There have been a spate of articles in different sites over the past week about a new solar energy project in Gaza, based on a press release by the University of Birmingham.
The articles include this quote:
Project leader Dr Raya Al-Dadah, Reader in Sustainable Energy Technologies at the University of Birmingham, comments, “Just 38% of Gaza’s electricity needs currently are met. People receive less than six hours of power per day, leaving hospitals providing only critical functions such as intensive care units. Coupled with continuous conflict, the energy crisis causes high levels of stress that affect physical, mental health and well-being.”
Forbes originally kept that quote in its article as well - and then edited the highlighted part out when it was pointed out to them.
No one doubts that Gaza has a serious gap between its electricity needs and its supply. The bulk of Gaza's electricity still comes from Israeli power lines. NGOs will issue reports about how Israel is supposedly withholding electricity - B'Tselem wrote an article in October that implies that Gaza gets only four hours a day based on a small time period in the summer when Israel closed the Kerem Shalom crossing because of bomb attacks (and even then it received six hours according to OCHA, showing B'Tselem's eagerness to lie.)
But why would the head of the solar energy project lie so baldly about how much electricity Gaza gets?
It was easy enough to remind myself and them who was really free and who is a scared doublethinker. All I had to do was tell some joke about the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Thank God, there were plenty of yarns about his arrogance, his crudeness, his senility. One kidded about him forcing Soviet cosmonauts to outdo the American astronauts who landed on the moon by rocketing to the sun, then reassuring them they wouldn’t be incinerated because they’d be launched during the night. As I’d tell my interrogators a joke, I’d laugh. And, as normal Soviet doublethinkers themselves, they would want to laugh. But they couldn’t, especially if two of them were there together. Laughter would end their careers.
So they’d covered up that temporary glint in their eyes with a tantrum. They’d pound the table, shouting, “HOW DARE YOU?”
“Look,” I’d say to them calmly, “you can’t even smile when you want to smile. And you claim that I’m in prison and you’re free?”
I did this to irritate them, because they spent so much time trying to irritate me. But, mainly, I was reminding myself that I was free, as long as I could laugh or cry in accordance with my own feelings.
Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that—with apologies to Tolstoy—every dictatorship is oppressive in its own way, but the doublethinkers’ mental gymnastics are all alike. The feeling of release from the fear and giddy relief when crossing the line from doublethink to democratic dissent is also universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.
In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance. Recent polls suggest that nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally, essentially becoming a nation of doublethinkers despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights
To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need a Twitter Test challenging bottom-up cultural totalitarianism that is spreading throughout free societies. That test asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn’t depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole.
#OnThisDay 1986, 'Prisoner of Zion' @NatanSharansky became a free man upon his release from Soviet gulag, where he spent 9 years!
As a fellow ‘Refusenik’, Natan Sharansky is a tremendous source of inspiration & personal hero of mine, the very epitome of a modern proud Zionist. pic.twitter.com/q5IZkLXNHG
Luck was a defining factor in determining the fate of many in the Soviet Union, and it is the common vein that unites the subjects of this story. Yet the stories recounted here are not representative. Such stories can never be completely told because the Soviet system intentionally left much undocumented. Critical marks on examinations were often written in erasable pencil. Written exams were eschewed in favor of oral ones. Some who lived through the period do not feel they have anything to add; others may find the experience too painful to contemplate, much less talk about. Even among the small cohort described here, there is consensus on a few things but not on many others.
Kac quit his job in 1976 and applied for an exit visa to Israel. He received permission to leave quickly. He secured a position immediately at MIT where he remains today. Zelmanov eventually secured a role at Novosibirsk State and left in 1990. For his breakthrough work on a century-old problem, he was awarded a Fields Medal in 1994—the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize.
Eliashberg was less lucky. He became a refusenik after his visa request was denied in 1979. He had returned to Leningrad before applying, and was forced to support himself at various temporary jobs. This promising mathematician found himself working as a night watchman at a car garage in the city. One of his friends put his own career on the line in order to secure for Eliashberg a job in an accounting software company. He remained there until 1987, when he was finally able to leave the Soviet Union. He was not sure if he would be able to rehabilitate himself as a mathematician. But he succeeded. In the decades since, he has won many of the most prestigious awards in mathematics including the Veblen, Crafoord, and Wolf prizes. Today, he is on the mathematics faculty at Stanford.
For her part, Julia Rashba recalled a poignant moment in the elevator with the MGU examiner who had failed her on the entrance exam. In many ways, she felt unprepared for what had just happened to her. She had experienced anti-Semitism in her childhood with bullies and cruel taunts. Once, as a little girl, she ran away from a day camp where the bullying was too much. She was not aware that the sorts of anti-Semitism that lived in adult institutions would be less benign. She was raised, however, to believe that even in such a discriminatory system, where her own father had experienced nearly insurmountable travails to rise to the top of the Soviet physics establishment—that she needed only to work hard and act with integrity and things should work out.
They had not. The examination she “failed” was not even for medical school, it was for a chemistry program that offered some biomedical tracks. She had hoped that she could contribute to medicine as a scientific researcher, even if she would not be allowed to be a clinician. The system would not even allow this tenuous finger hold on her dream. She recalls that the examiner, perhaps seeking absolution for the shame of what he had just done, quietly apologized and asked for her forgiveness. She refused.
That exchange tells us a lot about the Quincy Institute. The think tank’s foreign policy agenda and arguments echo the anti-interventionism of the 1930s. Most of its scholars are more worried about the exaggeration of threats posed by America’s adversaries than the actual regimes doing the actual threatening. In May, for example, Rachel Esplin Odell, a Quincy fellow, complained that Senator Romney was overstating the threat of China’s military expansion and unfairly blaming the state for the outbreak of the coronavirus: “The great irony of China’s military modernization is that it was in large part a response to America’s own grand strategy of military domination after the Cold War.” In this, of course, it resembled most everything else.
The institute has hired staff that come out of the anti-neoconservative movement of the 2000s. Here we come to a delicate matter. The anti-neoconservatives of that era flirted with and at times embraced an IR sort of anti-Semitism: the obsession with Israel and its influence on American statecraft. Like the America Firsters, the anti-neoconservatives worry about the power of a special interest — the Jewish one — dragging the country into another war. A few examples will suffice. In 2018, Eli Clifton, the director of Quincy’s “democratizing foreign policy” program, wrote a post for the blog of Jim Lobe, the editor of the institute’s journal Responsible Statecraft, that three Jewish billionaires — Sheldon Adelson, Bernard Marcus, and Paul Singer — “paved the way” for Trump’s decision to withdraw from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal through their generous political donations. It is certainly fair to report on the influence of money in politics, but given Trump’s well-known contempt for the Iran deal, Clifton’s formulation had an odor of something darker.
Then there is Trita Parsi, the institute’s Swedish-Iranian vice president, who is best known as the founder of the National Iranian American Council, a group that purports to be a non-partisan advocacy group for Iranian-Americans but has largely focused on softening American policy towards Iran. In 2015, as the Obama administration was rushing to finish the nuclear deal with Iran, his organization took out an ad in the New York Times that asked, “Will Congress side with our president or a foreign leader?” a reference to an upcoming speech before Congress by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The National Iranian American Council’s foray into the dual loyalty canard is ironic considering that Parsi himself has been a go-between for journalists and members of Congress who seek access to Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister.
This obsession with Israeli influence in American foreign policy is a long-standing concern for a segment of foreign policy realists, who believe that states get into trouble when the national interest is distorted by domestic politics — an affliction that is particularly acute in democratic societies which respect the rights of citizens to make their arguments to the public and to petition the government and to form lobbies. The most controversial of the realists’ scapegoating of the domestic determinants of foreign policy was an essay by Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer (both Quincy fellows) that appeared in the London Review of Books in 2005. It argued that American foreign policy in the Middle East has been essentially captured by groups that seek to advance Israel’s national interest at the expense of America’s. “The thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby,’” they wrote. “Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country — in this case, Israel — are essentially identical.”
Walt and Mearsheimer backed away from the most toxic elements of their essay in a subsequent book. The essay sought to explain the Iraq War as an outgrowth of the Israel lobby’s distortion of American foreign policy. The book made a more modest claim about the role it plays in increasing the annual military subsidy to Israel and stoking American bellicosity to Israel’s rivals like Iran. They also took pains to denounce anti-Semitism and acknowledge how Jewish Americans are particularly sensitive to arguments that present their organized political activity as undermining the national interest. Good for them. But the really important point is that events have discredited their claims. The all-powerful “Israel Lobby” was unable to wield its political influence to win the fight against Obama’s Iran deal. It was not able to stop Obama’s public pressuring of Israel to accept a settlement freeze. Decades earlier, it had not been able to thwart Reagan’s sale of AWACs to the Saudis. Anyone who believes in an omnipotent AIPAC is looking for conspiracies.
Impeachment, Matt Duss, what’s going on at the New York Times, the UN Human Rights Council, the ICC & Jerusalem. Our guest: ?@elianayjohnson?. Our best episode yet? You decide. Subscribe to ?@JIPodcast?. https://t.co/5JJ3Gln09D
Kissufim, Southern Israel, February 11 - A resident of this pastoral community near the Islamist-controlled Gaza Strip boasted today that she maintains a stockpile of fresh cakes and pastries just to be prepared for the eventuality of being able to feed terrorists who clambered through underground passages from the neighboring coastal territory to weak mayhem.
Sophia Barnea, 60, told reporters yesterday that she takes pride in her ability to get all of her freelance and homemaking work done and still have time to bake almost every day, in case a terrorist shows up to slaughter civilians and wants a muffin and maybe a cup of tea.
"It's something I make a point of doing," she asserted, gesturing to a platter of still-warm chocolate chip cookies. "If no boys from Hamas or Islamic Jihad stop by that day, I'll eat a few, but I am watching my weight, so the rest go to the nice fellows at the guard booth and the soldiers patrolling between here and the border.
Mrs. Barnea explained that since Nimrod, her husband of 30 years, died three years ago, she has taken to finding other outlets for her nurturing instinct. "I'm allergic to cats, unfortunately," she lamented. "My friend Meira, a few doors down, she has seven or eight cats, but while I see the appeal, I just can't handle the sneezing and the teary eyes it would cause me. So I've chosen to show affection to those who might not get that kind of attention around here. I do hope they like my apple pie."
Her routine calls for a different kind of baked goodie each day. "I have a variety of things I like to make," she explained. "I cycle through them about once every ten or eleven days, but I mix it up a little, not always doing the same thing. Sometimes I switch out apples in the pie in favor of pears, or I'll make oatmeal raisin cookies on a lark if I'm running low on chocolate chips. And now and then I'll whip up a streusel-topped marble coffee cake. You never know when the bloodthirsty gang might show up!"
"If Ahmad or Mustafa or whoever prefers some chocolate chip muffins to whatever I have on hand," Mrs. Barnea continued, "I can ask them to put the massacre on hold until I whip up a batch of chocolate chip muffins real quick. Seriously, it takes more time for the oven to preheat for those than the combined preparation and baking time. And they are just heavenly right out of the oven. I hope the boys appreciate what I do for them. A simple 'thank you' will be enough when the time comes. Such nice terrorist boys."
Arabic media today are quoting an interview with Dr. Ahmed Fouad Anwar, an assistant professor at Alexandria University specializing in modern Hebrew literature, Israeli society and the history of Zionism.
Speaking about the story of the Kuwaiti singer who says she converted to Judaism, Anwar correctly says that conversion is a difficult and time consuming task.
Then he says something weird.
"[Jews] do not accept a person’s conversion to their religion except through very complicated and difficult procedures.
And Dr. Ahmad Anwar continued, saying: “The entry of the Kuwaiti actress Basma into Judaism will be rejected by the Jews themselves, because the Jews require that whoever enters Judaism be breastfed from the breast of a Jewish woman, 10 satisfying feeds.”
I admit, usually I can figure out what grain of truth these sorts of Arab rumors come from, but this one mystifies me.
What I can say is that some ten years ago, a Saudi cleric issued a fatwa that an unrelated man and woman can be secluded in a room together if he breastfeeds from her, (perhaps five times) making him a relative. Other clerics strongly disagreed and the idea was widely lampooned in the Saudi and Arab worlds.
That's the closest thing I can find.
One thing's for sure: if it was true, we'd have a lot more Jews.
The Iranian nuclear scientist who was shot dead near Tehran in November was killed by a one-ton automated gun that was smuggled into the country piece-by-piece by the Mossad, the JC can reveal.
The 20-plus spy team, which comprised both Israeli and Iranian nationals, carried out the high-tech hit after eight months of painstaking surveillance, intelligence sources disclosed.
The Tehran regime has secretly assessed that it will take six years before a replacement for top scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is fully operational.
Meanwhile, Israeli analysts have concluded that his death has extended the period of time it would take Iran to achieve a bomb from about three-and-a-half months to two years — with senior intelligence figures privately putting it as high as five years.
The disclosures come as the JC gives the fullest account yet of the assassination that made headlines around the world and significantly degraded Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has long had its sights on what it no doubt considers an unholy trinity: Israel, the US and Britain.... First, these are the three Western democracies most active in using legitimate military force to defend their interests. This is anathema to the left-liberal doctrine of ICC officials and their soul-mates in such morally dissipated places as the UN Human Rights Council. Second, they wish to virtue signal, deflecting criticism that the court is biased against African states....
Yet by its charter, dealing with countries that lack the will or capability to bring their own to justice is the sole purpose of the ICC. This does apply to some states in Africa and elsewhere but demonstrably does not apply to Israel, the US or Britain, each of which have long-established and globally respected legal systems.
The ICC's design against Israel is the latest in a long history of endeavours to subjugate and scourge unwilling Jewish people deemed incapable of regulating themselves. When you examine the unexampled contortions the court has gone through just to get to this point, you have no choice but to question whether antisemitism is the motive.
The effects of the ICC's decision will be profound. This is only the end of the beginning. Unless halted, investigations into spurious allegations of war crimes will go on for years, perhaps decades, creating a global bonanza for all who hate Israel, including at the UN, the European Union, various governments and in universities and so-called human rights groups.
But the most detrimental effect of the ICC's decision will be felt by Palestinian Arab people who, for decades, have been abused as political pawns by their leaders and who would be the greatest beneficiaries of any peace agreement with Israel. The ICC's ruling makes such a deal even more remote today.
In an unprecedented move early last year Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Australia, Canada, Uganda and Brazil petitioned the ICC, of which all are members, arguing that a formal investigation could not be launched as the Palestinian Authority does not meet the definition of a state under the Rome Statute that established and governs the court.
I had a very good conversation with my friend Australian FM @MarisePayne. I thanked her for Australia's clear & decisive stance that the decision of the ICC is fundamentally wrong. I congratulated her on Australia's success against Corona & updated her on our vaccination program. pic.twitter.com/PLztZkDKjG
Morocco's popular Hespress news details Israel's record in recycling water and how important that is to Morocco and the Arab world.
The drinking water crisis has begun to present itself gradually in the Kingdom as a result of the climatic impacts on water resources in recent decades, especially in the southern and eastern regions, and this dilemma is exacerbated in the summer period with less rainfall.
The crisis has appeared in the Draa-Tafilalet region, especially in the city of Zagora, which witnessed what were called “thirst protests,” prompting the state to launch projects for water treatment plants. However, the projects are too little and too late compared to the presented environmental challenges.
In light of the resumption of diplomatic relations between Tel Aviv and Rabat, Moroccan officials can benefit from the Israeli experience in the field of water recycling, after it succeeded in overcoming drought, which made it a pioneer in the level of recycling and using wastewater in agriculture.
A news article published in the Israel Valley newspaper, which specializes in trade relations between France and Israel, indicated that Tel Aviv recycles more than 80 percent of the wastewater that is used to irrigate nearly 20,000 hectares, which represents 16 percent of Israel's water needs.
Israel, along with Kuwait and Singapore, is among the most advanced countries in the field of wastewater recycling.
The international scientific journal “Water” published a recent study alerting the great water shortages afflicting the Moroccan southeast, stressing the fragility of the water balance in the region, in addition to the challenges related to the quality of groundwater used for drinking and agricultural irrigation.
In this context, Abdel-Rahim Kassiri, the national coordinator of the Moroccan Coalition for Climate and Sustainable Development, said, "Israel is a world power in the development of water resources, as it invented water distillation and succeeded in greening dry desert spaces."
Al-Kusiri added, in a statement to Hespress: "The return of political relations would transfer Israeli technologies to Morocco, and from there to Africa."
Film director Ken Loach has long ago proven that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two sides of the same coin.
His first controversy with Jews came when he directed a play called Perdition that alleged Zionist collaboration with Nazis. it included lines like “To save your hides, you practically led them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz,” “Israel was founded on the pillars of Western guilt and American dollars” and “Israel was coined in the blood of Hungarian Jewry." Historians decried the play as wholly false and antisemitic.
This is of course patently offensive and false, but when Jews complained and the play was canceled, Loach whined about the "Zionist lobby" and its "extraordinary arrogance," adding that "they" want to suppress any discussion about clear lies.
Then he denied there was anything antisemitic about it.
Later, in 2009, Loach blamed antisemitism on Israel: “Nothing has been a greater instigator of antisemitism than the self-proclaimed Jewish state itself... Until we deal with that, until that is acknowledged, then racism, I’m afraid, will be with us.”
Is there any other bigotry on the planet that is blamed on its victims and excuses its perpetrators?
More recently, an actor was booted from his trade union after he denied the Holocaust. Loach came to his defense, giving him advice on making a film defending his bigotry.
Loach has also energetically defended Jeremy Corbyn and Ken Livingstone's tolerance of antisemitism.
When asked in 2019 whether it was unacceptable to debate whether the Holocaust happened or not, he said: "History is there for us all to discuss."
So it is not surprising that Jewish students at St. Peter's College protested at an invitation for Ken Loach to speak to the Master of the college, "Ken Loach in conversation with Professor Judith Buchanan".
When they met with Buchanan, she gave multiple excuses to ignore their concerns. Here is what they wrote to Rachel Riley:
During this meeting, she diminished [Jewish students'] concerns by claiming that "some Jews don't think it's offensive", said that she didn't know about his antisemitism because she hadn't read his Wikipedia page, refused to cancel the event because it would be bad for PR ("I don't want to create additional publicity [...] it would be huge to cancel an invitation at this point"), and put the burden on Jewish students to find a workable solution ("There isn't a way through this that you will be fully happy with - I'm not going to cancel it").
• This meeting left Jewish students at the college feeling hurt, ignored, and deeply uncomfortable with the ignorance about antisemitism and willingness to tolerate it displayed by the most senior individual in their college's administration, who represents the college to the outside world. Jewish students across the University of Oxford feel similarly frustrated with the lack of regard shown to the welfare of Jewish students, and the manner in which PR was prioritised over their concerns.
Ken Loach, an alumnus of St Peter's College, has been invited by the College and The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities to speak about two of his films. These films form part of a distinguished filmmaking career. This is the latest in a run of occasions on which Ken Loach has been invited to speak in College, all of which have previously been very well received by students. The event will be respected as advertised and we look forward to a good conversation about the films on this occasion.
Significant concerns about the event have been brought clearly to the College's attention and we are committed to creating further opportunities for these concerns to be properly respected and discussed within College. St Peter's stands vigorously against all forms of discrimination and always seeks to support students who are discriminated against.
In the context of the current conversation, College affirms without reservation its very strong opposition to anti-semitism. It recognises the appalling atrocities that anti-semitism has wrought and can bring. While not believing that no-platforming is the way to pursue goals of a free and open academic community, it is committed to supporting students who find such decisions painful and to finding ways to address these questions within College as part of a broader, ongoing conversation.
As we have seen so many times before, people and institutions will loudly proclaim how much they are against antisemitism - but there are always other principles that are more important than that.
Since then, the controversy has blown up more.
So now, after days of negative publicity, and after the event already happened, Buchanan issued an apology saying she shouldn't have done it to begin with!
"I have no wish to defend myself against having caused hurt or made mistakes. I clearly have and I am sorry for this. I say this, and mean it.
"And I realise that it is our Jewish students who have been most hurt by what has unfolded, and by my part in that hurt, and so to them I apologise specifically."
She explained that she was unaware of the “intense controversy” surrounding Loach at the time the invitation was issued to him.
The Monday statement from the college shows that she was very aware about the controversy ("Significant concerns about the event have been brought clearly to the College's attention") and the Jewish students met with her before that statement, so she definitely could have canceled - and chose not to.
It is clear that Buchanan and St. Peters wasn't concerned over Loach's antisemitism before the event, and this apology is a reaction to the negative publicity and not a moral stance.
The Abraham Accords are inflaming the Arab BDSers.
Yesterday, I reported about Kuwaiti singer Basma al-Kuwaiti who announced that she was embracing Judaism and rejecting the Kuwaiti ruling family. Now, prominent Kuwaiti Sheikh Ahmed Al-Qattan called for the application of the penalty of apostasy for her - which means death.
This week also brought the news of Moroccan singer Sanaa Mohamed, who sang a duet with Israeli singer Elkana Marziano:
Even worse, there are reports that she has been arrested or detained by Kuwaiti authorities under some sort of anti-normalization law.
In November, Egyptian singer Mohamed Ramadan was threatened and sued in Egyptian courts for posing for a photo with an Israeli footballer.
In December, Tunisian musician Noamane Chaari was also subject to death threats and reportedly fired from his job after collaborating on a song with Israeli artist Ziv Yehezkel.
The title of the song was "Peace Between Neighbors."
If you think that these death threats are part of Arab culture and enlightened Westerners wouldn't do that, think again. People who support the BDS movement act exactly the same way.
There is no world government based on international law, and there should not be one. That seems like something that should be understood and agreed to by everyone, but apparently it is not.
Today, Israelis, from the Prime Minister to almost any IDF soldier, are in legal jeopardy as a result of the overreach of arrogant international institutions and an overly-expansive idea of international law.
In its simplest form, international law is based on the (supposedly) universal acceptance of the principle that a nation should honor its agreements with other nations. If, for example, Iran signs the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and then develops nuclear weapons, it is in violation of international law. When a country joins the UN, it agrees to be bound by the UN Charter (which, for example, forbids the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”), and by certain kinds of Security Council resolutions. In these contexts, international law depends on consent: a nation is not bound to follow any laws that it hasn’t agreed to.
There is also something called “customary international law.” That refers to principles that are not covered by treaties, but are unwritten rules based on the customary behavior of states and a subjective opinion of obligation. One area in which it is applicable is where non-state actors are concerned, who are not members of the UN and have not signed any treaties. So Hamas’ use of human shields can be considered a violation of customary international law even though Hamas is not a member of the UN and has not signed any of the protocols of the Geneva Conventions. Here there is no consent. But even when customary international law is applied to states the question of consent can become murky, since there are no agreed-to treaties to refer to.
The difference between the laws of states and international law is most pronounced when you consider interpretation and enforcement. States establish domestic courts that interpret their laws and determine when someone is in violation of them. They have jurisdiction over all the residents of a country and their decisions are binding. A state can use force to enforce them. For international law, jurisdiction is limited by the principle of consent and enforcement is more complicated.
There are international courts. The UN has established an International Court of Justice (ICJ), which can adjudicate disputes between nations in the framework of international law. In order for the ICJ to do so, either the nations involved must explicitly consent, or they must have signed treaties that include clauses that require such adjudication of disputes. The ICJ can also give advisory opinions to various UN agencies when asked to do so. Such opinions are not binding on the nations involved. For example, in 2004, the ICJ produced a highly politicized advisory opinion for the UN General Assembly, holding that Israel’s security barrier violated international law and construction of it should stop. Israel cooperated with the court by providing testimony, but was not required to do so or to accept its judgment.
There is also an International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC is not a part of the UN; it was established in 2002 by a multilateral treaty called the Rome Statute and is financed by contributions from its member states. The ICC can try individuals (not states) who are accused of serious crimes like genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes. The ICCs jurisdiction is limited to crimes committed within the territorial area of states that have adopted the Rome Statute or declared their acceptance of its jurisdiction; or crimes committed by nationals of those states; or in special cases referred by the UN Security Council. 123 states have signed on to it and 42 (including the US and Israel) have not.
Note that the criterion for jurisdiction seriously undermines the principle of consent. The court can prosecute a citizen of a particular country whether or not that country is a member of the Rome Statute, as long as the offense was committed in a country that is a member.
The ICC can prosecute someone only if it decides that “national justice systems do not carry out proceedings or when they claim to do so but in reality are unwilling or unable to carry out such proceedings genuinely.” It can prosecute anyone, even if they are a head of state or a soldier who is required to follow orders. So far it has indicted 44 people, mostly for crimes committed in several African conflicts.
The ICC can issue arrest warrants which may be executed by member states, or any state that cooperates with it. Arrested persons can be tried at the Court’s headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands. If convicted, they can be sentenced to prison terms up to and including life imprisonment, which can be served in cooperating countries.
As you probably know, the ICC’s head prosecutor has announced that the Court would initiate a criminal investigation against Israelis and (presumably) Hamas members for war crimes committed during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge and the defense of the Gaza border, as well as Israel’s settlement policy. The prosecutor claims that the Court has jurisdiction over Gaza and Judea/Samaria, even though “Palestine” is not a sovereign state and Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute.
A pre-trial panel of judges decided that “The State of Palestine” had joined the Rome Statute in 2015, and that therefore – although the Court didn’t wish to decide the question of whether “Palestine” is a state – the very fact that it had joined the statute implies that it can be treated as a “state party” to the Statute. Once a “state party,” it would be unfair to deny it any of the rights and privileges accruing to one! (See pars. 89-113 of the decision linked above). Sometimes an argument is so bad, it’s hard to even restate it.
But since “Palestine” isn’t actually a state with borders, how do we know that the “crimes” were committed within its borders? Easy, say the ICC judges: UN General Assembly Resolution 67/19, which admitted “Palestine” to the UN as a “Non-member Observer State” in 2012 says that “Palestine” includes the Gaza Strip and the “West Bank.” QED.
Regarding the UNGA, I don’t think I have to add anything to Abba Eban’s well-known comment, “If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”
The Kafkaesque ICC decision, 60 pages of mumbo-jumbo intended to obscure the intention to pillory Israel and punish Israelis, proves that the ICC is “nothing but a pack of cards,” in the words of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.
And this illustrates how, at least in the realm of nations, politics trumps law. It illustrates why the expansion of international law beyond the principle of consent is dangerous. And – as if any more such illustrations are needed – it shows how important international institutions are viciously biased against one particular country, which just happens to be the one Jewish state.
In Mr. Ben Hamozeg’s office near Tel Aviv, the chief executive opened the sensor app on his cellphone and showed me an orchard in a Gulf country that doesn’t have open ties with Israel. He zoomed in with a finger and a thumb: A farmer there has a weevil infestation in four trees in the northwest corner of his orchard. It was even more striking to see, in a nearby Arab power that also has no official relations with Israel, 100 sensors showing a nine-tree infestation just a few miles from one of Islam’s holiest sites.
Last year, a few hundred Agrint sensors sold by a third party were drilled into trees in the North African kingdom of Morocco, and a few thousand more are going in now.
Morocco’s normalization announcement is of special significance to Israeli Jews, about a sixth of whom are of Moroccan descent — including Mr. Ben Hamozeg. His parents are from the city of Fez and lived there until the Jewish population of the Arab world left or was driven out after the creation of Israel. In recent years, Morocco has allowed Israelis to visit with special permission, and when Mr. Ben Hamozeg arrived and had to request a visa, he told me, he joked with the clerk that he shouldn’t need one. He should be a citizen. The clerk, it turned out, was also from Fez, and he waved Mr. Ben Hamozeg through.
In that personal anecdote is a story of reconnection, one that’s missed if these new accords are analyzed solely through the lens of American policy and the Iranian threat. Jews have always been around this region, farming and trading like everyone else, and it’s not the past few months of renewed contact that are the anomaly, but the past seven decades of isolation.
David Ibn Maimon, brother of Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher who lived in Cairo, was on a business trip not far from Dubai when he was lost at sea in the 12th century. Some of the sixth-century Jews around Arabia in the time of Muhammad were date farmers. The capital city of another date-palm power, Iraq, was about one-third Jewish into the 1940s. Most of those people’s descendants are now Israelis.
The sensor is a feature of the present moment, as are the normalization agreements, but much about this story seems Ottoman: A Jew from the Levant with roots in North Africa is doing date business with Arabs on the Persian Gulf. They agree about some things and disagree about others. They have a complicated past.
The United Arab Emirates’ mission to Mars is a major achievement for the Gulf country and comes seven months after the country launched its first interplanetary mission.
The Hope spacecraft made its way to Mars amid important developments in the region. The Abraham Accords were announced and signed, and more than 100,000 Israelis traveled to Dubai. The UAE and Israel have become leaders in vaccinating their publics. Both countries also face challenges ahead, but in general they represent leading technology sectors in the region.
Back in July the Hope spacecraft took off at dawn from Japan and made its way to Mars. It was reported at the time that the concept dated back to 2014 and was intended to inspire a new generation while celebrating the country’s 50th anniversary. This was a big deal for the UAE, the Gulf and the region. Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the US, praised the effort last year. He harkened back to the years of hard work and dedication it took.
Israel’s SpaceIL successfully launched the Beresheet spacecraft in February 2019 but failed when it landed on the moon in August 2019. Israel will try again. Israel is a leader in putting satellites into space, and the UAE is now the fifth country to reach Mars. Both countries are now major space powers. China and America’s NASA also have spacecraft on the way to Mars this year.
Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the giant skyscraper, lit up in celebration when it was announced the mission was successful on Tuesday evening. The team members behind the mission have an average age of 27, and the team is 35% women, CNN reported.
Meanwhile, in Israel the satellite program also showcases Israel’s abilities. The Ofek launch in 1988 made Israel the eighth country in the world with a launch capability. Ofek-16 was launched in July 2020 from Palmahim.
Veteran NBA player Amare Stoudemire talked to students of Yeshiva University in New York about his career, his life as an observant Jew, and maintaining a close connection to God.
Stoudemire, who is the assistant player development coach for the Brooklyn Nets, participated in a virtual Q&A event on Feb. 3 in which he began by discussing the start of his basketball career, and his experiences playing for both the NBA and the Israel Premier League.
The 38-year-old played for Hapoel Jerusalem (which he now co-owns) in 2016 and 2017, then returned for the 2018-19 season. He played for Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2020 and led both teams to victory in the Israeli basketball championships.
Stoudemire was “looking forward” to moving back to Israel and playing again for Maccabi Tel Aviv after one season with the team, but when Steve Nash took over as head coach for the Nets in December 2020, “I figured this might be a nice opportunity to get back involved with the NBA,” he told YU students.
The dual American-Israeli citizen recently made headlines for announcing that he will not work on Shabbat.
Talking about his path to Judaism, Stoudemire said his interest in the Jewish religion began when he was a young teen and his mother said their family should “keep the laws of Moses.” He completed his conversion to Judaism a year ago in Israel, where he studied in a yeshiva in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, and on the advice of his “rebbe” he took on the Hebrew name “Yehoshafat.” He also said that moving permanently to Israel is a possibility in the future.
“American Jews voted for this,” is something I’ve taken to
writing as a preface to every article I share on social media detailing the
ways in which the Biden administration is bad for America, for Israel, and for
the free world at large. I do this, in part, because I am angry. Angry at this
betrayal of brother for brother, prioritizing hatred of the Orange Man over the
welfare of the Jewish State. Angry at this very large subset of Jews who care more
about criminals who enter their country illegally than they care about the Jews
of far-off Israel. Most of all, I am angry at American Jews for being blind to
the threat of Iran that looms over us all, choosing fluffy social
justice issues over this major existential threat.
I am angry and I want them to know it. So I tell them, at every chance I get, “American Jews voted for this.”
I’ve pointed my finger and said “American Jews voted for
this,” when the Biden administration announced its intention to restore aid to UNRWA, whose schools are hotbeds of incitement that teach Arab children to hate
and kill Israeli Jews. UNRWA schools have even been used to house the missile
launchers that fire rockets at the one million Jewish civilians of Southern
Israel, which includes my children and grandchildren. UNRWA is thoroughly disreputable with serious
allegations of corruption at the highest level. But that didn’t stop Biden from
appointing former UNRWA official and “Palestinian-American” Maher
al-Bitar to be director of the NSC intelligence service.
American Jews
voted for this.
“American Jews voted for this,” I said when Biden
predictably appointed Robert Malley as US envoy for Iranian affairs. Malley wants to end the sanctions and return to the JCPOA. This wrongheaded policy of appeasement—of making funds available to the cash-strapped mullahs—only hastens Iranian nuclear breakout time. The appointment
of Malley undoes everything the Trump administration did to contain Iran. Yet American Jews voted for Biden even while he promised to reinstate
this self-destructive policy—a policy that empowers an enemy sworn to the goal
of first obliterating Israel and then the United States.
When the Biden
administration rejoined the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), something he
had promised to do during his campaign, I said it again: American Jews voted
for this. The UNHRC is a body made up of representatives from some of the worst
human rights-abusing countries, for instance Pakistan, Cuba, Saudi Arabia,
China, Indonesia, Venezuela, and Russia. The main purpose of this body of evil
is to censure Israel for imaginary infractions, which was the reason President
Trump pulled the US out of the council: the UNHRC is clearly antisemitic in its
singular focus on and hostility toward the Jewish State.
Last year in fact, the UNHRC published a blacklist of
companies it said raised “particular human rights concerns” due only to the location of these businesses in Judea and Samaria, indigenous Jewish territory for thousands of
years. A vote for Biden was, in reality, a vote for a return to the UNHRC, an antisemitic
body purporting to care about human rights as it looks daily for new ways to punish
Israel. American Jews looked the other way, if they looked at all. American
Jews voted for this.
The Matter of the Houthis
Then there’s the matter of the Houthis. While the Trump
administration imposed sanctions on the Houthis, the Biden administration
has already moved to suspend some of these sanctions. That’s because Iran is sending lots of sophisticated weaponry to this Yemen-based militia group and training Houthi militants in their use. And Biden, you see, is loath to upset Iran.
The Trump administration designated the Houthis a
terrorist organization. Biden, on the other hand, is reviewing this
designation. Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, said he has “deep
concern about the designation” of the Houthis as a terrorist organization. The
Biden administration's “review” is part and parcel of a return to the bad old
days of the Obama administration and the JCPOA
appeasement policy in which America pretends it can mollify the mullahs by
funding their nuclear ambitions. American Jews voted for
this and it literally makes no sense. It’s suicide.
The Biden administration is, in fact, an extension of the Obama administration’s “abnormal
Middle East strategy,” in which enemies are strengthened, and friends are punished. In voting for Biden, American Jews voted for strengthening Iran and
punishing Israel. Because that is how much they hate Donald Trump. For hatred
of this one man, they threw the Jews of Israel under the bus. They empowered an
Iran that promises to wipe out both Israel and America.
To Iran, Israel is only the "Little Satan." The USA is the "Great Satan."
When rumors emerged that Bernie Sander’s top aide, Matt
Duss, was to be hired by the State Department, I said it again: “American
Jews voted for this.”
“Duss,” said the Free
Beacon, “will join a growing roster of Biden administration hires who have
displayed a deep animus toward Israel, promoted boycotts of the Jewish state,
and advocated for a Palestinian ‘right of return’ that would destroy the
country’s Jewish composition.”
No less than the Simon Wiesenthal Center described Duss as"infected
with Jew-hatred.” But American Jews voted for Biden, knowing that Joe would
need to placate the influential, far left, Israel-hating wing of the Democratic
Party. What better way to do this than to hire far left, Israel-hating hacks to
serve in the Biden administration? American Jews voted for this, as well.
Iran's New Rocket: The Zuljanah
When Iran
tested a new rocket on February 1, a rocket capable of hitting Britain, I
gritted my teeth and thought (and said), “American Jews voted for this.” The rocket
launch was an Iranian threat timed to coincide with Biden’s assumption to power.
The intent was clear: Iran is telling Biden to lift the sanctions and reinstate
the JCPOA. In effect, the mullahs are saying, “Give us money or we will blow
some country—Britain or perhaps Israel—to smithereens.”
Iran's newest rocket, the Zuljanah
And of course, Iran knows that Biden is rehiring all the
Obama appointees so intimately involved in appeasing Iran the last time around.
Iran knows that Biden coming to power is the same as Obama assuming power. The
mullahs have already played this game. They know the rules, and how to win—how
to get more money to make more weapons. American Jews voted for this, as well.
During the election campaign, Biden promised he would open
the PLO mission in Washington. Already, the PA is in talks with the State
Department on how to make that happen without the PA having to pay the $650 million
it owes after being found guilty in 2015 by a New York jury, for no less than
seven terror attacks. A survivor of one of these attacks, Alan
Joseph Bauer, described his personal connection to the lawsuit, “In March
of 2002, a Palestinian policeman, Muhammed Hasheikah, detonated himself on King
George Street in downtown Jerusalem. I had two screws pass through my
left arm, and our son, then aged 7, had the head of a Philips screw pass fully
through his right brain.”
Biden intends to empower the terrorists responsible for this and countless other abhorrent antisemitic attacks, by reopening the PLO mission. He is,
moreover, trying to find a way to do so without making the PLO pay the monies
it owes to its victims. American Jews voted for this.
"Amcha"
When I met first Dr. Elana Heideman, of the Israel Forever Foundation, she talked to me about the possibility of writing a story for her website. She mentioned that she didn't care whether I was religious, or what my politics might be, all she cared about was whether I had something positive to say about Israel. It was such a simple concept, so sweet and clean.
She explained that the one thing we all shared was a love of Israel. And she told me that once upon a time, Jews in the Old Country had a way of identifying each other. They'd come up to a person and whisper, "Amcha."*
Amcha. A hidden way of asking: "I'm Jewish. Are you? Is it safe to speak?"
By asking, you were declaring your Judaism. And that was a bit of a risk. But it was a good feeling to find others like you in a world that hated your people. You felt warm and safe in the knowledge of that.
What happened to that simple way of showing up for each other, of caring for each other in a world that hates and wants to kill Jews, just because they are Jewish? When did we stop being a part of each others' lives, each others' worlds?
This is what angers me most of all about the American Jewish vote. This lack of connection, the lack of being there for their own kind in a time of crisis. It makes me think that maybe they aren't really Jewish after all, for all their talk about "tikkun olam."
Did Hatred Overrule Their Common Sense?
There is much more to say on this subject than can be contained in a single
article. But there is enough here to ask the obvious questions: Did American
Jews know the full import of what they were voting for, when they voted for Joe Biden? Did they care? Or did their
hatred for the Orange Man and his difficult personality overrule their common sense?
Where did that feeling of connection to their people go? What happened to the concept that we are your people, and you are ours? What happened to common cause?
Did American Jews know, when they voted for Biden, that they
were prioritizing animus for a single person over being actually complicit in the institutionalized hatred of an entire people: their own, "amcha?" Were they the victims of a media colluding with the left to hide the truth of what all of what a Biden administration would mean to Israel and the Jewish people? I don't see it,
because ultimately I believe that every voter is responsible for learning all the facts--for digging
deep and discerning the truth. Especially when it affects your people, "amcha."
And so, in order to make things entirely clear to them, I will
say it often, and I will say it aloud, “American Jews voted for this. You threw us under the bus, and with us, yourselves."
I couldn’t make them see it then, and I couldn’t make them
see it back when they voted for Obama, twice. I couldn’t make them see the
wrongness of their vote, how it hurts us, how it hurts them and divorces them from their own people, their nation, and
the world.
But maybe I can make them see it now, after the fact. Which is why I will keep saying this mantra and writing these words. “American Jews voted
for this."
And I promise you, I will not stop.
*Lit. "Your Nation" as in: "I'm part of your nation, I'm Jewish."
Israelis and Palestinians want to separate from one another, but the major political solutions to the conflict do not appeal to them, according to an in-depth study by the RAND Corporation released to The Jerusalem Post.
The research found that, overall, “mistrust, broadly defined, is likely the greatest impediment to peace.”
RAND, a leading global policy think tank, conducted the peer-reviewed research via 33 focus groups from 2018 to 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting detailed views of over 270 individuals. This widely used research approach combines quantitative data and qualitative insights, and is meant to complement the many random-sample polls taken on these topics.
Seeking “to assess whether there were any viable alternatives to the current status quo” between Israel and the Palestinians, the researchers found that Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, West Bank Palestinians and Gazan Palestinians were more likely to be uncertain about any of the five alternative solutions to the conflict offered – two-state solution, confederation, one-state solution, Israeli annexation of area C, or the status quo – than they were to support them.
The questions allowed for uncertainty and support at the same time, yet the only option a majority of Israeli Jews found to be acceptable was the status quo, and none were supported by a majority of any of the other populations.
“There is widespread skepticism that any alternative would be feasible,” the report states. “There was widespread distrust among Israelis and Palestinians of their own leadership, the leadership of the other side, and the people from the other side. As a consequence, there was great skepticism that a deal could be reached and that either side would abide by the terms of the deal.
“In addition, the majority of Israelis and Palestinians in our focus groups indicated that none of the alternatives would end the conflict,” the researchers wrote.
Dear Liberal American Jews,
Congratulations. Many of us democracy-loving Israelis cheered America’s political resilience as power transferred peacefully on January 20, defying Donald Trump’s rantings. And many of us join you in wishing President Joe Biden good luck. But we’re nervous too. We’re not sure Biden has Israel’s back regarding our greatest enemy: Iran. Heck – we’re not sure if you have our back regarding Iran either.
It’s confusing. Much of Biden’s foreign policy team boasts about having crafted the shameful, dangerous Iran deal Biden vows to restore. Yet he said “no” to lifting sanctions to woo Iran to negotiate. Biden’s persuadable. So why are you, our key allies, American Jews AWOL? Why are you still fighting the now-blessedly-less-relevant Trump wars, dodging this nuclear-powered battle between democracy and dictatorship, which could determine the future of the Jewish state, the Jewish people, the West itself?
Clearly, Iran isn’t on your mattering map. You refuse to acknowledge how dangerous the Iranian regime is – to America not just Israel; how urgent the issue is; and how harmful – not just useless – Barack Obama’s 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran was.
I know I am being too Israeli; inconvenient and impolite. Trump’s polarizing presidency has made everything Obama did above criticism and any position Trump took beneath contempt. But in recovering from Trump’s assault on democracy, America needs nuanced thinking, not partisan cheerleading. Restoring a commitment to truth in all its messiness requires some self-criticism and intense debate among the “good guys” too. The Republicans have proven what constant toadying to a president does to your party, your country, your soul. Why be Biden’s lapdogs – especially when he may appreciate lobbyists demanding a hard line with the mullahs?
So ask yourself two questions: 1) Israelis are crazily polarized too – isn’t Israel’s left-to-right military and political consensus rejecting the Iran agreement striking? 2) Isn’t it even more striking that so many Middle Eastern enemies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE so feared Obama’s softness toward Iran that they buried decades-old hatchets and started cooperating?
From the start, the "pro-Palestinian" movement has not been pro-Palestinian at all. It has been anti-Israel. And its supporters, no matter how educated or articulate, are so consumed with hate for the Jewish state that they literally cannot tell the difference between the two concepts.
Noura Erakat, the "human rights attorney" and assistant professor at Rutgers University, wrote an op-ed for NBC News that crystallizes this basic fact - and thereby reveals a major reason why the Palestinians have remained stuck in limbo for so long.
Notwithstanding several early steps that distinguish him from his predecessor, President Joe Biden promises to continue [Trump’s] legacy. It’s true that the new administration intends to reinstate critical U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees and will reopen the PLO mission office in Washington, D.C. Just Monday, it announced that it will rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, from which the Trump administration withdrew mostly in protest of its scrutiny of Israel.
But none of these policies, welcome though they are, will challenge the oppressive status quo sustained by the United States. Worse still, the Biden administration will uphold several of the Trump administration’s most damning precedents.
These examples are most revealing:
The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has made clear that the administration will not move the U.S. Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv; it will maintain, and celebrate, Israel’s normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan without ensuring a single enduring concession for the Palestinians; and it will continue to provide Israel with unconditional military support in the amount of $3.8 billion annually — a precedent established by Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama.
Late last week, the Biden administration also expressed “serious concerns” over the International Criminal Court’s effort to exercise jurisdiction over Israeli officials to prosecute them for war crimes, and is even considering maintaining the Trump administration’s sanctions on the court’s leading personnel.
She brings three examples of what she considers anti-Palestinian policies: keeping the embassy in Jerusalem, supporting peace between Israel and Arab states, and maintaining military aid that gets spent in the US.
None of these policies hurt Palestinians. None of them affect Palestinian lives at all, except for Gaza terrorists who want to murder Israeli civilians with rockets. None of them are speedbumps towards a Palestinian state.
They do support Israel as a sovereign nation – which this “human rights lawyer” considers “damning.”
The rest of the article is more of the same, complaining that a definition of antisemitism that includes demonizing the Jewish state’s very existence is somehow anti-Palestinian.
Erakat is so filled with hate for Israel that she literally cannot tell the difference between “pro-Israel” and “anti-Palestinian,” nor the difference between “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Israel.” She fully subscribes to a zero-sum mentality that what is good for Israel is automatically bad for Palestinians – and, worse, that nothing can be considered good for Palestinians unless it is also bad for Israel.
The UAE and Bahrain (and to an extent Morocco and Sudan) have abandoned the zero-sum mentality. No one can call them “anti-Palestinian” although the Gulf Arabs are justifiably critical of the current Palestinian leaderships. They see Israel not as an enemy but as a partner that can help them thrive; not as a open Jewish wound in the Arab Middle East but as a permanent feature that improves the region and that can lift up Arab states. Instead of zero-sum, they seek a win-win. The zero-sum mentality that they maintained for so many decades did not help them – or the Palestinians – one bit.
The zero-sum mindset is childish and counterproductive. If there is one lasting change from the Abraham Accords, it is that this puerile way of thinking is finally on the wane in the Middle East.
As long as the Palestinians – including their Western “defenders” – cannot grasp that basic concept, they will never get anywhere.
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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Friday, February 12, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
