On April 16, 2010, the New York Times issued a correction on a photo caption from two days prior:
Several officials point out that Mr. Obama has now seized control of Middle East policy himself, particularly since the controversy several weeks ago when Israeli authorities announced new Jewish housing units in Jerusalem during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Obama, incensed by that snub, has given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a list of demands, and relations between the United States and Israel have fallen into a chilly standoff.
Correction: April 16, 2010
A picture caption on Thursday with the continuation of a news analysis article about a shift in the Obama administration’s Middle East policy referred incorrectly to Ramat Shlomo, the name of a Jewish housing development that Israel says it is expanding despite objections by the United States and the Palestinian Authority. It is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, not a settlement in the West Bank.
Even saying it is in "East Jerusalem" is false. It is in the northern part of Jerusalem in an area that was never considered part of Jerusalem under Jordanian occupation.
Nevertheless, it is certainly not a "West Bank settlement."
Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu do go back a long way. But in 2010, Mr. Netanyahu alienated the then-vice president when his government announced the approval of 1,600 Jewish settlements in the West Bank while Mr. Biden was still in the country. Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, berated Mr. Netanyahu for what the White House viewed as an affront.
Actually, the writer (Mark Landler, the London bureau chief) made a worse mistake, referring to every apartment and housing unit as a "settlement," which is absurd.
As usual, New York Times errors only go one way.
(h/t Irene)
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President Donald Trump is the most pro-Israel president in history. President Barack Obama was the most anti-Israel president in history.
And now, the likeliest outcome of last week's presidential election is that Obama's vice president Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20 and Trump will depart the White House.
Trump is rightly exercising his right to cause a vote recount in Wisconsin and Georgia and suing to fight alleged voter fraud in Michigan and Pennsylvania. But to win the race at this point, Trump will need to win in Arizona and Georgia and either reverse the vote count in Wisconsin or Michigan or win the election in Pennsylvania. Trump owes it to his 71 million voters to ensure that the election results reflect the will of the voters. And so, he will exhaust all legal avenues. But the probability his efforts will win him the election is low.
The Israeli media grotesquely cheers the apparent defeat of Israel's best friend ever in the Oval Office and his replacement by the vice president of the most hostile US leader in history. While doing so the commentators soothingly insist Biden is a great friend to Israel.
While comforting, this claim is untrue, particularly in relation to Iran.
Biden is not known for his strong principles. Long a weathervane for popular opinion, Biden has changed his positions on everything from the politics of race to international trade to criminal justice to social security and Medicare. But while he has been quick to align his position on nearly all issues with the prevailing political winds, Biden has maintained allegiance to one, deeply controversial position throughout the years. That position is sympathy and support for the theocratic regime in Iran.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Biden advocated giving $200 million to Iran to show America's good intentions to the Islamic world. During the Iraq War, Biden was one of the most powerful voices calling for the US to cut a deal with Iran which would essentially transform post-Saddam Iraq into an Iranian satrapy.
Biden was one of the chief advocates of nuclear appeasement towards Iran, both in the years preceding his ascendance to the vice presidency under Obama and throughout Obama's nuclear talks with Iran. Those talks, of course, led to the conclusion of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that gave Iran an open path to a nuclear arsenal within a decade.
Since announcing his run for office, Biden – who was viciously critical of Trump's decision to abandon the nuclear deal – has pledged repeatedly that he will reinstate the US' commitment to the deal if elected, ensuring Iran acquires a nuclear arsenal.
2 / The remarks are made against the backdrop of the visit of the special US envoy for Iran, Elliott Abrahams, who met with Netanyahu and will meet today Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and Defense Minister Ganz. US sec Pompeo is also expected to arrive in Israel next week.
From Israel’s point of view, the biggest immediate challenge is probably rebuilding a relationship over decades was founded on broad, US bipartisan support. Israel’s security – as an essential US ally as well as in its own right – cannot be dependent on the identity of the US president’s party: Republican or Democrat.
But the prime minister was not alone in his preference for Trump. A survey published by the Israel Democracy Institute found that the vast majority of Israeli Jews unequivocally favored Trump as a candidate “from the standpoint of Israel’s interests.”
It found that 42% of Israeli Jews believe that the US-Israel bond will weaken under Biden and only 7% think it will improve. (The figures for Arab Israelis were 24% and 16% respectively.)
“Presumably, this pronounced preference among the Jewish public for Trump to keep serving stems to a large extent from the assessment that Biden’s election would weaken US-Israeli relations and strengthen the relationship between Washington and the Palestinians,” the IDI survey concluded.
As these election results confirmed, American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and Israel must always keep this in mind. It must also make an effort to maintain the bonds with the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora. Fortunately, also, despite the vocal pro-Palestinian progressive wing, the majority of elected Democrat officials traditionally support Israel.
While acknowledging with gratitude all that Trump has done for the Jewish state, including moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, Israel cannot afford to ally itself with only one American political party.
“Let’s give each other a chance,” Biden said in his victory speech in Delaware, promising that as the 46th president of the US he would work to unify the country and heal rifts. “And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as enemies,” he continued.
This message of unity and healing would be a good one for Netanyahu and the Israeli public to adopt, too.
The word Trump, as a noun, is translated to "cheverman," which means "clever guy, go-getter, active person, someone who gets on well with people, someone who copes with any situation."
It looks like someone gamed the Google Translate system.
I couldn't find the etymology of "cheverman" but it sure sounds like it came from Yiddish.
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I couldn't find the original article, but Ramallah News and Ma'an quotes Israel's Kan channel in reporting that an American official says that Trump will do everything he can to help Israel until the last moment in office. (Arab media is usually accurate when quoting Israeli media.)
A US official from the administration of outgoing President Donald Trump said on Monday that the Republican president who lost the election will continue to work for Israel, until his last moments in the White House.
According to the Hebrew Kan channel, the American official, who refused to be named, stressed that Trump will continue to exploit his last moments in office, and will take advantage of the coming period for that.
He added, "We have been elected for a period of 4 years, and we intend to use the time until the last moment. We have come to work, and we have a few things that we must do with Israel, and for the benefit of Israel, and we will continue to work as well."
It is expected that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will arrive in Israel next week for a visit during which he will discuss with officials in Israel the new sanctions that the current US administration intends to impose on Tehran during the remainder of President Trump's term.
Elliott Abrams is in Israel now so...perhaps he is the source?
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.
Which would be the smart way to do it - Biden is not as likely to cancel sanctions against ballistic missile development or terrorism.
(I somehow doubt that Ken Roth of HRW will tweet happily about sanctions against Iranian human rights violations. Just a hunch.)
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Here are some quotes and stories about Joe Biden from the 1970s relating to Israel and Jewish issues.
I'm not picking and choosing - these are all the topics I have seen in that decade.
The first is from Ma'ariv in Hebrew, the rest from JTA.
Ma'ariv, 2 September, 1973:
An American senator fears the rise of the Israeli right
Fears of the rise of the Israeli right and criticising Israel for it's "stubbornness" on the Territories - that is what US Democratic senator Joe Biden revealed in his talk with Vice Minister of Health MK Abdul Aziz Zoabi in Nazareth.
The guest added that strong Israel is the one that needs to be the first to make proposals to the Arabs on giving back the territories.
But, in his opinion, Israel is being stubborn on this issue.
Nevertheless, the American senator, known for his hardline stance on Israel, said that the US is the only one which can bring peace in the Middle East closer. He emphasized: "the oil can't be used as a political tool by the Arab states".
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is virtually split down the middle over the proposed sale of 650 “Maverick” TV-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia proposed by the Administration.
... In a related action, Sens. Joseph Biden (D. Del.) and Dick Clark (D.Iowa) were said to have moved to bar U.S. arms sales to all countries except Israel and NATO members. Their move was apparently offered to dramatize the need to review the entire U.S. arms sales policy.
The Senate’s confirmation last night, by a 10-vote margin, of President Carter’s Middle East warplanes package, ominously portends a visible weakening of Israel’s influence at the Capitol and a commensurate growth of persuasion with the Congress that the Arab governments already have with the White House.
The consequences of the struggle between the Carter Administration and supporters of Israel are seen as encouraging the White House to take further initiatives that will create “new realities” bearing an issues such as Israel’s withdrawal from occupied Arab territories and the creation of a Palestinian “entity” for “a just peace.”
... Sen. Joseph Biden (D. Md. [sic]), who introduced the resolution disapproving the planes sales in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, said the vote represented a “defeat for a sound policy, a setback for a negotiated settlement in the near future. I don’t know why Israel would move toward constructive negotiations,” he said.
Eighteen members of Congress, nine Senators and nine members of the House, were awarded the Council of Jewish Federations (CJF) Distinguished Service Award for “their continuing and unstinting support for the cause of human dignity and justice” at a reception at the Capitol Hilton this afternoon. Senators receiving the award are: Joseph R. Biden (D.Del.)....
The Soviet Union has received a new request to disclose the fate or whereabouts of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, missing in the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. The request was made in a letter to President Leonid Brezhnev by U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden (D. Det.), head of an American Senate mission which recently visited Moscow to discuss arms reduction.
...Interviewed by the Swedish news agency bureau in Moscow, Biden is reported to have said he was personally convinced that Wallenberg was still alive and it was extremely urgent that the Soviet authorities should trace him.
Failure to make a distinction between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestine Arabs was cited here last night by a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a factor “in some erosion of support for past Middle East positions” even among “traditional liberal groups” in the United States. That analysis was made by Sen. Joseph Biden (D. Del.) who spoke at the opening session of an International Leadership Conference jointly sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America, the Latin American Confederation of General Zionists and the Zionist Organization of Canada at the Doral Hotel. ...
Biden told the 400 people at the opening session that the erosion of support for past Mideast positions involved changing conditions “on the domestic scene” from which U.S. Middle East policy “is not immune.” He said that “there is also genuine confusion on the part of most Americans because of their misunderstanding” of the West Bank settlement policy of Premier Menachem Begin’s government. He said “I personally stand by Prime Minister Begin’s decision in this regard.”
Declaring that “the survival of Israel is directly connected to the survival of America,” Biden said “the creation of a PLO state” in the West Bank and Gaza “is contrary to U.S. interests. As supporters of Israel we are uneasy because we have become unsure of the fundamental commitment of the American people and the lack of continuity of the Carter Administration” in its Middle East policy.
He said also that “there has been a breach among old allies — the Black and Jewish communities — and this breach runs very deep,” a reference to overtures to the PLO by some American Black leaders, including some leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which, Biden said, “is being naive about what is at stake in the Middle East.”
The Carter Administration is unveiling a massive arms program for three of Israel’s Arab neighbors that includes about $3.5 billion in credits for Egypt, up to 200 tanks of the M-60 class for Jordan, and advanced munitions for Saudi Arabia, informed sources reported.
... [Harold H. Saunders, Assistant Secretary of State for. Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs'] testimony was received with “concern and skepticism” by all of the committee’s eight or nine members present, according to the informed sources. Senators present included Committee chairman Frank Church (D.Idaho); Jacob Javits (R.NY), the ranking minority member; Paul Sarbannes (D.Md.); and Joseph Biden (D.Del.), who have expressed themselves most strongly on the central theme that delivering such quantities of new weapons to Egypt would risk a duplication of the U.S. error in calculating the Shah of Iran would be a powerful and unshakable ally by supplying his government with a huge arsenal.
(h/t Yoel for Maariv quote)
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Here is a strong statement by Joe Biden on the Senate floor on October 24, 1995, urging that the US recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the Jewish people.
Closed caption transcript:
MADAME PRESIDENT, THANK YOU VERY MUCH. AS FAR BACK AS 1983, WHEN SENATOR -- AND I' D LIKE TO THANK SENATOR MOYNIHAN, WHO IS NOT HERE, BECAUSE IN 1983 HE STARTED THIS PROCESS. HE ARGUED THAT WE SHOULD BE DOING THIS. AND WE' RE FINALLY GETTING THERE. MR. PRESIDENT, WITH REGARD TO THE LAST POINT MADE BY MY COLLEAGUE FROM CONNECTICUT ABOUT THE PEACE PROCESS, I HAVE HAD THE VIEW FOR THE PAST 24 YEARS THAT THE ONLY WAY IN WHICH THERE WOULD BE PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST IS WHEN THE ARAB NATIONS KNOW THERE IS NO DIVISION BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL. NONE. ZERO. NONE. AND I WOULD ARGUE THAT THAT' S WHY WE ARE WHERE WE ARE TODAY, BECAUSE WE DID NOT RELENT UNDER THE LEADER HPSHIP OF THIS PRESIDENT AND OTHERS. WE MADE IT CLEAR THAT NO WEDGE COULD BE PUT BETWEEN US. AND, THEREFORE, THERE LEAVES NO ALTERNATIVE BUT TO SUE FOR, AND SETTLE IN EQUITABLE MANNER FOR PEACE. AMONG ANYONE WHO IS FAMILIAR -- AND ALL ARE -- ON THIS FLOOR WITH THE JEWISH PEOPLE, THEY KNOW THE CENTRAL MEANING OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF JERUSALEM IS AND WHAT IT IS TO JEWS EVERYWHERE. TIME AND AGAIN EMPIRES HAVE TRIED TO SEVER THE UMBILICAL CORD THAT UNITES JEWS WITH THEIR CAPITAL. THEY HAVE DESTROYED THE TEMPLE. THEY HAVE BANISHED THE JEWS FROM LIVING IN JERUSALEM. THEY HAVE ELIMINATED THE NUMBER OF JEWS ALLOWED TO EMIGRATE TO THE STIFMT AND FINALLY IN THIS CENTURY THEY TRIED SIMPLY TO ELIMINATE JEWS. THEY MAY HAVE SUCCEEDED, MR. PRESIDENT, IN DESTROYING THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURES AND LIVES, BUT THEY HAVE NEVER SUCCEEDED IN WHOLLY ELIMINATING JEWISH PRESENCE IN JERUSALEM. IN CUTTING THE -- OR IN CUTTING THE SPIRITUAL BOND BETWEEN JEWS AND THEIR CHERISHED CAPITAL. AFTER THE HORRIFIC EVENTS OF THE HOLOCAUST, THE JEWISH PEOPLE RETURNED TO CLAIM WHAT MANY RURELESE HAVE TRIED TO DENY THEM FOR CENTURY -- THE RIGHT TO PEACEFUL EXISTENCE IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY, IN THEIR OWN CAPITAL. HOW MANY OF US CAN FORGET THAT POIGNANT PHOTOGRAPH OF AN UNARMED ISREALI SOLDIER BREAKING DOWN IN TEARS AND PRAYER AS HE REACHED THE WESTERN WALL AFTER HIS ARMY LIBERATED THE EASTERN HALF OF THE CITY IN THE SIX- DAY WAR. THOSE TEARS TOLD A STORY, A STORY OF PEOPLE LONG DENIED THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE AMONG NATIONS, A PEOPLE DENIED ACCESS TO THE MOST HALLOWED RELIGIOUS SITES, A PEOPLE WHO HAD FINALLY, AFTER LONG TRIBULATION, COME HOME. MR. PRESIDENT, IT IS UNCONSCIONABLE FOR US TO REFUSE TO RECOGNIZE THE RIGHT OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO CHOOSE THEIR OWN CAPITAL. WHAT GIVES US THAT RIGHT TO SECOND- GUESS THEIR DECISION? FOR 47 YEARS WE AND MUCH OF THE REST OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY HAVE BEEN LIVING A LIE FOR 47 YEARS ISRAEL HAS HAD ITS GOVERNMENT OFFICES, ITS PARLIAMENT AND ITS NATIONAL MONUMENTS IN JERUSALEM, NOT IN TEL AVIV. YET, NEARLY ALL EMBASSIES ARE LOCATED IN TEL AVIV. I THINK THIS IS A DENIAL OF FUNDAMENTAL REALITY. MR. PRESIDENT, ARE WE, THROUGH THE CONTINUED SHAM OF MAINTAINING OUR ISRAEL AND TEL AVIV, TO REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE WHAT THE JEWISH PEOPLE KNOW IN THEIR HEARTS TO BE TRUE? REGARDLESS OF WHAT OTHERS MAY THINK, JERUSALEM IS THE CAPITAL OF ISRAEL. ISRAEL IS NOT JUST ANY OLD COUNTRY. AS THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS BEGAN THE FINAL STATUS NEGOTIATIONS IN MAY -- BEGAN IN MAY OF 1996 UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF PRESIDENT CLINTON, NEGOTIATIONS, I MIGHT ADD, THAT WERE MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH THE DILIGENT WORK OF THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION, IT SHOULD BE CLEAR TO ALL THAT THE UNITED STATES STANDS SQUARELY BEHIND ISRAEL, OUR CLOSE FRIEND AND ALLY. MOVING THE U. S. EMBASSY JERUSALEM WILL SEND THE RIGHT SIGNAL, NOT A DESTRUCTIVE SIGNAL.
That was just one of many speeches urging the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital that day - by Dianne Feinstein, Bob Dole, Joseph Lieberman, and Carl Levin among them.
(h/t Irene)
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The New York Review of Books has an article by a journalist born in Gaza, who couldn't report what he saw when he was there, and who finally received asylum in the US from Hamas.
My name is Jehad al-Saftawi. I am a photographer and journalist. For years, I clung to the idea of fleeing my country for the Western world. There is no free press in Gaza. Most of the news channels cater to political parties that use violence to silence opposition. I come from a place overflowing with weapons, where my father could easily buy a pistol and shoot it into the air while cruising the streets of our city. A place where, on any night, you could be awoken by a bomb exploding in your neighbor’s home, stored there by a member of their family who belonged to an armed faction.
Working as a journalist in Gaza is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step. Each neighborhood comprises its own intimate social network, and traveling through them with a camera makes you a significant cause for suspicion.
I am the second son of five children. Our father, Imad al-Saftawi, grew up in an ultraconservative middle-class family that was heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. As an adult, he spent many years participating in armed struggles, both within and outside the framework of Palestinian armed organizations, which he believed to be justifiable resistance to the Israeli occupation. As a member of one of the leading armed factions in Gaza, Islamic Jihad, he killed innocent Israelis.
I condemn these actions, though many in Gaza consider my father a hero, one who carried out valiant operations for the sake of his country and religion.
... My siblings and I lived with my father’s family at the time, constantly feeling the weight of his reputation as a hero, and his community’s disapproval that we weren’t following his lead. Set free in December of 2018, Imad al-Saftawi has served as a brigadier general in Hamas’s Ministry of the Interior.
By then, however, I had succeeded in escaping. In 2016, when I was twenty-five, I managed to leave the Gaza Strip for New York, and, soon after, I began the process of seeking asylum in Berkeley, California. I’m now seven thousand miles away from him, from Gaza, and I walk as a free man.
How often do we hear from journalists - whose only job is to report accurately from Gaza - how difficult it is? Even the many journalists who have left Gaza over the years don't write a final report about what they couldn't report at the time. Perhaps it is because they don't want to be known as cowards - but the rare articles like this show what supreme cowards nearly every Gaza journalist is and has been.
(h/t YMedad)
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The death of the former British chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, is a heavy blow not just to his family and not just to the Jewish community but also to the wider world.
The greatest of his stellar gifts lay not just in his learning but in the way he was able to draw upon this to convey moral and religious truths to Jews and non-Jews alike. His personal shyness made all the more remarkable his ability to communicate the most profound of messages in the most accessible way.
While he sometimes blundered as chief rabbi in a world of community politics where he was visibly uncomfortable, his outstanding achievements which will be his enduring memorial lay in his writing.
For the Jewish world, his great legacy is the body of prayer books he edited containing his unmatched commentaries on the liturgy. These furnished a profound and illuminating insight into the texts in a historical, literary and philosophical context, all written in luminous and accessible prose. His emailed commentaries on the Torah portion of the week have similarly sustained many with their creative, original and deeply human interpretation of a text whose often obscure or elliptical meaning suddenly emerged as a result into sharp and clear focus.
What blazed out from this great and hitherto unstoppable body of work was his deep love for Judaism and the Jewish people, and the overwhelming lesson of hope that he drew from Jewish teaching and Jewish history and offered to everyone.
And what gave him such unusual authority was something which conversely gave him the most trouble from ultra-conservative rabbis. This was that he straddled two worlds. While these conservative rabbis viewed with unassuageable suspicion anyone who had not been educated solely within orthodox Jewish institutions, the ultra-British Sacks had been educated in non-Jewish schools in London and read philosophy at Cambridge.
Britain’s Prince Charles on Sunday mourned the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, citing his legacy as a leader.
Sacks, whose extensive writings and frequent media appearances commanded a global following among Jews and non-Jews alike, died Saturday morning at 72. He was battling cancer, which he had announced in October.
In an official statement, Charles called Sacks “a leader whose wisdom, scholarship and humanity were without equal.”
“It was with the most profound personal sorrow that I heard of the death of Rabbi Lord Sacks,” the statement read. “With his passing, the Jewish community, our nation, and the entire world have lost a leader whose wisdom, scholarship and humanity were without equal.”
“His immense learning spanned the sacred and the secular, and his prophetic voice spoke to our greatest challenges with unfailing insight and boundless compassion. His wise counsel was sought and appreciated by those of all faiths and none, and he will be missed more than words can say,” Charles said.
The statement continued, celebrating Sacks’s contributions.
“Although Rabbi Lord Sacks’s death is a cause of the greatest possible sadness, we give thanks for the immeasurable contribution which — in the tradition of the most revered teachers of the Jewish people — he made to all our lives,” it said.
“I send my deepest condolences to his family,” Charles said.
The Jewish world was in mourning on Saturday evening as it learned of the passing of Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks — the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of the last 20 years.
Lord Sacks, who was 72, had been diagnosed with cancer last month. Sacks had been treated for the disease on two previous occasions.
Sacks was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth between 1991 and 2013. He was the author of over 30 books. His most recent title, “Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times,” was published this year.
Rabbi Sacks was knighted in 2005 and made a Life Peer in 2009.
Tributes to Rabbi Sacks were led by the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Johnson said he was “deeply saddened by the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. His leadership had a profound impact on our whole country and across the world. My sincere condolences to his family, friends and the Jewish community. May his memory be a blessing.”
UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who succeeded Sacks, said the world had “lost a Torah luminary and intellectual giant who had a transformative global impact.”
Rabbi Sacks was “an extraordinary ambassador for Judaism, helping many to understand and be proud of their heritage,” Mirvis said. “He will be deeply missed, not just within the Jewish world, which benefited immeasurably from his teachings, but far more widely, by all those whose lives he enlightened with his wisdom, profundity and inspiration.”
The Church of England’s leading cleric — Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby — paid tribute to Sacks as having been that “rare combination – profound depth, and equally profound commitment to relating with others – that made the leadership he offered possible.”
Hard to grasp just what a powerful, eloquent, and brilliant voice was just lost with news of Rabbi Sacks’ passing. Not just for Jews, but for humanity as a whole. His memory is truly a blessing and may his words continue to provide inspiration.
Lord Jonathan Sacks: 'Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism'
This is our - Aval Ze Shelanu: an inspirational speech that Lord Rabbi Sacks made in 2012 - about Israel and what really matters. Worth watching pic.twitter.com/YUTHObXtHx
For the past couple of months, Palestinian media - and some Western media - have been consumed with following the plight of Maher al-Akhras, who Israel put into administrative detention in July for membership in the Islamic Jihad terror group.
Akhras started his hunger strike the day he was arrested, July 27, insisting that he would not end it until his immediate release.
On Friday, he caved - completely.
Now Akhras is saying that he ended the hunger strike upon agreement that Israel releases him on November 26 and will not re-arrest him.
His detention was going to end on November 26th anyway, and Israel already said last month that they will not re-arrest him. In fact, Akhras rejected these exact terms in mid-October.
It seems quite unlikely that Akhras has really been hunger striking since July 27th. His condition has been on the "verge of death" for four weeks already. And somehow he had the strength to pose for this photo with members of the Arab Joint List in the hospital on Friday:
Notice that two of the visitors were not wearing masks for this photo - in the hospital with a person who is supposedly on the edge of death!
Arab media is celebrating his November 26 release as a victory for him.
Even though Akhras' wife denied he is a member of Islamic Jihad, the terror group has been supporting him more than any other group.
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
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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.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
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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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Monday, November 09, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
