for Netanyahu's Likud today, another person who simply doesn't exist if you read the Western media about Israel.
(h/t Yoel, @LikudnikTLV for the video, @MoranT555 for the translation, errors in placing the translation on top of the corresponding Arabic are mine.)
UPDATE: Sorry, I uploaded the video without the subtitles, fixed.
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It is midday here in Israel and the third time Israelis go
to the polls to try to elect a majority after two earlier, unsuccessful attempts.
This, in many respects, is the proof that Israel is a democracy: We have equal
numbers of people on the right and on the left. We are split straight down the
middle. And that is allowed!
How wonderful is that, after centuries of repression in
Russia, Poland, Germany? Syria, Morocco, and Spain?? We get to disagree. With
the government and with each other. With anyone we damned well please!
That is what we express with our vote: that it’s good to
have an opinion and it’s even better to be able to express it with your vote.
And I vote to use this liberty to strengthen the right.
It’s not yet time for someone to take over from Bibi. And Gantz
is capable of great damage on a scale of which I do not even want to dream,
God forbid.
So I got up early and I voted for Bibi.
Because the alternative is Gantz.
In Israel we have a saying, “Hold your nose and vote for Bibi.”
That’s what I did.
And that is my right.
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Mahmoud Abbas, meeting with members of his Fatah movement on Sunday, reiterated that he will never negotiate with Israel as long as the "Deal of the Century" is on the table.
Of course, he hasn't negotiated since he rejected Obama's parameters so his lack of negotiations has nothing to do with Trump. It is simply Abbas' rejectionism, holding on to positions that the PLO has held since 1988.
He did say that he would participate if the negotiations are done under the auspices of the Quartet - remember them? - and if UN resolutions are preconditions, what he calls "international legitimacy."
Abbas also put forth a novel theory, saying that he doesn't believe that Jared Kushner or Jason Greenblatt wrote the plan. He thinks it was Israel's Dore Gold, president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, that dictated it to the Americans. His "evidence" is that the Peace to Prosperity Plan mentions knafeh from Nablus and (I think) something about Palestinian ice cream, something the Americans wouldn't have possibly known about.
The Peace to Prosperity plan mentions nothing about Nablus knafeh or ice cream. Apparently Abbas never actually read the plan and had some underling summarize it for him, badly.
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I couldn't see anyone trying to stop the person threatening Jews with another Holocaust in the longer footage.
Also heard at the rally was a chant, "Resistance is justified when people are occupied" - a call for terrorism.
It is interesting to see the same people chant against the "occupation" and in the next breath saying "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." It is obvious that when they say "occupation" they mean all of Israel.
I also sat this antisemitic sign saying that voting is rigged by Jewish media - along with someone walking through with a sign saying that the Vegas shooting was a hoax.
Again, I couldn't see anyone objecting to the explicit antisemitism shown here.
The reason? Because people who hate the Jewish state also hate Jews.
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Khalidi exaggerates the influence of the tiny number of Arab nationalists, specifically Palestinian Arab nationalists, before 1917. He doesn't mention that the Arab nationalism that did exist was a result of Christian missionary influence and British attempts to subvert the Ottoman Empire - it was never a native Arab desire, and most Arabs were loyal Ottoman subjects.
When one sees a paragraph like this, it brings up some questions:
So rule by the British was "alien rule" but by the Ottoman Turks wasn't. Why not? If Palestinians wanted independence so much, shouldn't they have been equally upset at the Ottomans as they were the British? Wasn't the Ottoman Empire every bit as colonialist as the British?
Questions like these are glossed over when people like Khalidi make up their history. He says the Palestinians were nationalists in one paragraph and in the next he says they were satisfied with foreign rule. The only way to reconcile these is to note that the entire point of the book is to blame Zionists for the Palestinian plight: noting that their nationalism was nonexistent before Zionism proves that it was in fact a reaction to Zionism and not organic. So Khalidi must exaggerate the nationalism before the Ottoman empire fell and also pretend that the only colonialism they suffered under was from the West.
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Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer has been named the ninth best hospital in the world by leading US magazine Newsweek, climbing one place since last year's rankings.
The hospital, located east of Tel Aviv, is Israel's largest medical facility and cares for approximately 1.6 million people annually. The hospital is also home to more than one-quarter of all Israeli clinical research.
The weekly magazine cited the hospital's collaborations with biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide to develop new drugs and treatments, in addition to research specialities including cardiology, cancer, brain diseases and genetics.
The Rochester-based Mayo Clinic led the global rankings for a second year, followed by Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital. Tel Aviv's Sourasky Medical Center, also known as Ichilov Hospital, was named the world's 34th leading hospital.
Tens of thousands of medical professionals were invited to participate in the survey ranking the world's best hospitals, which also took into account results from patient surveys and other medical performance indicators.
Other leading hospitals included Toronto General Hospital, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Johns Hopkins Hospital, University Hospital Zurich and Singapore General Hospital.
Israeli company BATM of Hod Hasharon announced that its biomedical division has developed a diagnostics kit to detect coronavirus from saliva samples in less than half an hour.
CEO Dr. Zvi Marom tells ISRAEL21c that the test is compatible with the current hospital-based method for diagnosing COVID-19, reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) – a type of gene sequencing that takes about eight hours.
“This kit has undergone testing by several central laboratories and hospitals that have now verified its ability to diagnose COVID-19,” says Marom, referring to the disease caused by coronavirus infection.
Marom, who has degrees in medicine and in industrial electronics, said BATM already has an advanced diagnostics kit that detects SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). The COVID-19 aspect will be added to that kit.
“BATM is working with academic and research institutions, mainly in Europe, to progress the kit to make it at a price point suitable for large-scale production,” says Marom. “The kit, which supports all the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations, has already received interest from customers in several countries.”
By next year, BATM expects that the test will be commercialized as part of its NATLab doctor’s office solution using artificial intelligence and individual disease cartridges to diagnose bacterial, viral or fungal infections within 90 minutes. For now, only meningitis can be diagnosed with NATLab, produced by BATM subsidiary Ador Diagnostics in Rome.
Thanks to a new social-action project, Chinese coronavirus patients were able to ask Israeli primary care physician Dr. Rachel Libenson Vansh how to maintain proper health and hygiene while confined at home.
Using a Zoom video link over China’s Weibo social network, Libenson Vansh answered their questions in English with immediate translation into Chinese.
This remarkable setup, which took place over a week ago, was the first in a series of interactive video broadcasts spearheaded by Israeli organization Innonation, which links talents, companies and organizations across borders through its hubs in Israel and China.
One hundred Israeli physicians have volunteered to speak remotely with quarantined COVID-19 patients on topics of concern — such as family and children; dermatology (including sensitivity to protective masks); diet; psychology (as well as dealing with anxieties); pregnancy; and signs of serious illness that require immediate attention.
Figures today show the COVID-19 virus has infected 86,584 people in more than 60 countries and caused 2,976 deaths. Many people who have been put into quarantine, or are self-isolated at home, are worried and fearful and have many questions about their situation and how to look after themselves.
“The health systems in countries affected by the coronavirus are under tremendous pressure. They find it difficult to deal with the medical needs of people living under quarantine and with the general population that fears going to clinics and hospitals,” says Amit Gal-Or, who cofounded Innonation in 2016 with his father, Amir, and brother, Raz.
Today, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is traveling to Cairo.
According to The New Arab, this trip was requested by Israel.
Gaza suffers from a severe shortage of medicines. This is not because of Israel but because the PA has limited transfers of medicines to Gaza for years.
Israel does not limit medical aid to Gaza at all.
In the face of the coronavirus outbreak, Israel is asking Egypt to provide large amounts of medical aid to Gaza, and to help improve Gaza's health infrastructure. This would of course help Egypt as well in case the virus breaks out in Gaza.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad members routinely travel to Iran which has been hit hard by the virus, and the concern is that they can become a conduit for bringing the virus into the sector, which is ill-equipped to handle it.
Once again, Israel is showing more interest in the health and welfare of Gaza than the Palestinian Authority is.
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Iraqi political analyst Muhammad Sadeq Al-Hashemi said in a February 26, 2020 interview on Al-Ayam TV (Iraq) that in the 1981 thriller novel titled The Eyes of Darkness, American author Dean Koontz had written about the coronavirus. Al-Hashemi argued that this proves that coronavirus is an American plot and he said that the goal of the plot is to reduce the world's population. He said that in the past 10 years, two patents have been filed in the United States for the development of virus strains with the name "corona" and he compared this American "conspiracy" to when the Jews used blankets infected with anthrax to wipe out 86% of the native population in what is today the United States in order to have a real Jewish homeland. He said that the Zionist lobby similarly cleansed one third of the population of Scotland and that the Rothschild family has a monopoly of laboratories that develop biological and nuclear weapons. Al-Hashemi added that the Rothschilds had been the ones who decided to use nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In Koontz's book, he created a fictional bioweapon caleld "Gorki-400" but he renamed it "Wuhan-400" after the fall of the Soviet Union. (Wuhan does host China's main advanced virus research facility, and some people are claiming that COVID-19 may have come from there.)
Hashemi isn't the only one to come up with a way to blame Jews for the virus. This enterprising tweeter said it too:
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Settlers continued for the third day in a row, cutting down trees in the lands of Al-Khader, south of Bethlehem , raising the number of trees that were targeted cutting to 780 trees.
The youth activist in Al-Khader, Emad Da`dou, told our correspondent that today, Saturday, the settlers cut down 200 vine trees in the "Fagur" area belonging to Mohammed Ibrahim Abu Al-Kata'a .
All of the Jewish communities near Al Khader are religious - Givat Eitam, Givat HaDagan, Givat Hatamar.
The residents there would not be cutting down trees or vines on the Sabbath.
The photo that accompanies this story in one local Palestinian news site shows what are obviously pruned olive trees, not destroyed or uprooted trees.
The lies continue.
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This Week’s Sanity Report from Israel Dec. 22, 2024
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Tuesday, March 03, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
Although we've seen Lynk's bias before, I just found out that in 2009, he claimed Israel was guilty of "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians and havily implied that Israel itself is a mistake that must be erased.
Although we've seen Lynk's bias before, I just found out that in 2009, he claimed Israel was guilty of "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinians and havily implied that Israel itself is a mistake that must be erased.
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