According to the article, senior Fatah sources say that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was very pleased at Biden's election and they are no longer interested in reconciliation with Hamas nor in parliamentary elections, supposedly agreed at a meeting in Istanbul.
Abbas viewed reconciliation with Hamas as a last ditch effort to stave off Trump's Deal of the Century, but now thinks that with Trump out of the way, unity with Hamas would open the PLO up to accusations of being aligned with a terror group.
Even before the elections, it seemed unlikely that there would be either reconciliation or elections. Hamas and Fatah started sniping at each other immediately after the Istanbul talks. Both Fatah and Hamas members accused the lead negotiators (Jibril Rajoub and Salah a-Aruri, respectively) of selling out their causes for their own political goals.
The article also says that the election is prompting Abbas to militarily wipe out the backers of his rival Mahmoud Dahlan who have some strongholds in various West Bank camps and confiscate their weapons.
It looks like Biden's election will be the excuse Abbas uses to save face and resume accepting tax revenue from Israel that he has been refusing since Netanyahu said he would annex portions of Judea and Samaria. This doesn't seem likely to happen in a Biden administration so Abbas can escape his cage of honor that was holding Palestinians hostage for months. Observers say that he will likewise resume security coordination with Israel.
Abbas will position his accepting hundreds of millions of dollars that he had refused as a "goodwill gesture" to demand that new negotiations for a Palestinian state be resumed, based on the 1949 armistice lines and with Jerusalem as its capital, confident that Biden will back him up on that and erase any vestige of the Trump Peace to Prosperity plan, pretending that the last four years never happened and resuming things as if Obama was still president.
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One of the amazing things about Donald Trump's tumultuous administration was that he essentially redefined what it means for a president to be pro-Israel.
From around 1973 until 2008, there was large agreement as to what pro-Israel meant. It meant supporting Israel's existence, it meant providing Israel with weapons and allowing it to keep a qualitative military edge over its Arab enemies. It meant speaking at AIPAC. But that was about it.
Obama started to redefine what "pro-Israel" means by embracing the liberal J-Street definition, one that practically no Israelis would agree with. He tried to claim that trying to bully Israel into giving up strategic lands is "pro-Israel." A Palestinian state is "pro-Israel."
Trump moved things way in the other direction. He had no problem with a two-state solution - as long as Israel agrees to the terms. He finally moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel, which as far as I know wasn't even an Israeli request. He made some noises about the settlements but his peace plan would allow Israel to keep virtually all of them.
So what will happen now under a Biden administration?
Biden is not Obama. He is more an old-school pro-Israel Democrat. But things have changed.
Almost certainly all of the momentum towards Israeli normalization with other Arab countries - Oman, Morocco, and especially Saudi Arabia - will stop. Perhaps it has already stopped. Relationships between Israel and those other countries will continue to improve beneath the radar but those countries will not risk public recognition.
The good news is that he says he will not move the embassy back to Tel Aviv. But he will probably re-open a Palestinian consulate in east Jerusalem and also re-open the PLO mission in Washington. He will probably resume USAID money to the Palestinians and he will probably resume aid to UNRWA.
In those cases, the devil is in the details. How much oversight will that money have?
Settlements will once again be considered "incompatible with international law."
The biggest and most problematic move would be the resumption of the Iran deal. Giving Iran a lifeline will give Iran the flexibility to give Hezbollah and other groups more money, not to mention oxygen for its ballistic missile development program which was not covered by the JCPOA. He says that he will try to extend the "sunset clause" of Iran being able to resume nuclear activities, but as we saw with Obama, the zeal to cut a deal can allow a poor deal to be cut. And would he stand up to European allies who want the deal resumes in order to trade with Iran?
There is no doubt that the Biden administration will not push the IHRA working definition of antisemitism the way that the Trump administration has, even if he personally believes that some anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I am not sure that Joe Biden would cancel Trump's executive order on combatting anti-semitism but I can see him quietly instructing the Justice Department not to enforce the parts that refer to the IHRA working definition.
I also expect that Biden would replace Elan Carr as the State Department Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating anti-Semitism. Carr has been pushing the IHRA working definition hard, and there would be too much opposition to that from other Democrats.
There are a lot of articles about how pro-Israel Biden and Harris are. By a Democratic yardstick, this is probably true. However, both of them seem to they really, really dislike Benjamin Netanyahu. The lack of a warm relationship with Israel's leader is always a red flag, and it indicates that their pro-Israel positions are not going to be as warm as Biden's stories about Golda Meir try to indicate.
A lot depends on who Biden would choose for Secretary of State. Front runners Chris Coons and Chris Murphy are similar in their pro-Israel voting records, although both opposed moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and supported the JCPOA. Murphy has aligned himself with the more Leftist Democrats recently. Susan Rice may be more problematic and most likely to revert back to Obama's positions. Another front runner, Tony Blinken, follows Biden's line on Israel but claims that he recommended the US veto UNSC 2334 that the lame duck Obama administration allowed to pass.
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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the much respected former chief rabbi of the UK, has died aged 72.
Sacks was highly esteemed around the Jewish world for his erudition, his wisdom, and his prolific authorship of works on Jewish thought.
Sacks announced in the middle of October that he had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment, but passed away on Saturday morning.
Rabbi Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013, succeeding Immanuel Jakobovits. He was succeeded by the current chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis.
Before being appointed as chief rabbi of the UK in 1993, Sacks served as principal of Jews’ College, now the London School of Jewish Studies, and Rabbi of the prestigious Marble Arch synagogue in Central London.
During his time as chief rabbi, Sacks became an ambassador for the Jewish community in the UK and was respected by many in UK Jewry and in the non-Jewish world as well.
He was widely seen as a voice of morality and ethical integrity, and his positions and opinions were frequently sought by the British media on crucial issues of the day, including in a regular column in The Times newspaper, and as guest on current affairs TV and radio shows.
Some of you will probably be familiar with a charming German movie called “Goodbye, Lenin,” the story of which concerns a woman in Communist-ruled East Germany who falls into a coma and wakes up a few months later in a unified, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. To avoid another shock to her delicate nervous system, the woman’s two children carefully preserve her old living environment, so as to fool her into believing that her Socialist fatherland is still intact and that the outside world is exactly the same as when she temporarily left it.
The United Nations lives in a similar alternative universe. Since its creation in 1945, a good part of its internal life has revolved around an endless cycle of committee meetings, work plans and resolutions that take little account of how the outside world is changing. On certain occasions, its deliberations can seem so out of touch with reality that you wonder whether the directors of “Goodbye, Lenin” are lurking somewhere in the background.
Last week (a momentous, exhausting week, as we all recall) was also a busy one at the world body. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the U.N. General Assembly’s Fourth Committee—an entity that remains concerned with “decolonization” in an age when territorial empires are a thing of the past—passed seven resolutions, all of which focused on Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and all of which condemned Israel in resolute terms.
One resolution expressed dismay that the descendants of the Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1947-48 War of Independence, whom the United Nations still classifies as “refugees,” were still awaiting repatriation.
Another resolution referred to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as al-Haram al-Sharif, its Islamic nomenclature.
Yet another resolution decried Israel’s actions in the “occupied Syrian Golan,” as if the apocalyptic civil war in neighboring Syria, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were murdered, tortured and ethnically cleansed, had never happened.
The sense of a time warp is magnified by the list of member states who vote in favor of these resolutions, which is the vast majority of those present. The roster of nations that lined up last week to tar Israel as a rogue state included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan—the three Arab Gulf states that signed normalization agreements with Israel over the last few months, marking the most profound change in the dynamics of the Middle East situation in decades. The spirit of the Abraham Accords was rudely locked out of the Fourth Committee’s deliberations.
A foreign-policy realist can counter that the Fourth Committee’s deliberations mean very little, irrespective of the size of the majorities behind its various anti-Israel resolutions. Only at the United Nations is the Palestinian question still regarded as the key to regional, if not global, peace, when that view has become an anachronism everywhere else.
There is a reigning myth that when Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995, he also assassinated peace. It is, like many myths, at once comforting and entirely wrong.
This myth is comforting because it reinforces the kind of foundational story that Western civilization is based on, from Christ to the modern superhero. In these stories, a savior figure or leader shapes history through sheer force of will and against all odds. Transplanted to the Middle East, this foundational myth sets the stage by casting peace between Israelis and Palestinians as requiring an end-of-times salvation. And Yitzhak Rabin is the savior who could have brought about salvation and peace on earth had he not been martyred.
But this myth also reinforces another foundational Western trope, in which Jews are always cast as having an outsized role in shaping human affairs. This is why Jewish agency is always elevated over Palestinian agency in the context of the Middle East. Had Rabin been alive there would have been peace, the myth goes, and since Rabin was assassinated by a Jew, there is no peace. Thanks to the addition of the Jewish trope, the actions, goals and world view of Palestinians have no bearing on the possibility or impossibility of the attainment of peace.
Rabin's contribution was recognizing us as partners. Don't erase his. by the Forward
But the reason to be suspicious of the myth of the Rabin assassination killing peace is not just because of how neatly it fits into the wishful thinking of Western storytelling. The myth has persisted for another reason, too: because it rests on the belief that we cannot know what would have happened had he lived.
But we actually do: When he died, Rabin was already on his way to being trounced in direct elections by the up and coming Benjamin Netanyahu. Rabin was going to lose because there was a cavernous gulf between the handshakes on manicured lawns following elevated speeches about peace on the one hand, and the bloody massacres carried out by Palestinian suicide bombers against Israeli civilians on the other. And this gulf did not endear Israelis to the cause of peace. In the highly unlikely case that Rabin would have won the elections, the Israeli public would have pressured him to put the breaks on the so-called peace process, and there is evidence that he was already planning to do so.
A pharmacist, Nazim Ali, who leads the annual “Al Quds Day” march through London, has been found to have brought the pharmaceutical profession into disrepute following a two-week hearing that culminated today arising from a complaint by Campaign Against Antisemitism.
However, the General Pharmaceutical Council’s (GPhC) fitness to practice tribunal let Mr Ali off with a warning after ruling that his remarks were grossly offensive and that his fitness to practise was impaired, but that his statements were not antisemitic.
Remarkably the GPhC did not present expert testimony from academics or Campaign Against Antisemitism on what constitutes Jew-hatred.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s complaint related to Mr Ali’s actions in 2017, when he led the pro-Hizballah “Al Quds Day” parade for the controversial London-based organisation calling itself the Islamic Human Rights Commission, just four days after the Grenfell Tower tragedy in which over 70 people were burned alive.
Heading the parade, surrounded by the flags of Hizballah, the genocidal antisemitic terrorist organisation, Mr Ali shouted over a public address system: “Some of the biggest corporations who are supporting the Conservative Party are Zionists. They are responsible for the murder of the people in Grenfell, in those towers in Grenfell. The Zionist supporters of the Tory Party. Free, Free, Palestine…It is the Zionists who give money to the Tory Party to kill people in high-rise blocks. Free, Free, Palestine. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
At another point he told marchers: “Careful of those Rabbis who belong to the Board of Deputies, who have got blood on their hands, who agree with the killing of British soldiers. Do not allow them in your centres.”
The events were filmed by members of Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Demonstration and Event Monitoring Unit.
What Nazim Ali said
Nazim Ali’s words were blatantly antisemitic. This is some of what he said – these sentences were the key phrases used by the fitness to practise committee for their deliberations:
#1 It’s in their genes. The Zionists are here to occupy Regent Street. It’s in their genes, it’s in their genetic code.
#2 European alleged Jews. Remember brothers and sisters, Zionists are not Jews.
#3 Any Zionist, any Jew coming into your centre supporting Israel, any Jew coming into your centre who is a member of the Board of Deputies, is not a Rabbi, he’s an imposter.
#4 They are responsible for the murder of the people in Grenfell, the Zionist supporters of the Tory Party.
He also said the BoD had ‘blood on their hands‘, and that Zionists ‘give money to the Tory Party, to kill people in high rise blocks‘.
It is quite plain that even just based on those above, the decision is easy.
#1 Zionists do not have a ‘genetic code’ – Jews do.
#2 The comment about ‘alleged Jews’ is clearly a reference to the antisemitic Khazar myth.
#3 The ‘imposter’ sentence is also a pharmacist publicly arguing against interfaith with 93% of British Jews.
#4 References to Grenfell and murder is classic blood libel. A tragedy happens, the finger points where it always does.
My evidence
I was called to give evidence – and it took 3 long years to arrange the hearing. My recordings from the day were used for the hearing. Although under quarantine I was given an exemption and I was the first witness to give evidence. Ali’s lawyer was then allowed to ask me questions. His first was about my daughter.
For those that don’t know my daughter is currently in Israel preparing to join the IDF. Back in 2017 she had stood with me in that crowd as we listened to Nazim Ali. At the time, her thoughts were only about going to university in the UK. I cannot be 100% sure that what unfolded in the UK during 2016-2019 was responsible for my daughter’s change of heart – but it is hard to believe she would have gone otherwise.
Because the atmosphere in the UK had deteriorated for British Jews and my daughter had decided to leave for Israel – my loyalty was being questioned. The lawyer asked a few more questions and within about 15 minutes it was over. The time had come for the members of the panel to ask any questions – they had none. The prosecuting lawyer had none either.
In early 2016, nearly a year after the initial email had made its rounds, two families totaling 11 people were rescued from the city of Raida. Missry was at dinner when he received the call from Rabbi Sultan. “I excused myself from the table and began to cry.” In March 2016, 18 Yemeni Jews were brought to Israel, culminating a yearlong effort that joined the U.S. State Department and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
But even the joy brought danger. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posed with members of the group and an ancient Torah scroll that was smuggled out of Yemen, in what was soon a widely circulated photo-op. As a result, Libby (Levi) Salem Mousa Merhabi, the Jewish man still in Yemen suspected to have helped smuggle the scroll out, was jailed. He remains there today and his mother continues to beg for his release.
U.S. Rep. Max Rose, whose congressional district (which includes Staten Island and parts of Southern Brooklyn) houses one of the largest Yemeni communities in the United States, sees an opening for progress. “We have an opportunity here as a result of the Abraham Accords for the remaining Yemeni Jews to be put in a better situation,” he told me, stressing that “while the resources from the Sephardic community in my district have been tremendous, we really need to rally the international community as well.”
As of today, an estimated 26 Jews remain in Yemen. This figure does not include a number of women who have been kidnapped as young girls and remain hostages in their own homes, many of them now with children of their own. I recently spoke to one woman who escaped Yemen for London in 2007 before coming to the States. She asked to remain anonymous, so as to not jeopardize the life of her sister, who was kidnapped as a young woman when the family of nine sisters all lived in Raida. But she spoke fondly of her childhood spent in the small village of Beni Abt. The family had some animals, cows, goats, and a few chickens. Her sisters would rise as early as 4:30 in the morning to tend to them. When she was 8 years old, she and two of her sisters moved to Raida. There was a small school where she “learned tehilim all day,” although they never spoke Hebrew outside of school. Her parents joined them in Raida a few years later. They moved into a big house, complete with beds, sheets, showers, and baths—“like here,” she said. “We went to stores and schools. People were nice. There was some violence in the neighborhood, but that was all normal.”
Everything changed after a cousin and sister were kidnapped, “just because they were Jewish.” Her father whisked her and another sister to Sanaa, where they remained in a hotel for four months while he secured visas to the United Kingdom. “I just want to help the people get out,” she told me. “I want to do everything I can.” As it was for the Jews in Syria in the 1990s, the fear of government retaliation is great, and tangible. But make no mistake, the plight of Yemen’s Jews is clear and a global Jewish and governmental response should follow.
Somaliland is warming up to a potential agreement with Israel as the latter continues enter into diplomatic ties with Islamic nations.
Israeli intelligence director Eli Cohen in a recent interview said his country was entering into a peace deal with two countries, one in the Horn of Africa and one not far from the region.
And three members of Somaliland parliament, have asked their government recognize the existence of Israel and establish relations with Tel Aviv.
The three, Ahmed Mohamed Diriye Nac Nac, a member of Somaliland’s House of Representatives, Abdikadir indho Indho said, with Saed Elimi said it was important for Somaliland to recognize Israel.
Israel is preparing to sign an agreement with Sudan but Cohen is quoted saying another Horn of Africa nation- which he did not mention, is also in line to enter into formal agreements with his country.
That would be interesting!
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
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Trump’s ‘support’ for Israel was never a gift. He cared more about the way Christians viewed it, than the lives of American Jews, made Israel a partisan issue, and harmed public opinion towards Israel. Remember, Trump cares only about himself.
I disagree about Trump's view of Israel for various reasons. However, rather than argue, I propose a simple test to see if Trump's pro-Israel stance was self-serving or something he believes in.
Assuming that he has lost the election, he is a lame duck president.
If he ignores Israel in his remaining weeks in office, then that would strongly indicate that Mazzig is right.
If he works to do more things that are good for Israel, then that would strongly indicate that Trump really is pro-Israel.
This is not a perfect test. He could ignore Israel during upcoming weeks if he is fixated on overturning the election results, he could do pro-Israel things if he thinks he would run in 2024. But I think this would be a pretty good test as to Trump's commitment to Israel's security.
The Trump administration, in coordination with Israel and several Gulf states, is pushing a plan to slap a long string of new sanctions on Iran in the 10 weeks left until Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, two Israeli sources briefed on the effort told me.
The Trump administration’s envoy for Iran Elliott Abrams arrived in Israel on Sunday and met Prime Minister Netanyahu and National Security adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat to discuss the sanctions plan.
...Abrams said in a closed briefing several days ago that the Trump administration wants to announce a new set of sanctions on Iran every week until Jan. 20, a source who was privy to the briefing told me.
The Israeli sources told me the planned sanctions are not connected to the Iranian nuclear program — such sanctions are more likely to be canceled by a Biden administration and open the door to reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.
Instead, the goal is to impose sanctions on Iran that are connected to its ballistic missile program, Iranian assistance to terror organizations and Iranian human rights violations.
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The U.S. presidential election has illustrated more graphically than ever before that we are living beneath an erupting civilizational volcano.
The flaming cultural lava is spreading well beyond America. We have to wonder whether we are now watching the steady asphyxiation in the West of both liberalism and democracy.
Nowhere is waiting with greater apprehension for the eventual outcome of the election than Israel. If President Donald Trump is finally edged out, the recent startling prospects for peace in the Middle East may well be extinguished by the hideous prospect of a terrible war.
Those who most threaten the Jewish people, as well as the peace of the world, have been banking on Joe Biden winning the presidency.
He has said he will reactivate the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew the United States. This would open the cash spigots for the Iranian regime, ending the financial pressure under which it has been weakened.
It would instead be enabled to resume its regional power grab, ramp up its attacks on Israel through its Palestinian and Lebanese proxies, and speed up its development of nuclear weapons with which it intends to wipe out Israel and attack the West. War between Iran and Israel would become much more likely.
There would also be a domino effect in the Arab world. The unprecedented moves by the Gulf states to normalize relations with Israel have been driven principally by their perception that Trump was determined to neutralize Iran, and that their interests therefore lay in an alliance with Israel and America.
If America reactivates the nuclear deal, these Arab states may well revert to the strategy they adopted during the Obama administration’s appeasement of Iran: to cozy up to the “strong horse” in the region, which would once again be the Iranian regime.
The American public, along with 71 percent of American Jews, just voted for a presidential ticket that has vowed to fund the Palestinian Authority even as the PA insists that it will finance the "Martyrs Fund" which we call "pay-for-slay."
What this means is that whenever some random Arab in Israel runs out to stab a Jew to death in the streets of Jerusalem or Haifa or Tel Aviv they will pay him or his family out of US tax dollars. That is what we mean by "pay-for-slay" and financing it is against the Taylor Force Act and, thus, against American law.
It is also against anything resembling human decency.
The Democrats, if they take the White House, will now require American Jews to pay for the murder of our brothers and sisters in Judea and Samaria (aka Israel) and will do so while smiling at us and telling us what great friends they are to both Israel and the Jewish people.
And please do not forget this, they honestly believe that Jews, even within our traditional homeland, deserve whatever beating we get for allegedly being mean to the innocent, bunny-like Palestinian Arabs.
The Jews and other dhimmis, like Christians and Zoroastrians, spent thirteen hundred years as second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab and Muslim theocratic imperialism in the Middle East. They claimed traditional Jewish holy sites, such as the Temple Mount and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, as their own.
President Trump – fighting for re-election in America - has now lifted restrictions on American federal investment in science, research and agriculture projects undertaken in Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (West Bank).
Trump’s peace plan, it should be recalled, provides for Israel to ultimately extend its sovereignty into about 30% of Judea and Samaria where some 460000 Israelis presently live.
Signing the agreement lifting the investment restrictions on 28 October - U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman – said:
“Just as we have seen tremendous regional progress on the Abraham Accords, we are also seeing the tangible benefits of President Trump’s policies for bilateral cooperation with Israel”
The Abraham Accords - brokered by President Trump - signed on 15 September by Israel, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and expanded on 23 October to include Sudan after Sudan and Israel agreed to normalize relations – states:
“We support science, art, medicine, and commerce to inspire humankind, maximize human potential and bring nations closer together.”
Trump’s initiative is consistent with this noble principle and has not met with any opposition from its Arab signatories.
However a spokesman for PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said lifting of the funding ban represented:
"American participation in the occupation of Palestinian lands".
The PLO continues to bury its head in the sand as the Arab world’s burgeoning relations with Israel expand. Abbas also runs the risk of missing out on the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian Arab State in Gaza and 70% of Judea and Samaria - as envisioned in Trump’s plan.
The keynote speaker at the Palestine Book Fair was Rima Khalaf, the former UN official with a history of making up lies about Israel who was forced to resign when she issued a report calling Israel an apartheid state, something even the UN couldn't countenance.
Previously she had - as a UN official - supported BDS, praised Arab regimes that were against normalizing relations with Israel, praised Egypt for launching the Yom Kippur War, and supported terror attacks by calling them "resistance."
At the book fair, Khalaf said that "Zionists" made up history and that European Jews have nothing to do with Israel, essentially endorsing the antisemitic and absurd theory that Jews are Khazars.
To market settler colonialism, oppression, and apartheid to a world weary of all, Zionism had to invent a new narrative – a false narrative that would normalize the abnormal, legitimize the blatantly illegal, and justify the morally repugnant. Zionist leaders understood early on that it wasn’t enough to win military conflicts. They also had to win the conflict of narratives which in the past proved to have a bigger effect on the trajectory of human history.
...
Zionism... had to reinvent Judaism and Jewry to fit its purposes, and it did. All of a sudden, the Jewish portion of Palestine’s history became the history of Europeans of the Jewish faith. Accordingly, the European Jews became the “rightful” heirs to the land of Palestine.
This alternative history would portray their invasion of Palestine, as a ‘just’ war to reclaim what is theirs. And although still illegal under international law, it would depict their dispossession and uprooting of Palestinians as an unfortunate, yet justifiable necessity, for exercising their “legitimate” return to their land.
This false narrative was needed to beautify what under any other circumstance would look ugly and appalling. It was also necessary to harness the religious feelings of European Jews and give their narrative priority over the religious feelings or national rights of anyone else involved.
Hence, narrative was of the utmost importance in the construction of the state of Israel and the consequent dispossession, oppression, and subjugation of the Palestinian people.
She is saying that European Jews have no ties to the Land of Israel, and that somehow in a few decades Zionists fooled millions of them into believing they were really descended from Jews of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.
The projection is something to behold. Palestinians who have no history as a people before Zionism are claiming that it is the Jewish people who have a false history.
Palestinians, who deny even the existence of the Jewish Temples, are claiming that Jews have suppressed Palestinian history.
Denying a people's heritage to make a bogus claim on land is the Palestinian Arab invention, not a Jewish one.
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The media has been abuzz with the news that Israel "demolished a Palestinian village" in the Jordan Valley this week.
Just finding the village is a challenge.
It is being variously named as "Khirbet Humsa" (which is what B'Tselem calls it) and "Humsa al Bqai’a."
B'Tselem's map points to an area that has absolutely nothing there, at least in the satellite maps I could find.
But Google Maps does find Humsa al Bqai’a, and its satellite map is from November 2013. (The area highlighted is roughly a 100 meter square.)
According to reports, Israel demolished 73 structures in the village. This satellite image shows at most 20 structures, which means that the bulk of this "village" was built since 2013.
Here is that same area in 2010 and 2004:
The images are lower resolution, but it is obvious that the area was completely empty as recently as 2010.
The media doesn't report this, but Palestinians - with full EU support - have been building dangerous, haphazard collections of structures in as many parts of Area C as they can in order to claim as much land as possible. Lots of NGOs obsess over Jews building but these Palestinian land grabs are ignored. There is no reason that these residents couldn't move to Areas A or B, under Palestinian administrative control where they can easily get building permits, but they choose - or are encouraged by the PA and EU - to build in areas Israel needs for security reasons.
In this case, Humsa al-Bqai'a was deliberately built in an area that had been used as an army firing range for many years. Whenever the IDF does training exercises, it has to evacuate these makeshift areas to avoid accidentally hurting or killing the residents - and NGOs report on each incident as if it was deliberate harassment rather than trying to save lives.
The most bizarre claim comes from B'Tselem, which accuses Israel of choosing the date of the American elections to "raze" the tents in order to somehow hide what it was doing. Given the hundreds of articles in major media on this action, it doesn't seem like that nefarious Jewish plan worked.
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For most of the answers, it tries to pretend that there is no difference between UNRWA's "Palestine refugees" and how the UNHCR defines refugees:
Is The Transfer Of Refugee Status To Descendants Unique To UNRWA?
No. Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found. As stated by the United Nations, this principle applies to all refugees and both UNRWA and UNHCR have recognized descendants as refugees on this basis.
This isn't true - UNRWA automatically regards all descendants as refugees, while UNHCR defines them as derivative refugees. Unlike UNRWA, UNHRC refugees have to prove their eligibility for every generation.
But it turns out that there is one FAQ that even UNRWA cannot spin:
Why Does UNRWA Provide Services To Palestinians With Another Nationality?
UNRWA’s mandate is to provide protection and assistance to Palestine refugees pending a just and lasting solution to their plight. It is for the UN General Assembly to determine who the Agency serves. Eligibility for the receipt of UNRWA services has never been made contingent on the lack of nationality. Eligibility for UNRWA services is a matter separate to conferral of refugee status or nationality under international law – issues that go beyond the scope of the Agency’s mandate.
UNRWA is forced to admit that being a "Palestine refugee" only means one is eligible for UNRWA services but it does not mean they are refugees under international law.
In fact, the phrase "Palestine refugees" is a huge scam. Because UNRWA is a UN body, people think that the word "refugee" has a consistent meaning, but in fact - as UNRWA admits - "Palestine refugees" do not have refugee status under international law.
Careful observers knew this already. After all, real refugees can apply for asylum in other countries and "Palestine refugees" cannot, unless they are also refugees from Syria or other oppressive regimes.
The reason that UNRWA insists on using the knowingly false terminology of "refugee" is to confuse people, to try to gain more contributions, to garner sympathy for a population who are in much better conditions than virtually all real refugees worldwide.
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The Guardian just ran an article that could have been penned by activists at the propaganda rag Electronic Intifada. The piece heartbreakingly describes 41 children who have been left homeless by the Israeli army after their ‘village’ was razed.
The article tells us that 73 villagers lost their homes and that this is the ‘largest demolition in the past decade’. There are post demolition pictures of a bed (and a cot for good measure) lying homeless in the desert along with footage of villagers ‘rifling through their wrecked belongings’ as the ‘first rains’ fall. The Guardian piece quickly went viral, receiving 1000s of shares in just a few hours. And with every propaganda piece that only tells part of the story and dehumanises Israel, comes the vile responses. There is a clear correlation. Lies about Israel – a demonisation of the Jewish state – logically creates hate against Zionists.
This is not about whether you agree with Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Beduin in the Jordan Valley or not. It is about newspapers having a duty to tell the truth. The Guardian knowingly pushed out an anti-Israel propaganda piece.
The Guardian and Khirbet Humsa
The village name is given as ‘Khirbet Humsa’. There is even a link to a B’tselem video inside the article that shows vehicles on a road approaching with menace – before the footage swiftly cuts to an after image of a bed and some other objects lying around after the destruction. What there isn’t – is an image of the village itself being destroyed. Why doesn’t the B’tselem video show it?
Exercise 1 – Google “Khirbet Humsa” and click on images. You soon realise why nobody is showing images of the village prior to the demolition. There aren’t any. You’ll be lucky to see pictures of a tent. And publishing images of a couple of tents would greatly reduce the impact of the propaganda story. Which raises a question. In researching this story, the journalist Oliver Holmes MUST have looked for images of the village. Yet sorely lacking from the article is ANY suggestion, this village is no more than a few make-shift tents.
If you do a quick historic search of ‘Khirbet Humsa’, you soon realise this small gathering of tents has been a politicised battleground for decades. There is nothing on this ‘village’ at all – outside of the context of this conflict. It is a fairly basic conclusion that the Guardian reporter MUST have done this ABC research. Yet his article holds back all this information from the reader.
Should Biden enter the Oval Office, US ties with Israel will undoubtedly shift in a heartbeat. Biden will, of course, first be required to deal with domestic issues, first and foremost the coronavirus. On the international front, too, there are other more pressing issues to contend with, chief among them, tensions with China. Yet sooner or later, the Middle East will be on the table. Biden may have a soft spot for us, but he will aspire to reach a new agreement with Iran on the nuclear issue. He won't, however, necessarily succeed given that the ayatollahs in Tehran are not exactly thrilled with the changes he hopes to make to the original agreement.
But with or without these amendments, Israel will likely find itself once again in a contrarian positions, and then, simple as that, our first confrontation with Washington is upon us. The next unavoidable disputes will concern the Palestinian issue. In order to please the anti-Israel wing of his party, Biden will walk rescind many of the steps Trump carried out as president. The PLO office in Washington will reopen, the funds for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees will be reinstated, and perhaps a US consulate will be opened in east Jerusalem. There will also likely be a demand to halt construction in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. After all, it was Biden who caused an uproar over a negligible statutory approval of a construction project in the capital's east Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. The bottom line is that should the Democrats take control of both the White House and the Senate, Israel will once again be walking on eggshells with the US.
The long-established principle of not arguing in public with Israel will likely change under Biden. Too many on the Democratic side are too blind to see how the sanctification of the alliance between Washington and Jerusalem has done only good for one of the most volatile regions in the world. On the grounds of working toward peace, the radical wing of the party, as in the days of former President Barack Obama, will push Israel into a corner. But we've been there before, and this will most definitely not bring peace; if anything, it will likely bring war. Of course, we will be spared these conflicts should Trump somehow succeed in ensuring himself a second term in office. In this case, we should expect to see the continuation of the intimate alliance between the two countries. It is highly likely that there will be more peace accords to come and that the United States, together with Israel, will continue to exert heavy pressure on Iran. Of one thing we can be certain, Trump has raised the bar on US-Israel ties so high, it would be difficult for any successor to outdo him.
During the US election campaign, President Donald Trump boasted the fact that he moved the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, the peace agreements he brokered between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Bahrain – and at least five other deals that are in the works, according to the US administration.
Trump was also planning to endorse sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, but to realize that he had to have been elected for another term in office.
This is why, as an Israeli, one can be concerned about the results at this point, or at least contemplate what could have been achieved by the US and Israel during a second Trump term. This does not mean to imply that former Vice President Joe Biden is anti-Israel – not at all. But a pro-Israel president like Trump, one who has made his support for the Jewish state such an essential and prominent component of his legacy, has never before walked the halls of the White House.
Even if Trump is defeated, the legacy he carved out in his four years in office is guaranteed. The Republicans will make sure to preserve his achievements and the United States will make sure to hold on to the assets he procured for it, some of which are very important to Israel, too.
I came across this tweet that is a video of Iran-aligned Houthi soldiers in Yemen.
Looks like a colorized World War II film from Germany
זו אינה הפעם הראשונה שהחות'ים בתימן מתועדים מצדיעים במועל יד אולם בסרטון הזה הם הלכו עד הקצה לכיוון הנאציזם. pic.twitter.com/bQcBDzK0iZ
— אינטלי טיימס - מודיעין חדשותי (@IntelliTimes) November 5, 2020
(h/t Yoel)
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Ramallah, November 5 - The President of the Palestinian Authority believes public opinion surveys showing the deep unpopularity of him personally and of his governing faction among Palestinians, even though the field demonstrated serious shortcomings in the last two US presidential contests, failing to paint an accurate picture of the situation. As such, aides disclosed, he will not announce a vote anytime soon, if at all, as his administration approaches the seventeenth year of its four-year term.
Nabil Sha'ath, adviser to Mahmoud Abbas, informed journalists Thursday that while the polling industry has it problems, the president nevertheless gives surveys of Palestinians enough credence to refrain from allowing his constituency any say in who gets to lead them, for the foreseeable future.
"Nate Silver, Qunnipiac, and all the others certainly need to get their houses in order," acknowledged Sha'ath in a series of telephone interviews. "It's unacceptable that both this year and four years ago, the so-called experts got so much wrong. Relying on them going forward will prove a shaky proposition. The thing is, while the accuracy of the art and science of polling might fall into question, they haven't been off by such an order of magnitude that we can disregard their findings altogether. Bottom line, no elections for the time being. In that respect the will of the people is dangerous to our careers, so we can't afford to let the will of the people be expressed at the moment. Or ever again."
Abbas won election as President of the Palestinian Authority in January 2005, following the death of the previous officeholder, his mentor the iconic Yasser Arafat. Parliamentary elections occurred the following year; neither type of contest has been held since. Abbas's popularity has never approached that of his predecessor, and his Fatah faction also faces a surging Islamist rival in the Hamas movement, which favors armed conflict, not compromise, with Israel. Presidential confidant and former peace negotiator Saeb Erekat cautioned that expert analysis has often proved wide of the mark, but that does not mean ignoring the experts is a wise move.
"The experts also predicted the Arab street would explode in response to every move Trump made in the Middle East," he observed. "They explained that no progress in this region could occur, no normalization with Israel, without resolution of the Palestinian issue. The events of the last several years - the Jerusalem embassy move, the pronouncement on the legality of Israeli settlements, the recognition of Israeli Golan annexation, the hard line on Iran, the Abraham Accords, you name it - the collective Arab shrug, even endorsement, in response to all those things gave the lie to the experts' learned opinions. But we're still not going to tempt fate on this one.
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In the aftermath of the new peace treaties between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, important Arab public figures - from political officials to clerics to intellectuals - are now openly proclaiming that the Arab world has been the primary author of its own pain. These admissions may signal the beginnings of a new sensibility among Arabs and Sunni Muslims about their political and social situation.
Their error was the notion that Israel was the most crucial enemy of Arabs, Muslims, and their states, an enemy that had to be not only defeated but utterly eradicated because it disrupted the harmony and progress of the Arab and Muslim world. Until recently, this view was central to Arab and Muslim sensibility.
As Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has observed: "For most Arabs the terms peace and normalization with Israel were associated with extremely negative connotations: humiliation, submission, defeat, and shame." To the question of what ailed Arab and Muslim politics and society, there was always this widely-accepted answer: the state of Israel. If only it could be eliminated, all would be well.
The new deals have now shattered that discourse, declaring that Israel is not the enemy it was alleged to be, and promising a "warm peace" with broad economic and cultural exchanges. They acknowledge that Israel is not the problem, but rather a partner on the path toward solving Middle Eastern woes.
Most crucially, the changes in Arab discourse regarding Israel have not unleashed the vehement and widespread explosions of opposition throughout the Sunni world which would have been expected in decades past. Rather, they seem to bespeak views that were developing over some time, waiting for the opportunity to be let out.
Last week, Sudan agreed to the normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for its removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, joining Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and a growing chorus of nations that have seemingly put an end to decades of Arab-Israeli conflict. The Trump and Netanyahu administrations have heralded these achievements as byproducts of their diplomatic efforts, and President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Despite these claims, such an assessment would be a poor interpretation of events. Although the Abraham Accords are encouraging and historically significant developments, they are more a byproduct of tectonic changes that have transformed the region over decades than the result of diplomatic work of the parties involved. Most responsible for the accords is the restructuring of the Middle East regional balance of power as well as massive domestic transformations across the Arab world.
For three decades, the two Iraq wars and their aftershocks have restructured the power dynamic of the Middle East, producing what scholars term the phenomenon of balancing, when countries shift alliances to collectively meet the challenges of a rising power. States that have little in common and few incentives to form partnerships band together against what they perceive to be a common and larger foe. Here, the decline of Iraq and the rise of Iran have led countries across the region to reassess their regional and international partnerships.
Such a change in circumstance did not occur overnight. America’s two wars with Iraq, Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, militarily emasculated Iraq, which had long been considered Iran’s regional counterbalance. Iraq’s armed forces, which in 1990 were the fifth largest in the world, now cannot even provide domestic security.
While the middle eastern winds of change have brought about peace agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, the Palestinian leadership is still as intransigent as ever. For the Palestinian leadership it appears that peace with Israel can only be achieved in a “judenfrei” Palestinian state – a state free of Jews, ethnically cleansed of the over 800,000 Jews who now live in West Bank and Jerusalem.
This point was recently reiterated by PA Deputy Prime Minister and PA Presidential Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina, who said:
“The [Israeli] settlement[s] will disappear in the end. There will be no peace as long as there is one settlement on the Palestinian lands. Just as the settlements were removed from Gaza, they will be removed from the West Bank. Either a peace that is based on an independent, fully sovereign [Palestinian] state with East Jerusalem as its capital and without settlers or settlements, or else there will be no security, no stability, and no peace.”
[Official PA TV News, Oct. 14, 2020]
In order to understand the PA approach, it is important to point out two critical points.
The pillar of the PA demand is based on the Palestinian narrative which defines the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” as “Palestinian lands”.
While Abu Rudeina’s definition of the “Palestinian lands” is reflective of the often-repeated PA narrative, it lacks any historical veracity.
At no period in time were the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” under “Palestinian” control or part of an independent “Palestinian” State.
The Euro-Mediterranean Regional and Local Assembly (ARLEM) is an EU-affiliated group of local and regional representatives from the European Union and its Mediterranean partners to maintain political dialogue and promote interregional cooperation on a local level, between municipalities.
Both Israel and "Palestine" are represented.
Earlier this year the mayor of Ramallah, Hadid Musa, was promoted to be a member of ARLEM's Bureau. Members of Ramallah's city council promptly resigned - because one of the other members of ARLEM is the mayor of Modi'in, Haim Bibas, and the Palestinians Modi'in call a settlement.
Because of this, the city of Ramallah and the Al Haq NGO filed a complaint against ARLEM demanding that the EU exclude Modi'in (and presumably its mayor) from being a part of the organization.
According to Palestinian media, they succeeded. This is considered a major achievement.
As usual, when Palestinians join any international organization, the first and only thing they concern themselves with is how to use that position to attack Israel. And every other member of these organizations have to tolerate their intolerance.
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Sunday, November 08, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
