Yesterday the Daily Mail showed footage of Corbyn addressing the [Palestinian Return Centre] conference, on the topic of British Zionists. He mentions an impassioned speech made at a meeting in parliament about the history of Palestine that was “dutifully recorded by the thankfully silent Zionists who were in the audience” (audience members he presumably knew nothing about). So far so bad. But it gets worse. He goes on to say that these unnamed Zionists in the audience “clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either … So I think they needed two lessons, which we can perhaps help them with.”
Corbyn, whose hate for Israel and Zionism is uncontested, doesn't seem to know what Chanukah actually celebrates.
NYT, January 2, 1911
Because Chanukah is the most Zionist of holidays, celebrating the recapture of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel by the Jewish people and the defeat of their antisemitic enemies so Jews could rebuild their nation and rededicate their Temple.
Does Corbyn really support that message today?
Apparently, Jeremy Corbyn is the person who has the two problems he claimed British Jews have: he doesn't want to study history and he is clueless how ironic his statement is.
Perhaps we can help him learn those two lessons.
I made a cartoon last night about this:
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Palestine Today has an article about how some Arabs are extraordinarily upset over seeing Stars of David and Chanukiahs as Facebook wallpaper backgrounds during Chanukah.
Here's what the "offensive" wallpapers look like:
This person called for a boycott of Facebook over these "Zionist" symbols (autotranslation to English)
This one issued a warning to his readers about accidentally promoting the "symbol of Knesset" and Star of David:
The Palestine Today article notes that it is not easy to see the details of the wallpaper and its horrible Jewish symbols until after one posts on Facebook, which causes great embarrassment to the antisemitic posters.
It takes roughly three seconds to edit a post and change the background, but if someone gets a screenshot in the meanwhile, the shame of promoting a Jewish holiday might be too much for some people to stand!
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The test I proposed to Hen Mazzig to see if Donald Trump would continue to help Israel while a lame duck President (which would indicate his support for Israel is sincere) continues, and I believe I am winning handily.
Israel and Morocco have agreed to reestablish diplomatic relations, US President Donald Trump announced Thursday, marking the fourth Arab-Israel agreement in four months.
As part of the announcement, Trump said that the US would recognize Morocco’s claim over the disputed Western Sahara region.
As his time in office winds down, Trump said Israel and Morocco would restore diplomatic and other relations, including the immediate opening of liaison offices in Rabat and Tel Aviv and the eventual opening of embassies. US officials said it would also include joint overflight rights for airlines.
A year ago, just the announcement of allowing the overflight rights would have been front page news. Now it is practically a footnote.
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But were they really mourning for Jews killed in antisemitic attacks, or were they more interested in using these Jewish lives as puppets to attack the Right and Trump?
Based on their tweets from that day, they spent a bit of effort making sure that their message was at least as much about white nationalism and Trump as it was about the actual victims.
But surely they care about the Jewish victims of all hate crimes, don't they?
Neither Bend the Arc, nor Jewish Voice for Peace, nor IfNotNow, nor Peter Beinart's Jewish Currents, tweeted a single word about the antisemitic Jersey City shootings.
There is only one reason why: because the murderers were not white nationalists. In fact, they were Black.
These supposedly Jewish groups keep insisting that the only antisemitism that exists comes from white nationalists.
These socialist Left groups care more about pushing their political narrative than they care about Jewish lives. They don't give a DAMN about Leah Mindel Ferencz and Moshe Deutsch, gunned down because they were recognizably Jewish.
And their silence about Jersey City shows that their supposed outrage over the Tree of Life massacre is fake, too. They care as little about the victims in Pittsburgh as they do about the victims in Jersey City. To them the martyrs of the Tree of Life synagogue are nothing more than props for their politics. The victims are merely ammunition for these fake Jews to cynically use to attack anyone who doesn't share their socialist politics.
To these amoral Leftist groups, dead Jews fall into two categories: , whether they are useful or useless to their cause. Either way, they aren't mourning dead Jews - they are using or discarding them based on who their murderers are and if they can leverage the bloody bodies for their sick politics.
It is difficult to overstate how gross this is.
If you care about antisemitism, you care about all victims of antisemitism. The far Left Jewish groups fail that test, miserably.
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On Thursday evening, Jews around the world will begin the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah, one of the most beautiful and meaningful holidays in Judaism.
Although Hanukkah is a uniquely Jewish story, its lessons about the importance of preserving our religious freedom are universal, irrespective of individual faith or background.
The ancient story of Hanukkah itself occurred more than 2,000 years ago, around the 2nd century B.C., when the Jews, led by Judah Maccabee, successfully repelled their Greek-Syrian oppressors, led by the tyrant, Antiochus, who ruled the Land of Israel at the time.
Prior to the rebellion, Antiochus sought to forbid the practice of Judaism, and ordered the Jews to turn instead to the Greek gods and pagan-worship, the very antithesis of the Jewish faith, which gave birth to monotheism.
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In a miraculous victory against all odds, the Jews fought back, defeating Antiochus’s army—restoring their right to worship, and rededicating the Second Temple in their ancient capital, Jerusalem.
But what does this struggle for religious freedom teach us today?
The lighting of the large hanukkiah (candelabra) by the Western Wall will take place this year on Thursday with a small gathering of rabbis and public figures due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, rabbi of the Western Wall and holy sites Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, Jerusalem Affairs Minister Rafi Peretz and Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel will take part in the Hanukkah candle lighting. The event will take place according to Health Ministry guidelines.
Tours of hanukkiot in Jerusalem will also take place throughout the holiday, both in person according to Health Ministry guidelines and online. More details are available at the Western Wall's website or by calling *5958.
It is still unclear if the government will impose new restrictions and what those restrictions could be, so tours and other activities during the holiday may be affected. The government is set to convene on Thursday to discuss tightening restrictions over the Hanukkah holiday.
The lighting of the Hanukkah candles by the Western Wall will be livestreamed Sunday through Thursday on the Western Wall's website, YouTube channel, Facebook and other media platforms.
The bronze hanukkiah used at the Western Wall is two meters high and about two meters wide, weighs about a ton and took about seven months to make. The candles will use olive oil and will be in special wind and rain resistant vessels in order to stay lit throughout the night.
This is a response to an article by David Feldman, ‘The government should not impose a faulty definition of antisemitism on universities’, published by The Guardian on 2 December 2020. David Hirsh is author of Contemporary Left Antisemitism (Routledge 2018). This opinion piece first appeared at the Engage blog and is reproduced here with thanks to David.
After recently co-writing a decent article on antisemitism, David Feldman, the Director of Birkbeck’s Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, has now reverted back to the politics that drove his meek complicity with the Chakrabarti whitewash of Labour antisemitism in 2016. And he didn’t even get a seat in the House or Lords.
The Union of Jewish Students and other institutions of the Jewish community, as well as the government’s independent advisor on antisemitism John Mann, have been campaigning for universities to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. They say that the adoption of IHRA would give Jewish students and members of staff some confidence that they could hope for protection if they experienced antisemitism on campus.
And such antisemitism is commonplace in UK universities. Last week I was contacted by a student whose lecturer taught that IHRA was a pretext to silence criticism of Israel and by another whose Masters dissertation was failed because she wrote in the ‘wrong’ framework about Israel and Palestine. This kind of antisemitism is harder to sustain in institutions which have adopted IHRA.
In the Guardian article, Feldman characterises the universities which make a point of not allowing IHRA to be part of their official armoury against antisemitism as ‘refusenik’.
The refuseniks were overwhelmingly Jews in the Soviet Union who were refused permission to go to Israel, although there were others too who were refused permission to leave. They were denounced as Zionist agents of imperialism, they were purged from their jobs, they were deported to Siberia, they were imprisoned, murdered and tortured. The refuseniks were victims of antisemitism at the hands of a totalitarian state which called itself ‘Marxist’ and which demonised Zionism as the enemy of mankind.
Feldman turns this upside down. Today, for him, the refuseniks are the ideological descendants not of the Soviet Jews but of their oppressors, the apparatchiks and Party men who denounced Jews as particularist, pro-apartheid and privileged.
The New York Post has obtained a report providing evidence that a group of progressive professors at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Kingsborough Community College (KCC) attempted to bar an Orthodox Jewish professor from attending one of their meetings.
The December 7 Post report stated that the Orthodox Jewish professor and head of KCC’s department of business, Jeffrey Lax, filed a complaint in March 2018 claiming that the Progressive Faculty Caucus (PFC) on campus intentionally scheduled a meeting during Shabbat so Lax would be unable to attend. The KCC proceeded to hire the Jackson Lewis law firm to investigate the matter and produced a report in June; it is this report that the Post obtained.
According to the Post, three witnesses said in the report that the PFC attempted to schedule the meeting during Shabbat because Lax tended to be critical of the PFC during these meetings. The PFC also disliked Lax because, according to a witness in the report, “he was pro-Trump, pro-Israel, he’s a Zionist, conservative American,” although he does have some progressive stances on social issues.
“Although the primary objective was to exclude Lax, the PFC’s decision to schedule the meeting at a time that [Lax] could not attend due to his religious observance had the potential of creating a disparate impact on other Jewish faculty who observe the sabbath who wanted to attend the PFC meeting,” the report stated. “Allegations that respondents discriminated against them based on their religion can be substantiated in part…Observance of the Jewish Sabbath was at least part of the reason for the PFC to schedule a meeting on a Friday night.”
Ultimately, the meeting was canceled following backlash over the matter.
Here's an original song and tune for Chanukah from Daveed Diggs, for Disney.
And here is a Chanukah song just released today in Israel with Bibi himself singing with Eden Ban Zaken!
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Boston, December 10 - A Massachusetts silversmith admitted chagrin today following an incident last night in which he misinterpreted a Jewish festival ritual as a signal that he must warn fellow patriots of the route, destination, and purpose of an incoming British body of troops.
Paul Revere, 41, of this seaside colonial city, acknowledged this morning that he caught sight of Chabad of Boston's candelabrum from his window Thursday evening and mistook the flames for a prearranged sign from a lookout that Redcoats had begun boarding vessels to take them up part of the Mystic River, as opposed to route that followed only roads. Only this morning did Revere discover he had erred, and that the two flames he espied came not from the North Church overlooking the harbor, but the Chabad House menorah and the two candles that Jews kindle on the first night of Hanukkah - one to mark the first night and the other as an auxiliary flame.
"Oops," he muttered. "Awkward."
Chabad House Rabbi Mendel Kahan chuckled at the confusion his ritual had sparked. "Wouldn't be the first time people have confused some Lubavitch activities with Christian institutions," he observed with a wry smile, referring to a prominent sect of the movement that maintains the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, that last leader of the movement, who died in 1994, is the Jewish Messiah.
Colonist espionage efforts include an elaborate messaging system to alert inland strongholds of impending British military action, in this case a move against a significant stockpile of militia weapons and ammunition at the town of Concord, and including an effort to apprehend separatist leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The candlelight signal - "one if by land, two if by sea," i.e. the river - is designed to set off a chain of couriers to sound the alarm throughout the Massachusetts colony, summoning thousands of volunteers to grab their muskets and converge on the anticipated battle sites. A chagrined Revere confessed to reporters Thursday morning that his reaction was unjustified and careless, and that he vowed to apply a better sense of topography and geography henceforth.
"I also hope I didn't prickle any British Army regular intelligence antennae," he allowed with a sheepish grin. "If the wrong people become aware of this alert system we have in place, a few well-placed roadblocks could foil the whole operation. I could get arrested and interrogated, and that might compromise everything I've worked for."
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Israel and Morocco agreed on Thursday to normalize relations in a deal brokered with the help of the United States, making Morocco the fourth Arab country to set aside hostilities with Israel in the past four months.
As part of the agreement, US President Donald Trump agreed to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara, where there has been a decades-old territorial dispute with Morocco pitted against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, a breakaway movement that seeks to establish an independent state in the territory.
Trump sealed the agreement in a phone call on Thursday with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, a senior US official said.
Morocco is the fourth country since August to strike a deal aimed at normalizing relations with Israel. The others were the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.
Under the agreement, Morocco will establish full diplomatic relations and resume official contacts with Israel, grant overflights and also direct flights to and from Israel for all Israelis.
“They are going reopen their liaison offices in Rabat and Tel Aviv immediately with the intention to open embassies. And they are going to promote economic cooperation between Israeli and Moroccan companies,” White House senior adviser Jared Kushner told Reuters.
“Today the administration has achieved another historic milestone. President Trump has brokered a peace agreement between Morocco and Israel — the fourth such agreement between Israel and an Arab/Muslim nation in four months.
Another HISTORIC breakthrough today! Our two GREAT friends Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco have agreed to full diplomatic relations – a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!
The Trump administration plans to release a list of organizations that support the anti-Israel BDS movement, a senior Trump administration official told JNS.
The groups are still in the works and being decided this month, according to the official.
The move follows US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement last month in Israel that America would withdraw funding from groups that support the BDS movement, which he called “anti-Semitic.”
In a statement released by the State Department afterwards, Pompeo said he has instructed the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, led by Elan Carr, “to identify organizations that engage in, or otherwise support, the Global BDS Campaign” in which Carr’s office “will consider whether an organization is engaged in actions that are politically motivated and are intended to penalize, or otherwise limit, commercial relations specifically with Israel or persons doing business in Israel or in any territory controlled by Israel.”
He continued: “To ensure that department funds are not spent in a manner that is inconsistent with our government’s commitment to combat anti-Semitism, the State Department will review the use of its funds to confirm that they are not supporting the Global BDS Campaign. Furthermore, the State Department will conduct a review of options consistent with applicable law to ensure that its foreign assistance funding is not provided to foreign organizations engaged in anti-Semitic BDS activities.”
The Norwegian parliament has endorsed cuts in aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in response to racism, antisemitism and incitement to violence in Palestinian educational materials.
The cuts would amount to 30 million Norwegian krone, equivalent to $3.4 million.
The Progress Party led the push to cut the aid funds, with MP Himanshu Gulati saying, “Not a single krone should go to Palestinian education until this is clarified and they have stopped” using educational materials containing hate speech.
He added that he “regrets that it has taken us so many years to take a strict line against these things. It is very good that it is now happening.”
MP Sylvia Listhaug, deputy leader of the Progress Party, said, “The Palestinian school curriculum abounds with calls for violence and hatred against Israel and for martyrdom to be glorified. It is quite clear that Norway cannot support this, therefore we want to cut this item.”
Foreign Affairs Committee member MP Geir Toskedal of the Christian Democrats remarked, “We have long been uneasy about both textbooks and teaching programs in the Palestinian territories. It is very important that the school focuses on peace and cooperation.”
Until a just and durable solution to their plight is found, 5.7 million #PalestineRefugeesAtRisk will continue to need access to health care, education, protection and emergency assistance.
And the reason many of them are stateless today is because of Arab bigotry against them - and UNRWA helps keep that status quo in place by its very existence.
"Until a just and durable solution to their plight is found..."
UNRWA tells its dependents that the only solution is for them to "return" to Israel. Even the ones with Jordanian or Palestinian citizenship. Which means UNRWA will continue to exist as long as a Jewish state exists.
"5.7 million #PalestineRefugeesAtRisk"
How did 650,000 displaced Arabs become 5.7 million "refugees"? Because UNRWA is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that has no rules to take anyone off the "refugee" rolls - ever. And no one in the UN is pressuring Arab nations to naturalize Palestinian residents who would love to become full citizens of the nations they were born in.
"will continue to need access to health care, education, protection and emergency assistance. "
Comparing UNRWA's and UNHCR's work is always enlightening.
UNHCR protects over 20 million actual refugees and tens of millions of other internally displaced and stateless people who do not fit the definition of refugee.
Those millions of people also need health care, education and protection. But UNHCR doesn't run a network of schools or medical centers like UNRWA does.
It partners with governments and NGOs to coordinate and provide services.
UNRWA gives Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority an excuse to avoid their national responsibilities of providing services towards non-citizen residents. So instead of helping the so-called refugees, UNRWA hurts them by keeping them in limbo - and not lifting a finger to help find a permanent solution.
"UNRWA must be there to provide it.."
No, UNRWA must be demolished and its funding redirected towards an actual solution to the problem of stateless Palestinians. Everything it does makes the problem worse, generation after generation.
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48 delegates from the European Union visited Gaza yesterday for a short time, meeting with "civil society" organizations.
In the press conference held by the delegation before they left, the representative of the European Union in the Palestinian Territories, Sven Kohn von Burgsdorf, said, "We are here for two reasons. The first is to show solidarity with the Gaza Strip after 13 years of siege, to identify its problems and provide it with all support in the name of the European Union." .
The second reason is to provide support for fighting COVID-19 and to ensure that Gazans have access to a vaccine.
According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, since last March, the number of COVID-19 cases is over 26,000, including 169 deaths.
It is unclear whether the Palestinian Authority will provide adequate numbers of vaccines to Gaza. They have withheld medicine and medical equipment over the past decade.
The delegation did not meet Hamas, which welcomed the visit. Not that they don't want to. Sources told Safa news that the Europeans didn't want to stir controversy by meeting with Hamas or other terror groups.
The only government official to meet the delegation was the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, Yusef Abu Al-Rish, to speak about the health situation.
On previous occasions, EU representatives have met with Hamas, but they preferred that the meetings are informal and away from the media. Sometimes they speak to Hamas through intermediaries.
The only EU countries that meet directly with Hamas are Switzerland and Norway.
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Amnesty International has spent untold thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of time to attack Airbnb because that company decided not to discriminate against Jews in Judea and Samaria.
Today, Amnesty issued yet another press release attacking Airbnb, this one right before its public offering at Nasdaq. The excuse they used for this was that Airbnb didn't include the reputational risk of allowing Jews to rent out properties - according to the so-called human rights group, only Arabs should be allowed to host Airbnb.
How many other corporations does Amnesty attack?
Outside of arms manufacturers, and mining/energy companies, I found very few, certainly none with the zeal that Amnesty has attacked Airbnb.
Specifically, Amnesty has never investigated the manufacturers of cranes that Iran uses to hang gays.
And Amnesty is even aware of these campaigns - it mentioned one of them in their death penalty report of 2011. Yet it decided not to use its power to go after the remaining crane manufacturers who sell in Iran, including Atlas.
Why would Amnesty decide to incessantly attack a company like Airbnb with no connection to any human rights violations and ignore the companies whose names are literally on weapons of murder?
Because when it comes to Israel, the rules are completely different than in the rest of the world.
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Sharansky’s story counters the lie our foes – and some fellow Jews – peddle about Judaism, Israel and Zionism today. Those who claim that Judaism is “just” a religion have to acknowledge the power of peoplehood, of national pride, that courses through that story, just as those secular types who say the religion is meaningless, should admit the tale’s spiritual, theological magic.
In fact, the entire holiday refutes all these false choices. Try telling the Hanukkah story without any religious dimension, or while pretending the Jews are not a people with a national consciousness, or while claiming we have no ties to the land. The fight was about our freedom of religion. The Maccabees were nationalist warriors. And the Temple that had to be purified was in Jerusalem in Eretz Israel, the land yearning to be liberated.
Similarly, try telling the Hanukkah story as an either-or fanatic, choosing only freedom or only identity, only liberalism or only nationalism. Hanukkah reminds us that we need freedom just as we need the air we breathe; it represents the world of possibilities and open doors. But we also need our own particular identity, just as we need the substantive food that sustains us, just as we need guardrails and milestones, maps and a sense of mission, in the journey of life once the doors swing open.
And through it all, we feel blessed by that sense of Jewish national consciousness, that Zionist sense of peoplehood, that reminds us that wherever we are, whatever challenges we face, when we are part of this amazing network called the Jewish people we are never alone.
NATAN TOLD his story as we filmed an episode of “Drinking with Adam” (Bellos) for Wine on the Vine. I noted how remarkable it is that despite my never having suffered, spending the 1980s studying history at Harvard, and Natan’s having spent much of the ’80s suffering in the gulag, we remain ideologically on the same page.
Natan wondered: “Who really suffered most?” He quipped: “In the gulag, I had moral clarity; at Harvard, there was moral confusion.”
How sad that our universities so often fail to stand for moral clarity – or for open, critical inquiry. And how unnerving that the problems transcend partisanship, as cancel culture on the far Left oddly parallels the bullying totalitarianism of the far Right.
But how lucky we Jews are to have this holiday of freedom, along with freedom fighters in our own lives who stand up for personal liberty, for national identity, for the constructive, creative confusion of both – and against the false choices so many wish to impose on us.
Happy Hanukkah.
On December 9, 1917, British forces accepted the Turkish surrender of Jerusalem. Two days later, British forces officially entered the walls of the city.
As the world was engulfed in brutal armed conflict of an unprecedented scope, fighting raged in the Holy Land between Allied troops and the Ottoman-Turks (allied with the Central Powers) who had ruled the land for most of the past 400 years. On October 30, the strategic city of Be’er Sheva fell to the allies who then drove towards Jerusalem.
A London dispatch, on November 24, reported that the mosque containing the tomb of the prophet Samuel was bombarded. The ancient site of Mitzpeh, 5,000 yards west of the Jerusalem-Nablus road, was stormed by the British. The major battle for Jerusalem was in full swing. British cavalry ferociously fought their way into Jerusalem.
On December 11, the second day of Hanukkah, British troops marched into Jerusalem. British commander General Edmund Allenby respectfully entered its walls by foot through the Jaffa Gate.
Excited crowds lined Jerusalem’s streets to welcome the city’s liberators. Their very presence signified an end to the terrible suffering the people of Jerusalem had endured during the war.
One British officer described his entry into Jerusalem and the reception by its residents this way: “Swarms of children, Arab, Jew, and Christian, ran with us as we marched along, and the populace clamored to any point of vantage, waving and clapping their hands, cheering and singing. Jews clad in European dress came running up, singled out any one of us, wrung him by the hand, and — talking excitedly in broken English — said that they, the people of Jerusalem, had been waiting for … two and a half years.”
The German government has officially apologised after its consulate in Melbourne refused 82 years ago to accept a letter of protest from the Australian Aborigines' League about the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
On Sunday Felix Klein – the Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism – issued the historic apology via video link on behalf of Chancellor Angela Merkel's government.
The apology was screened at an event marking the anniversary of the 1938 delegation of the Australian Aborigines’ League – led by Aboriginal spokesman William Cooper [Yad Vashem] – to the German consulate in Melbourne.
According to The Argus newspaper, the delegation wanted to convey a resolution voicing "on behalf of Aborigines of Australia, a strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany, and ask that this persecution is brought to an end".
The Australian Aborigines' League, which used Mr Cooper's home in Footscray as its meeting place, drew a parallel between the treatment of Aboriginal people and a pogrom against Jews carried out by the paramilitary wing of the Nazis on November 9-10, 1938, that became known as Kristallnacht.
The league felt moved to protest at the violence from the other side of the world, and a delegation walked from Footscray to the German consulate in Melbourne on December 6, 1938.
But the consulate refused to admit the delegation.
"Officially, on behalf of the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, we are sorry that the 1938 Consul General in Melbourne would not accept the letter of the Australian Aborigines' League, nor forward it onto the political leadership here in Berlin as would have been the right and morally correct thing for a consulate official to do," Dr Klein said on Sunday.
Yorta Yorta activist and educator Lois Peeler said she was happy to accept the apology on behalf of her people.
"It’s a long time coming but we accept the apology," she said.
The Jewish Agency
for Israel is actively partnering with evangelical Christians who seek to
bring Israeli Jews to Jesus. That’s because 1) These missionaries are saving
the Jewish Agency money by setting up and running absorption centers for new
immigrants, lone soldiers, and young pre-army students and 2) The missionaries
swear up and down until they’re blue in the face that they’re not missionaries—they
swear they’re not here to bring Israeli Jews to Jesus.
That promise of innocence is of course, ridiculous. They are
missionaries. Full stop. If the Jewish Agency believes them, I’ve got a bridge
I can sell them for cheap.
As mentioned in an earlier column: Shannon
Nuszen is working to expose the mission of evangelical Christians in Israel—Jews
are trying to shut her down, regular Jewish Israelis, not unlike the Jewish
Agency, are happy to save money. And just like the Jewish Agency, these Jews
swear up and down that the missionaries aren’t missionaries. The evangelicals,
meanwhile, harvest grapes in the Jewish orchards of Samaria for free—a dream
come true for any farmer. (But at what ultimate cost?)
With all that free labor, is it any wonder that some Israeli
Jews fight the notion that in actual fact, these Christians are here to bring
Israeli Jews to Jesus? But Jews looking the other way on the presence of
missionaries in Israel has, perhaps, another subtext: some Israeli Jews retain a
pathological need to seek constant approval from outsiders. These remaining
vestiges of the ghetto mentality of these Israelis living free and easy in
Israel is almost understandable: What happened to past generations in the
diaspora has no doubt scarred the less emotionally hardy of our people.
So if just regular Israeli Jewish Joes support the
evangelicals in their mission, it only stands to reason that the Jewish Agency
believes it can get away with underwriting projects like the Aliyah Return
Center for Lone Soldiers, run by, yes, missionaries.
Now it wouldn’t happen in America. This is made clear in
this most recent clip from Beynenu, narrated by Rabbi Tovia Singer.
From the film:
"What's going on here in Israel would not go on in the
United States. Both the Reform and Conservative movements have bylaws that
they will not work with messianics, who are evangelical fundamentalist
Christians who use Jewish terminology, symbols, and icons in order to bring
Jewish people to know Jesus in a Jewish way.
“Here in Israel there seems to be no separation.
“The Reform Movement [in America] is the most liberal, and
even they would not allow anybody of the messianic movement to be involved in
any aspect of their education, much less run their programs.
"Jewish Community Centers around the world deal with
the problem of messianics working to infiltrate their centers and social
networks all the time, and they work very hard to address it.
"Yet here in Israel we have messianics partnering with the
Jewish Agency running absorption centers for new olim, lone soldiers, and young
pre-army students. Nowhere else in the world would Jews think to cross this
line!
"The Jewish Agency is partnering with the Aliyah Return
Center, a Christian organization headed in this country by a Messianic Jew.
It's astounding!"
This latest—some would say shocking—clip from Beynenu is, in
part, a response to the Jewish Agency, which has accused the organization of
doctoring footage to back the narrative that the evangelical Christians are
missionaries. Here is the official press release from the Jewish Agency for
Israel on the subject:
“The Jewish Agency runs an educational facility near the Sea
of Galilee called Bikat Kinarot. The site, fully managed by The Jewish Agency,
includes facilities for lone soldiers, new immigrants, preparation for service
in the IDF and serves as a regional center for those involved with civic
projects.
“We have a formal agreement with the Canadian Christian
Zionist organization Return Ministries to provide volunteers and to assist with
construction, maintenance and landscaping work on the campus. This is done
within a very clear contractual framework, stipulating that any kind of
missionary activity is strictly prohibited.
“We are familiar with Beynenu and while the videos are
heavily edited, using old and irrelevant footage and containing many false
statements, they do raise grave questions and concerns for us regarding our
relationship with Return Ministries.
“Let us emphasize that Return Ministries has no involvement
whatsoever with any Jewish Agency programming. Any involvement of Return
Ministries or the Aliyah Return Center beyond the very clearly demarcated roles
mentioned above is in clear violation of their agreement with The Jewish
Agency. The Jewish Agency will make no compromise on allowing any missionary
activity. We are examining the allegations and intend to take firm action if
they are found to be correct. We reject any effort to apply pressure on our
internal process by any outside body, who is trying to tarnish our good name.
If necessary, we will take steps to prevent this besmirching of The Jewish
Agency’s reputation and unwavering dedication to keeping the Jewish people
connected to each other and to Israel.”
That’s the official statement to the press. An internal
email from the Jewish Agency, however, tells a different story:
“From this examination we have issued a very strong formal
letter of complaint sent to Return Ministries. As we have searched for the
facts, numerous violations of our contractual agreement have been discovered
which have been included in our letter.”
As a result, Beynenu, went ahead and sent the following
letter to the Jewish Agency:
As for claims by the Jewish Agency that Beynenu is using doctored,
old, and irrelevant clips to prove a specific and unfounded point, Shannon
Nuszen has this to say:
"We wish we could say that this is Hollywood, but these
videos are real and it's happening in Israel. We understand that leaders are
upset about this, and I think we all understand that mistakes happen. However,
it would be a bigger mistake to be defensive rather than taking this seriously
and addressing the problem.
"Whether they are baptizing olim, or just doing the gardening,
we should not be partnering with Messianics. Legitimizing Messianics undermines
Jewish communities, and as the Jewish Agency emphasizes, these communities are
the building blocks of Jewish life.
"This would not happen anywhere else in the world, but
for some reason this grave mistake has happened here in Israel.
"I assure you we are on the same side, and we would be
happy to help the Jewish Agency address this serious matter."
So what exactly is Beynenu, and why are they going after
these evangelical Christians like a dog with a bone that just won’t let go? Nuszen
says that Beyneynu is a team of former missionaries, counter missionary experts,
and “concerned persons of influence.” Here is Beynenu’s official mission
statement:
Beyneynu is a
non-profit organization that monitors missionary activity in Israel and works
with government and community leaders to create awareness of the challenges
facing the public and to facilitate the establishment of proper boundaries in
their partnerships with faith-based organizations.
Establishing “proper boundaries” would seem to be something sorely
lacking here between the Jewish Agency and organizations like Return
Ministries, Hayovel, and the Aliyah Return Center. As a Jewish Israeli, I
am happy that organizations like Beynenu exist. Because the last thing I want
Jewish Israelis (such as my children) to encounter, is a missionary hiding the
fact that what he really wants is for you to come to Jesus.
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.
We are the descendants of the Canaanites who lived in the land of
Palestine 5,000 years ago, and continuously remained there to this day. Our great people remains
rooted in its land. The Palestinian people built their own cities and
homeland, and made contributions to humanity and civilization. [emphasis
added]
They [the Jews] are thieves who stole the land, and who want to steal the
history, but history cannot change and cannot be falsified. The facts bear
witness to it. We have been here for the last 5,000 years, and have not left
this land. We have not left this land.
Our forefathers are the monotheist Canaanites and Jebusites. They are
the ones who built Jerusalem, before Abraham was even here. [emphasis added]
What drives the Palestinian Arabs in general -- and Abbas in particular -- to
such obvious fabrications?
On the one hand, there is the Palestinian Arab goal to usurp the strong
indigenous Jewish connection to Israel.
But there is another element.
There is the attempt to establish a basis for Palestinian nationalism.
In his book The Seed of Abraham, Rafael Patai discusses the development
of Arab nationalism in general --and why Palestinian nationalism by definition
pales in comparison.
Many of the Arab countries in the Middle East are newly created as a result of
British, French and Italian machinations. The straight borders of many of
those Arab countries testify to the arbitrariness of both the borders and the
states themselves.
Writing in 1986, Patai notes
It is remarkable how rapidly the population of each of the newly created
Arab states developed a national consciousness and patriotic feelings of its
own. This process was facilitated in the major Arab states by historical
memories that the leadership soon learned how to utilize. Sentiments in
French mandatory, and later independent, Syria were thus related back to the
great days when Syria, with Damascus as its splendid capital, was the center
of the great Umayyad caliphate, while the newly reestablished Iraq saw
herself as heir to the Abbasid empire whose center was the Iraqi capital of
Baghdad. However, no other Arab country had as solid a basis for priding
itself of its glorious past as Egypt, which, although its greatest age lay
far back in the millennia of the jahiliyya [Arabia before the advent of
Islam], nevertheless came to view that early Pharaonic period as part of its
national history.
Some Arab countries could create a national consciousness based on their place
in Arab history. Other Arab countries, lacking that tie, could instead boast
of their ancient history -- even if that history belonged to a land they had
conquered and was not actually their own.
Where did that leave the Palestinian Arabs?
Up the creek.
In Palestine, such attempts at establishing a great Arab national past ran
into a vexing problem.
Since Palestine had never been an independent Arab country, its period of
pride had to be sought in the biblical Israelite age.
As we have seen in an earlier chapter, the Arabs considered themselves heirs
of Abraham the hanif [maintained pure monotheism], and claimed that Abraham,
with his son Ishmael, was the founder of the sanctuary at Mecca. One writer
even claimed that Abraham himself was an “Arabian.” Thus the more general
claim could be made, even though it retained tenuous at best, that Palestine
was the scene of part of Arab prehistory. [emphasis added]
That is where Jewish history got in the way.
The difficulty arose in connection with the long period between Abraham
(whose Arab progeny settled in Arabia) and the end of the Hebrew monarchy,
during which there was no Arab presence in Palestine, while the Banu
Isra’il (“Children of Israel”) were undeniably masters of the land. Hence,
in contrast to Egypt, the Arabs could not claim that they had also in
Palestine a national history going back to the long millennia of the
jahiliyya. (p.309; emphasis added)
But according to Patai, a sense of Palestinian nationalism did develop, and
Patai describes it as a slow process that started with Arab differences with
the Jews of the Second Aliyah who -- unlike the First Aliyah -- insisted that
only Jews be employed as workers to work the land.
That nationalism continued after the reforms of the Young Turks led to the
modernization of the Ottoman Empire and Arab representation in the new Turkish
Parliament.
And this reaction against the Ottoman Empire led to the possibility of an
unlikely (from today’s vantage point) alliance:
At the same time Arab nationalist leaders recognized that their cause could
benefit from Jewish help. In June 1913 was held in Paris the first
conference of Arab nationalists which was an overt anti-Turkish
demonstration, and in preparation for which
Arab approaches were made to the Jews with a view to setting up an
Arab-Jewish alliance. In the course of these contacts it appeared that most Arab leaders in
Cairo and Beirut took a positive view of Zionism were basically in favor of
Jewish immigration to Syria and Palestine, and expressed their understanding
of “the valuable assistance that the capital, the diligence, and the
intelligence of the Jews can provide to the accelerated development of the
[Arab] areas of Turkey.” (p.312; emphasis added)
Patai quotes Ahmad Mukhtar Bayham, an Arab leader from Beirut at that
conference who declared, “The entry of Jews--yes! But the entry of Turks--no!”
The president at that conference, Abd al-Hamid Zahrawi made a statement:
Because they [the Jews] are our brothers in race, and we regard them as
Syrians who were forced to leave the country at one time but whose hearts
always beat together with ours, we are certain that our Jewish brothers the
world over will know how to help us so that our common interest may succeed
and our common country will develop both materially and morally (p. 313)
It sounded promising, but in the end, no agreement was reached on Zionist
issues such as Jewish immigration and land purchases.
But it is in this context of the potential alliance between Arabs and Jews
that we can appreciate how it is that Chaim Weizmann and Emir Faisal were able
to come to an agreement that recognized Zionist goals in then-Palestine.
Today, the Abraham Accords are not necessarily a bolt out of the blue. Perhaps
the potential for Jewish-Arab cooperation existed all along.
At one time, they faced a common enemy: the Ottoman Empire.
Today, that common enemy is Iran.
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.
In November 2015, a newspaper in the United Arab Emirates dedicated a long editorial to the European Union’s newly issued guidelines about special labels for products from Israeli settlements.
“The decision by the 28-nation bloc has come after months of procrastination, but evidently underscores the bloc’s anger over Israel’s continued expansion of settlements on territory that Palestinians seek for their future state,” Gulf Today wrote at the time, calling for sanctions against the Jewish state. “Inaction on the part of the world community would be deemed by Israel as support for its oppressive actions.”
Four years later, after the European Court of Justice ruled that products made in Israeli settlements must be labeled as such, the Sharjah-based daily ran another editorial about the issue, hailing the judges’ “appropriate and welcome decision.”
Blind support by the US administration “has emboldened Israel to embark on a dangerous path,” the paper went on. The November 12, 2019, article ended with a call for all European countries to “implement what is a legal and political obligation regarding labeling of products.”
Fast forward 12 months. Israel and the UAE have signed the so-called Abraham Accords, quickly establishing diplomatic ties and vibrant trade relations. Emirati supermarkets proudly display Israeli products, apparently including some made in Israeli settlements — but no one is talking about labeling.
In this new era of peace, the idea of distinguishing between goods from Israel proper and those that come from areas Israel gained control over in 1967 is no longer in vogue in the Arab Gulf.
On Monday, Tura Winery, which is based in the West Bank settlement of Rehelim but proudly labels its products as being “from the Land of Israel,” inked a deal with Dubai-based FAM Holding.
We welcome the news that Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, a member of the United Arab Emirates’ royal family, has purchased a 50 percent stake in the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club, and congratulate him with the Arabic term, “Mabruk!”
“A historic and exciting day for Beitar Jerusalem,” the capital’s Premier League team tweeted to its followers, noting that the deal had been signed by the Israeli co-owner, Moshe Hogeg, and Sheikh Hamad on Monday – three months after Israel and the UAE established diplomatic ties as part of the US-led Abraham Accords.
Perhaps now, Beitar – which is infamous for its refusal to sign an Arab player and the anti-Arab chants of some of its hardcore fans, known as “La Familia” – can shed its racist image and become a sporting model of Jewish-Muslim teamsmanship.
Beitar’s announcement quoted Sheikh Hamad as saying: “I am thrilled to be a partner in such a glorious club that I have heard so much about and in such a great city, the capital of Israel and one of the holiest cities in the world.”
Pledging to invest NIS 300 million in the team over the next decade, he said this represented “the fruits of peace and brotherhood between the nations” and would “bring people together through sport.”
Saying he would strive to put together the best team possible, he concluded with the fans’ famous chant, “Yalla, Beitar!”
Hogeg said, “On the eve of Hanukkah, Beitar’s menorah is lit in a new and exciting light. Together, we all march the club to new days of coexistence, achievements and brotherhood for the sake of our club, community and Israeli sports.”
Israel Advocacy Movement: The Middle East past and present (Israel, UAE, Bahrain)
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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Elder of Ziyon
