The Jerash UNRWA camp in Jordan is a terrible place. We’ve reported about it for years.
The far-Left Israeli site +972 has finally noticed it as well. Here’s what it tweeted:
Jerash refugee camp is home to an estimated 30,000 Palestinians whose elders fled or were expelled from Gaza in 1967, after Israel occupied the territory.https://t.co/mVLb0oe8sI
No one was expelled from Gaza in 1967. Some 12,000 Gazans went quite voluntarily to Jordan to avoid living under Jewish rule (which is funny, since they also claim they want to “return” to Israel) and thousands more went to the West Bank, with Israel’s cooperation.
The article itself doesn’t use the word “expelled.” And it is pretty accurate in mentioning how bad things are in Jerash.
Based on a 2013 report by the Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies — the latest UNRWA study released on the socio-economic conditions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan — refugees who were displaced (either for the first or second time in 1967) from Gaza and their descendants are more than three times as likely to be among the most impoverished, living on less than $1.25 a day. Over half of the camp’s refugees have an income below the national poverty line of JD 814 ($1,148). Unemployment rates in the camp are close to 40 percent compared to 14 percent for Palestinian refugees in Jordan, according to a 2018 study by the Palestinian Return Centre.
The camp’s residents were also already facing a myriad of public health issues prior to the pandemic. More than 65 percent of the buildings contain asbestos and corrugated zinc, and have not been overhauled since their construction. There is limited access to clean water and a “reeking sewage system,” states the Palestinian Return Centre report. Garbage is strewn in the streets, as UNRWA had to reduce its trash collection after the United States slashed its funding to the relief agency in 2018.
The article even mentions that Jordan refuses to give the Gazans citizenship as it has done to the vast majority of Palestinians in Jordan.
But in the end, it doesn’t call on Jordan to give citizenship to Jerash residents. it doesn’t call on Jordan to at least extend basic medical services to them, or to fix the laws that don’t allow residents to build or to address any of the other myriad issues that non-citizen Palestinians have in Jordan. It doesn’t ask anything from Jordan at all.
The article concludes this way:
The COVID-19 crisis is highlighting the need for long-term, structural solutions when it comes to the rights and needs of Palestinian refugees — ones that not only respond to their humanitarian and economic difficulties, but that also address the root of their problems: their initial displacement.
There you go. It is Israel’s fault that Arabs in the south fled in 1948 to Gaza and that some of them then decided to move to Jordan in 1967. Egypt mistreated Gazans for 19 years and Jordan for the next 53 years, but that is all irrelevant, because Israel is obligated to commit national suicide by welcoming millions of Arabs who never saw Palestine to move into houses that mostly don’t exist. Only Israel has responsibility to fix the issue of Arabs mistreating other Arabs.
One would think that if any Palestinian government agency is trustworthy, it would be the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. After all, they should be dealing with hard numbers and facts.
That is naive.
Every year, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics issues a population report on the anniversary of Israel's founding - what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.
In 2006, it wrote. "The estimated number of Palestinians who were expelled as a result of the Nakba is about 750,000 persons in addition to approximately 350,000 persons in 1967. "
There are at least four lies in this sentence alone.
* Most of the Arabs who left in 1948 fled, they were not expelled.
* There were not 750,000 refugees in 1948 from areas won by Israel. Some 200,000 "refugees" were locals who took advantage of the free food offered by UNRWA and its precursor.
* None of the Arabs who left in 1967 were expelled; they fled to Jordan and Egypt because they didn't want to live under Jewish rule, although thousands of wanted terrorists fled to avoid prison in Israel. Israel did destroy three villages on the Latrun corridor because of their strategic position but it offered compensation to the residents; it did not force any to move to Jordan. Israel gave the people who fled a number of months to voluntarily return, as well.
Nakba in Palestine describes a process of ethnic cleansing in which an unarmed nation was destroyed and its population displaced systematically by gangs and individuals from all over the world. The Nakba resulted in the displacement of 800 thousand Palestinians out of the 1.4 million Palestinians who lived in historical Palestine in 1948 in 1,300 villages and towns.
Once you get beyond the "ethnic cleansing by [Jewish] gangs" lie, you see that the 750,000 number has magically become 800,000.
Perhaps, you can say, they are including thousands of Arabs who were displaced from their homes in 1948 but remained inside the 1949 armistice lines. But a look at their 2016 report shows that this is not the case:
In 1948, 1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 Palestinian towns and villages all over historical Palestine. More than 800,000 of the population were driven out of their homeland to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, neighboring Arab countries, and other countries of the world.
Thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes but stayed within the Israeli-controlled 1948 territory.
So besides the not insignificant fact that the PCBS blatantly lies about statistics, it inflates its own numbers as time goes by!
What kind of a statistics agency would publish numbers that contradict its own previous data? A Palestinian one, where propaganda and politics is always more important than telling the truth.
If you trust their current statistics, here's an interesting finding:
Even as they scream "genocide" and "holocaust" and "ethnic cleansing," the number of Palestinians worldwide has increased by a factor of nine since 1948. But in Israel, it has increased even faster, from 140,000 to 1.6 million - or about 11.5 times! Somehow, those racist Jews are allowing Israeli Arabs to thrive even more than the Palestinian Authority does.
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Apologies, for some reason the sound did not work for the YouTube clip at the end where Pessin is the "Genius" on David Letterman. You can see the entire clip here:
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If media bias like this doesn't impact American public opinion about Israel, should anyone bother protesting it?
In the first place, it is vital that a newspaper like the Times, which calls itself the nation's "paper of record" and which does devote more resources to reporting foreign news than any other outlet, not get away with biased coverage.
Straight news reporting without a heaping serving of bias is a thing of the past at the Times. Their animus against the Trump administration has, whether or not you agree with them about the president, led the paper and other mainstream outlets to discard even the pretense of objective reporting with editorializing in headlines and in the text of articles becoming so routine as to be hardly worth protesting anymore.
Still, that doesn't absolve those of us who still care about ethics in journalism from the duty to point out such egregious practices.
It's true that most Americans couldn't care less what the Times, CNN or other legacy media outfits say about any topic. But when it comes to one particular group, what the media, and in particular, The New York Times, says about Israel, matters a great deal.
While support for Israel among Americans, in general, has risen in the past decades, it has declined among Jews with a growing split between their views and those of Israelis. There are a number of reasons for this, including assimilation and the resultant shifting demography. Some of it also has to do with politics, as many in a group that overwhelmingly votes Democratic has followed the rest of their party on this issue.
But there's more at play here than just that.
We know that praise for Israel's underdog victories in its struggles for survival and positive events like the 1976 Entebbe rescue made Jews everywhere feel better about themselves and more connected to Israel.
The opposite is also true.
While some Jews are outraged by biased coverage that unfairly depicts Israel as a villain, others internalize the calumnies and distance themselves from the Jewish state. An average consumer of news may not be influenced by the Times. But a not-insignificant portion of American Jewry still regards the newspaper with the sort of veneration that observant Jews have for religious texts. The Times has been assaulting the Jewish community with the prejudices of its publishers, editors and reporters since the days when, as Dermer rightly notes, it "buried" the story of the Holocaust.
Media bias may not have turned Americans against Israel, but it has been doing a bang-up job of turning Jews against each other for decades.
The current coalition is a national unity coalition. It comprises the Likud and the centrist Blue and White Party, sitting with a couple of allies from the Labour Party. It has an impressive majority. Such as union should find widespread support in the UK Jewish establishment. The only semi-significant Jewish voice on the left not in the coalition is Yair Lapid. Outside of Meretz none of the parties support dividing Jerusalem, none support giving up the Jordan Valley and whilst some give lip service to theoretical negotiations, none are emphatically behind the Oslo vision anymore. Not one.
As Meretz no longer calls itself a Zionist party. There is absolutely NO Zionist support in Israel for the 2SS of the Oslo Process. So just which Israel are these signatures asking the Board of Deputies to speak against? All of it? Every single Zionist party?
Israelis know the truth. They were there when Barak was rejected in 2000, they remember the failure of Olmert’s deal. They understand that the factional infighting in the Palestinian street leaves them without a partner. Why didn’t we follow them through these experiences?
When Muslim representative bodies enter Parliament, most don’t mince words. There is support for BDS, the Right of Return, Jerusalem to be taken away from Israel and so on. They are not shy. Our MPs on the one hand are hearing a persistent demonisation of Israel from constituents that dwarf the number of Jews in the UK. On the other, our representatives keep mumbling about a ‘viable negotiated settlement’ that isn’t realistic and few in Israel believe in.
The PSC, PRC, Amnesty – all of these groups are also inside Parliament. What is the best the Jewish organisations can do to counter the smear of ‘Apartheid, racist, colonial, genocidal, ethnic cleansing’? Is it really to offer support for a ‘two state negotiated settlement’ with a people that want to see you destroyed?
No wonder our youth live in Narnia. We let the Israelis walk on alone and we don’t even make sense to ourselves. Which organisational body is out there telling the truth – that the negotiated 2SS is currently dead – and Israel is looking for a way forward? Because this is what we should have been screaming for a decade. Like a drumbeat. Our children would have picked up the message.
Instead – they mumble about negotiated settlements. If this is what we have spent the last decade teaching our youth, this letter should come as no surprise to anyone.
These kids are a product of our schools, our synagogues and our youth groups. Rather than look to them for an explanation, we really need to turn our attention to the organisational bodies that are meant to teach them. For this letter is a catastrophic indictment of all of them.
Israel's battle against the Covid-19 pandemic has not been perfect, but its overall strategy and leadership has been strikingly effective - as is borne out by the current death toll which compares extraordinarily well to much of the rest of the world. Israeli society is supposed to be perpetually tense and permanently riven - a country hopelessly divided between left and right, Jewish and Arab, religious and secular. You name it, we fight about it. Except, facing down Covid-19, we don't.
Several Israeli Arab communities, realizing they had high infection rates, closed off their own entries and exits to thwart a further spread. IDF Homefront Command officers have described the high degree of cooperation and appreciation they've encountered when helping Bedouin communities in the south deal with their Covid-19 cases.
It's only when you talk to relatives and friends abroad, and realize how unnerved some of them are by the way their leaders, authorities and citizenries have been dealing, or failing to deal with Covid-19, that you realize the relative common sense demonstrated here is not necessarily the norm elsewhere.
Lebanon’s economic problems have been building for years. A nation of 5.4 million on the Mediterranean with a variety of religious sects and large groups of Syrian and Palestinian refugees, Lebanon has long suffered from internal conflict and spillover from the wars afflicting its neighbors. Its historically weak government has relied on increasing amounts of debt to pay its bills, while failing to carry out reforms that could have bolstered its economy or unlocked international aid. That has made it the third most indebted state in the world, and rampant corruption has further siphoned funds from state coffers.
Not once in the article does it mention Hezbollah's strangehold on the country and its fealty not to Lebanon but to Iran.
The government led by Hassan Diab will not succeed in rescuing the Lebanese economy as long as its touted reforms are tailored to suit the needs of Hezbollah and its regional allies – and as long as the Prime Minister’s No 1 priority is to remain in power at any cost. This government is essentially a fig leaf for a coalition of political parties led by Hezbollah, an entity that is loyal to the Iranian regime in Tehran.
With Hezbollah being an important weapon in its arsenal, Tehran has two objectives that it is determined to achieve in Lebanon. First, it intends to help consolidate Hezbollah’s dominance over the country by overturning its banking system, market economy, political system and the constitution. Second, it hopes to eliminate all possibilities of a popular uprising demanding reform and accountability, as this could not only topple the corrupt ruling class in Beirut but also expose Hezbollah’s power structure to major risks – a red line for Tehran.
It is clear to all sides that there is no way to rescue Lebanon from collapse except through serious negotiations with the IMF, which would unlock external funds conditioned on serious reforms.
Hezbollah has rejected Beirut’s co-operation with the organisation except on its own terms, endorsed by President Aoun and Mr Bassil; the latter is known to hold the keys to Lebanon’s energy sector. In other words, this axis is bent on cherry-picking only that part of the IMF’s advice which suits it, while preventing any scrutiny of the government’s books, especially in the energy sector that has bankrupted the state.
The key to foreign aid is clear: serious negotiations must be held with the IMF with a proven commitment to comprehensive reforms – not selective adjustments that overlook certain sectors for political reasons.
Arab editorial cartoonists are also clued in to what the New York Times ignores. The caption here says "Hezbollah's weapons drag Lebanon's economy into the abyss."
Iran is holding Lebanon hostage, and that includes the economy. It is astonishing, although not surprising, that the New York Times does not want to even give Hezbollah's role in Lebanon's problems a passing reference.
(h/t EBoZ)
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This story has a happier ending but it should never have happened to begin with.
Nicholas Damask, chair of the political science department at Arizona’s Maricopa County Community College, has a world politics class that includes a module called “Islamic Terrorism.” In that module students were asked whom terrorists “strive to emulate,” which Islamic verses encourage terrorism, and when terrorism is justified in Islam.
Earlier this week, a student at Scottsdale Community College took a quiz as part of the class coursework. The student expressed concern over the wording of three questions related to Islam on the quiz.
SCC senior leadership has reviewed the quiz questions and agrees with the student that the content was inaccurate, inappropriate, and not reflective of the inclusive nature of our college. SCC deeply apologizes to the student and to anyone in the broader community who was offended by the material.
SCC Administration has addressed with the instructor the offensive nature of the quiz questions and their contradiction to the college’s values. The instructor will be apologizing to the student shortly, and the student will receive credit for the three questions. The questions will be permanently removed from any future tests.
We applaud the student for bringing this to our attention – and encourage any student or employee to speak out.
SCC does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, disability or age in our programs or activities. We value inclusiveness because we all benefit by embracing a diversity of voices, viewpoints, and experiences. SCC cultivates success when individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds are respected and empowered to contribute.
Chris Haines
Interim President
Scottsdale Community College
Professor Damask felt that he was being targeted and that his own job was in jeopardy for teaching the course his way - and there was nothing inaccurate about his course from what I can see.
As The College Fix reports, "The college committed the trifecta of censorship with this course of action, violating not only the First Amendment and core tenets of academic freedom but also state law protecting faculty against compelled expression of 'a particular view.'"
Only after the threat of legal action did the college apologize.
...I am troubled by what appears to be a rush to judgement in how the college responded to the controversy and the apparent failure to follow policy and procedure in addressing both the student’s concerns and the faculty member’s rights. I apologize, personally, and on behalf of the Maricopa Community Colleges, for the uneven manner in which this was handled and for our lack of full consideration for our professor’s right of academic freedom.
To avoid rushing to judgment a second time, I am announcing the immediate independent investigation of the facts related to this situation. I expect this to be completed with all deliberate speed. Upon conclusion of the investigation, I will ensure appropriate accountability wherever any failures occur. Also, to clear up misinformation, the MCCCD Governing Board is not currently involved in an investigation of the professor, nor does it plan to initiate one. Furthermore, it is important to note that the faculty member involved is not in jeopardy of losing his position.
Today, I am announcing the formation of the Committee on Academic Freedom, to be led by Provost Karla Fisher with members identified by the end of the week, to champion academic freedom education and training and to resolve academic freedom disputes in the hope of ensuring this fundamental academic value is better understood and realized alongside our longstanding commitment to the value of inclusion.
It should never have come to that. The reflexive idea that the questions were anti-Muslim without discussing this with the professor, and the pressure for him to apologize, is outrageous. To think that only the threat of a lawsuit made the college do the right thing does not say much about the value of the apology.
(h/t Andrew Pessin)
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UNRWA, and much of the apparatus of the UN these days exist inside a paradigm of apology. The end goal is a setting back of the clocks to before the 1947 partition plan. It is no coincidence that the annual UN ‘day of solidarity’ with the Palestinian people is on the 29th November, the day of the vote on partition. Why on that day, because they the UN are sorry it happened. Despite western pressure everything the UN does still treats ‘Zionism as racism’. This message is carried throughout the Palestinian movements and NGOs. The right of return is part of the way the ‘clocks’ get reset, the Jewish state is undone and Palestine – from the river to the sea – becomes ‘free’.
UNRWA, rather than working to help or assist in refugee resettlement, became a pillar in the Palestinian resistance – schools funded by the west, teaching children why they should join the armed struggle against the Jews. UNRWA must be dismantled as part of a comprehensive reworking of the possible ending of this conflict.
The Palestinians themselves are caught in an eternal prison predicated on a non-existent right that must be unravelled. A force created solely for the purpose of destroying Israel against a state of Israel that will not be destroyed. Perpetual statelessness forced on people who should have been given a new home 70 years ago. An identity that is today more virtual than real holding back Palestinians in Ramallah and Jericho from having the freedom of being able to make peace with their neighbours.
The farce of the UNRWA refugee
Look at Jordan. Over one third of Palestinian ‘refugees’ live in Jordan. They have lived there all their lives. They have Jordanian citizenship, they vote in elections and travel freely. The vast majority do not live in camps, with many joining the professional ranks of Jordan’s middle class. These are refugees? It is an insult to the millions of real refugees, survivors from war-torn regions, that exist in the world today. Worse still, it is THESE Palestinian refugees, that receive more aid and recognition than any of the others in the world. Ending this farce is a humanitarian objective that everyone on the left should support. Why should those Jordanians, with their Jordanian passports hold back the Palestinians in Bethlehem?
The Palestinian refugee in 2020 simply should not exist. To highlight the absurdity we can use another example:
1. A person who normally resided for just two years in the mandate of Palestine was given the status of Palestinian. As a Palestinian refugee, they are even given special status that makes it hereditary
2. A person who has resided in Lebanon for 70 years, is not given the status of Lebanese. Nor are their children and grandchildren who have lived in Lebanon all their lives. Instead they remain abused and denied their rights by the Lebanese.
UNRWA perpetuates this abuse. UNRWA has to go.
Removing the refugees and UNRWA from the equation
Incredibly, so fully has the ‘peace process’ become embedded into the western mindset this underlying truth – the calling out of the Palestinian refugee as a perpetuated myth forged as a weapon – receives pushback even amongst some Zionists. Yet there will be no solving this conflict until this farce is removed from the Middle East.
The evidence is everywhere. It is why they are not building homes in Gaza or Ramallah. Why those living in PA areas are also called refugees. It is all nonsensical UNLESS you see this for what it is. The Palestinian refugee was born into a paradigm of no to normalisation – and they cannot exist outside of it. If we are to move forward and find any accommodation between the Jews of Jerusalem and the Arabs of Ramallah, we have to end these lies.
Some 2,000 years ago, according to the Talmud, “Rabbi Akiva had twelve thousand pairs of students in an area of land that stretched from Gevat to Antipatris in Judea. It is taught that all of them died from diphtheria in the period from Passover until Shavuot.”
Lacking understanding of the natural causes of epidemics, a moral explanation about human behavior could serve to help to prevent another plague.
The Talmud says that 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva died “because they did not treat each other with respect.” Intriguingly it adds: “And the world was desolate.”
It is most certainly a coincidence that the current terrible pandemic affecting the world happened at the same time of the year. And the correlation between Rabbi Akiva’s students’ behavior toward each other may have nothing to do with the plague’s cause. Yet the images (and the tweets) that will be studied by our descendants hundreds of years down the road will have them ask if our present catastrophe was not largely because we “did not treat each other with respect.”
What the Talmud is unequivocally saying is that lack of mutual respect brings desolation to the world.
COVID-19 may not have much to do with the US cultural and political wars; and certainly with Assad’s crimes in Syria; or violence in Hong Kong, Venezuela, and Chile; or the hundreds of tragic situations around the world where the true root cause of the problem is lack of respect for others.
Scholars have ventured that the Talmudic reference to the plague was not the result of naïveté as a euphemism for the violence committed by human beings. Probably, with that in mind, Jewish tradition eventually instituted a holiday to reflect on what can cause epidemics and bring desolation to the world.
They named the holiday Lag B’Omer. It is, in fact, an invitation to civility that is mostly lost in barbecues, bonfires, bows and arrows, and haircuts. Prevented as we are this year from just burning energy in large outdoor gatherings, we should explore what can change when we treat with respect those with whom we disagree.
Due to the ban on bonfires during the holiday of Lag Ba'omer, air pollution was reduced by up to 90% across the country, compared to the same date in 2019, the Environmental Protection Ministry reported on Tuesday.
One exception was the Ketura air quality monitor, which registered a 149% increase in air pollution since the same date in 2019, but it seems to be a local event. Tel Aviv registered around an 80% decrease in three monitoring stations, Jerusalem a 69% decrease, and a 70% decrease in Beersheba.
The ban was set to prevent mass gatherings in order to curb the spread of COVID-19.
The ministry informed the public it may download Air in the Environment (Avir Baseviva) and be updated on air quality as monitored across the country.
A notorious terrorist who is on the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists was kicked off of several social media platforms this week after ADL sounded the alarm about her gratuitous, hateful and terrorizing social media presence.
ADL provided to Twitter and Instagram information about the social media activities of Ahlam al-Tamimi, an international fugitive wanted for her key role organizing and carrying out Hamas’s 2001 suicide bombing at a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem.
Anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. surged more than one-third in 2016 and have jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017, according to new data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In its annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, ADL reports that there has been a massive increase in the amount of harassment of American Jews, particularly since November, and a doubling in the amount of anti-Semitic bullying and vandalism at non-denominational K-12 grade schools.
The press release goes on to make clear that they connect this spike to Trump:
The 2016 presidential election and the heightened political atmosphere played a role in the increase [of antisemitic incidents]. There were 34 incidents linked to the election. For example, in Denver, graffiti posted in May 2016 said “Kill the Jews, Vote Trump.” In November, a St. Petersburg, Fla., man was accosted by someone who told him “Trump is going to finish what Hitler started.”
ADL head Greenblatt had already made abundantly clear what he thought of Trump. In a March 2016 article, he seemed to struggle to support his argument that No, Donald Trump is Not Adolf Hitler:
But while Trump’s stereotyping and bullying are truly troubling, he is not Hitler. He lacks an all-encompassing ideology like Hitler; he commands no paramilitary force like Hitler. He has no organizing principle like Hitler’s anti-Semitism. He has no genocidal ambitions.
Apparently, Greenblatt could not bring himself to just say that Trump was not a racist nor an antisemite.
The total number of antisemitic incidents during that 7 year period is 7,034 and Frantzman draws some different conclusions:
o First, where was the outcry, by either the ADL or the media over those over 7,000 cases of antisemitism?
o Over those 84 months of Obama's presidency, that comes out to 84 (83.7) incidents per month during those 7 years -- again, why no outcry?
o Frantzman teases out the number of actual antisemitic assaults during those 7 years, noting the increase in attacks during Obama's last years. The number nearly doubled between 2009 and 2015, while rising from 17 in 2012 to 56 in 2015 (more than tripling) -- yet again, why no outcry?
How Much Antisemitism Can One Person Be Responsible For?
In the first quarter of 2017, preliminary reports of the 541 anti-Semitic incidents included:
• 380 harassment incidents, including 161 bomb threats, an increase of 127 percent over the same quarter in 2016;
Frantzman claims that the claimed increase of 86% is overstating the case because one person was responsible for them -- a Jewish Israeli.
The 86% is based on the increase in incidents from the first quarter of 2016 (291 cases) to 2017 (541cases)
But if you remove those 161 bomb threats, the increase from 2016 (291) to 2017 (380 cases) is 31%.
A 30% increase is still very high, but it is not as staggering as 86%.
The ADL report bases its claim of a surge on the increase from 2015 to 2016 of 942 to 1,266 -- an increase of 34%.
Frantzman compares the 1,266 in 2016 with the similar 1,239 incidents during the Obama administration and makes the case that there is no surge:
When something is the same as six years ago, it is not a “surge.” It is “historical levels.” When half of the surge in “antisemitism” is caused by a Jewish teen, the data shouldn’t be used for the purposes of discussion. We don’t track racism against black people in America by keeping data on every time a black rapper uses the n-word, do we? We track racism based on actual racist attacks. But when it comes to antisemitism we throw out the rules, and try to record as much as possible, even recording more than 100 incidents of “antisemitism” allegedly caused by a Jewish teen. That data should be thrown out.
Incidents are defined as vandalism of homes/businesses/public areas, or harassment or assault on individuals or groups, where either 1) circumstances indicate anti-Jewish animus on the part of the perpetrator or 2) the incidents result in Jews perceiving themselves as being victimized due to their Jewish identity. Any vandalism against Jewish religious institutions or cemeteries is also included. [emphasis added]
Bernstein writes that as a result of the increase in "perceived threats" in the Jewish community in 2017, between Trump's election victory and the bomb threats, it is likely that "ambiguous" incidents were reported to the ADL. As examples, Bernstein cites a case of cemetery vandalism that turned out to be a case of old stones falling over and the case of a "drunk and mad" individual with no antisemitic intent, according to the police.
The ADL removed the first case from its list, but not the second.
In another point, Bernstein notes that when the ADL compares incidents of antisemitism on college campuses, it reports an increase from 108 incidents in 2016 to 204 incidents in 2017, but does not delineate between those by alt-right nationalists who supposedly inspired by Trump and leftist anti-Israel activists, who are not -- allowing Trump to be blamed for all of them.
Lastly, since Bernstein is writing in 2018, he can pick up on a point that is raised by Frantzman and carry it one step further.
While Frantzman in 2017 pointed to the increase in antisemitic assaults during the final years of the Obama administration, Bernstein notes that
despite showing a 57 percent increase in incidents overall, from 1,267 [in 2016] to 1,986 [in 2017], the ADL study shows a 47 percent decrease in physical assaults, from 37 to 19. This is obviously inconsistent with the meme that 2017 saw a surge in violent anti-Semitism. Physical assaults are also the most objective sort of incident to document, which adds to concerns about the robustness of the rest of the data. [emphasis added]
He concludes that he is neither a supporter of Trump nor an apologist for him. Rather, his point is that "the Jewish community’s assessment of the dangers of anti-Semitism should be based on documented facts, not ideology, emotion, partisanship, or panic."
Can Hate Crimes Be On The Rise If Assaults Are Going Down?
He points to an article in The Washington Post that repeats the common accusation that not only is there a major increase in antisemitism, but Trump is to blame:
According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump's first year in office. [emphasis added]
At issue is what the ADL is actually measuring.
The ADL statistic captures anti-Semitic "incidents," which is a much broader category of behavior than "hate crimes" or "attacks." Incidents include things like bullying in schools—which is bad, but usually not indicative of criminal conduct.
There are 2 issues at work here.
First of all, do all of the incidents being reported actually qualify as actual "hate crimes" -- or do we now suffer from the domestic equivalent of overusing the accusation of "war crimes"?
Secondly, if the results of ADL reports are going to be used to associate these antisemitic attacks on Trump, then a distinction should be made by the ADL to distinguish between right-wing and left-wing antisemitism -- based on the unlikelihood that the left-wing antisemites are taking their cue from Trump.
What Qualifies As Right-Wing Violence, Anyway?
This year, in April, another came out questioning the ADL's methodology. It addresses the issue of perception, but not of the victim of the incident but of the person behind it.
In Business Insider, Anthony L. Fisher, their politics columnist, makes a distinction in extremist incidents between "violent incidents committed by people with ties to extremist groups or ideas" vs. "incidents motivated by extremist views where violence actually occurs, is attempted, or is substantially plotted -- but are not actually targeting minorities."
Fisher is not arguing with the ADL claim that ultrarightist groups account for a disproportionate number of hate crimes and acts of terror. What he is arguing is that the number is still being inflated.
Fisher and his colleagues examined over 500 cases, defining extremist violence as "incidents where police reports, court documents, or news articles presented evidence that the incidents were motivated by extremist viewpoints."
They came to the conclusion:
Many of the ADL's 'extremist incidents' are not motivated by bigotry or politics. They're often extremists killing other extremists.
He gives some examples
o A member of a racist extremist group who is a methamphetamine dealer and kills a rival dealer,
o A white supremacists who kills either rival white supremacists, or even allies they suspect of being police informants
o A former neo-Nazi who killed his roommates when they made fun of his converting to Islam
These may still be classified by the ADL as "extremist killing." --
But by painting its findings with such a broad stroke, the ADL data might lead some to conclude that there are significantly more hate crimes and terrorism in the US than actually transpire.
Based on the incidents cited by the ADL, in most years, extremists are just as likely to kill each other, their criminal associates, or their family members as they are to kill people in protected identity groups.
Armed with this distinction, Fisher and his colleagues went through incidents reported over a 10-year time period from 2009 to 2018 and found:
The ADL identified 414 extremist incidents during that 10-year period. Of those, I found just 240 met the criteria that it constituted actually attempted violence and involved a perpetrator with verifiable or self-identified extremist beliefs against a member of a marginalized or targeted group or their property. That's 58% of the ADL's count. [emphasis added]
Fisher, like the other critics, does not see his critique as a way of supporting or advocating for Trump. He sees a need for greater accuracy in the labeling of right-wing extremist violence. Violent extremists generally inspire each other, and the publicity they get in the media is exploited as a recruiting tool. Seen this way, inflated statistics have the potential to embolden and encourage other extremists whose goal is to terrorize the public with the apparent extent of their violence --
It's not dissimilar to ultranationalists cherry-picking statistics regarding violence perpetrated by undocumented immigrants. The bigger the number, the more likely the public is to be cowed by a sense of dread.
Fisher, in particular, makes a point of saying upfront that he is not accusing the ADL of deliberately trying to create a particular impression with their data.
Not all of the critics of the ADL's methodology are quite that generous.
But the fact remains that similar to human rights groups that maintain a certain "halo effect" giving added validity to their accusations, the ADL, too, gets a certain amount of respect, which attaches itself to the numbers in its reports -- easily turning its data into a political weapon.
For example, the radical left-wing group Bend The Arc has decided to helpfully point out "far-right extremists and politicians" and reveal "who's inciting antisemitism."
We don't need this kind of weaponization of antisemitism by such fringes groups for political purposes, tearing the Jewish community apart.
All the more reason for the ADL to be more cautious and take more care in what it counts as antisemitism and how it documents it.
As Bernstein pointed out:
the Jewish community’s assessment of the dangers of anti-Semitism should be based on documented facts, not ideology, emotion, partisanship, or panic.
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Human Rights Watch issued a new report, Israel: Discriminatory Land Policies Hem in Palestinians: Palestinian Towns Squeezed While Jewish Towns Grow.
As usual with HRW, it plays fast and loose with the facts to make Israel appear to be monstrous.
It starts off with
The Israeli government’s policy of boxing in Palestinian communities extends beyond the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian towns and villages inside Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. The policy discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel and in favor of Jewish citizens, sharply restricting Palestinians’ access to land for housing to accommodate natural population growth.
Decades of land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand.
Notice that HRW refers to Israeli Arabs as "Palestinians." As Daled Amos recently showed, the majority of Israeli Arabs do not identify as Palestinian. If anything, HRW is trying to place an artificial distinction between two sets of Israeli citizens more than they accuse Israel of doing!
While the issue of land use in Israel is very complex, and there has been validity to the charge of Israel showing a preference for growth in Jewish communities over the decades, Israel has recently been addressing the issue and putting enormous amounts of time and effort into solving the problem. HRW glosses over, minimizes and ignores these efforts. By saying at the outset, as a fact, that Israel is "boxing in" its Arab communities, HRW is lying, as we will see below.
Another indication of bias comes from this paragraph:
Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute 21 percent of the country’s population, but Israeli and Palestinian rights groups estimated in 2017 that less than 3 percent of all land in Israel falls under the jurisdiction of Palestinian municipalities.
The implication is that Arabs are allocated only one seventh of the land they should have by their population.
However, one cannot compare the land of Arab municipalities with the total land of Israel - because most of the land in Israel is not part of any municipality, Jewish or Arab. Only about 6400 of Israel's 22,000 square kilometers is urban. Which means that the actual percentage of municipal land dedicated to Arab-only towns is over 10%. Furthermore, many Arabs live in "mixed" towns like Lod or Jerusalem or Acre or Haifa making this statistic an even less accurate metric of reality since they aren't "hemmed in" at all and can build and buy real estate exactly like their Jewish neighbors. Additionally, tens of thousands of Bedouin in the Negev do not live in any municipality at all.
By using the 3% figure, HRW is distorting the truth by an order of magnitude.
The bias continues:
Jisr al-Zarqa, between Netanya and Haifa in northwest Israel, is the only Palestinian town in Israel on the Mediterranean coast. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics lists its population as 14,700. Jisr al-Zarqa, a local council in the Haifa District with a size of about 1,600 dunams, is one of Israel’s poorest towns, with about 80 percent of residents living below the poverty line.
Policies of Israeli governments and institutions under the British mandate dating back almost a century have effectively boxed in its residents. In the early 1920s, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry, drained the swamps, from which local residents derived their livelihood herding buffalos and weaving reed mats, to make room for new Jewish settlements. Residents say they ended with roughly their current plot of land, far less than they had historically lived on.
Again, one can make an argument that Israel hasn't treated the Arabs fairly - but to say that ridding the country of malaria is a bad thing is a fairly ridiculous argument. And it isn't like the Zionists controlled the land in the 1920s; the British were who moved the residents so the swamps could be drained, which is the sort of thing governments do all the time when people are living in a dangerous area. It was the British who decided how much land the residents would have, not the Jews. HRW says none of this.
HRW included an appendix with a letter from the Israel Planning Administration which listed in great detail what Israel was doing in recent years to help Arab residents achieve equality with Jews in regard to land use. Specifically for Jisr al Zarqa, it says:
The plan allocates new development areas, some west of the built-up areas within the municipal boundaries and some east of Road No. 2 and outside the municipal jurisdiction, on land that belongs to the Beit Hanania moshav community. In answer to your question, the added development areas in the west necessitated the advancement of planning measures for zoning changes of “green” areas (a national park, a landscape conservation area, and agricultural land), which are approved as part of national masterplans, to allow residential use on state land for the purpose of developing new residential neighborhoods. The zoning changes were approved by the National Planning and Building Council Subcommittee.
This undermines the entire thrust of HRW's report - the Israel government is not only allocating state land to this community, it is taking land away from a Jewish moshav to give to the Arabs of Jisr al Zarqa.
So when HRW says Israel is "boxing in" Arab communities, it is flatly lying.
The IPA lists everything it has been doing over the past few years:
Of the 132 Arab communities, 119 have current master plans that have been approved, are in the approval
process, or are in preparation. These plans cover some 96% of the total population of these communities.
The plans form a planning framework that encompasses the entire area of the community and determines
zoning distribution for the coming decades as well as future development trajectories (residential,
employment, tourism, public buildings, open public spaces and more), and they are made in a process that
includes public involvement and participation.
These plans are complex and intricate, given the unique features of Arab communities, which are related
to the structure of land ownership: Most of the land in these communities is privately owned, with few
landowners in possession of a great deal of land (Some 20% in possession of some 80% of the land).
As a result of this, there are many unutilized agricultural enclaves. In addition, there is a short supply of
land for public use, partly due to the inability of local authorities to utilize land for public purposes and
authorize infrastructure on privately owned land. Most existing construction is in the ineffective form of
diffused single-family dwellings. This precludes large-scale solutions for young couples and features
multi-generational construction implemented over the years while forcing the authorities to deliver
infrastructure over an expansive area, which constitutes both a financial and operational burden. All of
this takes place in tandem with large-scale unregulated construction and challenging topographic
conditions, particularly in communities in the Galilee.
The comprehensive plans promoted by the Planning Administration, as detailed above, address these
issues on several planes: First, the plans recognize thousands of existing housing units, including ones
located at a significant distance from the area approved for development. Second, the planning process
includes great efforts to locate state-owned land that would allow both large-scale construction of housing
units in order to provide solutions for individuals in need of housing, as well as the allocation of core
public spaces needed for these additional housing units and as compensation for shortages in the older
core. State-owned land is sometimes located at some distance from the existing community, with
agricultural enclaves in between. These lands are included in the new development zones in order to
produce a compact urban structure that is not detached from the urban tissue. The result of these measures
is masterplans that include new areas for development on an extremely extensive scale, and are suited to
contain a number of housing units far exceeding the programmatic and demographic needs of the
community, as required by projected natural growth and internal migration over the coming decades.
Some of the plans include vast development areas reaching beyond the jurisdiction of these communities.
These plans bridge the gaps of the past and provide infrastructure for growth over the extended long term,
while taking into consideration construction practices characteristic of privately owned land. All of this is
in contrast to the compact high-density planning that is characteristic of planning in the Jewish sector.
HRW breezily dismisses this entire letter by saying,
in 2019, the Israeli group “Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights” noted an increase in planning activity in Palestinian towns, including steps to allow for more housing construction, but observed that the housing shortage in Palestinian municipalities would continue without the state allocating them more state land.
This is a far cry from "boxing in." This is saying that Israel is trying to accommodate all its citizens and some interest groups are complaining that it is not enough.
HRW knows that no reporter is going to go past the first paragraphs of the report that accuses Israel of wholesale crimes against its Arab citizens and read the details and appendix that show that the situation is far more complex and that Israel is investing enormous resources into fixing the issue. Because HRW isn't interested in telling the truth, but in pushing an anti-Israel agenda.
As always.
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Monday was World Keffiyeh Day, which was made up by a student group in Canada ironically named Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights.
The reason it is ironic is that while in English the pro-Palestinian crowd says it is a symbol of "unity and struggle," in Arabic it is all about "resistance" - which means terror.
It originally was used during the 1936 Arab riots to hide from the British, and then became popular again when Yassir Arafat wore it everywhere. But Arabs understand it as a symbol of terrorism.
This poem, illustrated with the face of a girl wearing the keffiyeh, ends off with "The way to Palestine is through the barrel of a gun."
Anyone who tells you that the keffiyeh is a peaceful symbol of unity is lying, and probably knowingly so.
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In 1920, reality struck the Yeshuv (The Jewish community in Palestine). Many who believed hitherto in the possibility of a bi-national state in Palestine between Arabs and Jews were shocked by the ferocity of the Arab hate and violence. Even those belonging to ‘B’rith Shalom,’ the group of intellectuals who believed in a bi-national state, realized after 1920, that it was a conflict between two national groups over the same land.
Leaders of the Yishuv in Mandatory Palestine realized that counting on the earlier existing Ha’shomer (armed guards) had little effect and wasn’t enough. Chief among them was Eliyahu Golomb, who was the architect of the Haganah, the underground military organization for the defense of the Yishuv between 1920-1948. Golomb convinced Ben Gurion (founder and future first Prime Minister), then a leader of the Labor Zionist movement, and subsequently the General Secretary of the Histadrut, the Zionist Labor Federation, that the Ha’Shomer was too weak for the needs of the community.
The subsequent violent encounters with the Palestinian Arabs forced the Yishuv, the Haganah, and later the Jewish State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to understand that survival depended on a strong military force. Golda Meir, the late Israeli Prime Minister, put it best when she said, “If the Arabs put down their guns there would be no more fighting. If the Israelis put down theirs, there would be no more Israel”
What then has changed in the 100 years since the pogrom of 1920? Not much, albeit, Palestinian Arab terror is no longer an existential threat. The Palestinian Arabs aim however remains the destruction of the Jewish state. Moreover, the same notion that existed in 1920, that the Jews are a religious group and not a national one that deserves sovereignty, still holds. To the extent that peace agreements have been signed between Arab states (Egypt and Jordan) and Israel, they were based on the recognition that Israel is too powerful to destroy. But it is not a recognition of Israel’s legitimate rights of self-determination in its historical homeland. Both the Arab states and the Palestinian Arabs recognize that what the Jews built in Israel cannot be erased. Thus, Israel’s relations with the Arabs in the territories or the wider Arab world is not based on love and understanding but rather on mutual economic, military, intelligence-sharing, and environmental interests.
A century after the beginning of the Palestinian Arab - Israeli conflict in 1920, Palestinian Arabs anti-Jewish and anti-Israel religious (Islamic) and nationalist elements of hostility, and refusal to compromise remain unfortunately, essentially the same.
In the last decades of the 20th century, black nationalist, anti-Semitic messaging has also found a receptive audience on college campuses throughout the country. At Wellesley, for example, one professor used The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews as a textbook and when he was accused of promoting bigotry in the name of history, he subsequently published The Jewish Onslaught, an attack on his critics whom he perceived were Jews. At Kean College, Khalid Muhammad, a disciple of Louis Farrakhan, accused Jews in a college lecture of being “bloodsuckers.” Invited by a black student group, rapper Professor Griff of Public Enemy told his audience at Southern Connecticut State University that Jewish doctors injected black babies with AIDS. These examples provide a sample of how anti-Semitic black nationalist rhetoric is being mainstreamed into academic programs that have as their stated objective the fostering of multicultural understanding.
In recent years, black nationalist spokesmen on college campuses have continued to verbally attack Jews while also using the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) to give a sheen of legitimate concern over specific Israeli government policies to mainstream their hate-filled beliefs. In using the boycott movement to attack Israel, they have found commonality with neo-Nazis and far-right extremists while gaining access to young and impressionable students. When student organizations are criticized for bringing such bigoted speakers to campus, they respond that freedom of speech requires hearing the “other side.”
In comparing BDS to the boycott in South Africa during the apartheid era, black nationalist groups have found a wider audience for their transhistorical anti-Semitic hate while cloaking it in the language of normative anti-racist politics. While one can argue about whether BDS is inherently anti-Semitic—there are perhaps a majority of BDS supporters who are sincere in support of the Palestinian cause without being anti-Semites, many of them Jewish, especially within academia—it is clear that BDS has also become a nesting place for black nationalists, neo-Nazis, and far-right extremists who use the movement to spread anti-Semitic ideas that they believe to be universal truths, and which are hardly dependent on specific Israeli government policies.
The reality is that as long as the country is divided along racial and political lines, black nationalist organizations will continue to find fertile ground to recruit the likes of those in the Monsey and Jersey City attacks without being accountable for inciting hate crimes against Jews, the LGBT community, and other vulnerable groups. There will continue to be more attacks by lone wolves, whether Grafton Thomas or Dylann Roof, who are infected by the bile of not only black nationalist but also white extremist organizations. Which raises the question as to why the leaders of hate group organizations are not held criminally responsible for promoting violence through their websites and Charlottesville-like marches. Unless and until we strengthen hate crime laws against those who encourage violence against Jews and other groups, then the Farrakhans and David Dukes of this world will continue to recruit followers through social media while messaging anti-Semitic canards on an everyday basis.
Black nationalism represents one component of a growing war of hatred against worldwide Jewry and Israel. In our country, the road to Monsey and Jersey City is not too distant from the road to Charlottesville.
"Jewish political intelligence is an oxymoron." Never forget that maxim when you walk into a gathering of Jewish/Americans. Be prepared to be amazed at their ferocious arrogance tempered with an unwillingness to hear you when you're recognized as a Conservative.
It's a fact that about 72% of this group are of the Democrat persuasion and infused with a suicidal zeal for the destruction of their own people. Their fanaticism and supportive compliance with their haters, a genetic mutation fostered by 2000 years of being treated like dirt in every nation in which they sought refuge, has led them to bend their knees to their oppressors, groveling to seek acceptance as "one of them."
Of course, they have been, time after time, looked down upon as useful idiots. And when the time comes, as in the past, bet on it, they will once again be treated as shifty, sly, deceptive, money hungry traitorous Jews. With no other country to seek refuge in, this next time, they may even, once and for all...... be made to disappear.
Did I hear you say, "What about relocating to Israel?" Understand that these same 72% of Jews who currently support all the Israel-hating voices emanating from the new leadership of The Party, will revel in the destruction of the Jewish homeland. Look at the astounding growth of such Jewish-infused groups such as J Street, Americans for Peace Now, T'ruah, Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbis for Obama, The Center for Middle East Peace, If Not Now and Jewish Professors Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Barry Trachtenberg and more than a host of others, all of whom are targeting the very existence of Israel by indoctrinating their students with a hatred for that land.
You can see the trend.
Naturally, all of the above groups and professors are adored and used by the Democrats to garner support for their candidates, all of whom march lock-step with The Party's leader. For eight years that was Reverend Wright-nurtured President Barack Obama. Now the lead Democrat Presidential candidate is Joe Biden, who recently promised to welcome back into D.C., the terrorist supporting Palestinian Liberation Organization's Embassy, opened by Obama in 2009 and kicked out by President Trump in 2018.
Every once in a while, some brainy Israel hater will find an old British Mandate coin that says "Palestine" on it (including the initials for Eretz Yisrael in Hebrew) and say that, look, this shows that there was a place called Palestine before the State of Israel!
The arguments are uniformly stupid. The Arabs of Palestine protested against having their own currency, for one thing. This is a British coin.
In honor of Lag B’Omer, the Israel Antiquities Authority on Monday revealed a rare bronze coin from the period of the Bar Kokhba revolt (circa 132 CE), which was discovered in archaeological excavations of the Israel Antiquities Authority in the William Davidson Archaeological Park, under the supervision of the Company for the Reconstruction and Development of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, Ltd. located between the Temple Mount and the City of David.
The obverse of the coin is decorated with a cluster of grapes and the inscription “Year Two of the Freedom of Israel” and the reverse side features a palm tree and the inscription “Jerusalem.”
The revolt coins featured the Temple facade, trumpets, a harp/violin, as well as the inscriptions: “Redemption of Israel” and “Freedom of Israel.”
I think 132 CE is a little earlier than 1939 CE.
Here's a video about the coin:
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Palestinian Media Watch notes that this music video, urging women to become suicide bombers in Israeli cities, has been shown numerous times on official PA TV in recent weeks:
Lyrics: “Strap on the explosive belt
Detonate the first in Haifa
and the second in Atlit (i.e., Israeli cities)
Do not let the usurper (i.e., Israel) sleep
Make him constantly terrified...
O my enemy,
this is the day you have never seen...
Strap on the Molotov cocktails
and the AK-47 bullets
Make the tyrant constantly afraid,
and may a volcano of oil boil below him...
Strap on the belt, O daughter of my land,
and detonate it in front of the enemies
How sweet is the taste of Martyrdom,
I have found none like it...
O Wafa [Idris] and Ayyat [Al-Akhras] (i.e., female suicide bombers)
You have lifted our heads to the heavens
Our public is now following you
by the thousands”
It has been years since the last female Palestinian suicide bomber attempt. Why would this message be broadcast so much today?
Perhaps the answer can be found in this article about how Palestinian women are suffering under the closures of COVID-19. The PA minister of women's affairs Dr. Amal Hamad gave a press conference on Saturday where she revealed that domestic violence has doubled in the territories since the pandemic began, including cases of incest. There have been 20 attempted suicides by Palestinian women in recent weeks.
Could it be that the Palestinian leaders are trying to recruit abused women in order to give them a path to move from being ashamed to becoming heroines? Is this their planned response to Israel possibly extending sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria? Suicide bombers no longer generate as much sympathy as they used to, but a narrative of "distraught Palestinian women" could be effective among certain circles.
Given that many female suicide bombers in the past have been discovered to have been doing something considered "shameful," this seems like disturbingly possible scenario.
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President Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are readying to create history together on 1 July when Israel restores Jewish sovereignty after 3000 years in 1697km² [square kilometers] of territory comprising 30% of Judea and Samaria – the Jewish People's biblical and ancient heartland.
About 65000 Arabs – 5% of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria – and 450000 Jews live in the area proposed for Jewish sovereignty.
The road forward has been made possible after Netanyahu was unanimously confirmed as Israel’s next Prime Minister by 11 judges of Israel’s Supreme Court.
Trump’s map (pictured below) gives practical expression to the following international treaties and documents justifyingIsrael’s proposed action:
• The San Remo Resolution and Treaty of Sevres in 1920
• The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922
• Article 80 of the UN Charter
Trump’s translation of a dream – begun 100 years ago at San Remo – into a miraculous reality for the Jewish people in July2020 – should be welcomed by every Jew worldwide – privileged to be the generation to see this amazing reaffirmation of the Jewish People’s past history coming alive again.
Instead, this momentous occasion is being met with opposition by many Jewish organisations, media and individuals concerned at what they call “West Bank Annexation” – the identical language used by the UN and EU, PLO and Arab League in opposing Israel’s action.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Restoring Jewish sovereignty in Judea and Samaria – designated for reconstitution of the Jewish National Home by the international community 100 years ago – is not “West Bank annexation”.
Trump and Netanyahu – therefore – would certainly not have welcomed the publication in the New York Times of an article by Middle East Forum President – Daniel Pipes – headlined “Annexing the West Bank would hurt Israel”.
Pipes opposes Israel’s decision for six reasons:
• President Trump could well erupt in fury at Israel for “unilaterally acting”on 1 July
• “Annexation”would alienate and weaken Israel’s diminishing number of friends in the Democratic Party and in Europe
• “Unilateral Israeli annexation”could end Israel’sexpanding ties with Sunni Arab states.
• “Annexation”could destabilize “Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza”.
• “Annexation”is sure to alienate Israel’s Leftwhich would lead probably to a contingent of Israeli Zionists turning anti-Zionist, with some Israelis leaving the country in disgust
• “Annexation”would be likely to make more Palestinians eligible to become citizens of Israel.
Two of Pipes’s reasons suggesting “unilateral action” by Israel are simply untrue.
Bonus Fear #7: Israeli sovereignty will achieve nothing
While not numbering it, Pipes sneaks in a seventh fear: that Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is merely “a symbolic move, a gesture towards Israelis living on the West Bank in legal limbo,” and will achieve nothing except trouble.
But Pipes forgets that symbolism is a powerful force in the ancient Middle East. Sending a signal that Israel intends to stay in its historic heartland forever will do much to deflate jihadist intentions. Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria will also broadcast a message of Jewish historic rights to all those who claim that Israel is merely a European colonizer.
Far from achieving nothing, Israeli sovereignty in the ancestral homeland and the annexation of strategic positions will have a much-needed positive impact for both Israeli identity and Israeli security. Daniel Pipes’ latest article serves as a boon to enemies who wish to weaken Israel through exaggerating the very fears he mentions. To be fair, he has written many strong articles in favor of a robust Israeli policy; this one seems to be a departure.
The real Israel, thankfully, is not afraid because it shouldn’t be. There is a buoyant sense of prosperity in the air, and a healthy embrace of tradition is permeating Israel’s consciousness. Thousands of new housing units were just green-lighted in the Etzion block in Judea. Israel’s birth rate continues to be high, and the GDP per capita is above even that of the United Kingdom. Now is not the time to be gripped by fear. Now is the time for Israelis to gather strength and confidence from all we have been through and all we are becoming, and to take control of our land through sovereignty and of our future.
I believe in a smart Israel “victory” that goes for the jugular, and I see annexation of the West Bank at this time as dumb, as going for the extremities. As I wrote in the article, it “would probably damage Israel’s relations with the Trump administration, the Democrats, Europeans, and Arab leaders, as well as destabilize the region, radicalize the Israeli left, and harm the Zionist goal of a Jewish state.”
I appeal for cool tempers, clear goals, and smart tactics.
In this case, that means carefully considering what steps will most advance the goal of breaking the Palestinian will to eliminate Israel, while simultaneously doing the least damage to Israel’s internal harmony and external standing. One possibility would be, as I have argued before: “When official [Palestinian Authority] guns are turned against Israelis, seize these and prohibit new ones, and if this happens repeatedly, dismantle the PA’s security infrastructure. Should violence continue, reduce and then shut off the water and electricity that Israel supplies.”
Again, let’s debate calmly and stay focused. Only that way — and not via legalistic distractions or tactical enthusiasms — can Israeli victory be achieved.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
Hezbollah Leader
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[image: Dry Bones cartoon, Iran, War, Hezbollah, Nasrallah, Israel,
Lebanon,]
He's gone with the wind.
* * *
*Please make a donation to Dry Bones.*
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[image: Hassan Nasrallah Nasrallahed]
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1) At the Misgav Institute, Arsen Ostrovsky explains ‘The Law Of Exploding
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Making a Correction
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The transparent mob attack on the Jewish Chronicle
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Make no mistake, the Jewish Chronicle made a huge error in trusting a
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One Choice: Fight to Win
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Yesterday Israel preempted a potentially disastrous attack by Hezbollah on
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Yom Hashoah 5784 – 2024
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Israel’s Yom Hashoah began at sundown this evening with the annual ceremony
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Closing Jews Down Under Website
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With a heavyish heart I am closing down the website after ten years.
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Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
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Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
