Of Course Anti-Zionism is Antisemitic (American Zionism)

 

Once the exclusive domain of the far-right and far-left, the expression “anti-Zionism is not antisemitic” has crept into the mainstream. We hear it all the time on social media from athletes to politicians, from journalists to “influencers.” Most surprising is that the expression has even made its way into the vernacular of liberal, progressive Jews, going so far as to claim that not only is anti-Zionism not antisemitic, but “conflating Zionism and Judaism” is what’s really antisemitic, disregarding that Zionism is a core belief for the vast majority of Jews around the world. So, is anti-Zionism antisemitic, or isn’t it? Before we can answer that question, we need to define what antisemitic means and what anti-Zionism means, two concepts that are far more complex than they appear.

If you ask most people what antisemitic means, they would answer that it is the hatred of Jews, and they would be correct...if you were talking about a person doing the hating. A person can hate Jews. But when you are talking about an idea, hatred of Jews doesn’t make much sense. Ideas don’t hate, people hate. For example, if there was a law that Jews could not attend school, the law does not hate Jews. The law discriminates against Jews. So, when we talk about ideas, and anti-Zionism is an idea, antisemitic means “discriminatory against Jews.”

Antisemitic – Discriminatory against Jews.

The terms Zionism and anti-Zionism are much more difficult to define. Many people who claim to be anti-Zionist struggle just to explain what Zionism is. You will hear definitions that are all over the place. Nearly all of them are wrong, and many of them are downright offensive. To understand Zionism, let’s consider the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah or The Hope, which was inspired by a Jewish poem from the 19^th century titled Tikvatenu by Naftali Herz Imber and revised by Dr. Yehuda Leib Matmon-Cohen. Hatikvah proclaims that that the two-thousand-year hope of the Jewish people is “to be a free nation in our home,” with home meaning the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, the Land of Israel. That is the essence of Zionism. To put it more simply, it means the Jewish nation is afforded the same rights as any other similar nation of people, which includes a right to a home, just like Indians have a home, and Poles have a home and Arabs have many homes. Anti-Zionism denies that right to the Jewish nation and only the Jewish nation – to live as a free people in their nation state. Since the state of Israel already exists, it also means seeking the destruction of the nation state of the Jewish people while not seeking the destruction of any other nation state of any other people. When is the last time you heard a large section of the population lobby for the destruction of a country other than Israel – not a government but an entire country?

Anti-Zionism - denying the Jewish nation the same rights as any other similar nation of people

Even with those definitions, it can still be hard for some people to wrap their heads around how anti-Zionism is antisemitic. To better understand, let’s look at another instance where a group of people are denied a right not denied to a similar group of people – gay marriage. For a long time, the homosexual community was denied the right to marry (and in many places they still are) - a right granted to the heterosexual community. A person may oppose same sex marriage for any number of reasons, religion being the most common. The person may not hate gay people, but the idea is surely anti-gay. It’s hard to argue that not allowing gay people to marry when straight people are allowed to marry isn’t discriminatory against homosexuals. Ironically, the very same people that will argue anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitic will be the ones who shout loudest that denying same sex couples the right to marry for any reason is anti-gay.

You may be saying to yourself, “Wait a second, I hear liberal Jews all the time identify as anti-Zionist and say that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic. Gay people never opposed gay marriage.” That’s not true, actually. During the height of the gay marriage debate in the early 2010s, you could hear or read many stories of gay people who opposed gay marriage for one reason or another. Here are two examples: The Gay People against Gay Marriage and I’m Gay and I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage. It’s important to note that those in the gay community who oppose gay marriage don’t necessarily hate homosexuals (although they might), but there can be no doubt that their position on gay marriage discriminates against homosexuals and that opposition is anti-gay. In the same way, Jews who oppose Zionism and want to see the dissolution of the state of Israel don’t necessarily hate Jews (although they might), but there can be no doubt that opposing the right for Jews to have a state like all other similar nations of people is discriminatory against Jews and that position is antisemitic. The same rationale applies to all people who are anti-Zionist. The person may not hate Jews, but the idea is discriminatory against Jews and thus antisemitic (a large portion of people who identify as anti-Zionist also happen to be anti-Semites or at least hold antisemitic views which drives their anti-Zionism).

What about the argument that “conflating Zionism and Judaism” is antisemitic? First, let’s define Judaism. Judaism put simply is the religion of the Jewish people. It is not the religion of every single Jew, some Jews do not practice Judaism while others may be atheists, but rather the religion of the nation of Jews. It can also be called an ethnoreligion.

Judaism – the religion of the Jewish people.

Considering the definition of Zionism – the longing to be a free nation in the Jewish home – and Judaism – the religion of the Jewish people – it is hard to see how longing to be a free nation in the Jewish home in anyway discriminates against the religion of the Jews. It seems to be quite the opposite. In order for the Jewish people to be a free nation in their home it would imply that part of that freedom would include the ability to practice their religion openly and safely, something that has not been the case throughout Jewish history in nearly every land where they lived as a minority. Even when replacing Judaism for a Jew, an idea for a person, it is still hard to see how Jews longing to be a free nation in the Jewish home is hateful to any Jews or discriminatory against that Jew. No one is forcing them to live in that home. Is it because the home founded by Jews, made up of a majority of Jews, and who are able to live free of religious & ethnic persecution as Jews, uses the word “Jewish,” as in Jewish state, that they think discriminates against them? Is the website Christian Mingle anti-Christian? Because some Christians do not want to date other Christians does that mean the site is discriminating against them because the site uses the word Christian? Since they don’t see a need for Christian Mingle, and they themselves are Christian, does it mean the site has no right to exist? The answer to all those questions is clearly no. But would trying to shut down Christian Mingle for any of those reasons, while having no problem with JDate or BlackCupid or Muslima, be anti-Christian? Sure. So why is okay for so many people when they apply the same exact logic to Jews and Israel?

The argument that “by conflating Zionism and Jews you are causing antisemitism” really tells more about the people that “become” antisemitic than the relationship between Zionism and Jews. Notwithstanding the fact that the people who make that statement have to jump through many hoops and unquestioningly accept many far-fetched stories to feel that the policies of the state of Israel are irredeemable, even if they were true it would still be wrong to hate people that have nothing to do with those actions, other than sharing an ethnic background and feeling a connection to that land. And that response is not applied to any other people on the planet. It is exclusively reserved for Jews. People do not say “by conflating Iran and Iranian-Americans you are causing anti-Persian racism.” Have you heard of anti-Persian racism in America based on the actions of the Iranian government? Have you heard of anti-Persian racism in America at all? For a person to hate an Iranian because something the Iranian government did thousands of miles away, they would have had to hated Iranians before those actions. The actions become an excuse to justify their hatred. You don’t see that with Iranians, or any other people. You only see that with Jews. Has there ever been an anti-Israel protest that did not include antisemitism? Let’s look at an example were the actions of a distant government were the catalyst for creating hate for an ethnic group. Consider America during World War 2. After Pearl Harbor, discrimination against Japanese Americans increased, including against many people who were born in America and had no direct connection with Japan. Was conflating Japan and Japanese Americans what caused the racism? Of course not. Was the racism any more legitimate because of the actions of the Japanese government? Would anyone say that Japanese Americans caused the racism or brought it upon themselves by being proud of their Japanese heritage or even having a Japanese flag? Racism caused racism, nothing else. Conflating Zionism and Jews does not cause antisemitism. Antisemitism causes antisemitism.

So, is a person who is an anti-Zionist necessarily an anti-Semite? No, but they most likely are. Their anti-Zionism, however, of course is antisemitic.

Hatikvah (The Hope)

As long as in the heart within,

The Jewish soul yearns,

And toward the eastern edges, onward,

An eye gazes toward Zion.

Our hope is not yet lost,

The hope that is two thousand years old,

To be a free nation in our land,

The Land of Zion, Jerusalem.

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Another day, another crazed antisemitic screed out of Jordanian media

When looking at classically antisemitic essays in Arabic news sites, Jordan has far more of them then all other Arab countries combined. 

There is a fair amount of antisemitism in Iraqi media, and Algeria will publish some. Most Arab countries are sensitive to charges of antisemitism and will stick with writing about Israel and Zionism to avoid that accusation.

But the media in Jordan - a supposedly moderate, Western-oriented state at peace with Israel - is virulently antisemitic. 

I gave an example only yesterday of a prolific Jordanian writer for several major newspapers publishing an article calling for the expulsion of nearly all the Jews in Israel. There is no fear from Jordanian writers of crossing the antisemitism line - no one outside myself and MEMRI bother to mention their hate. 

Today's example comes from Abdul Hamid Al-Hamshari writing in JordanZad, 

The article isn't too innovative; it claims that Freemasons are Zionists who are planning to take over the world. 

It is in fact a sadistic movement whose main goals are to destroy religions and values, and to spread corruption in all its moral, economic and social aspects, through its multi-behavioral mafias, such as the human trafficking mafia and arms trafficking. Trafficking in doping and drugs, manipulating global stock exchanges through which it was able to destroy the economies of countries and bankrupt those who do not walk in their orbit and lead matters on the stage of world events, in order to serve the foundations of the global Zionist movement that seeks to destroy the international community and spread corruption in it and fuel conflict between nations and different countries, small and large. It plays its distinctive role in exploiting what is happening in the Arab region in terms of local and regional conflicts and foreign interference, such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Sudan, in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish government that controls the whole world according to well-drawn plans and programs that take into account secrecy and covenants.

Once again, I point out that the antisemitic article is not the real story. The real story is the absolute absence of any Jordanian writer, politician or pundit to call out these idiots as the bigots and ignoramuses they are. Millions of Jordanians have their minds poisoned by the world's oldest hatred and no one - even Western-educated Jordanians, such as the King himself - is at all bothered by this. 

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The Mufti’s seminal antisemitic pamphlet

From “Islamic Antisemitism: Characteristics, Origins, and Current Effects” by

Matthias Küntzel in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs:

A thirty-one-page booklet in Arabic entitled Islam and Jewry, published in Cairo on August 18, 1937, served as an effective propaganda tool. ¹¹ As far as we know, this publication is the first written evidence of Islamic antisemitism. In 1938, the Berlin-based publishing house Junker und Dünnhaupt released it under the title Islam–Judaism: Call of the Grand Mufti to the Islamic World in 1937, explicitly attributing that screed to al-Husseini for the first time. ¹² In subsequent editions released by the Nazis during World War II, the Mufti continued to be named as the author. Whether al-Husseini was in fact the sole initiator and author of this pamphlet remains an open question.

While classical Islamic literature treats Muhammad’s struggle with the Jews as a minor episode in the life of the Prophet, now “Muhammad’s conflict with the Jews [was being] portrayed as a central theme in his career and their enmity to him given a cosmic significance.” ¹³ The anti-Jewish verses of the Qur’an were generalized and considered valid for the twentieth century. Finally, for the first time, religious tropes were combined with elements of conspiracy theory. Since Muhammad’s days, according to Islam and Jewry, the Jews have constantly been trying to “destroy Muslims.” The brochure concludes:

[T]he verses from the Qur’an and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. Do not believe them, they only know hypocrisy and cunning. Hold together, fight for the Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews. ¹⁴

Here, the Muslims are presented as eternal victims in order to legitimize new forms of aggression more reminiscent of the policies of the Nazis than the attitudes of the Prophet. In September 1937, days after its publication, the booklet reached a wide audience through its distribution at the National Arab Congress in Bludan, a health resort in Syria, fifty kilometers northwest of Damascus.

The Spread of Islamic Antisemitism

This first pan-Arab congress, held from September 8–10, 1937, was organized by al-Husseini. He also “provided the funds to rent the two largest hotels in Damascus and Bludan and grant a large number of penniless participants rooms without charge.” ¹⁵ No wonder, then, that the congress attracted 411 attendees, although only 250 were allowed into the hall of the Grand Hotel of Bludan, where the congress took place. The Mufti could not attend because he was in hiding in Jerusalem after a failed July 1937 attempt by the British authorities in Palestine to arrest him. ¹⁶ In October 1937, he fled to French-controlled Beirut. Nevertheless, the delegates named him honorary president of the assembly.

The congress was not a public event; even newspaper reporters were not allowed inside. However, Colonel Gilbert MacKereth, the British consul in Damascus at the time, arranged for a person in his confidence to attend. Based on the reports of the spy, MacKereth described the event as “a manifestation of Judeophobia.” He referred to “a startlingly inflammatory pamphlet entitled ‘The Jews and Islam,’ which was handed to each member of the congress on his arrival. It had been printed in Egypt.” Annex V of MacKereth’s memorandum, written by his confidante, bears the title “Description of a violently anti-Jewish Pamphlet printed in Cairo for the Palestine Defense Committee there, which was given to each of the persons attending the Bludan congress.” The summary of the pamphlet’s contents presented in an annex to the report leaves us with no doubt that he was referring to the Cairo publication of August 1937. ¹⁷

The Nazis viewed Islam and Jewry as an especially valuable tool. During the war, Berlin printed and disseminated this text nearly unchanged in several languages and editions. For example, there is proof that in 1942, the Spanish authorities confiscated some 1,500 copies of “a German propaganda pamphlet in the Arabic language called ‘Islam and the Jews’” that had been sent to the German consulate in Tangiers. According to the German Foreign Ministry, these brochures were to have been distributed “unobtrusively” in Spanish Morocco. “Unobtrusive” is the key word here. The Muslims would have laughed at an SS officer openly distributing an Arabic text pretending to speak in the name of Islam. But this was indeed what was happening. The Nazis disguised themselves as Muslims and falsified Islamic scripture so as to lend credibility to their murderous hatred of Jews.

The Spanish authorities responsible for Tangiers, however, frustrated this plan. They were of the opinion that “the distribution of such propaganda directed against the Jewish elements in Spanish Morocco could not be permitted” and had all copies confiscated and destroyed. ¹⁸ In 1943, another 10,000 copies of the same pamphlet were printed in Zagreb, capital of Germany’s Croatian satellite, this time in Serbo-Croatian (Islam I Zidovstvo), and distributed in Bosnia and Croatia. ¹⁹

Though the precise details of the pamphlet’s dissemination are unknown, Islam and Jewry might well be regarded as the forerunner to Sayyid Qutb’s notorious text Our Struggle with the Jews of the 1950s. David Motadel regards Islam and Jewry as “one of the most significant examples of this kind of religiously charged anti-Jewish propaganda dispersed among Muslims,” ²⁰ while historian Jeffrey Herf deems it “one of the founding texts of the Islamist tradition, one that defined the religion of Islam as a source of hatred of the Jews.” ²¹

The timing of the publication of Islam and Jewry, in August 1937, is also revealing. It proves that Islamic antisemitism took hold when the flight and expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs (1948) and Israeli rule over Gaza and the West Bank (1967) were still in the distant future. This fact alone contradicts the widespread assumption that Islamic antisemitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds. It was not the behavior of the Zionists that prompted the publication of this hostile text, but rather the fact that a first attempt had been made in the summer of 1937 to agree on a two-state plan. Islam and Jewry accordingly culminates in the following call: “Do not tolerate the Partition Plan, for Palestine has been an Arab country for centuries and shall remain Arabic forever.” This pamphlet was intended to theologize the territorial conflict between Jews and Arabs in order to destroy the first important attempt at a compromise—which had initially been met with a degree of approval from some moderate Arabs.

The antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem is, of course, an icon for Palestinians today. His influence remains.

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08/30 Links: Netanyahu: Palestinians can’t ‘veto’ Israel-Arab peace; Why aren’t pro-peace voices celebrating the UAE-Israel deal?; Families of three murdered teenagers sue Hamas for over NIS 500m.

From Ian:

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On eve of 1st UAE flight, PM claims Palestinians can’t ‘veto’ Israel-Arab peace

Israel’s normalization of ties with the United Arab Emirates will pave the way for treaties with more Arab countries since it has removed the “Palestinian veto” on peace between the Jewish state and the Arab world, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday, as he hosted senior American officials who brokered the historic deal between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi.

Netanyahu spoke Sunday during a press conference alongside US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, a day before a US-Israeli delegation including Kushner is set to take the first-ever Israeli commercial flight from Tel Aviv to Abu Dhabi to put the Israeli-UAE normalization deal into practice.

Kushner echoed the assertion that other Arab and Muslim states would make peace with Israel and said that Trump, his father-in-law, was “writing a script for a new Middle East.”

The August 13 Israel-UAE diplomatic breakthrough “will pave the way for other countries to normalize their ties with Israel,” Netanyahu said. “I think for too long the Palestinians have had a veto on peace. Not only between Israel and the Palestinians but between Israel and the Arab world.”

“If we have to wait for the Palestinians, we would have to wait forever. No longer,” he said. The Palestinians, when they realize that their veto has dissipated, “will be hard pressed to remain outside the community of peace,” he added.

Palestinian leaders have sharply criticized the UAE for agreeing to normalize relations with Israel, calling the move despicable and a betrayal.

Recalling that Kushner had been ridiculed for suggesting this process could happen, Netanyahu said the critics have been proved “dead wrong.” “We know that reality has changed,” Netanyahu said, “because we have changed it.”

Benjamin Netanyahu, Jared Kushner, Robert C. O'Brien Address Media in Jerusalem


JCPA: The Agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates

For the first time, there is a “warm peace” between Israel and an Arab state, where both sides see the mutual advantage from their scientific, economic, cultural, and strategic cooperation.

In contrast, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians maintained “cold relations” with Israel that were meant to extract the maximum concessions from Israel while minimizing normalization with it.

With this diplomatic achievement, Israel is taking a huge step towards one of its long-term strategic goals – integration into the region.

The pragmatic Arab camp members feel that the radicals are weaker. Israel is perceived as a powerful country that dares to act against the extremists and will not change its position.

The agreement is a historic achievement for Israel, the UAE, the United States, and the pragmatic camp. It creates a potential for further achievements at the regional level and in the Palestinian context, as progress continues in the normalization process.

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Boycotting Israel was never about Palestinians–it was about Jews

This weekend, the UAE announced that it will no longer adhere to the Arab League boycott of Israel.

AP reported:

Saturday's announcement formally eliminates a 1972 law on the UAE's books, since just after the Emirates's formation.

That law mirrored the widely held stance by Arab nations at that time that recognition of Israel would only come after the Palestinians had an independent state of their own.

NPR similarly reported:

The decree formally ends a 1972 law establishing a boycott, a common policy towards Israel in the Arab world for its treatment of Palestinians.

This is historical revisionism.

The original text of the 1945 Arab League boycott resolution stated:

Products of Palestinian Jews are to be considered undesirable in Arab countries. They should be prohibited and refused as long as their production in Palestine might lead to the realization of Zionist political aims.

The only use of the word “Palestinian” was referring to the Jews who were being boycotted!

When the boycott was announced, not one Arab stated that they were concerned with the rights of Arabs in Palestine. From the New York Times, December 4, 1945:

 

And when Arabs gathered in British Mandate Palestine to deepen the boycott, its antisemitic nature was made even more explicit (January 10, 1946):

 

The boycott was always a purely antisemitic idea, and it remains so. Which makes Hanan Ashrawi’s shocked reaction to the UAE move quite interesting:

 

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Arabs still publicly demand the expulsion of Jews from Israel in major newspapers

Ad Dustour is a Jordanian newspaper that has been publishing since 1966. It is one of the top 100 websites in Jordan and strongly supports King Abdullah.

Yesterday, one of its columnists  called for the expulsion of nearly all Jews who live in Israel.

Khaled Al-Zubaidi is the author of an article in Ad Dustour titled “They have no future in our region.” Guess who he is talking about? Zubaidi, who also writes for Ammon News and other Jordanian media, claims that before 1948, Jews and Arabs lived in peace in Palestine. This is a lie, of course – I recently documented the deadly attack and rapes of Arabs against Jews in Hebron in 1834, to give but one example.

He ends the article by saying that all Jews whose families arrived after modern Zionism was founded must be forcibly expelled.

It is certain that 72 years after the Nakba of Palestine, and despite the intensification of the oppression by the enemies, all the demographic, economic, and vital data affirm that the Zionist entity has no future in Palestine and the Arab region. Netanyahu’s place is in Poland or in Boston, from where he came, and all those that are similar to him know their natural place.

Those Jews who have lived among us for a long time have the same rights and obligations that we have, but the foreigner’s fate will be harsher than what they think, since they have no future in our region.

Notice that none of the Arabs who make this demand ever say the same about the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who moved to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who are now considered “native.”

This is not an anomalous position in Jordan – this is mainstream thinking. It is assumed by in intelligentsia as well as the ordinary citizen that one day nearly all the Jews in Israel will be forced out, and that this is a moral imperative.

This call to ethnically cleanse Jews from the Middle East caused no outrage or protest from the Arab world. This public call for a massive violation of human rights is likewise being ignored by the “human rights” community and by those who claim that their opposition to Zionism is based on moral principles.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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An Arab anti-normalization cartoon that Zionists would love

At Al Araby, this cartoon is meant to be derogatory to the Arab world – but it is actually very nice.

 

Reading from right to left, it says “Previously…” showing an Arab saying NO to reconciliation, NO to recognition and NO to negotiation with Israel, mirroring the “Three Nos” Khartoum Arab League resolution from 1967.

The last frame shows the Arab has changed his tune, with the three instances of the Arabic word “La”, “no”, turned into a Star of David.

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08/29 Links: Caroline B. Glick: The Israel-Sunni Arab bloc – the new sheriff; UAE formally abolishes Israel boycott law ahead of delegation’s arrival

From Ian:

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Caroline B. Glick: The Israel-Sunni Arab bloc – the new sheriff

In Pompeo's shuttle diplomacy we see the enormity of the administration's achievement.

After the Cold War, Israeli leftists and anti-Israel foreign policy analysts in America claimed that with the superpower contest settled, Israel was no longer a strategic asset to America. The Israeli Left argued that to retain its relevance to America, Israel had to sue for peace with Yasser Arafat on his terms.

Arguably the saddest man in Jerusalem this week was British Foreign Minister Dominic Raab. Blind to the seismic shifts that have occurred, Raab arrived uninvited in Israel's capital, (which Britain still refuses to recognize) to mediate peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

After Britain exited the European Union following the Brexit vote, the Trump administration expected Britain would renew its special alliance with the US and ditch Brussels' anti-American and anti-Israel unified foreign policy. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn't get the memo.

Much to Washington's disappointment, the Johnson government has continued to act as a loyal member (or vassal) of the EU. The Johnson government opposes the administration's maximum pressure strategy for dealing with Iran, and even abstained from supporting the US at the Security Council last week.

The British Foreign Office, like the EU and the UN, reacted coldly to the news that Israel and the UAE are normalizing their relations, insisting that the Palestinians must not be ignored, the chimerical "two-state solution" must be upheld at all costs.

Raab met with Pompeo in Jerusalem. While the details of their meeting were not reported, Netanyahu made clear Israel's displeasure at Britain's pro-Iran policies and expressed no interest in Britain's offer to pressure Israel to make unreciprocated concessions to the Palestinians.

The Israeli-Sunni Arab bloc is a stabilizing force in the region because it is an organic alliance. It was not the product of superpower rivalry. It was borne out of common interests that are likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future. The existence of this bloc has enabled Washington rebuild its credibility as a superpower and an ally in the Middle East and advance its Iran policies with or without UN Security Council support.

If Trump is re-elected in November, this stabilizing bloc whose members stand against both Sunni and Shiite jihadists will expand and the circle of formal ties between Israel and the Gulf States will grow. If Trump loses, just as the bloc protected its members against the hostile Obama administration, so it is likely to survive and shield its members from the vagaries of a Biden administration.

UAE formally abolishes Israel boycott law ahead of delegation’s arrival

The president of the United Arab Emirates on Saturday issued a decree abolishing a law boycotting Israel and allowing trade and financial agreements between the two nations, two days before a delegation from Jerusalem was due to arrive in Abu Dhabi in the wake of August 13’s normalization agreement.

The state-run WAM news agency said the move formally ending the boycott came on the orders of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and the Emirates’ leader.

WAM said the new decree allows Israelis and Israeli firms to do business in the UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula. It also allows for the purchase and trade of Israeli goods.

“The decree of the new law comes within the UAE’s efforts to expand diplomatic and commercial cooperation with Israel,” WAM said. It lays out “a roadmap toward launching joint cooperation, leading to bilateral relations by stimulating economic growth and promoting technological innovation.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the move as “an important step in promoting prosperity and peace in the region.”

Already, some Israeli firms had signed deals with Emirati counterparts. But the repeal of the law widens the likelihood of other joint ventures, such as in aviation, banking, and finance.

The decree formally eliminates a 1972 law on the UAE’s books since just after the country’s formation. That law mirrored the widely held stance by Arab nations at that time that recognition of Israel would only come after the Palestinians had an independent state of their own.

Prime Minister Netanyahu:
"I welcome the decision of United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed to cancel the law on boycotting products from Israel and economic contacts with Israelis. This is an important step in promoting prosperity and peace in the region."

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) August 29, 2020

Israel to declare UAE a 'green state' - report

Israel is expected to declare the Untied Arab Emirates a "green state," meaning that Israelis who return from the country will not need to enter home isolation, according to Walla! News.

On Monday, an Israeli delegation led by Meir Ben Shabbat, Head of the National Security Council, will leave for the UAE.

El Al said to ask permission for Israel-UAE flight to cross Saudi airspace

El Al has reportedly asked Saudi Arabia to use its airspace when one of its planes on Monday makes the first-ever commercial passenger flight from Israel to the United Arab Emirates, following the countries’ US-brokered agreement to normalize ties.

According to the Israeli news site Ynet on Saturday, the request was relayed on El Al’s behalf by way of the National Security Council and other unspecified mediators. The Saudis have yet to respond.

Earlier this week, The Times of Israel reported that the Foreign Ministry was conducting talks with Saudi Arabia about the flight potentially passing over Saudi airspace, but the matter wasn’t final, according to a source with knowledge of the talks.

On Friday, Israel listed the El Al flight taking off on Monday for Abu Dhabi on the Israel Airports Authority website.

It said the flight would be numbered LY971, a nod to the UAE’s international calling code number. A return flight to Ben Gurion International Airport on Tuesday will be numbered LY972, Israel’s international calling code.

Among those set to be on the flight are White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and several other senior Trump administration officials, who are scheduled to arrive in Israel over the weekend.

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08/28 Links Pt2: The Plot for America: Remembering Civil Rights Leader Joachim Prinz; The Pope, the Jews, and the Secrets in the Archives

From Ian:

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The Plot for America: Remembering Civil Rights Leader Joachim Prinz

The influential Newark rabbi was a confidante of Martin Luther King, but he’s been all but ignored by history

On the evening of June 26, 1937, thousands of Berlin Jews packed the city’s grand Brüdervereinshaus to bid farewell to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who had been ordered by the Gestapo to leave Germany immediately or face an almost certain death sentence for political subversion. Prinz had been the most popular, outspoken, and inspirational champion of Jewish national rights and Zionism in the dark years since the Nazis’ rise to power, preaching to overflow crowds at Berlin’s most important temples about the need to leave Germany and immigrate to Palestine. By the summer of 1937 he had already been arrested a half-dozen times by the Gestapo, but he always managed to elude deportation. This time, however, he was warned by his “friend” and informant, Gestapo Obersturmbanführer Kuchman, that his days were numbered, and he reluctantly decided to emigrate to the United States, sponsored by his friend and patron Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. Among the uninvited guests at Prinz’s farewell was a Nazi functionary, Adolf Eichmann.

Eichmann’s presence was to have important legal ramifications more than two decades later. In the initial discovery proceedings to establish Eichmann’s identity before his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, Benno Cohen, the foremost Zionist leader in pre-war Berlin, positively identified the defendant, testifying as follows:

We held a valedictory meeting to take leave of Rabbi Dr. Joachim Prinz who was leaving the country. He was one of the finest speakers, the best Zionist propagandist in those years. The large hall was packed full. The public thronged to this meeting. Suddenly, as chairman of the event, I was called to the door and my office clerk told me, “Mr Eichmann is here.” I saw this same man, for the first time in civilian clothing, and he shouted at me, “Who is responsible for order here? This is disorder of the first degree.” … I watched him the entire time from my place in the chair.

As a young rabbi in his late twenties, Prinz was already addressing congregations of thousands in Berlin’s largest temple, the magnificent Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, whose stunning façade has recently been restored. And less than two years after arriving in the United States after his expulsion from Germany by Eichmann’s goons, he was appointed rabbi of New Jersey’s largest Jewish house of worship, the magnificent Greek Revival Temple B’nai Abraham, which towered over Newark’s then-fashionable and heavily Jewish Clinton Hill section, where hundreds of young people swarmed to hear his Friday-night orations.

As Prinz so evidently delights in repeatedly recalling in his posthumously published memoir, Rebellious Rabbi, the Jews of both Berlin and Newark—especially “the younger generation” to whom he mainly dedicated his ministries—did not so much “go to shul” for an encounter with the divine as they “went to Prinz” for an encounter with the rabbi. The combination of Prinz’s charismatic personality and his distinctly un-theological and nationalistic understanding of the essence of Judaism proved as attractive to the nervously Americanizing Jews of mid-20th-century New Jersey as it had been to the deeply assimilated and newly imperiled Jews of early Nazi Germany. Prinz’s nationalist theology was first expressed in his classic work of Jewish defiance, Wir Juden, which was published in Berlin in 1934 and quickly became a best-seller among Germany’s deeply demoralized Jews. He used his experiences leading the Jews of Nazi Berlin to develop an almost metaphysical notion of Jewish national identity, which he referred to as the “doctrine of Jewish inescapability.”

Prinz’s initial, exploratory visit to the United States, in March 1937, just a half year before his final emigration from Germany, was marked by all manner of disappointments with the “Golden Land.” Prinz complained bitterly about America’s complacence in the face of the threat posed by Nazi Germany. In his first recorded impressions of the country, he found almost nothing that compared favorably with his native Germany. America’s cities are depicted as ugly and rundown, racism against blacks disturbingly pervasive, its political culture naïve and intellectual life second-rate, and its people primitive and poorly dressed.

The Pope, the Jews, and the Secrets in the Archives

In early 1953, the photograph of a prominent nun being arrested was splashed across the front pages of French newspapers. Over the next several weeks, other French clergy—monks and nuns—would also be arrested. The charge: kidnapping two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gérald Finaly, whose parents had perished in a Nazi death camp. The case sparked intense public controversy. Le Monde, typical of much of the French media, devoted 178 articles in the first half of the year to the story of the brothers—secretly baptized at the direction of the Catholic woman who had cared for them—and the desperate attempts by surviving relatives to get them back. It was a struggle that pitted France’s Jewish community, so recently devastated by the Holocaust, against the country’s Roman Catholic hierarchy, which insisted that the boys were now Catholic and must not be raised by Jews.

What was not known at the time—and what, in fact, could not be known until the opening, earlier this year, of the Vatican archives covering the papacy of Pius XII—is the central role that the Vatican and the pope himself played in the kidnapping drama. The Vatican helped direct efforts by local Church authorities to resist French court rulings and to keep the boys hidden, while at the same time carefully concealing the role that Rome was playing behind the scenes.

There is more. At the center of this drama was an official of the Vatican curia who, as we now know from other newly revealed documents, helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943—“the pope’s Jews,” as Jews in Rome had often been referred to. The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.

The newly available Vatican documents, reported here for the first time, offer fresh insights into larger questions of how the Vatican thought about and reacted to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, and into the Vatican’s mindset immediately after the war about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the Roman Catholic Church’s role and prerogatives as an institution.

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Jordanian cartoonist arrested for anti-UAE cartoon

From the International Federation of Journalists:

Cartoonist Emad Hajjaj was arrested on Wednesday August 26 for "disturbing relations with a sister country” in a cartoon. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns this arrest and recent attacks on media freedom in Jordan and demands Emad Hajjaj’s immediate release.

Published in Al Araby Al Jadeed, the cartoon mocked the recent deal the United Arab Emirates struck with Israel. Hajjaj was referred to the State Security Court yesterday, his trial will be held under the antiterrorism law.

Here is the cartoon, captioned “Israel asks US not to sell UAE F-35s.”

 

Today, his detention was extended 14 days. According to the newspaper Al Araby al Jadeed that he works for, the UAE complained about the cartoon which resulted in the arrest.

In an earlier cartoon this month, Hajjaj evoked Jesus’ drown of thorns in another cartoon against the agreement.

 

This fairly blatant antisemitic imagery didn’t cause any furor.

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08/28 Links Pt1: Arab countries aren't waiting for the Palestinians; Beat Nasrallah at his own game; Netanyahu’s grand strategy on peace, security vindicated with UAE deal

From Ian:

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Arab countries aren't waiting for the Palestinians

A few days ago, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of the Palestinian Authority and Jerusalem, published a fatwa (religious ruling) stating that Muslims in the United Arab Emirates were forbidden to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Who has ever heard of a fatwa like that? Who will enforce it? Whom is it supposed to deter? Will Arab states seeking to follow in the Emirates' footsteps be put off from normalizing relations with Israel out of fear that Mohammed Hussein will issue a similar fatwa for their own citizens?

The Palestinians' relations with Arab countries aren't an ongoing love story. The Palestinians weren't prepared to accept any solution that allowed Jews in western Israel any sovereign territory whatsoever and dragged the Arab countries into joining their opposition to the UN Partition Plan in November 1947.

During the War of Independence, Arab countries sent forces which, other than the Jordanians (whose real goal was to capture the territory earmarked for a Palestinian state for Jordan), comprised only a sliver of those countries' military power.

The Arab countries themselves did take in Arab refugees from Palestine, some of who we ran off and some of whom we expelled, but only Jordan granted them citizenship. All the others kept them as second-class citizens. In 1948, Egypt, under the auspices of the Arab league, set up in the Gaza Strip the ridiculous "All-Palestine Government," whereas Arab state exploited the Palestinian problem for their domestic and international needs.

The Palestinian expectation that the Arab countries would fight us and clear the way for the 1948 refugees to return was pathetic, and the Palestinian leadership's destructive transition to the use of terrorism in the late 1960s stemmed from a no less pathetic desire to take the fate of the Palestinians into their own hands and bring about the solution they desired, by themselves.

The expectation that Arab states would, at least, provide continual diplomatic backing for the Palestinians took a blow in the Camp David Accords, and when Anwar Sadat rose to power in Egypt. The country's need for peace with Israel (to get the Sinai Peninsula back, and because it wanted security and economic ties with the US), prompted Sadat to avoid the standard precondition that there would be no peace unless a Palestinian state was established. The Palestinians managed to initiate an Arab boycott of Egypt, and have the country expelled from the Arab League, but neither lasted for long.

Beat Nasrallah at his own game

One must ask: Where do the UN, EU, and ICC stand on what was surely a catastrophe foretold in Beirut?

Hezbollah has been consistently involved in attempts to obtain and store ammonium nitrate for the purpose of carrying out terrorist attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets. From the 1994 terrorist attack on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, to ammonium nitrate repositories discovered in London and Cyprus, to the Mossad intelligence agency's warnings to the German government about three tons of ammonium nitrate hidden in a warehouse in Berlin, – information that led Germany to outlaw Hezbollah.

If anything, the UN-backed tribunal's decision on convict only one Hezbollah operatives in the 2005 assassination of beloved Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has enhanced the Lebanese people's understanding that this is a brutal terrorist group that, despite professing to be "the defender of Lebanon," is actually hurting it.

The verdict infuriated many in Lebanon, who know that Hezbollah planned and executed Hariri's murder on the behest of Iran and Syria. The tribunal, served with thousands of documents and pieces of evidence, was wary of setting that fact in stone.

Israel must use the simmering unrest in Lebanon to deal Hezbollah a crippling blow in terms of psychological warfare. Not one bullet needs to be fired. This is also our moral duty vis-à-vis civilians being used as human shields by living in very close proximity to chemical warehouses and missile depots.

Militarily speaking, the value of the intelligence Israel holds is lower than the impact it could have on Lebanese public opinion, especially when the voices asserting that Hezbollah is dooming the Lebanese people to death and destruction are growing louder.

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It’s much more complicated than that (ElderToon)

I played with one of those “make your own comic” sites for the artwork…

 

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The shtetl mentality is alive and well with liberal American Jews

 

JTA reports:

[O]n Wednesday night, the 93-year-old synagogue’s driveway was graffitied with the words “Free Palestine.”

Critics of the Black Lives Matter movement have cited similar vandalism as evidence that protests have devolved into rioting. But has the graffiti changed the synagogue’s support for the racial justice movement?

“Absolutely not,” said Rabbi Dena Feingold, who has led the Reform congregation for 35 years. “That’s a trivial matter. What’s happened these last few days is not about us and what’s happened to us. It’s about the issues of systemic racism that plague our society. About police policy, about implicit bias, white privilege and those bigger issues is what this is about. It doesn’t change anything at all.”

European Jews were conditioned over generations to not make waves because of fears of deadly antisemitic responses to the slightest perceived provocations. This is the shtetl mentality, and it is one that Zionism worked hard to eradicate in Israel.

In America, though, it has been a major part of the Jewish experience.

The irony is that this mentality is worst among the most liberal Jews – Jews who fight hard for the rights of every minority but their own.

What kind of a rabbi would trivialize an antisemitic attack against her own synagogue? Any person with self-respect would send out a clear message of outrage over an incident like this one, but in the progressive circles that Dana Feingold inhabits, a Jew cannot be proud or make a scene. So she says, hey, no biggie – graffiti us all you want, and maybe we’ll take down that Israeli flag we are waving if it upset the community so much.

I had a similar story yesterday that mentioned the liberal Jews who were concerned with American synagogues flying the Zionist and then the Israeli flags, pre-emptively worried about whether it would stoke accusations of dual loyalty before any antisemite even made that accusation. To the liberal Jews of America, the overwhelming mentality is one of not rocking the boat – to act as if American Jews are not full Americans with the same rights as everyone else.

To act as if antisemitism is the Jews’ fault.

The irony is that the shtetl mentality was inherited by the liberal American Jews who are against what they look at as the separatist Orthodox Jews living in tight-knit communities that resemble Europe’s shtetls. They style themselves as being fully integrated into American society and they look at the religious as being backward and regressive. Yet it isn’t the Orthodox who are fearful of American non-Jews – it is the supposedly assimilated liberal American Jews.

The flag story, where the Orthodox fought for Jews to be proudly Zionist in the face of some Reform Jews who were frightened by that idea,  was a small example. Another one comes from the early part of the 20th century.

It is the story of the Jewish Sabbath Alliance, a group of Orthodox Jews who lobbied strenuously to allow Jews to be protected if they refuse to work on Saturday and to allow Sabbath observers to open up shops on Sundays, when this was illegal in much of America. While Reform Jewish leaders at the time paid lip service to the Orthodox position, they didn’t actually join the lobbying efforts, because they felt that Jews in America must act like “Americans,” meaning Christians. (Indeed, the Reform movement supported changing the Sabbath to Sundays starting in 1885, and only abandoned that idea in the 1920s.)

It was the Orthodox who vigorously defended the rights of Jews while the liberal Jews were too frightened to step up and fight for their own people – specifically because to them, assimilation and not standing out were higher imperatives than being proud Jews. This excerpt from an article in The Reform Advocate, June 25, 1904, describes the shtetl mindset while decrying practicing and identifiable Jews as being “fanatics.”

 

This is cowardice dressed up as being practical. Don’t make waves. Fight for other minorities and oppressed groups – but don’t fight for your fellow Jews. Don’t stand out. Make up a Judaism where no one need know you are Jewish.

Rabbi Feingold is following in a long tradition of liberal Jews trying not to make waves. Just like her forbearers in America, just like the shtetl Jews of Europe.

She has not yet learned the fundamental lesson that in order to gain respect from others, you have to respect yourself first. If liberal Jews were taught to be honestly proud of their Judaism and their membership in the Jewish people – proud enough to loudly fight for it when it is under assault – they would get the respect from the gentiles that they have been craving for the past 150 years.

______________________________

 

The Orthodox Jewish Sabbath Alliance eventually hit upon a solution that the Reform Jews could wholeheartedly support. Instead of framing this as a religious freedom and human rights issue, which the liberal Jews had no sympathy for, it was positioned as a social justice and workers’ rights issue which they loved. The religious Jews partnered with (liberal Jewish dominated) unions in  advocating a five day work week for all, where everyone would be off work on Saturdays and Sundays.

It took until the 1960s but eventually that discrimination against Sabbath observing Jews was largely abolished. (There are still some remnants of “Blue Laws” but as far as I can tell nothing that hurts Sabbath observing Jews.)

I am surprised that I cannot find a single book written about the Jewish Sabbath Alliance and the century-long fight for Sabbath observance in America. I could only find one academic article from 1979 on the topic. This is a book that needs to be written, about Jewish heroes who stood up for their rights in an American society that had plenty of antisemitism.

This is the message that liberal Jews  should internalize, that fighting for your rights is the American way, not assimilating into irrelevance.

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Harvard names serial liar and failed diplomat Saeb Erekat as a Fellow to teach diplomacy!

Remember when Harvard University actually meant something?

The Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has named four senior leaders in diplomacy to be Fisher Family Fellows for the 2020-21 academic year: Julie Bishop, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Australia and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party; Saeb Erakat, the Chief Palestinian Negotiator and Head of the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); Federica Mogherini, former High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission; and Peter Wittig, former Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United States.

“We are proud to welcome these four respected global leaders to the Harvard Kennedy School for this academic year. They will strengthen our capacity to learn the lessons of effective diplomacy and statecraft,” said Faculty Chair Nicholas Burns.

The Fellows will speak in virtual seminars in the autumn, hold office hours with students to help foster their professional development and networks, and participate in research initiatives. Public health conditions permitting, the Fellows will visit campus in spring 2021 to lead study groups for Harvard students on topics of their expertise, including on transatlantic relations; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and emerging foreign policy and security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region…..

Saeb Erakat has been extensively involved in all negotiations with Israel, including those conducted at Camp David (2000) and in Taba (2001). In 1991, he was the Vice-Chair of the Madrid Peace Delegation and was later the Vice-Chair at the Washington negotiations of 1992. Previously, he served as the Minister of Local Government for the Palestinian National Authority and is also Head of the Palestinian Side of the Steering and Monitoring Committee. He is the author of fourteen books on foreign policy, oil, conflict resolution, and negotiations.

What diplomatic victory has Erakat ever achieved? He has been instrumental in painting the Palestinians into a corner, stopping dealing with Israel even after “annexation” is off the table, which only hurts his own people.

His brilliant diplomacy skills have succeeded  in turning much of the Arab world from being pro-Palestinian to lukewarm or hostile.

He has a long history of the most egregious lies, denying Jewish history, and justifying terror attacks.  He’s even lied about his own life and his family’s history.

And that is only scratching the surface.

Erakat is not at all a “respected global leader.” He is a failure at everything he has ever done.

Why would Harvard hire a proven, serial liar, a failed negotiator and politician who has never helped his own people in the slightest way, and who is not really even popular among Palestinians, to teach its students?

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Suha Arafat threatens “war” against Palestinian leadership, says she has dirt on them

 

Over the weekend, Yasir Arafat’s widow Suha apologized to the UAE for how Palestinians were insulting the Emirates:

Suha Arafat said she wanted to apologise in the name of the Palestinian people in a post on Instagram.

“I want to apologise in the name of the honourable people of Palestine to the Emirati people and their leadership for the desecration and burning of the UAE flag in Jerusalem and Palestine and for insulting the symbols of the beloved UAE country,” she wrote. “The difference in opinion does not spoil the friendliness of the cause.”

“I tell our generations to read history well to know how the UAE, past and present, supported the Palestinian people and the cause,” she said. “I apologise to the people and leadership of the Emirates for any harm done by any Palestinian to these generous and kind people who have always welcomed us. I apologise to the mother of the Emirates, Her Highness Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, for this irresponsible behaviour.”

The reaction from Palestinian leaders and pundits was bitter – accusing Suha of working together with Abbas rival Mohammed Dahlan on the plan, and otherwise insulting her on social media.

Today, Suha struck back, with a threat to blow the whistle on top PLO officials with tidbits from Yasir Arafat’s unpublished diary.

Suha Arafat, the widow of the martyr Yasser Arafat, said in an interview with the Israeli television network Kan that she was receiving threats from officials in the Palestinian Authority following a post that she published on her page on the social networking site Instagram in which she apologized on behalf of the Palestinian people to the UAE United Arab Emirates after the announcement of normalization between the Emirates and Israel.

According to Suha Arafat, the Palestinian Authority has already started harassing her family members, and her brother - the Palestinian ambassador to Cyprus - has been summoned for interrogation in Ramallah after he refused to organize anti-UAE activities in the embassy compound.“Do they want to destroy Yasser Arafat’s family ... We are stronger than them! "

Arafat 's widow warned  that if the senior officials in the Palestinian Authority continued their  campaign against her , she will announce what she knows about them from the diary of Arafat. She said, "I will open the gates of hell. It is enough to publish a little of what I know, and I will burn them in front of the Palestinians."

Suha Arafat said that the defamation campaign against her is being lead by the  private secretary of president Mahmoud Abbas, Intisar Abu Amara, and she was the one who gave instructions to present Suha to people as a traitor.

I would love to see Arafat’s diary published!

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