Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, March 19, 2021

03/19 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War; Guardian op-ed promotes the end of the Jewish state; The Quincy Institute vs. John Quincy Adams

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War

Two weeks ago, a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals from the Bithonistim, a grassroots national security organization, slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.

They came to draw the public's attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.

The site was excavated between 1980 and 1989 by the late Professor Adam Zertal, who identified it as Joshua's Altar as described in the Books of Deuteronomy, (27; 1-9) and Joshua (8; 30-35). The animal remains at the site contained thousands of burnt bones of year-old male, exclusively kosher, animals. They were burned in an open flame 3,250 years ago—the time generally identified as the period of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel under Joshua. Other remains found at the site included earrings and scarabs made in Egypt at the time of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh often associated with the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

As Zertal explained in a lecture in 2013, the altar was buried under a layer of rocks, in keeping with Jewish prescriptions for preventing the desecration of abandoned holy sites. In keeping with the biblical narrative, the altar is made of unhewn stones; instead of steps, there are two ramps for the priests to alight to the platform—blocks of plaster were found nearby. The altar at Mt. Ebal also matches a Talmudic description of an altar from the Second Temple period, around 900 years later, indicating a continuity of Jewish practices throughout the biblical period.

Although initially controversial, Zertal's general finding that the site is around 3,300 years old and is a Jewish historical site, where sacrifices were carried out in keeping with biblical guidelines, has become widely accepted—although many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua.

In late January, the Palestinian Authority (PA) posted a video on its website of 60 meters of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road connecting the Palestinian village of Asira ash-Shamaliya to Nablus. Nablus, built on the ruins of the biblical city of Shechem, is located in northern Samaria between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim.

Zertal was a fiercely secular son of hardcore socialists. Yet, he explained in a 2013 lecture, his scientific work compelled him to accept that the biblical narrative "from Deuteronomy through the Books of Kings was historically accurate."

"There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the damage done here was deliberate," Major General Gershon Hacohen explained to Newsweek. "That since it was the surrounding wall—rather than the altar itself—that was destroyed, the altar wasn't harmed. That's like saying that if someone destroys the steps to the Acropolis, they aren't harming the Acropolis. It's the same complex."

"They also say the Palestinians weren't trying to damage the site—they just needed stones for their road. But look at this place," he said and waved his hand across the landscape.

The slopes of Mt. Ebal are strewn with loose rocks.

"If they needed rocks for the road, all the Palestinians had to do was bring up a truck and take as many as they needed. Instead, they brought a bulldozer all the way up here and deliberately destroyed 60 meters of a 3,250-year-old wall."

As if to prove Hacohen's point, this week, a group of Palestinians was filmed barbecuing on the altar itself.

The Palestinian effort to destroy the site is of a piece with the PA's long-standing efforts to destroy the physical record of millennia-old Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. That effort is now focused on destroying and appropriating the artifacts of Jewish history in Samaria.

Guardian op-ed promotes the end of the Jewish state

For the second time in as many months, the Guardian has published an op-ed calling for an end to the Jewish state. The latest piece, (“The Israeli and Palestinian elections offend democracy – each in their own way”, March 18) by Salem Barahmeh, director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, parrots the narrative of B’tselem in claiming that Israel isn’t truly democratic.

In January, Btselem’s director Hagai El-Ad penned a Guardian op-ed (based on his group’s report) which included the lie that Israel is a non-democratic “Jewish supremacist” state which “rules everyone and everything between the river and the sea” – propaganda we refuted at the time.

Similarly, Barahmeh’s op-ed includes the following:
Israel’s famed “democracy”, like its expansionist policies, doesn’t stop at or recognise the green line – if anything it has bulldozed them into oblivion. In practice, Israel effectively exercises total control over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

He’s arguing, much like El-Ad before him, that Israel has “total control” not only over Palestinians in PA-controlled Area A of the West Bank, but, even more absurdly, that Jerusalem has “total control” over the two million Gazans who live under Hamas’s authoritarian rule.

Barahmeh then peddles more untruths:
5 million Palestinians vote for the PA, an administrative body that today has only partial control over 40% of the West Bank and is dependent on Israel for its survival. The PA was supposed to exist for five years while Palestinians transitioned to statehood, but that state never came. Successive Israeli governments made sure of that, using settlements and annexation to turn the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem into an archipelago of disconnected Palestinian population centres.

In fact, the PA has both military and administrative control of Area A, where the overwhelming majority of West Bank Palestinians live. Further, contrary to Barahmeh’s claim, there was no such promise that, five years into Oslo, a Palestinian state would be born – a myth about the Accords that we’ve gotten corrected at other publications.

Finally, his suggestion that “Israeli settlements and annexation” have turned the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem into “an archipelago of disconnected population centres” is ahistorical. Since as far back as 1949, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, the two Palestinian population centres were “disconnected”. Contrary to myths spread by pro-Palestinian activists, there never was, at any time in history, a sovereign, unified, uniquely Palestinian polity between the river and the sea.

The Quincy Institute vs. John Quincy Adams

n the fall of 2019, a group of historians and foreign-policy scholars founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Featuring thinkers such as Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Wertheim and funded by the unlikely duo of Charles Koch and George Soros, the organization named after John Quincy Adams calls for a restrained, noninterventionist U.S. foreign policy. Its stated mission is to “set U.S. foreign policy on a sensible and humane footing” based on “diplomatic engagement and military restraint.” Its mantra is Adams’s pithy quotation that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” which Bacevich contends “has discomfited proponents of militarized liberation or benign hegemony or empire gussied up as social uplift ever since.”

According to documents published on its website, the Quincy Institute wants to “reduce U.S. military operations in the Taiwan Strait,” concede Chinese military dominance in the South China Sea, “significantly withdraw troops” from the Middle East, offer Iran billions of dollars of IMF loans “to fight the coronavirus pandemic,” slash American commitments to NATO, and reduce the military budget.

The recommendations on the Middle East and Iran are of particular note. For among the Quincy Institute’s coterie of experts are numerous figures who have been publicly antagonistic toward Israel and America’s close relations with the Jewish state. These include Lawrence Wilkerson, a bitter critic of “the Jewish lobby in America”; the indefatigable investigators of American Jews’ dual loyalties, Paul Pillar and Chas Freeman; and leading “Israel Lobby” conspiracy authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Bear in mind, the institute is named after a man who in 1825 endorsed “the rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation.” That the anti-Zionist scholars of the Quincy Institute are at odds here with their organization’s namesake is not surprising. In fact, they misunderstand John Quincy Adams’s foreign-policy thinking in general. Bacevich laments, “During the 20th century, particularly its latter half, Americans abandoned the precepts that had guided policy makers back in Adams’s day…. Meddling—always in a worthy cause, of course—became fashionable.” To him, “Adams’s singular achievement, articulated in the Monroe Doctrine, was to position the United States for hemispheric hegemony, while still heeding Washington’s dictum to avoid ‘interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe.’” He has also praised Adams for “avoiding unnecessary trouble” and continuing an American grand strategy that “emphasized opportunistically ruthless expansionism on this continent, avid commercial engagement, and the avoidance of great-power rivalries abroad.” Wertheim adds that Adams “came to strongly oppose U.S. expansionism in the 1840s and 50s.”

03/19 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Abdullah the Irrelevant of Jordan; Former Ambassador Friedman sifts through ‘transformative’ accords and their future success; Schrödinger's War: The Palestinian Redux

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Abdullah the Irrelevant of Jordan

This then brings us back to King Abdullah and his decision to prevent Netanyahu's trip to Abu Dhabi last week. If the raging success of Netanyahu's regional diplomacy causes ideological and political distress to Israel's rabidly political and ideological media, it presents a strategic challenge to Jordan and is a source of existential angst for the Hashemite regime.

The Hashemite royal house in Jordan is an artifact of Britain's colonial regime in the region a century ago. The Hashemites are a small minority of Jordan's population. And the country they control is poor, and resource-strapped. The principal source of the longevity of the Hashemite regime is Israel. Jordan is located between Israel and Iraq and shares a border with Israel and Syria. Its position has long made it a buffer state. And its (relative) moderation has served as a deterrent to Iraqi and Syrian aggression against Israel. As a consequence, Israelis – particularly Israeli military leaders – long viewed the Hashemite Kingdom as indispensable.

As things stand today, the threat of war between Iraq or Syria (or both) and Israel has never been lower. Both Iraq and Syria are failed states at advanced levels of decomposition. And as a result, today, Jordan's importance as a buffer state has never been lower.

So too, for many years, Jordan, which has long owed its financial survival to support from and the remittances of Jordanian workers in the Gulf states, served as a bridge between Israel and those states. It's been almost a decade since Jordan has been asked to serve in that capacity.

The Obama administration's decision to realign the US Middle East alliance structure towards Iran and away from Israel and America's traditional Arab allies spooked the Emiratis, Egyptians, and the Saudis sufficiently to convince them to develop defense ties with Israel. Once that happened, Jordan, which was close to the Obama administration, became more of a nuisance than a bridge.

Jordan's transformation into an irrelevancy was on display last Thursday. By blocking Netanyahu's flight to the UAE, Abdullah showed that far from a bridge, he is an obstacle to the Gulf States' ties with Israel. So too, Netanyahu's announcement – subsequently repeated by the UAE – that the Emirates intend to invest $10 billion in Israel showed that Abdullah's ability to serve either as a bridge or an obstacle to relations is a mirage.

No one cares what Jordan does.

This then brings us to the Palestinians. Aside from the PLO and its Palestinian Authority, the greatest Arab champion of the Palestinian veto over Arab-Israeli peace has been King Abdullah. Whereas Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi welcomed the Abraham Accords, Abdullah joined Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in condemning them. So too, whereas the UAE and Bahrain sent their ambassadors to the White House to celebrate when then-President Donald Trump presented his peace plan, which included Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria, Abdullah condemned the plan.

As Israel moved forward with its plan to apply its sovereignty to those areas of Judea and Samaria in accordance with the Trump plan, Abdullah let it be known that such an Israeli-US move would cause him to abrogate Jordan's peace treaty with Israel.

One of the regional developments that keep Abdullah up at night is the still-unofficial alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Abdullah lives in fear that in exchange for Saudi Arabia's official normalization of ties, Israel will provide the Saudis with an official position in managing the mosques on the Temple Mount at Jordan's expense. For its part, as the current custodian of the mosques on the Temple Mount, Jordan has torpedoed every Israeli effort to stabilize the situation at the holy site.

Former Ambassador Friedman sifts through ‘transformative’ accords and their future success

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman came to his position as an attorney without a background in politics or diplomacy. Not being allegiant to a particular point of view, he said, “gave us an open field to chart our own course which we are very proud of.”

Friedman served for four years under the Trump administration, which delivered a number of remarkable achievements for Israel, including recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; recognizing Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights; and launching an ambitious and game-changing peace plan known as the Abraham Accords.

The “us”—meaning Friedman and his team, including Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and Avi Berkowitz among others—thought the way that the United States and the rest of the world were looking at the Palestinians was that “they were giving them a pass on egregious human-rights violations, a pass on the inability of Hamas and P.A. [Palestinian Authority] to ever coalesce on anything, a pass on terrorism, a pass on pay-for-slay, a pass on not creating any of the institutions necessary for an economy … and yet people were talking about a Palestinian state.”

“This was putting the cart before the horse,” he said.

Sitting down in conversation with Martin Kramer, founding president of Jerusalem’s Shalem College, as part of this week’s Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference, Friedman said that when he came to office, “the Middle East was due for some unconventional thinking.”

The primary advantage of coming in without a diplomatic background, he said, was “not being wed to the past” and harnessing “problem-solving skills taken from past experience”as part of his career in the legal field.

Asked which conventional wisdom needed deflation, Friedman said “the most wrong was the indulgence of the Palestinian cause to the point where it negated the notion of accountability.”

“There would be this equivalence between building settlements and acts of terrorism. You can be pro or against settlements, but you cannot possibly equate the two,” he added.

Schrödinger's War: The Palestinian Redux

When discussing the Israel-Palestinian conflict, President of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes is fond of using the remarkable story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army as an analogy. Lt. Onada had been living on an island in the Philippines engaging in acts of a war that had, to the rest of the world, ended decades previously.

At the state level, Jonathan Schwarz in a 2006 Mother Jones piece aptly titled Schrödinger's War compared the schizophrenic nature of the Bush administration’s approach to the Iraq war to a well known physics conundrum:

“The famous “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment posits a situation in which, according to quantum theory, a cat could be both alive and dead. Today, America is in much the same situation. We’re not at war, since the attorney general insists Congress has not declared it. Yet at the same time, we are at war, because the entire Bush administration says so as often as possible.”

Most people in the State of Israel and around the world believe the Israel-Palestinian conflict has ended and has been since 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords, but the conflict is very much alive at the same time. While there is no negotiated solution, and acts of murder and bloodshed occur sparingly, these are frequently seen as disconnected from the reality of war as Onada was from the end of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, for us, the Palestinian leadership still very much believes they are in a war that will end in Israel’s destruction.

This might be obvious for Hamas, but it also remains true for Fatah and other groups which rule or are active in Judea and Samaria.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub has announced that Fatah urges “all the national activity factions” to run together on a joint list in the upcoming elections.

“[PFLP] emphasized its firm opposition to recognizing the racist Zionist entity, and its determination to continue with all forms of the struggle, and foremost among them armed resistance, in order to liberate every grain of the soil of Palestine,” PMW quoted Ma’an, a Palestinian Arab news agency, a day earlier.

In other words, Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is happily embracing and officially calling to partner an organization dedicated to the end of the Jewish State through violence and terror.

It might be useful to try and bring a comparison to Israeli or U.S. politics, but no party exists which calls for the violent destruction of a whole nation.

In a response to the events at Middlebury College I mentioned earlier, Max Shulman-Litwin, a member of Middlebury's Hillel, wrote an op-ed for the college newspaper explaining why Jews are uncomfortable with Students for Justice in Palestine.

Shulman-Litwin falls into a trap that many Jews do when talking about the Middle East - his arguments are wishy-washy and he agrees that Israel's critics are correct up to a point. Then he expects the readers to follow his nuanced approach of drawing a tortuous line between what they say that he(falsely) thinks is true and where they go too far.

Max's intro to the article points to how poor the entire op-ed is:

The Middlebury chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has created a website that helps us understand the extent of the suffering of the Palestinian people currently and in the past. In this op-ed, I do not deny the merit of their arguments for the rights of the Palestinian people, but I do draw attention to a harmful blind spot in their activism.

He links to the SJP website that calls Israel an apartheid state! Before he even gets to defending Israel or Jews, he essentially concedes the entire argument to those who want to destroy Israel!

Max's whole article follows the same apologetics:

This, naturally, does not mean that we may not criticize the government of the State of Israel (in which I find appalling flaws)....The state of Israel was meant to provide a safe space in which Jews could flourish free of ethnic cleansing. However, I struggle to find the words to express my lamentation for the manner in which this was carried out; rather than creating a land of emancipation and equal opportunities, those who wished to protect Jews fought fire with fire, protecting the well-being of Jews at the cost of that of Palestinian Arabs who had largely inhabited the region beforehand. The rights of those Palestinian Arabs who did not flee in many manners were infringed upon, and these people have suffered unspeakable inequality and maltreatment for decades under various Israeli administrations.

Palestinian terrorism, rejectionism, antisemitism - they aren't to be mentioned in an article showing the Jewish viewpoint of the conflict. Only supposed Jewish crimes.

Gee, thanks for your even-handedness.

And even his criticism of SJP is tempered by the idea that, sure, they don't really intend to be antisemitic when they want Israel to be Judenrein:

SJP claims that Zionism is nothing more than a colonialist ideology, going as far as entertaining the proposal that Jewish nationals return to the lands of Eastern Europe, whose peoples had so horrifically slaughtered their Jewish populations. As a result of this complacency and lack of consideration for the implications of their own demands, even if it is not their intention, SJP harmfully aligns itself with those who hope to cause the further oppression of Jews.

His watering down of SJP's desire to destroy Israel is mind-boggling:

If Palestinians Arabs inhabited the land of Israel/Palestine before 1948, and all Palestinian Arabs and their descendents are to return to their original homes, where are Jews to go as the cycle of anti-Jewish violence and antisemitism persists?...SJP does not even attempt to address this question; while their intention is righteous and ethical, the result of the policies it promotes is tolerant (or, dare I say, encouraging) of the hate that has universally plagued the Jewish people.

No, Max, their intention is not righteous and ethical. The entire point of "return" is to destroy Israel, not advocate for Palestinian rights. Read this book or watch this interview before you decide to defend a hate group like SJP.

Many of the best defenders of Israel - like Einat Wilf or the late Petra Marquardt-Bigman - are decidedly liberal. Many of them oppose settlements. But they know that those attacking Israel do not add caveats and excuses and discomfort to their arguments - they are full throated in their attacks. When Jews and Zionists do not respond in kind, the bystanders - in this case on Middlebury's campus - will naturally conclude that the antisemites are correct, because the "pro-Israel" side is agreeing with half of their premises.

This article does far more harm than good.

The Middlebury Campus should find someone who truly understands the issues to write a response showing that SJP is a hate group and that Israel is a modern, liberal, amazing Jewish state that eagerly seeks peace.

Israel is not merely a "safe space" for Jews. It is the eternal Jewish homeland. And if you don't understand that, don't act as a spokesperson who can defend Israel and Jews.

Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, has a feature in its online network where students can add what are called "go-links", shortcuts that take them to information pages. They are used to give students a quick way to get to important information, like course materials for classes or webpages for student groups.

The anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine group abused the system, creating a link called "go/apartheid" that linked to lies about Israel and creating posters and sidewalk chalk messages all over campus to encourage students to go to that link.

In response, a student named Benjamin Lesch created three links in response: go/sjp, go/palestine and go/palestinian - that linked to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs webpage “Palestinian terror and incitement.”

And then the president of Middlebury SJP, Matt Martignoni, a self-described queer Jew, created another go-link in response to Lesch, go/antisemitism, which linked to a Google Docs page (since removed) criticizing Zionism with no mention of antisemitism.

A further response, go-jewish, was made by Jews pointing to a letter explaining how Jews on campus felt attacked by the SJP go-links.

Three students and groups abused the go-link system by pointing students to pages that were not appropriate for the titles of the links. But only one of them was punished.

Lesch has been placed on indefinite leave from his positions at the campus Middlebury Consulting Group the Student Investment Committee because of what he did.

SJP and its president? Nothing. The ones who started this entire abusive use of the go-links system aren't punished at all - in fact, they are claiming to be the victims here.

Just another case of where Jewish sensitivities are ignored.

There is one other piece of hypocrisy here. The go-apartheid webpage made by SJP was created with the Wix website builder - and Wix is an Israeli company.

(h/t Andrew P)

This 16th century rabbi wrote a work on cryptography

The Seforim Blog has an article on R. Abraham Menahem ben Jacob ha-Kohen Rapa mi-Porto, a true Renaissance man and scholar.

He is best known for his work Minchah Belulah, an accessible commentary on the Torah written in response to the 1553 burning of every edition of the Talmud in Italy - an event Rabbi Menachem witnessed first hand.

But his work on cryptography is also fascinating. He wrote about it in his booklet "Zafenat Pane’ah," named after Joseph's royal Egyptian name.

According to the article, Abraham Menahem spent two years preparing Zafenat Pane’ah, and it was published in 1555. It appears that he took the method of encryption published in 1553 by Giovan Battista Bellaso and applied it to Hebrew.

Here is the page of Zafenat Pane'ah to help one encrypt (and decrypt) text:

Note the similarity with Bellaso's 1553 table, including the shifting of the alphabets.

Here's how it works. The sender and receiver of the message both know a password or passphrase that is the key. Find the row with the first letter of the key and choose the corresponding letter for the first letter of the message, and the cipher letter is the one that corresponds to it (above or below.) Then for the second letter of the message, do the same with the second letter of the key, and so forth. When you run out of letters of the key, just start at the beginning again.

Just like today, a stronger password makes it much harder to decrypt.

The receiver of the message does this in reverse, taking the first letter of the key, and choosing the corresponding plaintext on the row that has that letter.

One other very interesting thing about Rabbi Abraham Menachem is his escutcheon, his seal. It includes two topless women!

Although later versions changed the image, I verified this with the edition of Minchah Belulah that is at HebrewBooks.org:

Nudity of that type was obviously not too scandalous for 1th century Italian Jews!

Rabbi Abraham Menachem was definitely an erudite, interesting and well-read person.

(h/t YMedad)

03/18 Links Pt2: ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ is a grotesque insult; Israel Tops Resilience Index Among ME Countries; Arab Israeli Life Has Gotten Better

From Ian:

‘Israel Apartheid Week’ is a grotesque insult

Look around the Middle East. Syria still trapped in a brutal civil war. Libya in carnage, and Yemen in the grip of a fierce proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. How can anyone look at the Middle East and think the biggest problem is the region’s only democracy?

If the only country you campaign against, want to boycott or believe should be abolished is the only Jewish one, don’t tell me you’re not an anti-Semite. But the anti-Israel campaigners know what they are doing. They hope that demonising Israel with this grotesque insult will isolate the country and boost campaigns for boycotts and sanctions.

These campaigns are a barrier to a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because they drive people apart and make the prospects of negotiation and compromise more difficult. Worse still, they have a terrible impact in the Palestinian territories because boycotts and sanctions reduce economic opportunities for the very people they claim they are trying to help. This is why Britain’s role must be to promote trade, investment and economic development and to encourage dialogue, negotiation and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians.

The reality is that the pernicious boycott campaign is failing. Trade between Israel and the UK was worth a record £8 billion before the pandemic. Some 500 Israeli companies have invested in Britain, creating thousands of jobs across the UK. The country also makes a huge contribution to the NHS. One in seven of all prescription drugs is made by an Israeli pharmaceutical company, and UK and Israeli scientists are collaborating on research to develop treatments that will save lives in the UK and across the world.

Let’s celebrate and strengthen this partnership, tell the truth about this so-called Israel Apartheid Week and campaign to make sure its lies are no longer able to defile our universities and intimidate our students.

Meet the group behind Jew hate week in UK
(PSC )here they are meeting their Terrorists friends in Hamas ...Enough said . pic.twitter.com/Y6KZzGlI4d
— Jewish Human Rights Watch (@jhrwatch) March 18, 2021

Israel Tops Resilience Index Among Middle East Countries, New Study Finds

Israel is the most resilient country in the Middle East, according to a study published on Wednesday by the Institute of Economics, Society and Peace in the Middle East Studies at the Western Galilee Academic College.

The study ranked Middle East countries based on six main criteria—economic, social, gender equality, the degree of openness to globalization, ethnic variance and religious variance—using quantifiable figures from sources such as the World Bank.

Based on these criteria, researchers from a wide range of fields found that Israel is the strongest country in the region, followed by Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The countries at the bottom of the list are Jordan, Syria, Sudan and Yemen. The strength index does not account for military might, rather which reflects the degree of overall welfare among the people of each country.

In terms of economics, Israel ranked fifth, behind Qatar, Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in descending order. Israel also ranked fifth in the degree of openness to globalization, behind Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Iran. Economics might take into account factors such as total Gross Domestic Product, GDP per capita, population size, the ratio of children and elderly relative to the size of the civilian workforce and other measures.

As for social strength, Israel, as one of the only democracies in the Middle East, ranked first by a wide margin over the other countries, the vast majority of which are ruled by totalitarian regimes or monarchies.

Another variable examined by the researchers was the degree of religious variance in the respective populations. In this category, Israel ranked sixth out of 33 countries, showing religious variance to a considerable degree.

Arab Israeli Life Has Gotten Better

There have been dramatic improvements in the lives of Israel's Arab citizens over the last 15 years.

Beginning in 2006, the government funded training programs, improved educational support, subsidized employment, expanded transportation networks and built industrial parks near Arab towns.

Funding to rectify imbalances between Jewish and Arab communities has meant that 85% of homes in Arab towns are now connected to modern sewer networks, up from less than 40% in 2015.

The employment rate among Arab Israeli women ages 25-54 rose from 21% in the early 2000s to 35% in 2016.

In the 2017-2018 academic year, Arab Israelis made up 16% of college students in Israel compared to 8.3% in 1999-2000. The Technion - Israel's MIT - reports that its proportion of Arab students increased by 200% since 2004.

Arab Israelis now comprise 17% of the country's doctors, 24% of nurses and 47% of pharmacists.

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.

Check out their Facebook page.

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.