Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 22, 2021

Jordan renews $435M defense agreement with the US, Ahlam Tamimi not a factor

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said on Sunday that Jordan recently signed a defense agreement with the United States.

The agreement, which allows US forces to enter Jordan freely, was signed on January 31 and approved by the Jordanian government on February 17.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told the Jordanian parliament that "the defense agreement with the United States of America took place after lengthy negotiations. It includes 19 articles and appendices that include the legal status of the American forces and civilian employees of the US Department of Defense and it regulates the relationship between the Jordanian Armed Forces and the American forces."

Safadi added that the agreement is worth some $435 million annually to Jordan.

There is no indication that the Biden administration (or the Trump administration beforehand) even tried to condition the agreement on progress in extraditing Ahlam Tamimi, the terrorist responsible for the murder of two Americans and any others at the Sbarro pizza shop bombing.

It appears that justice for the victims of the bombing is back to becoming the lowest priority to the United States.

There is an old joke about two Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad in Czarist Russia. One tells the other that he is going to request a last cigarette, and the other says, "No! Don't make trouble!"

That is how the Jews of the UK sound in Tuvia Tenenbom's latest book, The Taming of the Jew.

The book repeats his style of his previous books - part Borat, part Columbo, but always keenly intelligent, Tenenbom travels the world with genuine curiosity to meet all kinds of people and to get them to reveal how they really feel.

In this book, he visits the United Kingdom, where he meets a serious challenge: British people don't tell the truth. A fan of theatre, Tenenbom recognizes that the reason the British are such wonderful actors on stage is because they hone their skills all their lives, rarely revealing their true feelings, and many times in this book he listens to British people saying things that are the exact opposite of the truth.

Tenenbom's journey came as the UK was grappling with Brexit and the Labour Party was grappling with its own antisemitism issues. Others have done excellent reviews of the book and there is a lot there - it is far longer than his other books.

I would like to concentrate on what he reveals about the Jewish community in Great Britain.

The first Jews he meets are small communities in Ireland, Scotland and Leeds. As he writes about the elderly Leeds community, at first they tell him that everything is great, "but if you continue talking to them, they tell you that everything is a disaster."

In Manchester, there is a significant Jewish community, thousands strong. Tenenbom asks a couple at a pizza shop if they ever heard of any antisemitism there, and they say, not at all. He then asked their eight year old son who responded that he and a friend were pelted with eggs recently because they were Jews.

The father sheepishly admitted that it was true, and then said, "What do you want me to do? If I tell you about the antisemitic attacks that we experience here, you'll write about them, inviting copycats, and more people will attack us. If I tell you that everything's good, hopefully it will be good."

That is a serious level of fear and denial. And later Tenenbom finds out that two kosher restaurants in Manchester were firebombed and spent months rebuilding. Tenenbom hears similar stories about kosher restaurants in Golders Green, the Jewish section of London. (When I visited Golders Green one weekend in the 1990s, the synagogues there were already fortresses, way before US shuls started worrying about shootings and bombings.)

I follow the news fairly closely and I was not aware of these firebombings. It seems the Jews don't want to make trouble.

In Gateshead, where there is a major yeshiva, the Jews live in absolute fear. The Jewish bookstore keeps its shutter down all the time; Jews are attacked all the time on the streets in similar ways we saw religious Jews attacked in Brooklyn. The Gateshead yeshiva itself does not allow anyone in without authorization.

The contrast between the security at the synagogues Tenenbom visits and the mosques, which are wide open, couldn't be clearer. Many British synagogues are fortresses and often do not even display their names on the outside. The world talks about Islamophobia but the houses of worship shows who really is in danger.

One other alarming episode is an interview with Lord Stone of Blackheath, who is Jewish. He is more forthcoming than most of the Jews interviewed. He is not close to right wing - he is working on a plan for Jews and Palestinians to join a federation, he has experts working on the constitution for such a Frankenstate, he thinks it is the best chance for peace. He won't directly address the Labour Party antisemitism issue, but then he says something shocking: "I have a bag which I carry everywhere. In it I have my passport nd twenty-seven different currencies. If I had to leave tomorrow, I'd go. I'm 76 and I've lived here for 76 years and I'm a member of the House of Lords and yet.....That's why I've got a flat in Jerusalem."

A Jewish Lord does not feel at home in the country he has lived in his entire life.

(Yesterday, the London Shomrim released a horrific video of a pregnant woman being attacked because she was Jewish. Tenenbom keeps the tone light, but the hate of Jews in the UK is real and dangerous.)

Tenenbom also notes how ubiquitous Palestinian flags and murals are, especially in Ireland. When he speaks to Irish people nearly all of them express hate and disgust for Israel and love of Palestinians. When Tenenbom presses them for details, they know less than nothing about Israelis nor about the Palestinians they show such solidarity with. The Palestinian issue is an excuse to hate Jews and feel righteous about it, that's all. It is proof positive that anti-Zionism is often a thin excuse for good old fashioned Jew-hatred. It is notable thatTenenbom interview a number of Jewish politicians who agree with the IHRA working definition of antisemitism but are unwilling to apply it to, say, Jeremy Corbin.

Is Tenenbom's characterization of Jews as a group that is too scared to stand up for themselves accurate? To an extent. He did interview Rachel Riley, who didn't grow up with that fear and is now an outspoken voice against antisemitism. There are other Jews in England who are not afraid to make waves with their unabashed support of Israel. But it is hard to escape the fact that so many Jews clearly are scared out of their wits, acting like the pre-war Jews in Russia and Europe who went to great lengths to "not make trouble."

It never works.

The Taming of the Jew is as funny, entertaining, and maddening as Tenenbom's other books, and it must be read.

Dayenu through a far-Left lens

Just imagining the editing session of a Jewish Voice for Peace/IfNotNow/Jewish Currents Haggadah....

03/21 Links: Will the Exodus story be the next victim of cancel culture?; What has anyone ever done for the Palestinians?; Failure to stop Iran's terror support might lead to Israel-Hezbollah war

From Ian:

Will the Exodus story be the next victim of cancel culture?

With Pesach (Holiday of Passover) literally just around the corner, should we be concerned that the story of Exodus may very well be the next victim of “cancel culture”.

The story of Exodus tells of the Jewish nation’s departure from Egypt, the revelations at Mount Sinai, and their wanderings in the desert wilderness for 40 years prior to entering the Land of Israel. The central message of Exodus was that the Jewish nation was delivered from slavery to freedom by God, and therefore became the “Chosen People” by the covenant given to the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai.

Early Christians saw the Exodus as a typological prefiguration of resurrection and salvation. The story has also resonated with other non-Jewish groups, such as the early American settlers fleeing persecution in Europe, and African Americans striving for freedom and civil rights. However, this message of liberation from slavery to redemption may very well be nothing more than a hollow manifestation of wishful thinking and a remnant of what was once accepted as progressive thinking.

Today’s progressive movers and shakers, such as Black Lives Matters and their supporters among America’s intelligentsia, academia, and media celebrities, have rendered this interpretation of Exodus no longer valid. With the proliferation of fake news alongside the unparalleled political polarization that has swept America, its makes it nearly impossible to establish an agreed-upon set of historical facts from which to draw conclusions, let alone accept the story of Exodus as a beacon of hope and freedom from slavery.

Current progressive thinking has a wholly different approach and asserts that not only are Jews to be seen as privileged whites, but that being Jewish can be invoked and used to benefit Jews as a way of intensifying someone’s status as being white. This being the case, their argument goes further and claims that essentially Jews have no right to be identified as oppressed and thus cannot claim sympathy for being slaves under Egyptian bondage. Inferred in this interpretation is that Jews should not be viewed in the same way as other minorities who have been freed from slavery. In other words, the Jewish nation's past persecution has been canceled by their present day status as white privileged.

National Review Editorial: Against California’s Ethnic-Studies Curriculum

The proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world. Even after all of the many revisions made to the document, it remains at bottom a political catechism, clearly formulated for the purpose of indoctrinating children into the intersectional electoral priorities of the far Left.

The first draft of the curriculum was so far outside the boundaries of the Overton window in California that it was rejected out of hand by the Board of Education, the governor, and even by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, who ridiculed it as an “impenetrable mélange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements.” One of its lesson plans included a list of 154 influential people of color but omitted to mention Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, or even the late congressman John Lewis. Pol Pot, however, the architect of the Cambodian genocide, did make an appearance, alongside other violent revolutionaries.

Antisemitism has also plagued the development of the model curriculum from the start. An early draft listed the anti-Semitic BDS campaign alongside Black Lives Matter and #MeToo as an example of an historic American social movement and also referred to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence only as the “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” Even in the final version of the curriculum, Jews have been relegated to an appendix. Their outsized contribution to American life does not warrant a place in the core content of the course in the eyes of the curriculum’s authors.

Jonathan S. Tobin: The Problem With Ethnic Studies Isn’t Just How It Treats Jews

The trouble with ethnic studies is that even with the more overt symptoms of anti-Jewish prejudice removed, the curriculum is still a political catechism rooted in intersectional ideology about Third World nations and people of color locked in a never-ending struggle against white oppression. The subtext is therefore still one that puts Jews in the unfortunate position of either denying their own “privilege” or being enlisted in a political struggle that has little to do with a celebration of diversity, let alone the manifold blessings of American liberty.

The disturbing aspects of this teaching go beyond the trouble it makes for Jews. After all, in California, students are only required to take three semesters of English and two of math to graduate high school. But while subjects like biology, chemistry, physics, geography, civics, history, and foreign languages are merely optional, this ideologically tainted ethnic studies curriculum will be mandatory. Think about what this means for the future of a country in which important disciplines, including those that were once correctly viewed as essential for an informed citizenry in a democracy, are ditched in favor of lessons about prioritizing race and tearing down the country.

Those who are trying to remind Californians of the struggles and achievements of Jews in America have a good story to tell that is deserving of attention. The same is true of Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and a host of other groups. But Jewish success in the United States is rooted in the core truths about that so-called “dominant” narrative about the country in which immigrants from a variety of backgrounds joined together to embrace the values and the ideas of the Founding Fathers about political and economic freedom. The same is true for the successes of every other group, including those who were subjected to far worse discrimination than the antisemitism Jews had to face.

By enshrining an ethnic-studies course into law in this manner, California has set up a destructive competition along racial, religious, and ethnic lines that makes race the primary way we all define ourselves rather than as individuals and Americans. It glorifies a struggle for “equity” in which some Americans will get privilege and power based on their group identity, rather than demanding that all are given an equal chance and judged on their own merits.

We should know the stories of all groups that make up the mosaic of American life. But the critical race theory animating this curriculum and other versions of it infiltrating into American society is a poison that undermines national identity and patriotism. Instead of Jews demanding their piece of the ethnic pie and begging that the core ideology of intersectionalism that dismisses them as privileged whites be watered down, we should be rejecting the entire edifice of this deplorable curriculum as something that will hurt all Americans.

From Time, March 29, 1954:

At dawn one day last week, a bus pulled out of the stockade at Elath, Israel's southernmost outpost and single Red Sea port. It headed north into the Negeb desert, toward Beersheba and civilization, wheezing and jogging for hours through the cratered wasteland that comprises half of Israel. The 15 passengers chatted and compared souvenirs. Outside, vultures wheeled in the pale sky.

The bus reached treacherous Scorpion's Pass, 60 miles south of Beersheba, and started up the grade like a clumsy beetle. As it neared a stone monument, erected to honor the Jews who fell in 1948 to win the Negeb, it was struck by a volley of gunfire. Ephraim Fuerstenberg, the driver, slumped dead; the bus rolled to a stop. Four passengers raced wildly through the door; a second burst spat from a hillock, and they fell lifeless onto the bleached clay. A bottle of cologne broke in the pocket of Hanna Kirshenbaum, 29, mother of three, and mingled the scent of flowers with her blood.

Two khaki-clad Arabs raced for the bus, leaped inside and sprayed it with Tommy guns. A soldier saved Ephraim's five-year-old daughter by throwing himself across her body, but he was riddled. Then the Arabs grabbed revolvers and fired into anything that twitched. "I played dead," said Miriam Lesser, a waitress. "One of the Arabs dragged me up by my hair to see if I was alive, then shot at my head but missed." A moment later, the assassins were gone.

Behind them they left eleven dead and a woman and a child critically wounded. Three shammed death. For a long time they dared not move because they heard noises. Later they learned that the sounds had been made by a dying man's feet drumming the bus floor in his last agony. Ephraim's daughter whimpered a few times; her father and mother were dead. The vultures were swooping lower and lower when an army truck twisted up the road and onto the terrible scene.

Once again—as it does almost every day—blood flowed in mockery of the state of affairs that diplomats call the Palestine truce.

Trackers traced the footsteps of approximately five people to Jordan, and the Jordanians then saw that the team split up, but they were never found. One of the IDs of a victim was found later in Gaza.

This was before 1967, before "occupation." Today, "occupation" is an excuse for Palestinian terror, but there was no such excuse before "occupation" and there was plenty of terror.

I've mentioned before that Palestinians have been protesting UNRWA's decision to a implement a "unified food basket program" where it would give all families the same food benefits and take away free food for families with a steady income.

Cash-strapped UNRWA isn't backing down, so the Palestinian protesters have been escalating their activities.

Today, the Joint Committee for Refugees closed all UNRWA service centers in the Gaza Strip for two consecutive days in protest, ensuring that no one gets food at all.

If they keep it up, UNRWA can save lots of money on food rations. Soon all recipients of food aid in Gaza can starve thanks to the people who pretend to defend them.

This is the sort of story that gets roundly ignored in the Western media, because Palestinians having reckless disregard for their own people isn't worth reporting on.

Captain Triumph was one of the many mostly forgotten superhero comics of the 1940s.

In one episode Triumph confronts a thinly disguised composite of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini named "Mussler:"

Triumph's friend pretends to be the dictator's guard, and when the Hitler character demands to know what happened to his regular assistant, he is told that his grandfather was found to be a ....unnamed type of person. Therefore he was shipped off to a concentration camp.

There has been research in how comic books in the post-war years addressed the Holocaust, but I couldn't find any mention of how the comics - which ridiculed the Axis countries often - ever hinted at the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

03/20 Links: The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy; Israel climbs to 12th spot in pandemic-focused World Happiness Report

From Ian:

The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy

Since the Biden administration’s decision to reverse the designation of Yemen’s Houthi militia as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) on February 12, drones and ballistic missiles have targeted Saudi Arabia 48 times.

The latest attack, on Saudi oil facilities in Ras Tanura, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, on Sunday, did not come from the direction of Yemen, a royal court adviser told the Wall Street Journal; declining to comment on whether the projectile was launched from Iran or from Iraq.

The removal of the Houthis from the US government’s FTO list was meant to reduce tensions, but it achieved the opposite result. At the heart of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy is a fallacy: that the region’s politics should be understood as a contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict between two states that is also a sectarian struggle.

Seen from Tehran, the central contest in the region is between the American alliance system and Iran’s self-styled “resistance alliance”.

Biden’s misconception leads to a number of erroneous ideas: that the United States can play a neutral, mediating role between Riyadh and Tehran; that by distancing itself from Saudi Arabia, it creates opportunities for regional stability and understanding; and that it is the Saudi role in Yemen – and not the Iranian role – that has perpetuated the conflict in that country.

While escalating by attacking Saudi Arabia via its proxies is a core part of Iran’s regional policies, we must not forget that Iran has waged a forty-year war to spread its control across the region — not to compete with Saudi Arabia, but to undermine the American alliance system. The Biden administration’s resurrection of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East has breathed life into one of its most inaccurate and damaging myths: the centrality of a Saudi-Iran rivalry to regional politics.

Iran’s imperial project in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon does not exist to reclaim influence from Saudi Arabia, but to upend the American security order in the Middle East. And, like Iran’s Foreign Minister, Iran’s network of terrorist groups in the region chant, “death to America,” not, “death to Saudi Arabia”.

Team Biden sees these attacks as cries for help from partners for peace. Trump-style deterrence “did not work,” b/c bad people continued to exist and do bad things. Only a new approach that calls the bad good can make the bad disappear, not unlike choosing your pronouns properly. https://t.co/MGslyaU8LY
— Mike (@Doranimated) March 19, 2021

Don't cut or condition US military aid to Israel

One of us is a member of Congress from Florida who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and used to work as a national security specialist at the Department of Defense. The other is also a former Pentagon official who now leads an organization that promotes strong U.S. defense policies, including close cooperation between the United States and Israel.

One of us is a refugee from Vietnam whose family fled a communist regime that seized power after the Vietnam War. The other is an American Jew whose ancestors fled virulent anti-Semitism in Europe. Just as the United States was a safe haven for our families, we recognize — on both an emotional and intellectual level — that the state of Israel, which reestablished ancient Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land, has been a sanctuary for millions of Jewish families enduring persecution in their native lands.

Informed by our personal and professional backgrounds, both of us believe that U.S. military assistance to Israel — beyond helping our ally to deter conflict with aggressive state and non-state actors, to prevail if conflict occurs, and to protect its civilian population from persistent rocket and missile threats — directly advances America’s national security interests. It also promotes our shared democratic values in a region of the world where autocracy predominates.

We appreciate the fact that U.S. military aid to Israel — which currently amounts to $3.8 billion a year and is used to enhance Israel’s offensive and defensive capabilities — has long enjoyed broad support from the American public, from their Democratic and Republican representatives in Congress, and from presidential administrations of both political persuasions.

It is precisely because support in this country for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship has been bipartisan that it has also been enduring.

That’s why we’ve been troubled by recent calls from U.S. political leaders in some quarters to cut security assistance to Israel, or to condition that assistance on Israel making changes to policies toward the Palestinians that these U.S. leaders find objectionable. We believe this approach is counter-productive and dangerous. (h/t jzaik)

India Israel Relations – An Overview

India-Israel relations have always been an ongoing topic for academic research and journalistic reporting, as well as a fascinating experience for practitioners. Many generations of diplomats, scholars and reporters have witnessed the unique story of the Indo Israeli journey. As a young diplomat, during the early 1970s, I was attracted by what promised to be a special partnership but lacked, at the time, political feasibility. I thus felt privileged, years later, as Ambassador to India, to contribute to the long chain of dedicated diplomats from both the countries, who brought our relations to where they stand today.

Trade between the Jews and the Indians dating hundreds of years ago, the fact that Jews were always welcome in India, never suffering from racism or discrimination were the first threads in the fabric of today’s special relations between the governments and peoples of India and Israel. Both the nations also have much in common, with shared democratic values and interests, as two relatively young societies, proud of their respective historical, cultural roots, eager to embrace the future, innovation and technology.

While India officially recognized Israel in 1950, it took four more decades until a suitable political atmosphere and political will, allowed the recognition to be translated into diplomatic relations. A ‘wind of change’ reshaping global, regional and national paradigms, also led to a new global approach to Diplomacy. The stage was thus set for 1992 to be a turning point in the emerging relations between both the nations.

Looking back at the past 29 years, two notable trends come to mind in the Indo Israeli relations: Visibility and Scope. When full diplomatic relations were established, they were kept low-key, with a conveniently, discrete emphasis on Defence. The “zero sum game” perception prevailing at the time in many Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) capitals, including New Delhi, avoided admitting publicly good relations with Israel and the Arab world at the same time. As a leader of NAM, Delhi opted to stick with the Arab countries (NAM members by themselves). This “arrangement” did not last beyond the Cold War era, as the rationale behind the low-key approach was no longer acceptable, relevant, or needed. The low-volume relations paradigm slowly shifted by the end of the 1990s. It was dramatically replaced in 2014, when the Indian Government adopted a landmark “De Hyphenation” (or “No Zero Sum Game”) policy toward West Asia: Shortly after coming to power, on July 21, 2014, the Government of India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM), the late Sushma Swaraj, stated in the Parliament, that while continuing to support the Palestinian cause (which was the overriding policy element until then), India maintains good relations with Israel. This dramatic public departure from previous policy has since been reiterated numerous times by various Indian officials, in words and deeds. Dramatic as it was then, this new approach has since become part and parcel of our relations, as acknowledged recently by EAM, Dr. Jaishankar, speaking at the opening session of Israel’s Ambassadors to Asia-Pacific Annual Conference, “the (India Israel) relationship finally enjoys the stature and visibility it deserves”.

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.