How was 2020 for Palestinians, using the metrics of supposed Israeli oppression, compared to previous years?
According to OCHA-OPT, the number of Palestinians killed by Israel went down over 90% since 2018 - from 299 to 28.
The number of injuries plummeted by over 92% - from over 31,000 to just over 2400.
The number of hours of electricity in Gaza has doubled from an average of 7 hours a day in January 2018 to 14 hours a day this month.
Now, reading the mainstream media or the anti-Israel media seemingly obsessed with Palestinians, would you have any clue that anything has changed that dramatically?
The great unreported news is that Israel isn't out to hurt Palestinians or make their lives miserable. When possible, Israel tries to make sure Palestinians can live dignified, safe lives. The number of attacks against Israelis has gone down as well (from 14 killed in 2018 to 3 in 2020) and this is reflected in the response.
Peace brings peace.
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An Israeli woman in her 50s was found dead in a northern West Bank forest in the early hours of Monday after she went for a run on her own a day earlier, with authorities investigating the case as a suspected terror attack.
Police said in a statement that there were signs of violence to her body and that the woman’s death was considered a suspected murder. The Shin Bet security service was also taking part in the investigation.
The woman was later identified as Esther Horgen, 52, of the Tal Menashe settlement, a mother of six.
The police and Shin Bet were “increasingly convinced” that the killing was terror-related, security officials said Monday afternoon, though the police officially said that “all directions are being investigated.” The Shin Bet declined to officially comment on the matter.
The head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, said Horgen was killed with a large rock.
There were no initial reports of any arrests. Police requested and received a court-issued gag order on Monday morning, barring media outlets from identifying the identities of any suspects or any other details of the investigation.
Despite the gag order, security officials told reporters that there was growing evidence to indicate that this was a nationalistically-based crime, though it appeared unlikely to have been carried out by a well-trained, established terrorist group, given the brutal and unmethodical manner in which Horgen was killed. The officials said that investigators were looking into the possibility that the suspected terrorist was an Arab-Israeli from the nearby Wadi Ara area.
West Bank: Woman Murdered in Suspected Terror Attack
The husband of an Israeli woman found dead in a northern West Bank forest called for an increase in settlement building and “an appropriate Zionist response” to the apparent terror attack.
“Esther raised a beautiful family and loved her grandchildren, and now they will have neither a mother nor a grandmother. Esther will be missed by us all, her family and everyone who knew her,” Benjamin Horgen told reporters outside his home in the Tal Menashe settlement.
His wife Esther, 52, a mother of six, had gone out for a run in the Reihan forest near their house Sunday afternoon and did not return, whereupon Benjamin called police. Her body was found overnight in the forest with signs of violence on it.
“Esther went out yesterday as she often did, to stroll through the nature that she loved so much around the settlement,” Benjamin Horgen said through tears. “She was so full of life, light and love for everyone, and all of that was cut short in an instant.”
“We attribute the great success of our family and community as a whole to her,” he continued, calling on the government to put forth “an appropriate Zionist response to the murder and to add [to settlement] construction and light for our children.”
Horgen’s funeral is to be held on Tuesday at 10 a.m.
Security forces are increasingly convinced that the death was a terror attack committed by a Palestinian assailant, officials said on Monday afternoon.
The impending peace agreement between Morocco and Israel has been causing a bit of embarrassment to Morocco's Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) which is a major part of the ruling government.
The PJD has been anti-Israel and they are worried about the optics of having to be photographed with Israeli officials this week.
PJD Secretary-General Saad Al-Othmani discussed thiswith party members by emphasizing that the issue of the US recognizing Western Sahara as Moroccan is a priority.
He also said that the Palestinians themselves disagree on the solution to their issue.
A source told the Hespress newspaper that ministers from the Justice and Development Party are preparing "psychologically" to greet their Israeli counterparts and take pictures with them upon signing the partnership agreements between Morocco and Israel, and that that they don't even object to any future visit by an official Israeli delegation to the PJD headquarters in Rabat.
To justify this, they are mentioning that even Turkish leader Erdogan shook hands with Ariel Sharon and laid a wreath on Herzl's grave.
Another op-ed in Hespress also justifies the impending agreements, saying that the old methods of hiding behind the Palestinian issue as a reason not to move forward is not effective, and emphasizing how much Morocco has supported the Palestinian cause.
The lesson from all this is that even when a carrot helps being a peace agreement, as it did in Sudan, that doesn't take away from the fact that these agreements can cause huge changes in the psychology of Israel's most determined opponents.
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IMPACT-SE, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education, has released its report on the Saudi 2020-21 textbooks, and the changes from the antisemitic and anti-Zionist materials from before are significant.
Among the problematic examples removed for the 2020–2021 curriculum is an infamous Hadith which teaches students that a war between Jews and Muslims is inevitable in which Muslims will kill the Jews. Historically, this Hadith has considerably influenced antisemitic attitudes in the Muslim world so its removal from the 2020 Saudi textbooks is hugely significant.
Other examples removed include a text describing the nefarious means utilized by Zionist forces, such as money, women and drugs, lending to the common antisemitic trope. Another alleges that Jews have no religious-historical rights as they refused to accept Muhammad. An entire chapter focused on commentary and analysis about a verse from the Qu’ranic Surah al-Baqarah that also contained a warning against those “resembling the people of Moses” was also removed from the textbooks.
The Islamic idea of killing the Jews during the Day of Resurrection was removed as too was the glorification of violent Jihad: "Jihad in the way of Allah is the climax of Islam."
Much of the anti-Israel content that previously appeared in the textbooks has now been removed
including Israel as plotting to expand its territory from the Nile to the Euphrates to secure "Greater
Israel" (The 2019 version already omitted an addition to this description that had previously been included: "The global Jewish government, to control the entire world”). The description of Zionism
as a racist movement was removed in one place, but still exists in another.A polemic delegitimizing
Israel’s right to exist was also removed. All of the above examples were part of a chapter titled “The
Zionist Danger” that has now been entirely removed.
Moderation was found to be
introduced and removed from the curriculum in a seemingly pendulum-like fashion however, the main
direction in recent years points toward growing moderation, while serious problems persist.
Problematic examples still remained in the 2020–2021 editions.
These include conservative Islamic
views that infidels will be punished on Resurrection Day; A Jewish boy converted to Islam by the
Prophet is saved from hell; and Jews are demonized in an example showing the generosity of
Muhamad. In what appears to be an attempt to moderate terminology in the 2019 edition, the term "Jews and
Christians" has been replaced by the generic "enemies of Islam" in some areas. ...Non-Qur'anic praise for martyrdom is still taught and there are still
emphatic warnings against "polytheists,” including a decontextualized and ambiguous story with
antisemitic implications about “Jewish wrongdoers” who are described as monkeys.
Israel is still not represented on maps and is still demonized in the curriculum in many ways. Zionism
is presented as a racist political movement (although one example of this had been removed), and Jews as settlers, occupiers and aggressors. The First Intifada is praised as exposing Israel’s "falseness
of democracy." Allusions to the "State of Israel" appearing in 2017 were replaced by the pejorative
"Zionist" or "Zionist Enemy" in the 2019 and 2020 editions.
Here is an example of blatant antisemitism that was removed:
Here's a good example of how antisemitism was moderated but the section is still filled with lies:
The Goals of Zionism
The Zionist goals in the Arab East region aim at regional expansion in three successive stages:
A. The State of Israel in Palestine.
B. The Greater State of Israel in the Arab East region.
With the help of all the international powers, Zionism has succeeded in achieving the first stage, namely the establishment of the State of Israel in the years 1367–1387 H. / 1948–1967 on all the Palestinian lands.
Zionism continues to work hard in order to achieve the rest of its stage goals, which include the establishment the Greater State of Israel in the Arab East region, according to the claimed Divine Promise: from the Nile to the Euphrates.
However, the third stage was removed from the textbook: "The global Jewish government, to control the entire world”.
There are still plenty of problems. Zionism is defined as a racist European movement which aims to expel the people of Palestine and establish a Jewish state by force. Students are falsely taught that Israel deliberately tried to burn down the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969.
Yet the changes are remarkable and show a definite moderation in Saudi Arabia both towards Jews and towards Israel.
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In a new manifestation of coexistence between Muslims and Jews in the Kingdom of Morocco, the city of Marrakesh (in southern Morocco), today, Sunday, witnessed a march in which about 1500 Jews and Muslims participated, aboard hundreds of cars, to celebrate the official recognition of the United States of America of Morocco's sovereignty over the entire region of the Moroccan Sahara.
The march was organized by the "Imma House" association in Marrakesh, in partnership with the Jewish community in the city itself and its environs, as other civil society associations participated.
"The aim of this march is to celebrate the recognition of the United States, the Moroccanness of the Sahara, and the territorial integrity of Morocco," said Maryam Al-Jawawi, president of the Imma House Association, in statements to Al Roeya, which was confirmed by the head of the Jewish community in Marrakesh and its environs, Jackie Kadosh. He said "the aforementioned process has nothing to do with the decision to resume Moroccan-Israeli relations, which I consider a great decision."
Al-Jawawi explained that "the march was organized on board cars, in respect of precautionary measures to prevent the spread of the Corona virus, and began at 11 am from the Bab al-Jadid area in the city of Marrakesh, with the participation of about 1,500 Moroccan Jews and Muslims, on board about 300 cars and 10 huge motorcycles belonging to the royal cyclists club. They toured the city for an hour and a half, then returned to the starting point, where the imam of a mosque and a Jewish cleric prayed to King Mohammed VI, the royal family, and all the Moroccan people, after which the march activities ended at two thirty in the afternoon."
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With Israel's coronavirus numbers on the rise and the government poised to instate a policy of rigorous restrictions, the worst kept secret in the country is that the Temple Mount as turned into "Corona Mount."
Some 18,000 people crowd into the compound every Friday, many without masks. They infect each other at a dizzying rate. Then they go back to their neighborhoods in east Jerusalem or Arab communities in Israel, where they infect many more. In east Jerusalem, 14% of COVID tests are coming back positive. In Issawiya, it's 17.5%. In Kafr Aqab, 23%, and in the Shuefat refugee camp – 50% Of the 23 neighborhoods in Jerusalem coded red under the Health Ministry's stoplight plan, 12 – which are home to 320,000 people – are Arab.
The high rate of new cases in Jerusalem's Arab sector are not contained there. Arabs comprise 71% of salaried workers in the city's construction center, and 57% of public transportation workers. According to the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, in regular times some 35,000 of them work in Jewish neighborhoods.
The Temple Mount has become a hotbed of COVID infection at a level that is hard to grasp. When we add the crowded housing conditions in Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods, where people continue to gather and law enforcement is virtually nonexistent, we get a chain of infection that kills Jews and Arabs alike.
Two Fridays ago, Israeli police used loudspeakers to tentatively encourage Muslims on the Temple Mount to socially distance and use masks - which resulted in a backlash.
But being frightened of angry Arabs isn't a reason to abdicate responsibility for the welfare of both Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem.
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History is being made today, in 2020, as Israel makes peace throughout the Muslim world. Peace – for peace – which benefits all people and is best for all interests in the region. With hope of a better tomorrow, Morocco, Bahrain, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates have all signed peace agreements with Israel in recent weeks.
Against this backdrop, two famous quotes today from Israeli Prime Ministers ring true. Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” And it is clear that today, thankfully ,for many, that day has arrived.
And as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel'.”
Reflecting that, The Washington Post reported this week that in the two weeks since commercial flights began between Tel Aviv and Dubai and Abu Dhabi, more than 50,000 Israelis have visited the region - this in the midst of a global pandemic.
Iconic Israeli singers Omer Adam and Eyal Golan visited, as have the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rishon Letzion Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef, and countless others across the political spectrum, right-wingers, left-wingers, Orthodox and non-Orthodox - Israelis are flocking to this Muslim country.
Here in New York, we feel it as well. Well-respected local Rabbi Elie Abadie has moved to the UAE to become the senior rabbi for the Jewish Council of the Emirates. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Gilad Erdan lit the eighth candle of Hanukkah with the Moroccan Ambassador at a special ceremony in New York, where he proclaimed, "There is no alternative to peace. We are all the sons of Abraham and the sons of Abraham, they always at the end of the day will sit together to make peace together and to build a future together for the next generation."
What an amazing thing for the world and for the Jewish state – tourism, billions of dollars in foreign investment in high tech, agriculture and arms. With the help of G-d, safety, peace and prosperity.
Israel kicks off its coronavirus vaccination drive on Saturday evening with reports suggesting the Jewish state could be the first country in the world to vaccinate its at-risk populations.
The first Israeli to receive the vaccine will be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, followed by Health Minister Yuli Edelstein. They will be inoculated Saturday evening at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv. Netanyahu is 71 and Edelstein 62.
The event, which will be broadcast live, is aimed at “encouraging the Israeli public to get the vaccine,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement, adding that Netanyahu will thus become one of the first world leaders to get the vaccine. US Vice President Mike Pence and Congresspeople began receiving the vaccination on Friday.
President Reuven Rivlin will receive the vaccination Sunday when the country starts vaccinating health workers. From Monday, elderly Israelis and at-risk populations can receive a vaccine at Health maintenance organizations (HMOs) with a doctor’s appointment.
Both Channel 12 and 13 reported that Israel was likely to be one of the first countries in the world, if not the first, to complete the vaccination of its at-risk populations.
Doctors and nurses at Tel Aviv's Ichilov hospital who have been treating corona patients day and night for over nine months, erupt in song and dance this morning as they prepare to be vaccinated and to vaccinate the Israeli public. #איכילוב#עברילידרpic.twitter.com/Rkh4xFlFcd
The director-general of the Health Ministry said Sunday that the ministry has set a goal of vaccinating the majority of Israelis by early next year.
“The goal is to vaccinate about 60 percent of the population by the end of the first quarter of 2021,” he told the high-level coronavirus cabinet, according to leaks from the meeting.
Levy, however, warned that it would be longer before Israelis could return to normalcy.
“Maybe a month after we have achieved a herd immunity state we will start to get back to routine, but with masks,” he said.
Levy also reportedly said that by the end of January, Israel would be able to store up to seven million doses at temperatures low enough for Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
His comments came as Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv announced that it had run out doses for the day, after administering 1,000 shots on Sunday.
So FYI: #Moderna’s chief medical officer is Tal Zaks from #Israel, who served in IDF & studied at Ben Gurion University. #Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, is also Jewish, and son of Holocaust survivors from Greece.
Al Hayat al-Jadida publishes a memo from the Waqf in Gaza to limit Christmas activities for the next few weeks, until after Greek Orthodox Christmas on January 7.
The Waqf is run by Hamas.
The Director General of the General Administration of Preaching and Guidance, Walid Aweidah, asked the Undersecretary of the Ministry, Abdel Hadi Al-Agha, to approve a series of activities of the department, to limit interaction with the Christmas holidays of the Christian community .
The Christmas activities that are to be limited include electronic invitations, greeting cards, interactive video material, and local radio, satellite TV and media .
Naturally, this is not being covered by the mainstream media.
(h/t Tomer Ilan)
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The Jewish socialist Left has been in the forefront of fighting against anyone using the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, with countless articles that often falsely claim that this definition criminalizes any criticism of Israel.
What they try very hard not to do is to offer an alternative definition of antisemitism.
This is deliberate, because any definition that they offer will necessarily exclude obvious case of antisemitism from their own political allies.
Rabbi Alissa Wise, the Jewish Voice for Peace's Deputy Director, moderated last week's "Dismantling Antisemitism" panel which included people with history of antisemitic statements themselves. In her introduction she veered into antisemitism herself by claiming [13:23] that Israel built "Jewish only roads" in the West Bank and would shoot any Palestinian Arab who crossed them. This is of course a double lie.
She later on said a little bit about how JVP and its socialist Left allies define antisemitism. "Antisemitism is a tool used to manufacture fear and division," she said [17:39].
This is an astonishing statement. it downplays the fact that many people actually hate Jews, and instead she is saying that it is often some sort of myth that is weaponized to divide the Jewish community.
This was not a slip of the tongue. On Friday, JVP sent out a fundraising email where Wise said the same thing: "Antisemitism isn’t a virus, nor a tide, nor a force of nature. It’s a political tool that is used to divide us."
Talk about psychological projection!
The entire point of JVP and its allies is to divide the Jewish community, and the entire purpose of the "Dismantling antisemitism" panel and similar initiatives like the "How to fight antisemitism" website of Bend The Arc is to weaponize antisemitism as a strictly right-wing phenomenon. They studiously ignore the instances of antisemitism we saw just this past year from prominent Black entertainers and athletes, from Louis Farrakhan, from Leftist icons like Roger Waters, the daily antisemitism that is published by Palestinians, even the attacks on synagogues and Jewish stores we saw during Black Lives Matters protests.
If you want to fight antisemitism, you would show solidarity with all Jews, not only Jews who are your political allies. If JVP and the Jewish socialist Left really cared about antisemitism they would be in the forefront of criticizing their Black and Arab allies when they spout Jew-hate.
They don't ever say a word about it. Because it is the Jewish Left who is using antisemitism as a political tool to divide us.
If you believe Alissa Wise's definition of antisemitism, then her JVP organization - along with her fellow travelers at IfNotNow, Bend The Arc, Jewish Currents and other fringe anti-Zionist groups - are the real antisemites.
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A few days later police arrested a suspect - and he wasn't a white nationalist.
A suspect was charged Thursday in connection with an alleged hate crime at Oakland’s Temple Sinai, where a black swastika was found scrawled in paint on the historic wooden sanctuary doors early Monday morning.
Freddie Lee Smith, also known as Zachary RunningWolf, a 57-year-old Berkeley man, was charged with six felonies, including vandalism and violation of civil rights with a hate crime enhancement, according to Alameda County assistant district attorney Teresa Drenick. Smith describes himself as an “Indigenous Elder” and is well known in Berkeley as a frequent mayoral candidate.
Footage from the synagogue’s security cameras, turned over to Oakland police, was instrumental in identifying the alleged perpetrator.
According to the arrest report, Smith’s backpack and shirt matched images of the suspect, and police found several cans of spray-paint in his backpack. He was charged with the most recent incident as well as with two others that took place earlier this month, including painting the words “Bye bye evil evil evil Jews.”
With California’s 99% Genocide of Indigenous Peoples, vote for Berkeley’s FIRST Indigenous Mayor Pikuni/Blackfeet Elder Zachary RunningWolf. Want free Housing, Health Care, Education, Clean Water, Energy, & Food? Reparations and Decolonization are the answer. Ohlone Sovereignty means Natural Law enforcement and societal wealth distribution in accordance with Indigenous Principles. All basic needs could be met with ending the hoarding of wealth. RunningWolf supports Black Lives Matter and affirms that Red Lives are Sacred - abolish the colonial prisons & police!
His Twitter feed is filled with dozens of references to Jews, including "bad Jews" who are Zionists. He also refers to the Elders of Zion a number of times.
I cannot find a word against this vandalism by any of the supposed fighters against antisemitism - Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow or Linda Sarsour or Rashida Tlaib or Marc Lamont Hill.
Because they are invested in the lie that antisemitism comes from the Right.
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Of all the problems President Trump threw at senior adviser Jared Kushner, developing a peace plan for the Middle East was the toughest, a win that has eluded administrations for years.
For the Jewish adviser, bringing peace to Israel was personal. And any victory would provide the administration with an everlasting legacy in the region and the world.
He ignored the ridicule of former administration officials when he took a different and secretive path, as he had on several other projects.
“If you look up the definition of an impossible objective in the dictionary, people say Middle East peace. It's almost a metaphor for impossibility,” he told Secrets.
Kushner built a plan that had a big economic and prosperity push, and while many in Washington brushed it off, it has taken root in the region.
And it set the stage for the Abraham Accords, which has led four former foes — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco — to sign peace agreements with Israel.
“We took a very different approach, and this isn't a rebuke of Democrats, it's a rebuke of maybe more of the foreign policy people who've come before because they're Republicans and Democrats, and for years, they did this dance and didn't get results. Then, those were the people who criticized me the loudest for doing things differently than the way they did. I was like, 'Wait, so you want me to accomplish a different result than you got, but you want me to do the exact same way that you tried?'” he said.
Joel Rosenberg, a bestselling author, editor of All Israel News and All Arab News, and a roving diplomat, called Kushner one of “the most innovative and successful Middle East peace brokers in history.”
Amid a COVID-19-induced economic recession, Irish independent Senator Frances Black has revived a draft law targeting Israel after a previous failed attempt. The Occupied Territories Bill, if enacted, could have disastrous consequences for U.S. economic relations with Ireland – and Ireland itself.
The Occupied Territories Bill seeks to criminalize trade in goods and services produced in Israeli settlements. When the bill was initially introduced in January 2018, it triggered a sharp denouncement from the Irish government and U.S. policymakers.
During the 32nd session of the Irish parliament, which was dissolved in January 2020, the bill reached the seventh of 10 steps toward becoming law. Unpassed bills typically lapse at the end of Ireland’s parliamentary session and must begin the process anew in the subsequent session. However, Black succeeded in now having the bill reinstated at the same stage during the 33rd session.
If enacted, the bill could force U.S. companies with an Irish division or subsidiary to choose between one of two costly options: violate Irish law by continuing to do business with companies and persons in Israeli settlements, or violate U.S. law by participating in a foreign boycott not endorsed by the U.S. government. Major U.S. companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, employ over 155,000 people in Ireland. All four of these corporations have substantial research and development centers in Israel. Not only would these and other U.S. companies risk running afoul of U.S. federal law prohibiting compliance with an unsanctioned boycott, they would also be violating nearly two dozen U.S. state laws that prohibit unauthorized boycotts against Israel.
The bill has already received sharp criticism from officials of Ireland’s two leading political parties, as well as bipartisan criticism from the U.S. Congress. Earlier this year, Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin of Ireland’s Fianna Fail party asserted that the bill would violate EU trade regulations by undermining the European Union’s exclusive right to determine trade policy for its member states.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney of the Fine Gael party has made similar assertions. In addition, Irish Attorney General Séamus Woulfe weighed in that the bill would be “impractical” to enforce.
The words leap out and grab you. Former President Barack Obama characterizes no other world leader in anything like the terms he reserves for former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
In his recent memoir, Obama tells us that Sarkozy is a “quarter Greek Jew.” Little wonder, then, that Sarkozy has “dark, expressive, Mediterranean features,” which resemble the exaggerated, often distorted figures “of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.”
Little wonder, too, that he is “all emotional outbursts and overblown rhetoric,” while his conversation, which reflects unbridled ambition and incessant pushiness, “swoops from flattery to bluster to genuine insight.”
One might have thought Obama was deliberately directing at Sarkozy the insults notoriously hurled at Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), the first person of Jewish birth to become Britain’s prime minister. The colonial administrator Lord Cromer said of Disraeli that he was driven by “a tenacity of purpose” that was “a Jewish characteristic.” With his swarthy, “Oriental features,” Disraeli was consumed by an “addiction” to the “passionate outbursts” and “excesses of flattery” that were the hallmarks of his “nimble-witted” race.
Cromer’s taunts, which Obama so uncannily echoes, were hardly unusual. On the contrary, the traits Obama attributes to Sarkozy — from oily complexion to pushy, self-centered assertiveness — were at the heart of the anti-Semitic caricature of the Jew that crystallized, with murderous consequences, in the 19th century.
That history makes calling Sarkozy a Jew vastly different from noting, say, that Angela Merkel’s father was a Lutheran pastor; and if anti-Semitism involves using the label “Jew” to evoke, emphasize or explain an interrelated complex of unattractive attributes, Obama’s description of Sarkozy is unquestionably anti-Semitic.
Yet from The New York Times to The Washington Post and beyond, not one of the gushing reviews considered Obama’s statement even worth mentioning.
AP has a biased report essentially accusing Israel of anti-Palestinian racism because the Pfizer vaccine cannot be used in the territories, due to a shortage of super-cold refrigeration units that are needed for it to remain effective.
Left unsaid is that millions of Israelis will also have to wait months - there are not enough vaccines to go around now. AP is suggesting that Israel prioritize its own citizens behind Palestinians, which no nation on Earth would or should do.
While buried in the story it mentions that all rich nations are getting the vaccines before all poor nations, only Israel is blamed for this. No one is telling the US to wait to inoculate its citizens until Haitians are all vaccinated.
It isn't a question of discrimination. It is a question of logistics and limited resources. And even with that, PBS doesn't mention how Israel is working to provide vaccines for Palestinians by the millions.
But there is one part of the report where an Israeli Leftist NGO, Physicians for Human Rights, makes an incredibly condescending statement about Palestinians, and no one even bats an eye.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, a group that advocates for more equitable health care, says Israel has a legal obligation as an occupying power to purchase and distribute vaccines to the Palestinians. It says Israel must also ensure that vaccines that don’t meet its own safety guidelines — like the Russian shot — are not distributed in areas under its control.
The Palestinian Authority has approved the Russian vaccine. Israel hasn't.
PHRI is saying that Palestinians cannot make their own decisions as to which vaccines are safe for them to use. Even worse, they are saying that the potential benefits of the Russian vaccine must not be made available to Palestinians but that they must adhere to Israeli medical standards, whether they want to or not - and at the risk of many more people becoming ill and dying.
The Russian Sputnik-V vaccine, although viewed with some skepticism by some, has been bought by countries like India, Brazil and Mexico. Russia claims a 92% effectiveness rate, on par with those of Pfizer and Moderna. Israel's Hadassah Hospital is helping the Palestinians import the vaccine, even though it will not be used by Israel at this time.
Yet Physicians for Human Rights-Israel is against this potentially life saving measure, because they condescendingly consider Palestinians too stupid to make life and death decisions for themselves.
That is Leftist racism.
And you can be sure that if Israel blocked the Russian vaccine from being sent to Palestinians, PHR-I would be the first to accuse Israel of human rights abuses.
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To mark the 30 November Day of Commemoration of the exodus of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran, Gilad Erdan, Israel's UN ambassador, pledged to press for a UN resolution for the recognition and compensation of Jewish refugees.
Enter Joseph Massad into the fray to call out 'Israel's outrageous fabrications'. Massad is Associate Professor of Arab Politics at Columbia University. Erdan's campaign, he alleges in Middle East Eye, is designed to exonerate Israel from the 'original sin' of expelling the Palestinians and other 'criminal actions'.
Dismissing all the ''push' factors, he argues that Jews coming to the Jewish homeland cannot possibly be refugees. They can't be said to have been expelled either, because Yemen defied an Arab League ban and 'allowed' the Jews to leave. Israel 'removed' 'Arab Jews', as he calls them, to face institutionalised Ashkenazi discrimination in Israel' and the abduction of hundreds of children'. Massad obviously knows better than three Israeli Commissions of Inquiry, who could find no evidence of an abduction racket.
Ignoring the mass violence and state-sanctioned persecution confronting 'Arab Jews', Massad resurrects the old chestnuts favoured by Palestinian propagandists of the 1950 'Mossad' bombs in Iraq and the 1954 Lavon Affair bombings in Egypt to infer that Jews had to be made to leave 'the paradise 'of Arab countries by the Zionists. Then comes a curious inference : because most Jews in Egypt did not have Egyptian nationality, one could not blame Egypt for expelling them as foreigners. In other words, Jews in Egypt were a mini-settler colony. It does not cross Massad's mind that Jews in Egypt could have been denied Egyptian nationality by racist laws. Of 1,000 Jews detained by Nasser after the Suez crisis of 1956, only half were of Egyptian nationality. (A negligible number, so that's alright then.)
Calling mainly on sources such as Tom Segev's The First Israelis, articles in Haaretz, Joel Beinin's The dispersion of tEgyptian Jewry and writings by Ella Shohat, Massad passes over massive evidence that Jews were stripped of their rights as Jews . He claims that there was no population swap between Jewish refugees and Palestinians, as Israel argues : while Jews were given Palestinian homes and land, Palestinians were not given Jewish property in return (Not true: some Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq were housed in Jewish property, and it was Arab League policy neither to complete the exchange, nor resettle the refugees - ed). Massad inflates Palestinian losses to $300 bn, so that they dwarf Jewish losses.
In Britain, a number of people who eulogised le Carré after his death praised him for the moral sense they claimed illuminated his fiction. They did not mean by that his contempt for Soviet communism. They meant instead his contempt for the west.
For they were reflecting the cultural orthodoxy of moral relativism, the doctrine under which there can be no objective moral distinctions between behaviour.
That leads them straight into despising western culture while inflating the moral worth of the developing world. And this loss of moral compass leads them, in turn, straight into the detestation of Israel — the new antisemitism that is a fig leaf for the older kind.
Le Carré was clearly very upset at being accused of antisemitism. That’s a reaction shared by many in progressive, Israel-bashing circles.
Such people often valorise the victims of the Holocaust, sentimentalise certain Jewish characteristics and boast of having Jewish friends. They therefore dismiss as outrageous the suggestion that they may harbour some form of anti-Jewish prejudice.
But antisemitism doesn’t always wear jackboots. Like le Carré’s spies, it hides behind multiple disguises, including western liberalism.
John le Carré was a wonderful writer whose works gave pleasure to millions. His early spy fiction was superlative, and his semi-autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy was a masterpiece.
English literature, however, is full of writers of enduring quality and importance but who had antisemitic views. From Chaucer to Dickens to TS Eliot to Roald Dahl, we continue to read and appreciate writers of genius while being uncomfortably aware of their anti-Jewish prejudice.
This doesn’t just tell us something about these authors, but also about the culture that produced them. Le Carré was the product of an era in which rampant antisemitism has been facilitated by precisely the same moral bankruptcy posing as conscience that is reflected in his fiction.
Ultimately, though, he himself remains an enigma. Was he on the side of the Jewish people — or their enemies? Even George Smiley might fail to resolve that one.
Our cultural elites’ least favorite Jewish holiday has arrived: Hanukkah, of course.
Why did Hanukkah irk everyone from the late Christopher Hitchens, who memorably derided it as a “celebration of tribal Jewish backwardness,” to author Sarah Prager, who took to the pages of The New York Times recently to explain that she won’t be teaching her kids about it?
Well, because Hanukkah is about as out of step with the contemporary elite consensus as any religious tradition can be.
If you haven’t reviewed the story in a while, here’s how it goes. One fine day in 167 BC, a crowd of Jews was gathered in the town square of Modi’in, a suburb of Jerusalem.
They were there because the Seleucid Empire — the successors of Alexander the Great’s expansive dynasty — had recently moved into town. The conquerors believed that their Greek culture was the only path to enlightenment. The Seleucids had resolved to Hellenize this peculiarly stubborn people, the Jews, and they sought out the right kind of Jewish collaborator — you know, those who weren’t too bearded or too weird — to persuade the rest of the locals to abandon their backward mountain God and primitive laws.
And then, just as one of those Hellenizing Jews stepped up to sacrifice to almighty Zeus, out came a priest named Mattathias. Having precisely zero patience for idolatry, the fiery-eyed zealot killed not only the Jewish collaborator but the Seleucid governor, as well. Mattathias thus launched a war — partly an internal Jewish conflict, partly a rebellion against Greek imperial power — that would end with that well-publicized victory of the priest and his sons, the Maccabees, aided by one miraculous vat of oil.
The basic, universal rule for determining a new country’s borders is to look to the borders of the preceding political entity in the territory, be it a colony, administrative district or Soviet republic. In Israel’s case, it was Mandatory Palestine, which included all of the West Bank. Concerns that the Trump administration’s actions could be used to justify Russia’s takeover of Crimea are baseless. Crimea was indisputably part of Ukraine, a sovereign country.
The Polisario demands a country of its own. Yet only a few countries have recognized the purported Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic. Self-determination in international law doesn’t typically mean the right of a people to have its own country. It can be satisfied by some degree of self-governance, and autonomy in internal matters such as language and culture. This is why the U.S. recognition was coupled with an endorsement of an “autonomy plan” for Western Sahara.
The Palestinians today have vastly more autonomy than the Saharawi would have in the Moroccan plan, which makes Rabat the final arbiter of Saharawi law. Ramallah, by contrast, has the last word on its own legislation. The Palestinian Authority and Hamas, for better or worse, govern the daily lives of their people.
The Obama administration also supported Moroccan sovereignty with Saharwai autonomy, as did other countries such as Spain and France—and even the Palestinian Authority. Morocco’s position has bipartisan support in Congress, and thus the U.S. will likely maintain the recognition policy.
There is a huge gap between many countries’ stances on Western Sahara and the West Bank that can’t be explained by legal differences. It will be a bad look for a Biden administration to harp on Israeli “occupation” and “settlers” while maintaining recognition of Morocco’s 1975 takeover. The U.S. recognition makes eventually doing the same for Israel in the West Bank much easier, and indeed a matter of consistency.
Having supported more than a dozen U.N. General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel in the past two weeks, the representatives of some of the world’s most egregious rights-abusing regimes complained on Wednesday about “country-specific” resolutions targeting some among their own ranks – Iran, Russia, North Korea, and the Assad regime – saying they violate the cherished U.N. principles of “objectivity, non-selectivity, and impartiality.”
Among the most outspoken critics during Wednesday’s plenary session in New York were the delegates from China and Cuba, governments whose widely-documented human rights abuses at home have attracted not a single General Assembly resolution this year.
At the meeting, the assembly considered texts from its Third Committee – which deals with social, cultural, and humanitarian issues – including country-specific resolutions relating to the human rights situations in Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Russian-occupied Crimea peninsula of Ukraine.
All four passed, but with sizeable numbers of “no” votes, and large numbers of abstentions:
-- The Iran resolution passed by 82 votes to 30, with 64 abstentions
-- The Syria resolution passed by 101 votes to 13, with 62 abstentions
-- The Crimea resolution passed by 64 votes to 23, with 86 abstentions
-- The North Korea resolution passed without a recorded vote (although several countries – including China, Iran and Cuba – then disassociated themselves from the “consensus.”)
Patterns are everywhere: in nature, in art, in human behavior, in interpersonal relationships. They also exist in diplomacy.
And for students of diplomacy, or more specifically those who carefully watch the ebb and flow of US-Israel relations, there is one particular pattern that may appear somewhat disconcerting as US President-elect Joe Biden is poised to take office in just over three weeks.
Veteran US Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross identified this pattern in Doomed to Succeed, his 2015 book on the history of US-Israel relations from presidents Harry Truman to Barack Obama.
“When an administration is judged by its successors to be too close to Israel, we [the US] distance ourselves from the Jewish state,” he wrote.
And then Ross gave numerous examples.
“[Dwight D.] Eisenhower believed that Truman was too supportive of Israel, so he felt an imperative to demonstrate that we were not partial to Israel, that we were in fact willing to seek closer ties to our real friends in the region – the Arabs
“President [Richard] Nixon, likewise, felt that Lyndon Johnson was too pro-Israel. In his first two years, he, too, distanced us from Israel and showed sensitivity to Arab concerns. President George H.W. Bush believed his former boss, Ronald Reagan, suffered from the same impulse of being too close to Israel. He, too, saw virtue in fostering distance.”
And finally, Ross continued, “President Obama, at the outset of his administration, certainly saw George W. Bush as having cost us in the Arab and Muslim world at least in part because he was unwilling to allow any gap to emerge between the United States and Israel.”
it just seems that too many people are hurling accusations of "antisemitism" to their political enemies and thinking that this is how one fights antisemitism. In the end, it makes Jews feel less secure than they did before.
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Elder of Ziyon
