Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 18, 2021

Newest "Apartheid?" poster starring Ayman Odeh

The series continues....

Sir, We Cannot Figure Out In Which End Of The Anti-Zionist To Insert The Anal Probe (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Sir, We Cannot Figure Out In Which End Of The Anti-Zionist To Insert The Anal Probe

by Lieutenant Zorb-8, Watch Commander, Galaga-X Scout Vessel 22R, Squadron Blue, Intergalactic Fleet Task Force M

alien Intergalactic Standard Date 14.5.99.008, in orbit around Earth - Captain, our surface team has returned from the planet with several specimens upon which to conduct our experiments, including at least three of the fascinating "Anti-Zionist" subspecies of human, but our laboratory crew are reporting some trouble determining which is the anterior and which is the posterior, and those specimens have yet to undergo the anal probing as a result.

As you no doubt realize, sir, the procedures mandate a two-hour turnaround time for all specimens, and we must decide within the net fifteen minutes how to proceed, or this batch will prove abortive, and we will fall behind schedule. At the same time, as you also know, sir, inserting the probe in the wrong end will corrupt the data it provides and our research will suffer as a result,

In consultations with the mission planners and our existing protocols, my preliminary conclusions point to an unforeseen gap in those protocols and procedures, and not to any incompetence or negligence on the part of any crew members. The lack of distinction among this subspecies between the oral and anal apertures and their respective anatomical neighborhoods, if you will, is unlike any other we have encountered to date, and yes, sir, that does include even the flat-Earther specimens and those who insist Marvel is superior to DC except perhaps for specific outliers such as the Punisher. But I digress, sir.

I think maybe this diagram will help illustrate the problem, sir. As you can see, unadulterated fecal matters spews from either end in similar quantities, a factor that deprives us of our primary method for making the determination. In addition, given the limited intelligence of the subspecies, we cannot confidently hold to the assumption that they walk upright, which deprives us of another key indicator.

Yes, sir, the trend toward, well, just plain ugliness among this subgroup has also given us problems, of course. An astute observation. Humans of all kinds have also adopted an ever-shifting array of sensibilities as to which parts of the body should have hair and which should be shorn, so we cannot put very much stock in that either, sir.

We will need a command decision on this very soon, sir. I will instruct the surface team to remain on alert, and the launch crew to prep the vessel for another sortie, just in case, so that we can at least attempt to find Anti-Zionists with a less ambiguous anatomy.

03/18 Links Pt1: Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines; ICC contacted Israel to notify of war crimes probe; US plans $15M in coronavirus aid for Palestinians

From Ian:

'The National' obtains US official document for Palestinian ‘reset’

The US administration is looking to 'reset' relations with the Palestinians with a plan that includes $15 million in Covid-19 assistance and a rollback of several Trump administration positions that favoured Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and did not prioritise the two-state solution, an internal memo reveals.

The official document, obtained exclusively by The National on Wednesday, was raised to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on March 1, by acting assistant secretary of state for near eastern Affairs Joey Hood.

It was drafted by deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs Hady Amr and his team.

The memo, The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward, is the most detailed proposal so far by the Biden team to rebalance relations with the Palestinians after four years of Donald Trump, who cut ties with Ramallah.

The US memo acknowledges new challenges in approaching the Palestinian situation.

“As we reset US relations with the Palestinians, the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection point as it moves towards its first elections in 15 years,” it says.

“At the same time, we [the US] suffer from a lack of connective tissue following the 2018 closure of the PLO office in Washington and refusal of Palestinian Authority leadership to directly engage with our embassy to Israel,” the memo says.

It mentions growing disparities between Israelis and Palestinians and outlines a “reset under way and the path ahead”.

The memo defines the US vision on the issue as one “to advance freedom, security, and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians in the immediate term which is important in its own right, but also as means to advance the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution”.

Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines

The Biden administration will reportedly push for a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines, with mutually agreed upon land swaps, reinstating US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to more traditionally held positions than those of former president Donald Trump.

A memo titled “The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,” which was revealed Wednesday to the Abu Dhabi-based The National, also showed that the Biden administration is planning on announcing a $15 million aid package in coronavirus-related humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians as early as this month.

Drafted by Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr, the memo also details plans to roll back various Trump policies that Washington believes made reaching a two-state solution more difficult, such as US legitimization of the settlement enterprise.

Amr recommends in the memo that the White House back a two-state framework “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps and agreements on security and refugees.”

While behind closed doors, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has participated in peace negotiations based on the 1967 lines, publicly the formula is not very popular in Israel, particularly among the right wing, which is expected to further expand in the Knesset after next week’s election.

The memo discusses “rolling back certain steps by the prior administration that bring into question our commitment or pose real barriers to a two-state solution, such as country of origin labeling.”

The memo was referring to a last-minute policy change announced by Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, which requires all US exports from the settlements to be labeled as having been “made in Israel.”

Since 1995, US policy had required products made in the West Bank and Gaza to be labeled as such. That directive was republished in 2016 by the Obama administration, which warned that labeling goods as “made in Israel” could lead to fines. Prior to the Oslo Accords, however, all products manufactured in these areas were required to mention Israel in their label when exporting to the United States.

The Pompeo order went into effect in December, but manufacturers were given a 90-day grace period, until March 23, to implement the change.

“As we reset US relations with the Palestinians, the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection point as it moves towards its first elections in 15 years,” the new memo reads. “At the same time, we [the US] suffer from a lack of connective tissue following the 2018 closure of the PLO office in Washington and refusal of Palestinian Authority leadership to directly engage with our embassy to Israel.”

Ouch: Member of the Trump MidEast peace team tells me re: Biden plans to roll back pro-Israel reset in the region: "The reporting reeks of the current Admin returning to the failed policies of the past that only served to prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
— Adam Kredo (@Kredo0) March 17, 2021

Last week, the Czech Republic opened its diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, under the lead of its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Earlier this week, Kosovo opened its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, making some history along the way:

And now Netanyahu is claiming that there are four more countries that will soon be signing peace deals with Israel. While it is not known which countries Netanyahu is referring to, Niger, Mauritania, Indonesia are considered to be possibilities.

Syria is not considered to be one of those countries.

And yet...

Back in May 2018, The Wall Street Journal ran an article claiming that Iran’s Push for Influence Meets Resistance in Iraq and Syria:

Syrians in the largely secular capital, Damascus, have meanwhile accused Iran of stoking religious tensions. And Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s other main foreign partner, Russia, has showed impatience with Iran’s growing military presence in Syria, which Israel has moved to contain with airstrikes.

The existence of friction between Syria and Iran is not the same as a rapprochement between Syria and Israel.

But that was back in 2018. A lot has changed since then.

Russia has presented itself as a broker between Israel and Syria, arranging the deal that saw an Israeli woman who wandered into Syria returned home in exchange for 2 Syrian shepherds (with Israel funding Russian Covid vaccine for Syria) and searching for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in Syria, missing since 1982.

Along these lines, Foreign Policy reported last month that analysts suggested that "Assad’s strong relationship with Russia and growing ties with the UAE, both of which want Syria to come to terms with Israel, has impacted the regime’s thinking." The article goes on to quote a former human rights activist in Syria:

We have seen several deals recently, such as when Russia dug graves in Yarmouk to find to Israeli soldiers. Now we have heard that Israel is buying Russia’s coronavirus vaccine for Syrians. This comes in parallel with the normalization wave between Israel and the Arab countries. It’s not impossible we will see a formal normalization between the regime and Israel very soon. [emphasis added]

Normalization sounds overly optimistic.

But he is not alone in seeing forces moving Syria in that direction.

Jim Dunnigan, a military-political analyst and editor-in-chief of the website StrategyPage, posted analysis this month that also claims there is an effort towards a peace deal between Israel and Syria:

Israel is quietly working on a peace deal with the Assads by first consulting Russia, Turkey and the Arab nations Israel has diplomatic relations with. If Israel can achieve a consensus on how to offer and deliver the Assads a workable peace deal, Iran could be driven out of Syria.

The idea is that on the on hand, the Iranian people are not pleased with Iran's involvement in Syria because of the financial cost, and on the other, Russia sees Iran's ongoing involvement as destabilizing.

Now we know how Russia, Iranians, Turkey and the Arab countries feel about this.

What do Syrians think?

The article continues:

There has been a shift in Syrian public attitudes towards Iran as Iran moved in more of its Lebanese (Hezbollah), Afghan and local mercenaries to Syrian army bases around the capital and other areas where a lot of Assad supporters live. That is followed by truckloads of missiles and other weapons from Iran to be stockpiled for use against Israel. Several hundred times over the last few years Israeli airstrikes have destroyed these Iranian stockpiles, usually with few casualties on the ground and those tend to be Iranians or their mercenaries. Now the Iranians, or at least their Hezbollah veterans, are talking of the need to store these weapons in residential areas to use Syrian civilians as human shields to discourage Israeli air strikes. Syrian civilians know how this works. [emphasis added]

This is where things become problematic for Syria. It is one thing for Russia and Israel to discuss moving Syria out of Iran's orbit -- there is nothing Iran can do about that. But Iran will not take kindly to Syrian public opinion that opposes Iran. According to StrategyPage, if Iran believes that this public opinion extends into the Assad government itself, it will take action.

And where does the Syrian government itself stand?

In January, Mordechai Kedar wrote for the Besa Center about re ports of secret talks between the Assad regime and Israel. He quotes from an article appearing in the online Arabic newspaper Elaph, last December, featuring an interview Israeli journalist Majdi Halabi die with an officer of the IDF General Staff. The officer said that Syria was in touch with Israel, both through Russia and through other means. Those 'other means' would include a reported meeting of Israeli and Syrian representatives in Cyprus.

Then, on January 14, 2021, the newspaper al-Shira reported that Israeli representatives met with Assad's representatives at a Russian base in northern Syria. Four days later, the London-based newspaper Asharq Al-awsat, picked up on the report and indicated that Lieut. Gen. (res.) Gadi Eizenkot and Ari Ben-Menashe, a former top Mossad official, met with the head of the Syrian National Security Bureau, Gen. Ali Mamlouk, and Assad’s security affairs adviser Bassam Hassan. The meeting was hosted by Russia’s Gen. Aleksandr Tchaikov.

Kedar admits:

While the details might not be entirely accurate or complete, it appears that intensive Israeli-Syrian contacts are being held behind the scenes.

What exactly would Syria want from Israel?

When Halabi asked this question during his interview, the IDF officer responded:

They want to go back to the Arab League and they want economic aid, fuel for example. They need money to pay the Iranians to get out of Syria, and they want to solidify their regime. Assad sees the reality, and he wants to forge ties with the Sunni axis so that he can pay his debts to Iran and get them out of Syria. He sees that Israel can help him with the US on the one hand and with the Gulf axis and the Sunni axis on the other...But he is now prepared to talk with us so as to shore up his rule, defray the financial debt to Iran, and create a situation of non-belligerency with Israel, and after that negotiations on the Golan and other things. [emphasis added]

Since December, Biden has taken office and it is likely that the degree to which "Israel can help him with the US" has diminished, while its ability to help with the Gulf and Sunni axes has improved.

How realistic is Syrian normalization with Israel?

According to that IDF officer:

Certainly, I’m prepared to reach an agreement with [Assad] tomorrow morning, but to tell the truth, we haven’t spoken about this with the Chief of Staff or with the political echelon because it’s still at the starting point, with improvised mediators…The important thing is that there’s a possibility of breaking up the radical axis, the Iranian axis. [emphasis added]

In the Middle East, Israel is developing into a force -- not just a force to be reckoned with vis-a-vis Iran, but also a force to be relied upon by less than friendly Arab/Muslim states. And while Biden has undermined this by delaying the delivery of F-35's to the UAE and undercutting Saudi Arabia with a leaked CIA report, the wheels have already been set in motion by Trump in this changing region.

Just ask Syria.

There is precious little greenery in Jerusalem's Old City. Most of it is on the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest spot where Arab families picnic and play soccer.

The Jerusalem municipality wants to change that.

Kol Hair reports:

Ronen Harari, a Jewish businessman from Canada, recently approached the Jerusalem Municipality with a proposal to finance a large-scale renovation of Galicia Yard, a huge complex that dominates the market roofs in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old Quarter, for NIS 15 million. This is an area that has become a popular promenade for tourists and a particularly convenient vantage point overlooking the Old City and the surrounding neighborhoods.

In addition, Harari proposed renovating the Pardusi Garden complex, which is also located in the Old City, with an investment of about NIS 2 million, according to one of the proposed programs for the complex, an ornamental pool, seating areas, seating stairs for tourists and groups, and a playground.

Today, Monday, the Jerusalem Municipality's donations committee is expected to approve the donation, with the agreement between Mayor Moshe Lion and Harari's representatives in Israel, the donations will be transferred directly to the Jerusalem Municipality, and the municipality will carry out the projects through the Moriah Municipalities and East Jerusalem Development Company.

As the illustration shows, the new rooftop promenades and gardens would be for all residents of the Old City to enjoy, Arab and Jew alike.

Right now the roofs are used by Arab parkour artists and skateboarders. This would open them up for all to enjoy - and it would reduce the excuse that Arab youth must play games on the Temple Mount because there is nowhere else in the Old City for them to relax.

So, of course, the Palestinian Authority is incensed.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates condemned the announcement of the occupation municipality in Jerusalem yesterday about a colonial, Jewish project that aims to establish a biblical garden for settlers on the roofs of the historic markets in Jerusalem, including planting trees and placing recreational games for settlers to change the appearance of the roofs of those markets.

The ministry stated in a statement today, Thursday, that this comes within the framework of a policy aimed at falsifying the landmarks of the heart of Jerusalem and its old town and besieging Al-Aqsa, in a clear disregard for the Islamic Endowments Department and an open confiscation of its role and powers.

And it considered that changing the features of the roofs of the ancient historical markets in Jerusalem is not only a crime to be held accountable by international law, and disregarding the decisions of the United Nations and its relevant specialized organizations, but rather an intended Israeli mockery of the international community and its legitimacy and decisions regarding the situation in Palestine.

I can't wait for the UN to be presented with an official letter saying that planting flowers is a war crime.

A bunch of progressive and anti-Zionist Jews wrote a letter to President Biden urging him to appoint an antisemitism envoy that will ignore most forms of antisemitism. Haaretz gave this piece of stupidity oxygen.

Let's take it apart:

Dear Mr. President and Secretary Blinken:
As Jewish leaders, we write to you at a moment of both fear and hope. We are deeply concerned about the antisemitic violence and rhetoric we have witnessed worldwide over the last few years. We are hopeful because your administration has an opportunity to choose a new approach in response to the urgency of contemporary antisemitism.

No, their statements have shown that they utterly ignore all antisemitism that comes from the Left, from Black people, from Palestinians and Muslims. Which is most of it.

At this pivotal moment, our society is reckoning with centuries of white supremacy and with new, globally networked right-wing extremist movements — problems we will only be able to face if we understand antisemitism’s role in white supremacist and ethnonationalist ideologies. We feel compelled to raise our voices because we see our fights at stake, too, in the question of how the U.S. government will define and pursue the fight against antisemitism in America and around the world.

No one - and I mean no one - minimizes the threat of right-wing antisemitism. No one supports Nazis or white supremacists. No one says that the US shouldn't do everything is can to dismantle violent far-right groups. Their emphasis on antisemitism from the right, and only the right, is their way of shielding and excusing most antisemites.

Antisemitism is a racial justice issue. We have seen antisemitic conspiracy theories used to undermine Black-led movements for justice: false and dehumanizing claims that posit Jewish responsibility for Black brilliance and in so doing endanger us all. Too often, the same people deploying those anti-Jewish conspiracy theories then wield accusations of antisemitism as a weapon against progressives, especially Black and Palestinian progressives who criticize the Israeli government. All the while, Jews of color and their experiences of antisemitism and racism at the intersections are ignored. We need an envoy who understands how antisemitism and white supremacy reinforce one another.

Everyone knows that far-right nutcases are also anti-Black. But antisemitism is not limited to them, as these people are saying.

Antisemitism is an economic justice issue. The U.S. economy is in crisis. Conspiracy theories that blame economic suffering on Jewish financial control are being used to obscure the structural inequities that plague our society. To tackle economic inequality head on, we need leadership that is clear-eyed about how antisemitism is used to scapegoat Jews for the failings of our financial systems, weaken trust in government-led solutions, and undermine movements to build an economically just future. We need an envoy who is prepared to counter antisemitism as part of the fight for a more just, inclusive economy.

Antisemitism is a climate issue and a migration issue. Antisemitic theories wrongly cast climate crisis-induced migration as a Jewish plot to replace the white race — an idea that the gunman who killed 11 Jews at prayer at Tree of Life in 2018 used to justify his violence. As we prepare for humane and just responses to climate migration, we need an envoy who understands the threat of eco-fascism and the role antisemitism often plays in eco-fascist ideology.

Antisemitism is a feminist issue. Antisemitic ideas are almost always intertwined with toxic, hateful ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality. Over and over, we have seen violence carried out by men who have been radicalized to hate both women and Jews — but the connections between antisemitism and misogyny are under-emphasized, to all of our detriment. We need an envoy who is committed to dismantling antisemitism and misogyny together.

This is beyond absurd. Now that they have badly defined what antisemitism is, they try to minimize the danger of even that, by placing Jew-hatred in "context." This means that the fight against antisemitism gets subsumed under general progressive issues which, we have seen over and over, always have a higher priority.

If you look at antisemitism as a feminist and economic and climate and migration issue, you no longer have any tools to fight actual Jew-hate. Antisemitism takes a backseat to every other issue. All you are left with are slogans that Nazis are bad, which is pretty much the depth of this entire argument.

For all of these reasons and many more, we demand that the Biden administration choose a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism who will commit to treating the fight against antisemitism as part of the fight for just, multiracial democracy. We need an envoy who is willing to confront antisemitism wherever it occurs, transcending the shallow framing of “left and right” and understanding both the disproportionate threat of organized, violent white nationalist antisemitism and the complexities of antisemitism across communities.

This letter mentions far-Right antisemitism six times and all the others are ignored. Who are the ones who put the issue in a shallow frame of "left and right"?

Antisemitism is found everywhere. Throughout history, antisemites of all creeds, colors and political identities associate Jews with what they despise most. This is why far-Right antisemites call Jews "communists" while far-Left antisemites call Jews racists, colonialists and child-killers; Black antisemites will say Jews try to control their lives by controlling their livelihoods; Muslim antisemites will say Jews are cowards and enemies of Mohammed; Christian antisemites will call Jews Christ-killers; Black Nation of Islam followers will call Jews slave owners. If there is one hatred that unites the world, it is Jew-hatred.

The more you know about antisemitism, the more you realize that the people who signed this letter don't know the first thing about antisemitism.

For too long, antisemitism has been used as a justification for Islamophobic policies and for the targeting of advocates for Palestinian rights, here in the U.S. and around the world. We need a new approach, carried out by an envoy who has the integrity to build bridges between communities and movements.

The utter inability of these Jews to even acknowledge the existence of Arab antisemitism - after Jews were ethnically cleansed from all Arab countries - shows you that they are not really against antisemitism.

Denying any form of antisemitism is condoning it.

One other point: While every other kind of bigotry is defined by the far-Left as expansively as possible, antisemitism is defined as narrowly as possible. People who want to throw the Jews into the sea, or who claim that Blacks are the real Jews and Jews are imposters, or that the Jewish state is the most racist state in the world, are not denigrated. Nazis are bad - but poets of color or Leftist rock stars or Palestinian leaders who echo Nazi literature are celebrated and their antisemitism, when called out, is excused.

The last thing that Jews need is an antisemitism envoy who so grossly misunderstands antisemitism as the signatories of this letter.

Why You Should Make Aliyah (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Even before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem there were colonies of Jews living outside of Eretz Yisrael. It’s true that they were unable to fulfil the mitzvot that were incumbent upon them, because they couldn’t participate in the three festivals that require a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and they couldn’t offer sacrifices for other purposes. But still many of those who for various reasons found themselves more or less permanently living somewhere else still identified with their homeland and still observed other mitzvot, like circumcision and some form of kashrut. At least for a few generations and in many cases until today, they felt themselves part of the Jewish people.

After the loss of the Temple, rabbinic Judaism codified a way to be fully Jewish wherever you were physically located. Different customs arose in different places, but Jews usually stayed Jews. They knew where they were from and how they were set aside from non-Jews. Of course there was attrition. Some Jews became Christians, and after the advent of Islam much later, some converted to that faith. Others faded into pagan cultures. But – really quite remarkably, I think – the Jewish people persisted as a people. Indeed, I believe that the history of the Jewish people serves as a paradigm for other groups that see themselves as a people, with our unique language and religion, and our common memory of our origins, as we express it in our observation of Pesach.

Starting around the period of the Enlightenment, the late 18^th century, the phenomenon of secular Jews appeared, people that still identified as Jews but did not practice Judaism. Some of them were mechanistic rationalists whose cosmology didn’t leave room for a supreme being, and some were reformers who created a new religion based on Judaism, but with enough essential variations to make it conceptually distinct. Some of these Jews assimilated into local cultures, but some maintained their connection to the Jewish people despite their disconnection from Judaism.

Until the period leading up to the founding of the state of Israel, the option of living in Eretz Yisrael was sometimes a possibility and sometimes not, but it was always extremely difficult from a practical point of view. That is no longer the case. Jews can live in Eretz Yisrael if they want to, without starving, getting malaria, or being interned by the British. Any migration is somewhat uncomfortable, but the discomfort today is negligible compared to what it was 100 or even 70 years ago.

I want to argue that for both observant and secular Jews, it is advantageous to live in Eretz Yisrael, both from the point of view of the individual Jew and that of the Jewish people as a whole.
Observant Jews in the diaspora can meet their religious needs if they are prepared to live in very circumscribed locations in a few cities where they can find kosher food, a mikva, and at least a small Jewish community. Even so, several European countries have banned or are considering banning kosher slaughter and circumcision. Antisemitic harassment is growing in Europe along with its Muslim population. In the US, historical (as well as newly-created) Jew hatred among blacks is expressing itself more and more frequently in the large cities where large numbers of Jews live. Identifiably Jewish (i.e., observant) Jews are targeted. In addition, observant Jews are faced with astronomical costs to send their children to Jewish schools.

Even secular Jews face difficulties from antisemitism. Universities everywhere are less comfortable for Jews, where both pro-Palestinian Muslim students and leftists try to push them out of student organizations and generally harass them, and not only if they are outspokenly pro-Israel. In the US in particular, Jews are caught between white supremacist crazies and an anti-Jewish black/left/Muslim alliance (Jewish leadership seems to recognize the danger from the former while ignoring the latter). The Jewish connection of the secular or liberally religious majority becomes more attenuated day by day. What’s left is a few Yiddish expressions and jokes about gefilte fish. The consequences of this include large-scale assimilation, a decline in the number of diaspora Jews, and a growing political divide between Jews in Israel and the diaspora.
Life in the diaspora for Jews will not get better. The deterioration is proceeding differently in North America, Europe, the UK, and in other places, but it will only get worse.

By contrast, in Israel a new, specifically Israeli form of Jewish culture is developing from the interaction of Jews from all parts of the world and all Jewish traditions. There is no other place in the world that this can happen. Because of this, Israel is the guarantor of the spiritual continuity of the Jewish people as well as their physical protector. Jewish education is paid for by the state, and even in the secular schools, there is significant Jewish content. For those who want to develop and expand their Jewish identity, either religiously or culturally, there is no comparison between the diaspora and the Jewish state.

While diaspora Jews played a very important role in supporting the state before and shortly after its creation, they have become progressively less important as the state has grown more powerful and prosperous. As diaspora communities decline, their influence declines as well. And as the political gap between diaspora and Israeli Jews grows, the independence of the state from external support becomes more important. Jews that want to support the Jewish state can do so more effectively by contributing to the Israeli society and economy than by advocating from outside.

The state has been in existence since 1948 and many of its inhabitants have a hard time imagining what it would be like if there were no Jewish state. Someone who has experienced the insecurity and lack of belonging that a Jew experiences in the diaspora brings an appreciation for it that may be lacking in someone that has had it all their life. This is another kind of contribution that an immigrant can make.

Many Jewish people are comfortable in the diaspora. Change is hard. But ask yourself this: what will it be like in five or ten years? What will it be like for my children? Will I still feel at home here? Will I be sorry?

03/17 Links Pt2: The Miracle of Osirak; ‘Progressive Except for Palestine’: A new label for an old hatred; The Grammys Proved You Can't Get Canceled for Anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Miracle of Osirak

The year 2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the “Begin Doctrine,” according to which no enemy of Israel will be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and that Israel will act, on its own if necessary, to ensure this remained the case.

Four decades along, it is easy to forget how unexpected the attack was and how outraged much of the world was by it. In Israel, Begin’s electoral opponent, Shimon Peres, had sent him a letter pleading to hold off, but he only convinced the prime minister to act. Shilon describes how Begin told a cabinet member, “For all I know, a month from now, Shimon Peres will be sitting in this room. From his letter it’s clear to you that he certainly wouldn’t carry out this operation, and I’m not willing to leave the stage knowing that I left this problem hovering over our children.”

The international media largely denounced the attack as state-sponsored terror, and even world leaders sympathetic to Israel came down hard. Margaret Thatcher spoke of “a grave breach to international law,” and the Reagan administration ordered Jeane Kirkpatrick (to her dismay) to support an anti-Israel resolution at the UN.

The controversy and surprise show just how this operation, which kept a nuclear weapon out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, was a testament to the unique worldview of one man. Menachem Begin was a modern Zionist, but unlike some of Israel’s other founders, he always felt the personal presence of those murdered in the Holocaust, especially of his father and mother. Again and again, Begin made clear, in the months before the attack, that the fate of his family was very much on his mind. “This morning,” he told the cabinet during an Osirak planning meeting, “when I saw Jewish children playing outside, I decided: ‘No, never again.’” In a meeting with American Jews in May 1981, Begin was asked what he thought the lesson of the Holocaust was. He replied:
First, if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment. Don’t make light of it. Do all in your power to deny him the means of carrying out his satanic intent. Second, when a Jew anywhere is threatened, or under attack, do all in your power to come to his aid. Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say. The world will never pity slaughtered Jews. The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him.

These Americans had no idea what Begin was planning when he said these words. He was indeed the fighting Jew, and the world certainly did not like him. Time magazine helpfully informed its readership that the name Begin “rhymes with Fagin,” and American Jewry in 1981 was told repeatedly that they must choose “between Reagan and Begin.” But Begin did not “pause to wonder what the world would say,” and the world did indeed “have to take account of him.”

Yisrael Medad: Did Jews Contest the Temple Mount During the Mandate Period?

As for the Temple Mount, there surely were Jewish claims to access and they did enter, both prior to World War One and for a few years afterwards. By the mid-1920s, the Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini began to increase restrictions on Jews entering and after the 1929 riots, for all practical purposes, Jews could not enter even as tourists.

But what did occur was that the Mufti extended the Temple Mount’s borders.

As the so-called International Commission of 1930 decided,
To the Moslems belong the sole ownership of, and the sole proprietary right to, the Western Wall, seeing that it forms an integral part of the Haram-esh-Sherif area, which is a Waqf property. To the Moslems there also belongs the ownership of the Pavement in front of the Wall and of the adjacent so-called Moghrabi (Moroccan) Quarter…Such appurtenances of worship and/or such other objects as the Jews may be entitled to place near the Wall either in conformity with the provisions of this present Verdict or by agreement come to between the Parties shall under no circumstances be considered as, or have the effect of, establishing for them any sort of proprietary right to the Wall or to the adjacent Pavement.

In other words, a wall that was built by Herod, a Jewish king, and where, for centuries, Jews had worshipped, was not Jewish property. All Jews could rightfully claim were the bringing of “hand-books or other articles customarily used at their devotions either as a general thing or upon special occasions”, the “wearing such garments as were of old used at their devotions”. The “prohibitions against the bringing to the Wall of benches, carpets or mattings, chairs, curtains and screens, etc….are to be made absolute…The right, however, for Moslems to go to and fro in an ordinary way along the Pavement shall be respected and remain inviolable as hitherto. It shall be prohibited to bring to the Wall any tent or a curtain or any similar object with a view to placing it there even though for a limited space of time. The Jews shall not be permitted to blow the ram’s horn (Shofar) near the Wall…”.

To speak as if the Jews could, in any way, possibly ‘contest’ the Temple Mount is obfuscating the entire issue. Non-Moslems could only enter the Haram precincts after the first third of the 19th century as for four centuries strict security measures had been in place. In April 1947, a young Jew, a recent immigrant and survivor of the Holocaust, who accidentally entered the Haram compound, was beaten and stabbed to death by Moslems. He wasn’t the sole victim of Moslem exclusivity practices.

Once Jewish political sovereignty retuned in 1967, of course there was a renewal of internal Jewish debate over whether entrance should be permitted and whether the Moslem apartheid approach to the Temple Mount is justified. That does not indicate that all was dormant, as there were aspirations and yearnings. Dothan Goren has published (in Hebrew here) a survey. We know that the precursors of political Zionism, the Rabbis Kalischer, Alkalai and others, discussed the possibility of sacrificing the Paschal offering on the Temple Mount as a link in the very practical return to Zion. The students of the Vilna Gaon thought likewise. In 1836, Kalischer proposed a far-reaching project to Baron Anshel Rothschild: that the latter should purchase the Temple Mount from the Egyptian ruler Muhammed Ali. The Kabalah school of the Rashash was also quite attune to the Temple Mount as the story of their attempt to bring the Messiah reveals.

Dormant to an extent, yes, but not sterile or fossilized or outside planning considerations.

There is much to argue about and discuss regarding Jewish rights on and to the Temple Mount. There is no need to corrupt history.

The Israeli-Palestinian Context | Unpacked: Was Zionism a Form of Colonialism?

We’re unpacking the journey of the Zionist — from the beginning of the Roman exile in 70 CE to the present — its relationship with the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, and its equation to colonialists today. Rooted in the word for the Land of Israel, Zion, the word Zionist may not actually be as “modern” as you thought! In fact, Zionists have been around for thousands of years. The complex and rich history of Israel’s path to statehood is abundant with often-overlooked facts. Historically known as Zion, the Land of Israel has a long and winding past that touches on many peoples, cultures and events.

Malki Roth. This story should be about her, instead of the woman who planned and helped to execute her murder, Ahlam Tamimi. But Malki is dead and Ahlam Tamimi is not only alive and free, but celebrated in Jordan as a national hero. Malki’s parents, Arnold and Frimet, have worked hard to convince US officials to extradite Tamimi from Jordan to stand trial in the States, to no avail. But they’re not giving up, no matter how long it takes.

The latest setback in the Roths’ quest for justice occurred on March 11, 2021, when Interpol announced without warning that it had removed Tamimi’s name from its Red Notice database. Red Notice is an alert system that sends requests to law enforcement in member states to locate and arrest criminals like Tamimi, pending extradition. Arnold and Frimet Roth responded by pledging that very same day that they will not stop their efforts “to see this loathsome person—the embodiment of murderous bigotry—eventually brought to justice to answer for her crimes.”

Frimet Roth has recorded a personal plea to President Biden to help them in their quest for justice. We can only hope this mother’s pain and grief will touch the new president’s heart, and move him to action on Malki’s behalf.

I spoke with Arnold Roth to get a clearer picture on recent developments in this story. This will, in fact, be the third time that Roth has been gracious enough to consent to be interviewed in this space. (See here and here.) It is my hope that readers will become invested in the story of Malki and question why it is that four consecutive US administrations have done nothing to change an unjust reality in which an American citizen—a young girl just out eating pizza with a friend—is murdered for the crime of being Jewish, while her unrepentant murderer is celebrated as a hero in Jordan.

Varda Epstein: Why have successive American governments not pressed for the extradition of the woman who masterminded and assisted in the murder of your child? Wasn't Malki an American citizen? Weren't there other American citizens killed or injured in the Sbarro massacre?

Arnold Roth: Malki, just 15 when her life was stolen, was one of two US nationals murdered in the Sbarro massacre. The other was a young Jewish tourist from New Jersey, the only child of parents who somehow found the strength to reach out to us during their shiva and ours to try to comfort us and especially my bereft wife. They are heroic figures in our eyes. Their murdered daughter was pregnant with her own first child. I deliberately don't mention them by name but can testify to how exceptionally heartbreaking is their loss.

Another young mother, also a US national but like Malki a resident of Israel, was in the pizzeria with her toddler daughter at the time of the attack and suffered horrific brain injuries. She doesn't get counted among the dead according to the rules of this awful narrative. But she has remained in a vegetative coma throughout the nearly two decades since Ahlam Tamimi delivered her satanic bomb to the center of Jerusalem.

I can speculate about why successive US governments have failed to press for the extradition of Tamimi, who orchestrated the attack and self-describes as the first female Hamas terrorist. But since no US official has ever explained this reality in public, it remains speculation and anyone can speculate. That includes me. So I say that it's all about a woefully misconceived sense that in pressing Jordan to live up to its bilateral obligations to its treaty partner and far-and-away largest benefactor, funder, supporter, and ally, the US will cause headaches for its king. Behind that statement is the reality that Jordan, more than any other country on earth, is overwhelmingly made up of Palestinian Arabs.

Varda Epstein: What do you think of the argument that America is invested in keeping Abdullah on the throne and that extraditing Tamimi would make him unpopular? Do you think this is the reason behind the unresponsiveness of the State Department under the past four administrations?

Arnold Roth: It's a reasonable argument in my opinion and a revealing one. The Jordanian leadership has done well in depicting itself as fragile, in danger of collapsing at any moment because of internal stresses and explosive resentments among its people. Jordan is a country in constant need of nurture and understanding which the US has provided for decades.

The world saw something similar, as my wife Frimet likes to point out, in 1960s South Vietnam. I think the expression "the tail wagging the dog" is a good title for this strategy. No one can deny it works. The real question is—why do so many governments and smart political figures fall in with this policy? To that question, I don't have any satisfying answers.

Varda Epstein: What do you think of the FBI putting Tamimi on the wanted list and offering a reward for information leading to her capture? Don't they know where she is?

Arnold Roth: To understand my answer, let me take you back four years.

When the US Department of Justice told us on March 14, 2017—a few hours before it happened—that they were unsealing terror charges against Tamimi in Washington later that same day, we actually didn’t appreciate the implications.

No one has said this to us. But it is clear that the delay in announcing federal terrorism charges against Tamimi four years after the judge had signed the papers was because Jordan refused to extradite the fugitive.

Throughout those years, she, Tamimi, was living a dream life, lecturing and advocating for terrorists and terror widely throughout the Arab world and having her own terror-centric TV show. She became a celebrity while Federal prosecutors and investigators from Washington, intent on seeing her stand trial, were being ignored and obstructed by Jordan’s most powerful officials.

On the day the criminal prosecution was announced, Tamimi was added to the FBI Most Wanted Terrorists list. Only one other woman had preceded her there. But unlike the rest of the terrorists on the list, there was no multi-million dollar reward from US law enforcement for Tamimi’s capture.

When we discovered she was living at an address that everyone who needed to know knew—not hiding, not living under an assumed name, not concealing her daily movements—we were puzzled. Then it became clear there was no reward and that seemed to say there was no real desire to take her into custody and bring her in chains to a Washington court. A $5m reward was eventually announced nine months later. It seems to still be in effect, but it’s hard to understand why, given how she moves freely throughout Jordanian society without fear.

It would be comforting to be able to say that all of this was explained to us and that we now know why things happened that way. But I cannot. The people who administer the State Department Rewards for Justice program which provides the rewards for the capture of the people on the FBI list, have never returned any of our calls or emails right up until today.

Varda Epstein: Why do you think Interpol took Tamimi off their Red Notice database?

Arnold Roth: I know that the Tamimi family and their lawyers say they fought for 18 months to have Ahlam Tamimi’s name removed from the Interpol Red Notice database. In the Arabic-language media, there are reports that this amounts to a vindication of her. None of their claims make any sense to me.

Varda Epstein: Why do you think the Biden Administration will take action when the last 4 presidents did nothing? Why didn't the Trump Administration take action?

Arnold Roth: When the Biden Administration’s people say theirs will be a principled approach to dealing with allies and rivals, eschewing the transactional approach of the Trump people, I believe them. If true, this is very encouraging. And when the Trump people said they would do everything to ensure justice is done in our case, I believed them too. As a matter of fact, when the Obama people said they would pursue the bomber with the full force of US law, I believed that and still believe it.

Why do politicians and officials say things and then do other, often very different, things? I wish I knew. Meeting and getting to know honorable officials in public life only deepens the puzzle. So much goodwill, and—in our case—so little to show for it.

We continue to hope for better. And to do whatever we possibly can to see it happen.

Varda Epstein: Why should Ahlam Tamimi be behind bars? How will this help you and your family personally? What can we do to help?

Arnold Roth: As a citizen of Jordan and celebrity media figure, Ahlam Tamimi has significantly increased the stock of lethal evil in the world. She is a lightning rod for bigotry-driven, explosive hatred, an articulate representative of some of humanity’s most hateful tendencies.

At the personal level, with her not only free but celebrated on a massive scale by admirers and supporters, I sometimes find it literally impossible to contemplate her rich life alongside the fact that Malki is dead. Malki, who was full of love for people and for life and for being helpful and empathetic, whose murder brought so much darkness into our lives, should be living a life of influence and accomplishment. The injustice is crushing.

Our failure to see Tamimi brought to trial in Washington weighs heavily on me. My wife and I have no intention of giving up but we know that if we succeed, it will only be brought by effecting real change. Support in the form of helping us to change things, by helping us influence lawmakers in Washington, by escalating the doing of justice so that it is not crushed into meaninglessness by expedient politicians—these are things that require outreach and input from Americans.

It is the United States and those who govern it who will determine the outcome of our efforts since 2012. I am always glad to hear from individuals and organizations who are able to take a role in that process with us. We are determined to see justice done. But it cannot be done by us alone.

03/17 Links Pt1: Israel’s key Middle East concerns in 2021; 'Time to change anachronistic laws of war,' says Israeli counterterrorism expert; Israel’s Homeland Security Is Collapsing

From Ian:

Seth Frantzman: Analysis: Israel’s key Middle East concerns in 2021

For Israel, a continuing priority is that Jerusalem views Iran’s threats as existential and Israel will work to prevent that threat.

“No security or political leadership will ever accept an existential threat,” says the senior official. In Feb. 2021, Iran threatened to enrich uranium to 60-percent, rejected talks with the U.S. in Europe, and sought to use nuclear inspections as bargaining chips with the IAEA.

“The presence of multiple uranium particles of anthropogenic origin, including isotopically altered particles, at a location which was not declared by Iran, is a clear indication that nuclear material and/or equipment contaminated by nuclear material has been present at this location,” said IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi to the IAEA Board of Governors, on March 1.

The track record of Iran’s enrichment, including installing advanced IR-6 centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow, puts Iran back on the course it pursued in 2012 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned about a red line on enrichment. Iran was warned in October 2012 about enrichment to 60 percent.

Second, the Israeli official noted how important U.S. commitment to the region is for stability. “There is no substitute for U.S. power and influence in the Middle East. There is never a vacuum in the Middle East, and any voids will eventually be filled.” He noted that Israel and U.S. have an unshakeable bond based on shared values and bipartisan support in the U.S., which is crucial to Israel’s security. The special relationship with U.S. is an essential part of Israel’s national security, alongside the peace with Egypt, Jordan, UAE and Bahrain.

Third, in the context of Iranian entrenchment and Iranian proxy threats, the U.S. and western allies can count on Israel. Israel and the U.S. have been in close contact since the new Biden administration came into office. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to his Israeli counterpart Gabi Asheknazi in late January and again in late February. The National Security Advisors Jake Sullivan and Meir Ben-Shabbat spoke on Jan. 23, and U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in mid-February.

'Time to change anachronistic laws of war,' says Israeli counterterrorism expert

The decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to launch an investigation into Israeli actions warrants an urgent response that should include a push to reform the existing laws of war, a leading counter-terrorism expert told JNS.

Professor Boaz Ganor, founder and executive director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, said, "The response to this dangerous step by the court is to urgently change the anachronistic laws of war and to adjust them to the challenges of war in the face of hybrid terror organizations."

Ganor defined hybrid terrorist organizations as those entities that control territories and populations, such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah and Lebanon, and until 2019, ISIS in Syria and Iraq. "They embed themselves in civilian populations and use civilians, even children, as living shields," he said.

Terror organizations are on an evolutionary path, able to adapt themselves and to cynically exploit "every opportunity they encounter," he continued. This means that "enlightened states must unite, through professional experts, jurists and others to formulate fair laws of war that will allow states to defend themselves against these terror organizations while maintaining a maximum protection of the lives of citizens."

The new laws of war should "place the blame on harm to civilians first and foremost on those who use them cynically as living shields," he argued.

Part of that adaptation involves taking advantage of the constraints placed on liberal democracies by humanitarian international law – particularly, the obligation by states to avoid harming civilians in line with the principles of discernment and proportionality, according to Ganor.

"In order to challenge these states, modern terror organizations, especially hybrid organizations, place weapons storehouses and rocket launchers in underground sites underneath residential homes and under-protected facilities like hospitals, medical clinics, schools and others," he said.

"These organizations do not see themselves as being obligated to humanitarian international law, and they use civilian hiding places to conduct random attacks on civilian areas and facilities in the territory of an enemy state. From this perspective, the states dealing with such terrorists find themselves being Gulliver, with their hands and legs bound by morality and by modern combat principles, fighting dwarfs that attack without pause and in violation of every legal or moral principle."

Israel’s Homeland Security Is Collapsing

From its establishment to the present day, Israel is a country that has invested its efforts in the security of its borders against surrounding countries. Countless efforts have been made to develop technologies and capabilities that have, at all times, preserved the military and defensive superiority of the State of Israel in the face of the non-stop threats that it faces.

At the same time, a clear outlook also developed — that military operations can be contained by on-duty forces in the short term, but that war can only be won by reservists. It is not by chance that the ratio of reservists and regular personnel is one regular person for every four reservists. Reservists are the most caring, and also the most influential, population in times of emergency, as history teaches.

But given that the State of Israel knows how to successfully defend its borders, how can we explain the failure in protecting its homeland security?

The state of violence prevailing in almost every aspect of our life has become an existential issue.

It is now routine that thousands of businesses have to pay “protection money” to criminals; frequent murders are happening in Arab society, and women are frequent victims; illegal construction now amounts to an incalculable number of buildings; an unimaginable amount of illegal weapons are found in our society; there is terrorism and agricultural theft in huge quantities; and, in practice, there is almost no police presence or enforcement of any kind in many areas, especially in the Negev.

Hamas celebrates a terror attack on Purim, 1992

Hamas' Al Qassam website is celebrating the anniversary of a 1992 slashing attack that killed two, including a woman waiting to enter a Purim party.

On March 17, 1992, an Arab from Gaza went amok on a Jaffa street with a machete. He murdered Ilanit Ohana, 19, of Bat Yam, who was standing near a business where she had just gotten a job as a clerk. A heroic Arab who owned a nearby garage, Abed Abdelghani, 44, rushed to help her and was stabbed to death as well.

The terrorist then went through the streets and injured some 20 people, mostly schoolgirls waiting to enter a Purim party.

People thought the terrorist with a machete was just someone in a Purim costume.

This is what Hamas and its allies celebrate.

A couple of antisemitic cartoons from a Palestinian site in Europe

The Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad is a website for Palestinians who live outside the Middle East who want to influence the Palestinian political process. The group supports terrorism, as it said in a declaration after a 2017 Istanbul conference.

The editorial cartoonist they use is the same one that draws in Hamas' Felesteen newspaper, but he seems more willing to engage in explicitly antisemitic themes for a European Palestinian audience than for Gazans.

Here's one captioned, "Settlers storming Al Aqsa....and Arab countries."

And this one is captioned simply "The Biden Administration."

Dr. Zafer Fouad Eliyahu, a beloved doctor who was one of the very last Jews in Iraq, has died of an apparent stroke. He was 61.

An orthopedic surgeon, he was one of the last three Jews in Baghdad, along with his sister and her husband. The couple is childless so these are the last Jews of Baghdad, and possibly in all of Iraq.

Dr. Eliyahu himself never married, perhaps because there are no Jewish single women in Iraq.

Colleagues praised him, saying he was kind and always smiling as well as an excellent doctor. Patients on social media say how he saved their lives.

Most people did not know he was Jewish, and he was even nicknamed "Sayyid" which indicates a direct descendant of Mohammed for Shiites.

One colleague said that Eliyahu "was an example of humanity and humility. He treats patients with a smile, even those who do not accept treatment from him after knowing his religion." But that was rare, he added.

Asharq al-Awsat adds that the remaining Jews in Iraq generally keep their religion secret "especially in Baghdad, as a result of the dangers that they may be exposed to if their identities are revealed."

There were over 150,000 Jews in Iraq in 1947. They have been about as thoroughly ethnically cleansed as possible from that country.

03/16 Links Pt2: A New Zionist Congress Is Born; Anti-Semite-in-Chief; WaPo Uses Bad Social Science to Push Anti-Israel Propaganda; Bible scroll fragments among artifacts found in Dead Sea Cave of Horror

From Ian:

A New Zionist Congress Is Born

Defiant Jewish undergraduates are forming their own national organization dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and promoting Jewish pride. Join us.

In this new world order, nobody is surprised when a majority of students at Tufts University vote to pass a referendum blaming racist police violence in the United States on the State of Israel. In this new world order, it’s not cause for alarm when an Israeli restaurant in Portland, Oregon, is forced to remove all mention of Israel from its menus and signs, but still gets vandalized with graffiti that reads “eat shit” and “falafel is from Palestine.”

In this new world order, no one blinks when the organizers of a rally against police brutality in New York City say it’s “open to all, minus cops and Zionists.”

In this new world order, the first draft of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum listed the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement as a domestic civil rights issue and defined the Jewish people through the lens of colonialism and whiteness.

In this new world order, a professor at the University of Bristol can accuse his own Jewish students of being henchmen in a Zionist plot to silence left-wing professors, and still win the support of hundreds of “progressive” colleagues around the world, including Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler.

In this new world order, a man can walk into a kosher supermarket in Michigan and taunt its Jewish customers by asking them to read “Free Palestine” on his phone, post the video to Instagram, and receive hundreds of thousands of likes and comments from adoring fans.

This is the insidious hatred students like me are dealing with on campus. Yet I’ve had professionals call me, their voices shaking, worried that they might get shamed on Twitter by college students if I use their platform to speak freely about what is actually causing anti-Semitism at school. This is all part of a desperate need to sit at the table with those who style themselves as fighting for justice. The adults in the room beg us to reason with them, to explain to them what Judaism means to us and why we have a connection with Israel. “Allyship,” they preach, because the only way we’ll be accepted is if we are conceived as oppressed.

I’m sorry. If a Jew is called a Nazi on campus, is it really his or her responsibility to invite the offending student to share a bagel on the quad? If someone bans me from their organization, is it really my responsibility to, as one individual put it to me recently, “internalize ways in which I am not welcoming, and strive for a more intersectional approach to dialogues about oppression and power”? What the hell does that even mean? What other minority community would be forced to endure this jargon-filled hellscape? Every time Jews speak out about anti-Semitism, we're immediately told to endure a corporate diversity training seminar, one which concludes that it's still our fault for causing all the drama.

And yet for many in the Jewish community, this is a tolerable price to pay to sit at the table. Well, I don't want a seat at that table. I don’t want to be anywhere near that table. I am in fact determined to flip that table over.

At 80 years old, human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler is busier than ever

Unlike most other activists, Cotler might be lucky enough to have a direct line to the person handling U.S. foreign policy. He had a decades-long friendship with U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s stepfather, Samuel Pisar, a Holocaust survivor. “When I was a law professor at McGill, we inaugurated the Raoul Wallenberg Lectureship in Human Rights,” Cotler recalled. The first person to give that lecture was Elie Wiesel; the second was Pisar, sparking a friendship in which Cotler visited him at his homes in New York and in France.

But human rights work is only half of Cotler’s portfolio — he also has another full-time job, as Canada’s antisemitism envoy. He took the job pro bono, he said, with practically no budget, to handle a huge portfolio that includes both domestic and global antisemitism, domestic and global Holocaust remembrance, and chairing Canada’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. (Canada has adopted the IHRA working definition of antisemitism, which Trudeau says is part of the nation’s “anti-racism strategy.”)

Cotler sees a straightforward connection between his two passions: the Jewish community and international human rights. “I take a human rights approach to combating antisemitism,” he explained. “While [bigotry] begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews. So for me, all these things converge, and there’s a universal resonance, both of the lessons of the Holocaust and the combating antisemitism today.”

Some on the political left might call this framework intersectionality. But Cotler is not trying to apply a political ideology to his fight against antisemitism, and he says he feels fortunate that Canadians by and large do not politicize the issue. “People are not weaponizing antisemitism. You don’t have the right weaponize it against the left, and the left weaponizing it against the right,” he noted — unlike Canada’s neighbor to the south. “The big difference is Canada is not as polarized or as divided as the U.S.,” and “there still is a consensus.” His biggest concern is what he calls the “normalization” of antisemitism, where “it gets mainstream, and it doesn’t elicit the condemnation, or maybe the outrage, that it deserves.”

One of Cotler’s goals as Canada’s global antisemitism envoy is to address what he views as antisemitism at the United Nations, in the double standard he says the U.N. applies to Israel. “The rights of Israel deserve equal respect, not that human rights standards should not be applied to Israel. They must be. But these standards must be applied equally to everyone else,” Cotler said. He pointed out that Syria was recently appointed to a top position on the U.N.’s Special Committee on Decolonization, despite its well-documented history of brutal repression during the country’s civil war.

Cotler noted that some in the pro-Israel community who criticize the U.N.’s treatment of Israel simply oppose the institution entirely, but he is not among them. “If you’re Canadian, the United Nations is part of your DNA,” Cotler explained, noting that “human rights is a centerpiece of our foreign policy, [and] international law is part of my identity.”

His work truly is international: The cases currently in his docket include Badawi in Saudi Arabia, along with dissidents from China and Russia. During his conversation with JI, he received a call about a matter related to political persecution in Venezuela. “That’s another priority,” he said. For Cotler, every matter related to global injustice is a priority: “I get energized by the work.”