The same question every year: Can you really find 73 new reasons (one for each year of independence) you love Israel? I looked back at the kick-off column of 2004, and saw that Reason 7 of 56 was, “Twenty-five percent of Israelis were close enough to hear a terrorist bombing, yet 2 million of us were out vacationing on Passover.” We were in the Second Intifada.
This year we’re facing the coronavirus. Here are 72+1 new reasons I love Israel, in no particular order.
1. Demonstrating the value of harmonizing, social-musical initiative Koolulam brings together hundreds of Holocaust survivors and their
offspring; Jews and Arabs; Israelis and Diaspora Jews through mass sing-alongs. Because of coronavirus, Koolulam is gathering thousands of clips of people from around the world singing a song called “Fix You.”
2. In what other country could a song about the high priest in the ancient Temple (Ishay Ribo, “Seder Ha’Avodah”) make the hit parade?
3. More than 1,000 people attended a Jewish soul music concert at Yad Vashem in memory of Klezmer musicians murdered in the Shoah.
4. Not that you need it, but Jerusalem’s Lightricks Ltd. has a photo-editing app that touches up selfies. The start-up is valued at a billion dollars.
5. In Jerusalem, steakhouse proprietors go on vacation during the nine days of Av when meat is eschewed – and festival food trucks (auto-ochel) in the Valley of Gehenna offer dairy fare.
Celebrating Israel's Independence Day
Until we can experience the real thing, here's a little taste of Israel in honor of Israel's 72nd Birthday.
With Independence Day events limited or canceled this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the IDF’s Home Front Command is encouraging Israeli children to recreate parts of the festivities at home.
One of the main events in Israel for Independence Day is the traditional torch-lighting ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, which regularly features Israeli soldiers performing elaborate foot drills. However, as the ceremony is being held under a limited format this year with no audience, the Home Front Command is calling on families to perform and record their own drills at home, videos of which will be used in the event.
“[We’re] going to create a joint drill ceremony from home,” Colonel Shimon Deri, the ceremony’s master-at-arms, said in a video released by the Home Front Command on social media channels.
Among the examples Deri gave of possible drills were the forming of a Star of David, cooking a kebab on the barbecue, and a human recreation of the coronavirus.
“From your video clips we’ll create a civilian foot drill ceremony of the State of Israel for the year 2020,” he said. The final, edited video will be posted to the Home Front Command’s site and social media channels.
Deri added, perhaps jokingly, that if some of the submitted shapes are particularly eye-catching, he could use them as inspiration for next year’s Independence Day celebrations.
The San Remo conference in April 1920 appointed Britain as mandatory for Palestine with the specific task of "putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2, 1917, by the British Government [the Balfour Declaration], and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." This mandate was then ratified on July 24, 1922, by the Council of the League of Nations - the UN's predecessor.
The importance of the Palestine mandate cannot be overstated. Though falling short of the proposed Zionist formula that "Palestine should be reconstituted as the national home of the Jewish people," it signified an unqualified recognition, by the official representative of the will of the international community, of the Jews as a national group - rather than a purely religious community - and acknowledgment of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine" as "the grounds for reconstituting their national home in the country."
It is a historical tragedy that 100 years after this momentous event, the Palestinian leadership and its international champions remain entrenched in the rejection not only of the millenarian Jewish attachment to Palestine but of the very existence of a Jewish People (and by implication its right to statehood).
Rather than keep trying to turn the clock backward at the certain cost of prolonging their people's statelessness and suffering, it is time for this leadership to shed its century-long recalcitrance and opt for peace and reconciliation with their Israeli neighbors.
One hundred years ago this Sunday, the four principal allied powers involved in World War I signed a resolution at San Remo. Next week, Israel celebrates Yom Ha'atzmaut, the 72nd anniversary of the state's declaration of independence.
Typically, the world thinks that the key step towards the establishment of the State of Israel was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the statement in which the British government committed itself to work for the establishment of a Jewish home in what was then called Palestine.
Relatively little attention has been paid to the more important milestone in that story: the San Remo resolution signed on April 26, 1920.
For it was at San Remo that Britain, France, Italy, and Japan turned the Balfour Declaration into an internationally binding treaty to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, with Britain being given the mandate to facilitate Jewish immigration there.
A few months after the San Remo conference, for reasons of realpolitik, Britain hived off some three-quarters of Palestine to create Transjordan.
The scope of what was left for the Jewish national home, however, is something that Israel's enemies don't want to acknowledge – and is the reason that San Remo is conspicuously ignored. For in that resolution lie the roots of Jewish legitimacy, not just in Israel but also in the disputed territories.
That's because the Palestine within which the Jews were legally entitled to settle as their designated national home included not just the Israel that emerged in 1948, but also Judea and Samaria. That legal right given to the Jews to settle the entire land of Mandatory Palestine has never been abrogated.
During the war of extermination mounted against Israel at its rebirth in 1948, some of that designated territory was captured by the Jordanians.
As the international lawyer Eugene Kontorovitch has noted, when Israel eventually recovered this land as a result of the Six-Day War in 1967, much of the international community pretended that its own earlier guarantees didn't exist.
Far from acknowledging the legal, moral and historical right of the Jewish people to live in Judea and Samaria, the international community has consistently claimed that the areas Jordan ethnically cleansed of Jews in 1948 must indefinitely remain Jew-free zones.
Last week an event occurred that will be remembered as a key moment in the disintegration of organized American Jewish support for Israel and American Jewish organizational life itself.
Last Friday, the leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations announced that the Conference's nominating committee had selected Dianne Lob, the former president of HIAS to run unopposed for the position of chairman of the Conference's Executive Board. Her election is scheduled to take place on April 28.
The Conference of Presidents – an umbrella group that comprises 53 Jewish American organizations – is widely viewed as the most important Jewish organization in the United States.
Why is Lob's selection important? On the face of things, it was unremarkable. People who have known Lob for decades describe her as a garden variety New York Jewish liberal whose views on Israel are in keeping with the views of the vast majority of American Jews.
Members of the Conference of President, for their part, claim not to know her at all. During her term as chairman of HIAS, from 2016-2019, she didn't participate in major Conference events like its trips to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Lob's selection is an earthquake in American Jewish organizational life is not because of anything she has said or done, but because of her organizational affiliation with HIAS.
HIAS was established at the end of the 19th century under the name Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to assist the hundreds of thousands of penniless Eastern European Jews who were immigrating at the time to the US. The last major group of Jewish immigrants HIAS was involved in resettling in the US were the Jews who left the Soviet Union between the 1970s and 1990s.
In 2014, HIAS officially set its Jewish roots aside. It abandoned its full name in favor of its acronym. HIAS CEO and President Mark Hetfield claimed that the world "Hebrew" is exclusionary.
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I tweeted this a couple of weeks ago, but I don't think I posted it.
(h/t Andrew)
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The Health Ministry on Friday said there were 14,882 confirmed coronavirus cases in the country, an increase of 79 from the previous evening.
In a statement, the ministry confirmed that the death toll is now 193, up by one since Thursday evening with the death of Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Heber whose kidney donation organization saved 800 people over the past decade.
The ministry figures showed 139 Israelis are in serious condition, of whom 107 are on ventilators, and 101 are in moderate condition. The remainder have mild or no symptoms.
In addition, 5,685 Israelis have recovered from COVID-19, a number which is included in the tally of total cases.
Heber, 55, died Thursday of COVID-19 and was mourned by many senior public officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.
Heber, himself a recipient of a kidney donation, had been sedated and on a ventilator at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem for about two weeks. His condition worsened on April 14.
The kidney donation organization Heber founded, Matnat Chaim (Gift of Life), last week celebrated its 800th transplant over the past decade. Matnat Chaim facilitates voluntary kidney donations in Israel.
Blue and White MK Chili Tropper recently donated a kidney in a life-saving procedure for a man he did not know through Heber’s organization.
Tropper mourned Heber on Thursday, calling the rabbi one of Israel’s “heroes” who “dedicated his life to save lives, with infinite dedication, exceptional humility and love for humans that is hard to come by.”
“Many owe him their lives and Israeli society is better and more humane thanks to his life’s work,” Tropper said.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his “deep sorrow about the passing of the rabbi,” saying Heber “instilled in the general public the awareness of the importance of donation.”
“Thanks to him, hundreds of people in Israel were granted a new life,” Netanyahu said. “Rabbi Heber was a model of humanity, kindness and mutual responsibility.”
Whoa. Flatbush Jewish Journal, weekly Orthodox Jewish publication in Brooklyn, prints 50 pages of obituaries NOT including obit ads.#HashemYerachempic.twitter.com/yn46hPAyxM
A total of 42 deaths were added to Israel's list of fallen soldiers between the previous Remembrance Day until now, the Defense Ministry announced on Friday morning, with another 33 disabled persons dying as a result of injury in defense services. Since coronavirus regulations limit bereaved families from visiting their lost ones' graves, the names of all fallen soldiers will be read in succession prior to the Remembrance Day ceremony on Tuesday morning.
Remembrance Day "expresses the painful partnership of bereaved families and the moral obligation to remember and perpetuate the fallen," said Arieh Moalem, Deputy Directer of the Family, Memorial and Heritage Department of the Defense Ministry. "This year, Remembrance Day events will be held without the participation of the general public. We will continue to march alongside you, the bereaved families, in the long and neverending journey of coping with the memory of your loved ones.
"This year, we will all stay home and remember," he concluded.
As is every year, a siren will go off on the eve of Remembrance Day this coming Monday at 8 p.m., and another one on Remembrance Day itself at 11 a.m., during which the country stands still for a moment of silence and remembrance for the fallen soldiers of the IDF.
Due to the continued spread of the coronavirus, the Defense Ministry decided last month that the main ceremonies at the Western Wall plaza (on Remembrance Day eve) and Mount Herzl (Remembrance Day) to be held without an audience and instead to be broadcast live.
I reported Wednesday on the story of the first Palestinian resident of an overcrowded camp in Lebanon being found to have COVID-19, and how the people who scream every time a Palestinian in Gaza is found to be infected - and blame Israel - are completely silent over a much worse potential danger to Palestinians' health in Lebanon.
If there are no Jews to blame, their sense of social justice evaporates.
Four residents of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Thursday, a health official said, bringing total cases in the settlement to five.
The residents of the Wavel camp in the eastern Bekaa Valley were tested after a member of their household, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, was admitted to the state-run Rafic Hariri hospital in Beirut earlier this week for demonstrating COVID-19 symptoms.
Contact tracing and initial investigation by the health ministry “of the refugee patient who tested positive with Covid19 in Baalbek yesterday reveals four members of her immediate household affected,” Firas Abiad, the hospital’s head, said in a post on Twitter.
Medical experts visited the Wavel camp on Wednesday to carry out tests, focusing on relatives of the first patient, people she has interacted with, as well as 50 others chosen arbitrarily inside the camp and its surroundings, according to Lebanon’s official National News Agency.
Apart from the 5 confirmed cases in the camp, all other tests have returned negative, said the head of the Rafic Hariri hospital.
There have been no reports of coronavirus cases in other Palestinian camps in the country.
In coordination with Lebanese security forces, Palestinian factions in charge of security have imposed a lockdown on the Wavel camp, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, the NNA report said.
Here's a video of a car going through the camp warning people to stay inside their houses.
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Students for Justice in Palestine sponsored an almost unwatchable discussion with Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, a professor at San Francisco State University.
Abdulhabi listed a litany of lies about Israel and coronavirus:
The fact that Israeli interrogators actually infected Palestinian prisoners while they were torturing them with the COVID-19 is quite alarming. The fact that Israeli prison authorities tell the Palestinian prisoners use your socks to protect yourself from COVID-19...
As best as I can tell, the rumor that Israelis infected Palestinians while torturing them came from a story last month that Israel quarantined four Palestinian prisoners because they came into contact with a guard who was found to have the disease. So while Israel is trying to save prisoners from COVID-19, antisemites like this professor are claiming that the Jewish state is deliberately infecting them.
Arab papers claimed they were infected. Abdulhabi made up the torture claims all by herself.
The socks rumor came from that reliable source Hamas, and again has no basis in reality. While masks have been hard to come by across the board in Israel, last week Israel did manage to get a steady supply of masks for prisoners, specially colored so they cannot use them as disguises.
This shows yet again how little regard for the truth the anti-Israel activists have. In this case, we have a professor who literally makes things up. Why San Francisco State University allows a proven liar to be teaching their students is a mystery.
The Canary Mission has a large dossier on Abdulhabi's outrageous statements over the years.
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Beth Oppenheim is Director of International Relations at the Israeli Gisha NGO, which is dedicated to improving the movement of people and goods in and out of the Palestinian territories. She just started her job there in February.
"Director of International Relations" apparently means "bashing Israel in international forums."
Gisha calls itself a human rights group, yet when it comes to criticizing Egypt or Hamas for their own restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in Gaza, they are restrained and muted. The vast majority of their pretense of defense of Palestinians is aimed at only one target: Israel.
In her first article for her new employer, Oppenheim curiously chose the Arab News as the forum for yet another article about how Israel is not living up to its responsibility for Gaza. Why the Arab News? Do Arabs not hate Israel enough for Gisha? Or perhaps she was just getting her feet wet and trying to establish credibility to get into the Guardian.
Oppenheim pretty much parrots the many similar articles that we have debunked in recent weeks. She doesn't say a word about Hamas' responsibility for keeping Gazans safe and their choice to fund weapons tunnels instead of hospitals, or how Hamas indeed uses medical facilities for terrorism. She doesn't mention that the PA has been withholding needed medical aid from Gaza for years, including now (according to Hamas, but probably true.) Instead, she falsely claims that Israel is legally obligated under the Geneva Conventions to directly provide aid to Gaza, not just facilitate aid.
I commented on only a couple of points:
Repeating a falsehood over and over does not make it true. Gaza is not occupied under international law. The legal definition of occupation by every jurist in history (before Israel left Gaza) requires "boots on the ground." Making up new international law for only one nation is not valid.
That being said, Israel is indeed keeping Gaza in mind in its coronavirus planning, for example when it is acquiring ventilators. Every ounce of aid donated to Gaza is being allowed by Israel. It is not in Israel's interests for an epidemic in Gaza. Your organization Gisha knows all this.
Gisha also knows very well that any shortage of medical supplies in Gaza is from the Palestinian Authority not sending Gaza its fair share of aid out of the tens of millions already donated. For some reason, while unwarranted criticism of Israel is amplified, the actual attempts by the PA to block all aid to Gaza is virtually ignored by your NGO.
Is your priority to help Gazans - or to bash Israel?
Arab News, that bastion of free speech, did not allow my comment to be published.
Isn't it interesting that a supposed human rights organizations chooses to publish anti-Israel articles in forums where free speech is a joke and censorship is the norm?
Gisha doesn't care about human rights. If it did, it would pay as much attention to Palestinian suppression of their own people's right to movement as it does for Israel. If it did, it would publish articles abut Egypt's restrictions on Gaza. If it did, it wouldn't choose to publish articles in newspapers that don't allow any contrary opinions to be published.
No, it is not a human rights organization. It is an anti-Israel organization. And this is par for the course for anti-Israel NGOs.
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One out of every three Jews on Planet Earth were slaughtered by Nazis and their various collaborators in the Holocaust. While there were unfortunately many other victims, Jews and Roma (“Gypsies”) were the ones targeted for total extinction. Of the six million Jews who perished, a million and a half were babies and children. The Nazis were proud of their work and took many pictures…
There were many worthy commemorative articles by esteemed authors regarding this somber annual event, but two especially come to mind that should be read. The first one by Meir Jolovitz gave me yet another reason to like the actor Morgan Freeman,. Ruthie Blum honored the martyrs beautifully as well
This year, due to the current pandemic, we all recalled these tragic events at home. Since the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar, the corresponding dates on the Western calendar change yearly.
I obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside to recall the Holocaust and its lessons. Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to assure that “Never Again ! ” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949.
The 1949 lines made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways, at least according to President George W. Bush.
Additionally, I’ve fought for relative justice for all peoples– Jew and non-Jew alike–with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for well over half century now. That’s also what http://q4j-middle-east.com is all about.
But, last year, before corona, I stayed away from this public display of sympathy for dead Jews.Putting it bluntly, too many people attending annual Yom Hashoah commemorations leave and then, either consciously or unconsciously, aid and abet those who claim that Arabs are now allegedly the new stateless, oppressed Jews; Gaza is the new Warsaw Ghetto; Jews are the new Nazis; and so forth.
If that above paragraph had even an iota of truth to it, Israel would have solved its Gaza terror problem long ago.
On January 24, 2020, one day after the Fifth World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, which marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and was attended by dozens of leaders from across the world, Moroccan writer Kamal Ait bin Juba posted an article on the liberal website ahewar.org,[1] in which he noted that the Holocaust was an undisputable fact and an indescribable horror. He added that commemorating the Holocaust was legitimate and justified, especially in light of Iran’s threats to eliminate Israel, and called to continue commemorating it so that tragedies of its sort never recur. He also expressed sorrow that many Islamic countries today still teach children to hate Jews.
The following are translated excerpts from his article: "I have no intention of discussing in this [article] who has the right to live in the Jewish lands in Israel today, for this is not the place to do so… But as human beings, we do not condone the extermination of any nation in the world, be it the Armenians, the Palestinians, the Rohingya Muslims, or anyone else. When the Jews accuse the dictator Hitler of exterminating millions of Jews in gas chambers in Germany [sic] as part of what he called the ‘final solution,’ the world knows they are not directing accusations against a person who brought joy to people’s hearts… but against a person who commanded vast, destructive military and intelligence forces… and who attacked others. And how can they [not accuse him], when he wrote in his book that capitalism and communism were both invented by the Jews, and expressed covert hostility towards them[?]…
"The truth is that, when I myself studied the issue of the Jewish Holocaust… I found it to be an undisputable fact… It was a terrible tragedy that befell the Jews of Europe in [the era of] Nazi Germany, [a tragedy] whose heinous nature cannot be imagined, except by those who are directly connected to it, being Jews or descendants of [Holocaust] survivors, who transmit from generation to generation the stories about this sad and tragic affair.
"On January 23, 2020, a ceremony was held in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Germany [sic], where many Jews were exterminated. The anniversary of this event becomes [especially] justified and meaningful in light of the existence of a state like Iran, which never stops threatening to wipe Israel off the map… by means of its supporters, who take every opportunity to chant slogans like ‘death to Israel, curse the Jews.’
"Moreover, hatred of Jews is still being taught in many schools across the world, [including] in so-called Islamic states, some of which may even have diplomatic ties and peace agreements with the state of Israel. These people [the Jews] are described [in their curricula] as devils, violators of agreements, etc.
In April 2020, the Jewish people will be commemorating the 100th anniversary of the San Remo Conference, convened in Italy from April 19 until April 26, 1920, in the aftermath of the First World War. British Prime Minister Lloyd George and his minister of foreign affairs, Lord Curzon, attended along with the prime ministers of France and Italy. Representatives of Belgium, Greece, and Japan also took part. They constituted what was called the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. Most people have heard of the other great postwar conferences, like the Paris Peace Conference or the Geneva Conferences at the end of World War II. But San Remo has not been on many people’s radar screens, despite the fact that it created the geographic basis of the modern Middle East for most of the 20th century.
San Remo dealt with the disposition of territories that until 1920 were a part of the Ottoman Empire, which had been defeated in the war. Formally, the Ottomans renounced their claim to sovereignty over these lands, sometimes called Arab Asia, in the Treaty of Sevres, which was signed the same year as San Remo, on August 10, 1920. It was at Sevres that a draft peace agreement between the allies and the Ottoman Empire was worked out. What these postwar treaties enabled was the emergence of the system of Arab states, on the one hand, and the emergence of a ”national home for the Jewish people,” on the other hand. The Balfour Declaration from 1917 was in essence a declaration of British policy. But San Remo converted the Balfour Declaration into a binding international treaty, setting the stage for the League of Nations Mandate, which was approved in 1922. It has been noted that at San Remo, Jewish historic rights became Jewish legal rights.
Were these legal rights of the Jewish people superseded in subsequent years? At the time that the UN Charter was drafted in 1945, officials were cognizant that this argument might be raised. Therefore, they incorporated Article 80 into the UN Charter which stated specifically that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” Thus, the foundations of Jewish legal rights established through San Remo were preserved for the future.
Jerusalem, April 23 - Neighbors, relatives, and friends of a local resident expressed shock this morning upon discovering that he had purchased a coffee-colored pooch but given it a moniker other than "Shoko," thus defying a powerful societal custom.
Concerned citizens in the immediate social circles of Amit Dolev, 34, voiced surprise and dismay Thursday when he informed them his new brown retriever is named Kinamon (Hebrew for cinnamon), and not Shoko, the name that every other brown dog in the history of Israeli society has carried.
"I'm stunned," admitted his sister-in-law Adi, the only close relative willing to go on the record. "This isn't something anyone in the family ever expected, especially from Amit. He's generally not a troublemaker or anything, and I never would have pegged him as having imagination or an abundance of daring. I mean, he's an accountant who likes reading and maybe some occasional fishing. This is going to take some time process."
"Oh, so it's true?" wondered a neighbor who declined to be identified by name, citing concerns of associated shame in the deeply conservative society of secular Israelis. "Wow. Just wow. I grew up in the 1980's amid rumors of someone in our school, always a sibling or cousin of an unnamed student in a different grade, or who'd already graduated, whose car wasn't a white Subaru, so I'm used to this sort of thing, but it's still kind of shocking when it happens, and happens so close by."
Mr. Dolev himself appeared oblivious to the controversy and scandal his actions have generated. "I was considering the name 'Fistuk' (Hebrew vernacular from the Arabic for pistachio)," he recalled, "but figured that might better work for a smaller breed. Then I thought of Hummus, Juju, Looloosh, Loco, Lafa, Mocha, and a bunch of others, but none of them had quite the right flavor. Then I thought, 'Hey, what's something brown that everyone likes and makes a cute name for a dog? Cinnamon, obviously.' So here we are. I can't wait to introduce her to everyone."
Experts observed that while rare, such a flagrant departure from tradition has occurred in secular Israeli society on several notable occasions. "It would be analogous, to give non-Israelis an idea of what's causing the confusion," explained Tel Aviv University sociology professor Enka Zedavar, "to a Hollywood director having somebody get shot on a rooftop or other high surface and not have the character scream as he falls several stories to the ground. The last time anything like this happened here was probably a flight landing at Ben Gurion in 2014 on which no one clapped at touchdown."
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Its exclusion of Palestinians from becoming citizens is explicit, and in line with Arab League recommendations from the 1950s:
Article 6 II- Iraqi nationality shall not be granted to Palestinians as a guarantee to their right to return to their homeland.
Any Arab has a path to become a citizen, except Palestinians. The justification, as always, is that this is what is best for Palestinians. Of course, no one is giving Palestinians who want to become citizens a voice in that matter.
Non-Arabs seem to theoretically have a path as well, but the Minister of Interior must approve any requests so he can reject anyone for any reason. Which makes is virtually impossible to even imagine a Jew being allowed to become a citizen.
What about Jews who were expelled from Iraq in the early 1950s? Can they become citizens again? Article 18 gives a glimmer of hope, until you read the second paragraph.
Article 18
I- Any Iraqi, who was denaturalized on political, religious, racist or sectarian grounds, shall have the right to restore his Iraqi nationality, subject to submission of an application to this effect. In the case of his death, his children, who have lost their Iraqi nationality consequent to his father's loss of nationality, shall have the right to submit an application to restore Iraqi nationality.
II-Excluded from the benefit item I of this Article shall be those Iraqis who had lost their nationality pursuant to Law No. (1) Of 1950 and Law No. (12) Of 1952.
Law No. 1 of 1950, entitled “Supplement to Ordinance Cancelling Iraqi Nationality,” deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality. Section 1 says “the Council of Ministers may cancel the Iraqi nationality of the Iraqi Jew who willingly desires to leave Iraq...”
Of course, that law was an excuse to expel the Jews of Iraq giving as an excuse that they are all Zionist.
Meaning that Jews who were expelled from Iraq are excluded from returning. By law.
How many leftists have ever protested either the antisemitism or the explicit anti-Palestinianism of the citizenship law on the books today in Iraq?
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Israel is a democracy. Let it decide on its own future.
There is a lot of debate within Israel itself on what the future of Judea and Samaria should be, in a way that respects the rights of both Arabs and Jews. There are no simple answers.
But leftist American organizations are trying to subvert Israeli democracy by pressuring Israel to do what they want, rather than what Israelis want by choosing their elected officials.
It is chutzpah to assume that Israelis don't understand the issues as well as American Jews do. Israelis are the ones who live in Israel and have to live with whatever decisions are made. Not all of them agree, by any means, on the best way to move forward. If they want to choose a different direction they can elect different leaders. Outsiders do not have the same risks that Israelis have, and their attempting to pressure Israel is an attempt to subvert Israeli democracy.
Let Israel decide what it best for Israel.
I'm not going to send this out to my mailing list like J-Street is because I don't like to spam people. This petition will likely not get as many signatures. But it doesn't matter, because the entire point is optics - if people who support Israel take the time to create petitions then there is no longer a clear playing field for the people who oppose Israel and its policies.
Furthermore, my petition can be signed by people who oppose annexation too. The point isn't the decide Israel's policy one way or the other, and I support Israel's right to make its own decisions even when I disagree with them.
So sign on and help neutralize the people who think they can tell Israel what to do.
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Scientists racing toward a vaccine against COVID-19 at Israel's MigVax will commence a safety and efficacy assessment in rodents in May prior to initiating human trials during the summer months, a senior company official said on Wednesday.
Kiryat Shemona-based MigVax, an affiliate of the Migal Galilee Research Institute, is working to adapt a vaccine developed over the past four years against infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) - a coronavirus strain causing bronchial disease in poultry - for human use.
Phase 1/2 clinical trials in humans will start during the summer of 2020 and last six to nine months, senior Migvax researcher and director Prof. Itamar Shalit told a webinar hosted by Jerusalem-based crowdfunding investment platform OurCrowd.
"People think the winner takes it all. We are going to need much more than one vaccine. Manufacturing the needed quantity for all the world will require different types of vaccines," said Shalit, who specializes in infectious diseases.
MigVax researchers aim to adapt the vaccine for the avian coronavirus into a new oral subunit human vaccine against COVID-19, based on their great genetic similarity and identical infection mechanism. Except for some required genetic adjustments, researchers say the same vaccination concepts should apply in humans.
"It is very important to understand that to suppress coronavirus and go back to our normal life, we have to invest in a vaccine that will be effective," Shalit said. "Once we have an effective vaccine, that will be the time to exit this pandemic situation and return to normal life."
Twenty-two-year-old Amir Kashfi arrives early in the morning around 6:30 a.m. outside a Los Angeles school to set up boxes of canned goods, pasta, rice and other non-perishables to dispense. A number of recipients line up by car or by foot by 8 a.m.
The need for this food pantry has spiked during the ongoing coronavirus crisis.
“There’s a huge increase in demand because of the pandemic,” said Kashfi, a volunteer with IsraAID, an Israel-based NGO that partners with Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and Team Rubicon, which is a US veterans organization, among others in these efforts. “It hurts my heart to see so many in need.”
“Our goal is to be there for the community,” said Seth Davis, chief executive officer of IsraAID US.
He noted that the short-term goal was to fill a gap and get food to people in need, but the long-term goal was to create a cadre in the community who can respond to such crises. In addition to Los Angeles, IsraAID has helped operate food banks in other California locations, including San Diego, Orange County, San Jose and Santa Barbara.
Davis said, “This deployment will go on for months, because even if the curve flattens, there’s going to be a long tail of people still in need of food and financial help.”
“These are unprecedented times,” Dr. Lucy Uber, another volunteer, said. “Food is a basic necessity that most of us take for granted.”
Latest: Orthodox Jews are emerging as a major force in plasma donation efforts in the New York region.
More than half of Mount Sinai's donors so far are Orthodox.
Defense Minister MK Naftali Bennett presented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with plan for the immediate opening of educational institutions and stores, as an exit strategy following the coronavirus pandemic.
Bennett explained that at this stage the closure would crush the livelihood of Israelis, which is infinitely worse than the medical benefits of the closures.
This Ongoing War writes, "The opinions of Palestinian Arabs are, to a great extent, a puzzle."
Are the opinions of Israeli Arabs any less a puzzle?
For example, in July 2012, The Israeli website The Marker, (a Hebrew-language daily business newspaper published by Haaretz) featured the headline:
60% of Israeli Arabs define themselves as Palestinians
But then, right below it:
However, 80% also consider themselves Israeli
How does that work?
(Note: translations by Google Translate)
The article quotes the results of a study by Prof. Sammy Smooha and Zohar Lichtman on the effects of a year of civil service on Arab participants. They looked into the results of a survey by Adalyah Economic Advisory that showed that Arab civil service volunteers are satisfied with their year of service and say it has been very helpful to them.
Smooha and Lichtman found that when it comes to how Israeli Arabs define themselves:
o 40% self-define as Israeli Arab o 40% self-define as Israeli-Palestinian o 20% self-define as Arab-Palestinian
Looks clear enough.
But if you mix and match the numbers, you can get the contradictory results of the headline:
This data, as Samucha points out, can be read in two ways. It can be read that "60% of Israeli Arabs define themselves as Palestinians"; And they can also be read as "80% of Israeli Arabs incorporate Israelis into their identity". The choice between half full glass and half empty glass can be made by anyone.
Just 2 years later, in January 2014, Haaretz itself ran an article on what it claims is the failure of the attempt to integrate Israeli Arabs into society. It again features Prof. Sammy Smooha, of the Sociology Department at Haifa University. This time Smooha is using different data and describes the self-identification of Israeli Arabs this way:
o 32% self-define as Israeli-Arab o 45% self-define as Israeli-Palestinians o 22% self-define as Arab-Palestinians
Using the same mix and match approach, the article concludes:
These figures can be read two ways: We can call the cup half empty, with 67% of Israel’s Arabs defining themselves as Palestinian in one way or other; or call the cup half full in that 77% refer to themselves as Israeli.
The numbers here are a little different, but the ability to combine them to reach contradictory conclusions remains.
But even without combining results, some of Smooha's findings seem self- contradictory.
On the one hand:
Anyone following Smooha’s surveys knows that the position held by Israeli Arabs towards the state has become more extreme over the years. It is doubtful the Jewish majority knows that 67% of the country’s Arabs believe Israel is a racist state, only 36% accept it as a Zionist state, only 47% believe it has the right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, or that 53% support having a strong Muslim force in the Middle East to restrain Israel, and that 63% support the development of nuclear weapons by Iran.
But on the other...
63% of the country’s Arabs believing it would be good if Arab and Jewish citizens continue to coexist here, and 60% to 70% supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state where Arabs and Jews live together. These findings indicate clear support for a constitution establishing Israel’s status as Jewish and democratic, with the Arabs’ status being defined as that of citizens with equal rights. Fully 60% accept Israel’s existence as a Jewish state with Hebrew serving as the dominant language and culture.
Surprisingly, the Arabs even think Israel should aspire to turn more towards Western culture than that of the Arab Middle East. And perhaps most surprising of all, they express affection towards their country: 58% believe Israel is a good place to live and 55% would prefer living in Israel than any other country in the world. [emphasis added]
Still, Haaretz is not the only left-wing source that marshalls data indicating an increase in Israeli-Arabs identifying with Israel.
+972 Magazine makes clear that: "the findings in the current poll show that the number of respondents self-identifying as “Arab-Israeli” has risen, and the number of those identifying only as “Palestinian” dropped."
But with qualifications:
Perhaps following the ratification of the Jewish Nation-State Law, some of the respondents in the 2019 poll were more fearful, and sought to appease the poll with their answers. Disclaimers aside, one thing is clear: there is no evidence of a trend in the opposite direction.
One advantage of this poll is that it distinguishes between identifying as "Palestinian" vs "Arab." On the other hand, their breakdown makes it difficult compare the results with the other 2 polls. What the first 2 polls refers to as "Arab-Palestinian" -- does that really correlate to "Palestinian" in this survey? To a combination of "Palestinian" + "Arab"?
According to the survey, conducted by Prof. Camille Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, about a quarter of Israeli minorities (23%) define themselves primarily as "Israeli" and half (51%) self-identify as "Israeli-Arab."
The proportion of non-Jewish people who define themselves primarily as "Palestinian" now stands at around 7%, down from 18% this time last year.
Moreover, there was a sizable increase in the number of Arabs who define themselves as Israeli - that number rose from 5% last year to 23% this year. [emphasis added]
Without the actual results of the survey, the results still remain unclear.
The numbers add up to 81% -- leaving the question of what other options were available to choose from.
Also, is it accurate -- as the tweet says -- that 74% of Israeli Arabs see themselves as Israeli, when the 23% component seeing themselves only as "Israeli" are defined as coming from "Israeli minorities," which would apparently include those who are neither Jews nor Arabs?
All this all makes it impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
But if we were to make a table comparing the 4 surveys, using the 74% number, it might look something like this:
Israeli Arab
Israeli Palestinian
Arab Palestinian
Arab
Palestinian
Smooha I (2012)
40%
40%
20%
---
---
Smooha II (2014)
32%
45%
22%
---
---
+972 Magazine (2019)
46%
19%
---
22%
14%
JPPI (2020)
74% (23% Israeli and 51% Israeli Arab)
---
---
---
7%
We will have to wait for JPPI to publish the results so that we can see what choices were offered to the respondents, and what kind of mixing and matching might have been done to reach its results.
In any case, there does seem to be a sizeable number of Arabs in Israel who really do see themselves as Israeli-Arabs -- and a significant drop in the number of Palestinian Arabs who see themselves as just Palestinians.
The fact that Arabs in Israel can identify as Israelis, Arab-Israelis, is a sign of some success in the integration of Arabs into Israeli society -- success that can only be accomplished by providing equal rights and opportunities.
But more remains to be done.
And then there are the Palestinian Arabs.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
There is always intense interest in the Arab world about the miniseries that are broadcast during Ramadan.
This year, there is additional controversy.
The Arab MBC network is presenting "Um Haroun," a series about the history of the Jews in the Gulf and specifically in Kuwait, told through the story of a Jewish nurse of Turkish origin who moved between Iran and Iraq before settling in Bahrain, and the antisemitism she and her people experienced.
Here is the trailer:
Arabs are upset that a Ramadan film is actually sympathetic to Jews. The comments on the trailer include:
Jews teach their children from childhood to hate Muslims and love to kill them
A prelude to accepting and marrying the Jews, and this is essentially forbidden
This is a prelude to normalization with the Jews
It is our duty to fight every normalization act that promotes normalization with the enemy and / or dilute forms of conflict with it and / or falsify the reality of terrorism that it engages against Palestinians and Arabs
A malicious trick to establish the idea of the presence of civilian Jews before the usurping Jewish Zionist entity in the Arab land of Palestine in 1948 and that they are part of the fabric of Gulf society !!! It becomes clear to the inattentive viewer about the goals of the writer and director, the true Zionists or Zionists, which are the safety of the Jews' intentions, their humble life and their desire to live benignly, despite the people’s rejection of them and the oppression that occurred to them !!!
There are some sarcastic responses as well, saying that the Arabs aren't exactly the most peaceful people and that there are plenty of good Jews.
On Twitter, Arabs are saying things like, "A hashtag must be made to boycott MBC channels because of a Gulf series for sympathy for the Jews."
Um Haroun star Hayat Al-Fahad, who also co-produced the series, has been hitting back at critics.
Al Jazeera interviewed a professor on why Arabs should be upset at the series.
Professor Tariq Al-Tawari, professor of interpretation at the College of Islamic Law at Kuwait University, says that there are two concerns.
The first is that it opens the way for claiming the existence of a historical right for Jews in Kuwait or in other Gulf countries, which is not baseless because these families came to Kuwait at the beginning of the ninth century from Iraq and Iran....
The second fear of the series is that it could be an introduction to normalization by paving the way for penetrating the Kuwaiti consciousness that ultimately leads to Jews being accepted in the social structure.
While Arab antisemitism is evaporating ever so slowly - as is evidenced by the series itself, and a very pro-Jewish documentary in Egypt several years ago - it is still open.
Arab antisemitism will disappear when it is considered more shameful to be an antisemite than to embrace Jew-hatred.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
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Saturday, April 25, 2020
