Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, April 29, 2021

04/29 Links Pt1: Israel reels from rockets, riots and arm-wrestlng; Congress Needs to Review UN Agency's Terror Finance Problem; 'There's no such thing as occupied Palestinian land,' legalist says

From Ian:

David Singer: Israel reels from rockets, riots and arm-wrestlng

Rockets from Gaza indiscriminately targeting Israel’s civilian population and Arab riots targeting Israel’s Jewish population in the streets of Jerusalem seem to have not moved Israel’s politicians to stop engaging in arm-wrestlng in pursuit of their own personal political power.

It is hard to know who is to blame for this current sorry state of affairs: the electors who have brought about - what appears on the face of it - four indecisive elections in two years – or the seemingly-intelligent politicians they have elected who have been unable to reach a compromise on setting up a Government with at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 currently-elected representatives.

A vendetta continues to be pursued to remove Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu - despite the overwhelming vote of confidence he and his party received from Israeli voters on 23 March 2021 - 1,066,892 votes.

The following leaders and their respective parties are seeking to replace Netanyahu as Prime Minister or deny him the right to head a right of centre Government:

Naftali Bennett – 273836 votes
Avigdor Liberman – 248370 votes
Gideon Sa’ar – 209161 votes

All three and their respective parties have similar policies and political ideologies as Netanyahu and his allies. Collectively - as Likud, Shas, Yemina, United Torah Judaism, Yisrael Beytenu, Religious Zionism and New Hope - they comprise 72 of the 120 Knesset members.

These three leaders need to fall in behind Netanyahu to end the political uncertainty steadily eroding Israel’s ability to deal with the challenges it is facing – not only from rockets and rioting – but from the continuing confrontation with Iran, Hezbollah, the International Criminal Court, a hostile United Nations and the Biden Administration.

That this appalling political stand-off could have also been avoided in the three previous elections is an indictment on the common obstructionist denominator in all four elections: Avigdor Liberman

Congress Needs to Review UN Agency's Terror Finance Problem

UNRWA provides no public records detailing its payments or beneficiaries from its cash assistance program. There is also no indication that U.S. authorities run clearance checks prior to making disbursements to UN agencies. In the late 2000s, congressional criticism of how the U.S. Agency for International Development handled Gaza-based assistance forced an overhaul of its anti-terrorism vetting. It now pre-clears every potential recipient of U.S. assistance, including sub-contractors. The same standard should be set for UNRWA.

In this year's foreign aid bill, Congress should condition U.S. assistance to UNRWA on thorough anti-terror vetting for all UNRWA expenditures prior to disbursement. UNRWA staff, contractors and recipients of cash assistance should be vetted to ensure that they don't have ties to terrorism. Legislation should require the State Department to halt and claw back U.S. funding if the agency declines to turn over its payroll, contractor and beneficiary information for vetting.

Congress can also legislate broader reforms. Since UNRWA is a welfare agency—not a refugee agency—the U.S. government should not use scarce refugee assistance dollars to support it. Wherever possible, assistance should transition away from UNRWA and toward bilateral aid programs that help Palestinians achieve self-sufficiency. Any contribution to UNRWA should also be contingent on allowing the U.S. to independently audit its books. American taxpayers should not trust China with ensuring UNRWA's financial transparency.

Congress should consider two other conditions for future assistance to UNRWA: verification that textbooks used in UNRWA schools do not include anti-Semitic content, incitement or extremism and a requirement that UNRWA return all contributions should the U.S. discover its facilities are being used by terrorist organizations to store weapons or equipment.

UNRWA's steering millions of dollars to terror group affiliates should alarm U.S. taxpayers and their representatives in Congress. If the Biden administration wants to restart U.S. funding to UNRWA, congressional appropriators should insist that funding be contingent on verifiable reform. Congress must ensure that humanitarian aid reaches the Palestinian people, not terrorist group affiliates.

'There's no such thing as occupied Palestinian land,' legalist says

Dr. Jacques Gauthier is a Canadian lawyer and international law expert who is currently the greatest expert on the San Remo Conference, during which the legal infrastructure for the Jewish state was laid in 1920.

Gauthier, whose life's work has been devoted to proving the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria under international law, says the question of the legitimacy of the settlement enterprise – and the legal basis of Israel's very existence – is one of crucial importance.

He believes that for Israel and the Jewish people, it is imperative not to lose sight of what was theirs in the past.

Over the past two decades, the legal arena has become rife with propaganda by left-wing organizations and by the Palestinians, giving way to the rise of a new term: Lawfare- the misuse of legal systems and principles against with aim to delegitimizing the adversary, wasting their time and money, or winning a public relations victory.

In this reality, the question is simple, Gauthier says: Are Jews living east Jerusalem, or as settlers in Judea and Samaria, or in Hebron, or even within the Green Line legal residents? Do they own land and property that are not actually theirs?

Israel's critics, he explained, claim that Jews should be barred from living in certain areas in the country, so the question of justice and sovereignty is crucial because if the right granted over the entire territory exists within the framework of international law – then the Jews are not in breach of the law.

According to Gautier, Israel lacks sufficient understanding and recognition of the historical rights of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.

Amb. Alan Baker: Refuting the Palestinian Allegation to the ICC that Israeli Settlements Are a War Crime

Israel’s settlement activity cannot be considered as a “war crime” in the context of the ICC Statute. The overriding criteria established by the Statute for war crimes include the requirement that such activity be “part of a plan,” “done on a large scale,” and be “of sufficient gravity as to justify further action by the Court.” Israel’s settlement activity does not fill any of these overriding criteria. Therefore, the allegation of a war crime cannot be considered admissible by the Court.

Israel’s settlement activity is conducted in accordance with the requirements of international customary law, which enables the legitimate use of state and non-privately owned land and property, pending resolution of the conflict. Strict measures are taken by Israel’s investigative and judicial authorities to ensure that violations of laws and norms are duly investigated and prosecuted. Israel’s ongoing legal and juridical supervision fulfills the complementarity requirement of the ICC Statute.

The most important legal document used to evaluate the legality of Israel’s settlement activity has been the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. As clarified by the ICRC Official Commentary to that document, the population transfer prohibition set out in the Convention was specifically drafted to address a repeat of the mass, forced population transfers conducted by the Nazis during the Second World War. As such, it is not applicable to Israel’s settlement activity.

The “transfer” prohibition in Article 8 of the ICC Statute does not reflect established international law inasmuch as it was deliberately tailored and manipulated to address Israel’s settlement activity. As such, Israel’s settlement activity cannot be seen to fulfill the Statute’s overriding requirement that such a crime be within the “established framework of international law.”

The Oslo Accords established an agreed legal regime enabling each party to conduct planning, zoning, and construction activities within the areas under its respective jurisdiction, pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations. Israel’s investigative and judicial institutions regulate all such construction activity, including, where necessary, investigating and prosecuting violations. Such activity fulfills the complementarity requirement of the ICC Statute.

Israel’s official governmental commission to investigate the legality of construction in the territories established strict criteria prohibiting seizure and use of private property in violation of international law and requiring that construction be carried out in accordance with the law. The observance of such criteria fulfills the complementarity requirement of the ICC Statute.

The Joshua and Caleb Network: Joe Biden's Undercover Building Freeze - on Israel

Adventure Show #2 is here! This week, we’re answering a similar question to our first adventure show, but in a different location. Is there a Jewish housing crisis inside the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria? You might be shocked to find out the answer.

We started the day by visiting what some might call an Israeli outpost. There we talked to Nati Rom, Jewish attorney and a settlement founder. Nati explained how building Jewish homes in the heartland is vastly different than building Arab homes.

The second half of the show we visited an established Israeli settlement that is home to more than 3,000 Jewish people. Here we hear from the city manager, Chaim Margolis about the difficulties that the community faces when building and expanding, even after being in existence for 30+ years!

As the Palestinian Authority and the anti-Israel Left say that Israel has not been helping Palestinians during the COVID-19 crisis, the actual statistics of what Israel has provided the PA from last March through the end of 2020 shows that these are all lies.

According to data provided by the Civil Administration to the organization Im Tirtzu, during 2020 Israel transferred:

110 respirators,

170 monitors,

109 oxygen generators,

87 intensive care beds,

86 hospital beds,

2,313,050 surgical masks,

312,724 N95 masks,

6,967,823 surgical gloves,

248,544 PCR kits

Another 244,500 test kits.

Some of the equipment was transferred by Israel and some by international organizations.

In addition, Israel treated about 20 Palestinian COVID patients in Israeli hospitals, one of whom came from the Gaza Strip.

We don't know what the numbers have been since January.

(h/t iTiIL972)

Human Rights Watch racist propaganda, illustrated

The antisemitic Human Rights Watch report that says that Israeli Jews are guilty of apartheid features three graphics that purport to show how unequal the lives of Palestinians and Jews are between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.

Here's one:

This is propaganda. HRW chooses specific facts, ignores counter-examples, and even lies about the ones it lists.

For example, pre-COVID, tens of thousands of Palestinians visited Jerusalem and even all of Israel for Ramadan. Scroll through Palestinian Facebook pages to see that a large percentage feature photos of them smiling in front of the Dome of the Rock.

Jews have received administrative detention.

Peaceful protesters in the West Bank do not get arrested - only people who encourage or participate in violence.

Jews have to jump through a great deal of hoops to build homes in Judea and Samaria, and there are often freezes - hardly ever publicized.

I made a similar poster to show how this propaganda works - by using the exact same methods to prove the opposite:

If anything, my cherry picked facts are more accurate than HRW's.

The other HRW graphics are equally deceptive. For example, they compare a Jew in an Israeli community to a Bedouin Israeli in an illegal Negev village. If Jews would build haphazard villages in the middle of state land, their homes would be uprooted far faster than the Bedouin structures have been. Even in Judea and Samaria, Israel has demolished Jewish communities built illegally. Israel has built new, recognized communities for the Bedouin, with infrastructure, and have offered to give them free houses and land plots. That doesn't happen to Jews!

However, HRW's infographics are far worse than just being filled with highly selected half-truths and propaganda. They actually cross the line into racism.

Look at the pictures they used to illustrate what Jews and Palestinians look like:

The Jews all have lighter skin. The Jews have light, straight hair. The Palestinians have darker skin and wavy/curly hair.

Both Ashkenazic and Mizrahi Jews tend more towards darker complexion and curly hair. In fact, traditional antisemites actually obsess over Jewish curly or kinky hair as proof of Jewish racial inferiority.

The new antisemites, represented by this Human Rights Watch report, say that Jews have no semitic features or dark skin. The new antisemitism wants to paint Jews as white supremacists, so instead of caricaturizing of Jews as swarthy and coarse as the old antisemites do, they characterize them as being fully white - in a universe where whiteness is something distasteful and darker people are the only righteous people.

This racism is an exact mirror image of racism in the "old" antisemitism. While these new antisemites stress how anti-racist they are, this is proof that they are no different from the old antisemites. The entire point of the illustrations is to subconsciously make the reader believe that only Arabs are indigenous and Jews have no ties to the land that they have prayed to return to for thousands of years.

Those with a worldview that white people are superior say Jews are not white. Those with a worldview that white people are racist say Jews are white. What is the difference between these two types of racism and antisemitism?

I would say that this race-centered antisemitism is ironic coming from a supposed human rights group, but human rights groups have long ago shown that they support human rights only for those they deem worthy. Defining Jews as white leads to the conclusion that Jews do not have human rights worth fighting for.

Fakhri Abu Diab, an anti-Israel activist from east Jerusalem who gets lots of interviews with fellow Israel-haters, is accusing Israel of erasing Palestinian history.

Naturally, he is doing it by trying to erase Jewish history.

In an article in Safa, also published in a Jordanian news site, Abu Diab complains about a new tourist center Israel is building near the Western Wall.

The researcher in Jerusalem affairs, Fakhri Abu Diab, says occupation authorities have taken advantage of the "Corona" period and the decrease in tourism movement in the city of Jerusalem to accelerate the establishment of a Judaic tourist center at the bottom of Al-Buraq Square [the Western Wall plaza.]

He explains that the occupation continued its excavations under the Al-Buraq Wall to establish huge religious and tourist Jewish halls and centers to serve Israelis and extremist settlers, and to establish their Talmudic rituals and prayers.

According to Abu Diab, the tourist center includes several halls and small rooms for displaying films, video clips and theatrical plays that explain false Talmudic narratives, and simulate an alleged Jewish civilization and history, at the expense of real Palestinian narratives.

He added that the center also includes a small hall inside which clothes, collectibles, and tools written on it from the days of the Temple period are displayed for the service of the “temple priests,” and that it also contains pictures of the alleged “temple,” and that there is no other people or civilization in this place.

It states that Jewish guides will supervise the tourist center, by providing historical information about the alleged "Temple", the so-called "Holocaust", and the establishment of the "Occupation State"; To familiarize Jewish and foreign visitors and tourists with the history of the Jews and their forged civilization, and to brainwash them.

Several main Jewish institutions, namely the "Israeli Antiquities Authority, the Ministry of Jerusalem Affairs, the Wailing Legacy Committee, the Wailing Development Fund, the Ministry of Religions, the Occupation Municipality in Jerusalem, and settlement associations" are working to Judaize the Al-Buraq Wall.

Funny, the Israel Foreign Ministry has a page celebrating those Muslim Umayyad palaces that Israeli archaeologists discovered to the south of the Temple Mount, and anyone can visit them today.

Jews are as bad at destroying Muslim antiquities as they are at genocide.

A couple of @HRW memes

I often never get to post the memes I post on Twitter.

04/28 Links Pt2: Human Rights Watch’s long war against Israel; News Fit and Unfit to Print; Jewish Groups Mark Two-Year Anniversary of Deadly Passover Shooting at Poway Chabad

From Ian:

Human Rights Watch’s long war against Israel

HRW also refers to 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, maliciously blurring the distinctions between Arab-Israeli citizens, and Palestinians living under autonomous self-rule in the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority, and in Gaza, under Hamas’s brutal dictatorship.

HRW further erases the distinct identity of Israel’s Arab citizens by lumping them under the blanket term “Palestinian,” although only 7 percent identify as such, and many belong to minority religious or cultural communities, such as Druze, Bedouin, Christian Aramean and Circassian.

In HRW’s fantasy world, Palestinian terror is practically non-existent. According to HRW, most Israeli security measures “have no legitimate security justifications.” HRW’s dismissal of Israeli security concerns entirely ignores or whitewashes the thousands of Israelis brutally murdered or maimed by ongoing Palestinian terror.

Finally, HRW dishonestly claims that Gaza is under Israeli occupation and blames the humanitarian crisis there solely on Israel, despite Egypt’s blockade of its borders and the fact that Israel withdrew from it completely in 2005. The Hamas terror organization has exclusively ruled Gaza since 2007, and is solely responsible for its failed rule and resulting humanitarian catastrophe.

It is worth recalling that this compulsive singling out of Israel for unjustified opprobrium led HRW’s own founder, Bob Bernstein, to write in 2009 that the organization had “lost critical perspective” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, warning that if it failed to rectify this, it risked seriously undermining its credibility. Twelve years later, one must ask, does HRW have any real credibility on this topic?

HRW’s report is another shot fired in the war to disenfranchise the Jewish people and criminalize the Jewish state.

Jews are no strangers to hysterical blood libels, hurled throughout history. Our response must be the same as that of Ambassador Chaim Herzog to the infamous 1975 U.N. “Zionism is Racism” resolution, of which this report is a natural continuation: “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution, based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value.”

Seth Frantzman: Human Rights Watch really wants to push Israel and PA into one state

AT THE end of the day, the Palestinian leadership doesn’t want to surrender its autonomy and become part of Israel, and neither does Hamas in Gaza. The illusion that these areas are all seeking to be part of one state is used to present the area as a single entity.

There is no way, presented within these new human rights reports, for Israel to ever not control the “single entity.” Despite the fact that various accords and UN plans and resolutions have indicated that these are not the same entity – but, rather, are defined as two states, an autonomous region, or “occupied” territory – the new reports seek a one-state analysis.

This definition may be designed to delegitimize Israel – because forcing the Jewish state to retake all these areas, and thus arguing it must grant citizenship to millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, inevitably creates a road to a so-called “binational” state which would no longer have an Israeli majority.

Pro-binational arguments have been advanced for years without any evidence that the vast majority of people want this future. It would make more sense if half the people in the “single” area wanted a binational, one-state end result. That they do not and that they have lived apart for decades, and that Israel has improved its human rights record across the “single” area, indicates that advocating for this analysis has an agenda.

It remains to be seen if this new push will catch on among Western countries, which are the natural targets of this talking point. The fact that large parts of the world have less interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and many states already recognize a Palestinian state, as opposed to recognizing the Palestinian state as part of Israel, would appear to negate the “river to the sea” analysis.

The reports may have been designed to preempt the fact that Palestinians and Israelis are growing apart and to prevent a Palestinian state from becoming more autonomous. While it not clear whether the Palestinians are on board with this idea, Israel is clearly not.

This is a great resource from @The_ILF, that contains:

✅ Original @hrw report
✅ Public statements from Israeli Government officials
✅ In-depth reports responding to #HRWLies
✅ Visuals & graphics
✅ Articles, opinion pieces and statements from NGOs https://t.co/PSOyQbhdZa
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) April 27, 2021

Watchdog slams human rights group for branding Israel an apartheid state

In its report, HRW is calling on the international community to support the BDS campaign, calling for an embargo, banning entry of Israeli citizens, freezing assets, and banning business deals with Israelis. It also called on the Palestinians to end the security coordination with Israel, a move contrary to all values of human rights and non-violence.

"The distorted reality presented by Human Rights Watch is part of its ongoing political and obsessive campaign against Israel in recent years," Strategic Affairs Minister Michael Biton said.

The Israel legal system is one of the most respected ones in the democratic world. It works tirelessly to protect civil and human rights. The HRW report has nothing to do with human rights. It only aims to discredit Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, Biton said.

Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum, an Israel-based global network of lawyers dedicated to fighting antisemitism, terrorism, and the delegitimization of Israel in the international legal arena, issued a statement denouncing HRW.

The group's report accusing Israel of apartheid "is just the latest attack in HRW's longstanding and relentless obsession and lawfare campaign against the State of Israel.

"Written under the guise of 'international law and human rights,' this report is replete with malicious lies and gross distortions of truth and law while peddling in unhinged hate, incitement, and racist stereotypes.

"In short, this report is tantamount to an antisemitic 'blood libel' against the Jewish state," he said.

Thirty-six rockets were fired at Israel on Friday night, disturbing the Sabbath peace of Israeli civilians living in the south of Israel. Three more rockets were shot into Southern Israel on Saturday night, with a further three rockets launched at Israel on Sunday night. Where I live, in Efrat, rockets are so rare as to be almost nonexistent. But where my grandchildren live, in the South, rockets are the norm. What does it feel like to be targeted, to live with sirens and explosions, ruined homes and death?

I put the same five questions to each of three women in Southern Israel, all of them native English speakers, and all of them teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL), to see how they cope under fire.

First, a bit about the women:

Adele Raemer

Born in the United States, Adele Raemer has lived on Nirim, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza, since 1975. A mother and grandmother, Raemer founded and moderates Life on the Border, a Facebook group active since 2011, depicting life in that region. A teacher of EFL, Raemer is also an EFL teacher trainer and counselor for the Israeli Ministry of Education and a Tech Integration Coach.

Aside from all these qualifications and the rest of her busy life, Adele is a blogger and dedicated YouTuber on the subject of all things digital, and other things, too. You might, for instance, hear her talk about her side-gig as a trained medical clown. Raemer spends a lot of time with the kids in the pediatric ward in the hospital in Ashkelon. Then again, there are her diplomatic activities. An independent investigative committee invited her to address the UN in November 2018 to bear witness to the border situation, and in December 2019, Raemer addressed the UN Security Council at the request of the US ambassador to the UN.

Miriam Goodman

Miriam Goodman is from Montreal and Hamilton, Ontario. Along with her husband Avraham, Miriam lives in Ma'agalim. The couple have lived in Israel for 27 years.

Prior to making Aliyah, Miriam was a preschool teacher. In Israel she tutored children in EFL for many years, until her retirement. She adores her dog, Patches.

Esther Revivo

Esther Revivo made aliya in 1977 straight after college. Revivo married an Israeli of Moroccan extraction and after a year of study for Esther at the Michlala Seminary in Jerusalem, the couple moved to Netivot. Esther taught EFL, first for 19 years in a comprehensive high school and then for 22 years in a local religious high school in Netivot. Revivo remarks that so many years later, she is still “in love” with Netivot, where today she runs a bridal gemach (free loan society) collecting and distributing dowry items to poor brides of all backgrounds who live in her city. Esther’s gemach is recognized by Israeli nonprofit Yad Eliezer.

Now our Q&A:

Varda Epstein: Can you describe how you feel, including any physical manifestations you experience when the siren goes off?

Adele Raemer: You go into fight or flight mode and of course, this isn’t a question of “fight.” It is flight. Your heart rate goes from zero to two hundred in a nanosecond. I personally grab my phone and run. During times of escalation I’m always careful to have my phone near me so that I can be in touch in case anything happens when I’m in the safe room or in case family are worried and I want to tell them how I am. Your heart will go from zero to two hundred in a nanosecond but getting it back down after you hear the explosion, after it’s over, that takes a while, and if that wakes you up in the middle of the night it’s not easy getting back to sleep. But during times of escalation you are in a period of being super-aware, super-sensitive . . . tension . . . every little sound, you think it’s the start of a red alert siren or something exploding nearby. It’s tense.

Miriam Goodman: Varda, my first thoughts are Oh no! Hamas is firing rockets again. I say a prayer, “Hashem, may no one be injured,” and I go and check my messages to see where the rocket was sent.

"I Say tehillim"

Esther Revivo: My heart stops for a moment and I rush to the safest place in my home (as we have no mamad [safe room, V.E.]) and wait to hear the boom. I say tehillim [psalms, V.E.] while waiting.

When the Iron Dome takes a rocket down that's one heck of a loud boom. I am then filled with such anger I can't express it adequately, for although I do stress over little things, the rockets don't faze me—not me or my husband. However, my heart bleeds for the many pupils at my high school who are terrified and have heard sirens in such areas as Moshav Shokeda and in Sderot, since they were born.

Additionally, many of the old buildings like ours in Netivot lack a mamad and that is awful for anyone who panics when the sirens go off. They've nowhere to go!

Varda Epstein: How does rocket fire—even when it’s not daily—change your daily life and routine?

Adele Raemer: It’s sort of like [coronavirus] in that you get messages all of a sudden that you didn’t expect and I didn’t know if I was going to be going into school this morning until I woke up this morning and saw that there were no messages canceling and just saying that school is on as usual which is kind of difficult to swallow, because you can go from zero to two hundred, but as I said, going back to feeling safe and normal and calm is not easy, and you can certainly feel it in the students as well.

During periods of escalation when I’m walking around, I constantly have in mind: "If there’s a red alert, now where I would run to?"

The Other Shoe

Miriam Goodman: It doesn’t. I continue doing whatever I was doing. If we have to go out, we follow the instructions of the IDF. If they say, “Don’t go out,” we don’t. The only exception is in the middle of the night. If the siren wails, I stay awake, waiting for the other (next) shoe to drop.

Esther Revivo: It doesn't change my daily routine at all, except that I can't invite my children and grandchildren during a tense period like the present. Not only because we lack a mamad, but because even with a mamad, many of their children get hysterical when a siren goes off.

My daughter who lives locally, flees Netivot when things get tense, as she lives in a rented apartment on the top floor. Last year, a bunch of balloons with a grenade attached to them landed on a tree outside of her building and in Tzuk Eitan [Operation Protective Edge, 2014, V.E.], their living room windows were blown out when a rocket landed nearby.

Varda Epstein: Can you talk about how your children or grandchildren are affected by rocket fire?

Adele Raemer: My daughter lives here on the kibbutz. She has children of her own. It is very, very, very difficult for her and I was actually very surprised a few years back when I realized that she did plan on settling here and building her house here. Her children are very young and they hadn’t experienced a red alert in quite a while, but you know, they talk about it in the children’s houses and at home and they know what to do. I don’t know how my three-year-old granddaughter reacted when there was a red alert here last night on the kibbutz. That’s probably the first time there was a red alert that she heard, the first red alert that she remembers, because before that she was a little baby.

First sound: Boom, Boom!

Miriam Goodman: Seven of my grandchildren have lived with terror all their lives. Our youngest grandson was born during a terror attack when a rocket was fired at Beersheva and exploded outside of Soroka Hospital. His first sound on this side of the world was “Boom, Boom!”

Usually, the kids will sleep in the bomb shelter if there are more than a couple of rockets.

Esther Revivo: My local grandchildren are used to being packed into a car and zoomed up to Central Israel. My other daughter, who used to live in Netivot, now lives in Ofakim, which has not, during the past 2 years, had any rockets. When she lived here they had a mamad. However, when they visited us once during a siren her children were terribly scared. We adults were calm, so they didn't become hysterical, but they were clearly very, very scared.

Varda Epstein: Would you move if you could? Why/Why not?

Adele Raemer: No! No. This is my home. I had my children here. I raised my family here. My parents are buried here. My husband is buried here. There’s no reason for me to move. And if you’re in Israel, where is it safe?

You go to Ashkelon, there’s rockets. You go to Beersheva, they have rockets, too. Tel Aviv has had periods with buses exploding, and Jerusalem certainly isn’t the quietest place, either. Where in the world isn’t there terror, these days?

So, no. I wouldn’t move because this is my home and I love it and it’s 95 percent heaven (and five percent hell.)

"My Homeland"

Miriam Goodman: Never! Israel is my homeland. I live in the biblical area known as Gerar. This is where Avraham Avinu (Abraham the Patriarch) set up his tents, where his animals grazed, and where he conducted his business affairs. Arabs will never throw me off my land.

Esther Revivo: No, NEVER! Because I adore Netivot! This town has a unique character or “nature” if you will. Netivot lacks the polarization one might find elsewhere. Folks whom others might label according to sector: secular; National Religious; Haredi; Ethiopian; or Russian; and etc. coexist in our town in harmony. A dear Ethiopian friend of mine told me once that Netivot is Gan Eden for precisely this reason.

Varda Epstein: What’s the solution to these attacks from Gaza?

Adele Raemer: I don’t know what the solution is. I’m just an English teacher. You need to ask the politicians who aren’t quite doing their job now because they’re so busy trying to figure out who’s in charge and who has what position and it’s not a very good opportunity for getting things done.

In fact there are a NUMBER of possible solutions, and they run the gamut between all out war to diplomacy, including to recognizing Hamas as the de-facto government and talking to them..... and other options in between. All options have high prices to pay.

The danger with all out war is that you know how it begins, but you can't know where it will end. When you go into a war, you need to be willing and ready to go ALL THE WAY. That would mean being willing to totally flatten Gaza into a parking lot, (which we have the capability of doing, but I do not believe is something any of us want).

Unfortunately, our government is not doing anything now - we had a year of #CORONAQuiet when the issue was easily swept under the table, pushed aside for more "urgent" issues. It's time the Western Negev got back ON the table, and in a BIG way. To finally deal with it seriously, thoroughly, in one way or another. Of course, personally, I believe diplomacy will get us much farther than warfare, and I don’t believe that route has ever really been seriously, thoroughly, attempted.

Miriam Goodman: Hit them hard by air and by sea. No boots on the ground, unless absolutely necessary. Forget the world and their condemnation. Place serious sanctions on Gaza. Close all the checkpoints and crossings. Give them no humanitarian aid: nothing goes in. Right now all we do is give a little slap on the hand and say “Nu, nu, nu!”

"Ho Hum. What’s for Dinner?"

Esther Revivo: I have no idea. What I will say is that I am totally fed up at being ignored by our government. It's as though, "Ho hum, rockets in Sderot. What's for dinner?"

Rockets in Netivot, Sderot, Ashkelon, and the Gaza Envelope are considered A-OK. Only if Beersheva is rocketed or somebody dies, chalila [Heaven forbid, V.E.], will the government do something, but even then—it is only a stopgap measure.

Our Enemies Deploy the Cognitive Bomb (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

The first thing you need to know about the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report that was released on 27 April accusing Israel of “apartheid” is that the accusation has nothing to do with apartheid as most people understand it, the racially-based system of oppression that was in place in South Africa before roughly 1991.

HRW is accusing Israel of “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution,” which are defined by a treaty called the “International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid,” based on a UN General Assembly resolution passed in 1973, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

It should be noted that neither Israel nor the USA are parties to either treaty. The 1973 convention was signed by 109 countries, which do not include Israel, the USA, Canada, Australia, or any of the developed countries of Western Europe.

Here is the definition of the crime of apartheid as understood by HRW:

1. An intent to maintain domination by one racial group over another.
2. A context of systematic oppression by the dominant group over the marginalized group.
3. Inhumane acts.

The “inhumane acts” referred to by the definition include such things as murder, torture, “arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment,” forced labor, “deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part,” all on the basis of race or ethnicity. While Palestinians often claim such mistreatment, their claims – often amplified and lent authority (the “halo effect”) by HRW and similar NGOs – are overwhelmingly false, exaggerated, or lacking in context (e.g., the claim is commonly made that a Palestinian was “executed” when he was shot in the act of stabbing a Jew or running one down with a car).

HRW also adds that

The reference to a racial group is understood today to address not only treatment on the basis of genetic traits but also treatment on the basis of descent and national or ethnic origin, as defined in the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. Human Rights Watch applies this broader understanding of race.

In other words, apartheid doesn’t have to involve “race.” Any alleged discrimination against a national group can be considered apartheid. And given that “Palestinians” have diverse origins, including Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Jordan, Turkey, and even the same Canaanite tribes as the forbears of the Jewish people, they don’t even fit this broader definition.

When I hear “apartheid” I think of white, black, and colored beaches and restrooms, laws against interracial marriage or even sexual relationships, laws establishing segregated housing, employment, and public transportation, denial of the right to vote or hold office, and so forth. I think of official classification of people by color. It is not an exaggeration to say that such a system, brutally imposed by force (as it was in South Africa), is a crime against humanity.
And that, of course, is why HRW, an organization that has changed over the years from a legitimate human rights watchdog into part of the well-oiled (and thickly greased with dollars and euros) machine for the delegitimization and demonization of Israel, wishes to accuse the Jewish state of apartheid, a crime that today evokes revulsion throughout the world – and which, following the precedent set by the treatment of the Republic of South Africa, justifies the boycotting, sanctioning, and total expulsion from the international order of Israel.

As the Kohelet Forum notes in its response to the report, no country other than South Africa has ever been deemed an “apartheid state” by a majority of the international community, including China, Sudan, and others that have engaged in massive systematic oppression of minorities.
None of the characteristics of South African apartheid can reasonably be applied to Israel. Everyone who knows anything about apartheid South Africa and Israel knows that. There is simply no resemblance, and HRW’s abstraction of the crime of apartheid and application of the word to Israel is dishonest and is part of the cognitive war that is being waged against her as a prelude to her hoped for physical destruction.

But never mind. Israel is being accused of seriously mistreating Palestinian Arabs, both its Arab citizens and the residents of the Palestinian Authority and Gaza, simply because they are Palestinians. If that is true, it is certainly reprehensible. So we should consider if the report even succeeds in making that case.

The report is 213 pages long, so it is impossible for me to critique it in detail in a short blog. But here are some things that I noticed in the first few pages (see the Kohelet response to HRW for more):

The report says that

From 1967 until the present, [Israel] has militarily ruled over Palestinians in the OPT, excluding East Jerusalem. By contrast, it has since its founding governed all Jewish Israelis, including settlers in the OPT since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, under its more rights-respecting civil law.

This is untrue. There is no military government in Gaza – there is zero Israeli presence there at all – and areas A and B of Judea and Samaria are ruled by the PA. There is a military administration of Area C, the territory that is under full Israeli control according to the Oslo Accords, but that administration governs both Israeli communities and Palestinian ones. There is no “separate law” for the two populations.

In general, the report ignores the existence of the PA and the Hamas government of Gaza. It’s true that Israel controls the borders and airspace between the river and the sea (with the exception of the border between Gaza and Egypt). But it does not control the daily lives of all of the residents of those areas as the report asserts.

HRW criticizes Israel for not allowing free movement of Palestinian Arabs from the territories into pre-1967 Israel, and for not allowing those Arabs outside of Israel recognized by the UN as “Palestinian refugees” to enter the territories or pre-1967 Israel. It dismisses Israeli explanations that this is a consequence of the amply-demonstrated Palestinian propensity to commit murderous terrorist acts against Israelis, saying “[e]ven when security forms part of the motivation, it no more justifies apartheid and persecution than it would excessive force or torture.” Tell it to those thousands of Israelis who have lost friends and family members to Palestinian terrorists.

There is almost no mention of Palestinian terrorism throughout the full report, even though most restrictions placed on Palestinian movement, such as the Judea/Samaria security barrier, were instituted after the murderous Second Intifada, in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered by terrorists. The selective blockade of Gaza is criticized without reference to the thousands of rockets that have been fired into Israeli towns, or the numerous tunnels intended to infiltrate terrorists into Israel. There is no mention of the 2015-2018 “stabbing intifada” which took the lives of dozens of Israelis.

The report claims that within pre-1967 Israel, “Palestinian [sic] citizens [have] a status inferior to Jewish citizens by law” as a result of the Nation-State Law, which in fact does not restrict them in any way, and which is similar to constitutional provisions in other ethnic nation-states, including the proposed constitution for the State of Palestine. It also invents or misrepresents other laws, including those concerning citizenship and residence.

The report will probably be a prime exhibit in the upcoming “Durban IV” conference on racism which will be held this September at the UN in New York, on the 20^th anniversary of the first Durban conference, which devolved into an “anti-Israel hate-fest.”

Accusations of apartheid and persecution are tremendously powerful, especially in the US in today’s climate of racial antagonisms. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is actually a national/political one, and not a racial one (although antisemitism plays an important role). It has little in common with pre-1991 South Africa or the racial problems of the USA. It is also a small part of a much larger project by a group of nations, international institutions, NGOs, and others to eliminate the Jewish state. These antagonists are motivated by geopolitics, religion, ideology, antisemitism, or all of these. By focusing only on the Palestinians, the HRW report has the effect of hiding this broader context.

Israel’s domestic political paralysis, which has been ongoing for at least two years, makes it hard enough to respond to the military challenges it faces from its enemies. But it is impossible for an essentially leaderless nation to properly fight a cognitive war. Fixing this has to be Israel’s top priority today.

04/28 Links Pt1: EU moves to stop funding Palestinian terrorists, inciting textbooks; Abbas Unleashes Profane Rant Against Rest of the World; Where John Kerry’s truth lies; Washington’s Weirdest Think Tank

From Ian:

EU moves to stop funding Palestinian terrorists, inciting textbooks

The European Parliament Wednesday reaffirmed its commitment to ensure EU funds do not reach anyone affiliated with terrorists. It also rapped UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, for iinciting hate and violence in their textbooks.

The legislature’s annual budgetary report says the EU must “thoroughly verify” that its funds are not “allocated or linked to any cause or form of terrorism and/or religious and political radicalization.” Any funds that did go to any person or organization with terror ties must be “proactively recovered, and recipients involved are excluded from future Union funding.”

The article in the report came following an ongoing dispute between Palestinian NGOs and the EU over the affiliations of some of the organizations’ leadership and employees. Palestinian NGOs demanded that the EU erase a stipulation that aid can only be sent to organizations without ties to EU-designated terrorist groups, claiming that groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is designated a terrorist group in the EU, US, Canada and Israel, and has been responsible for many terrorist attacks on Israelis, are political parties.

Last March, EU Representative to West Bank and Gaza Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff wrote in an official letter to the Palestinian NGO Network that said as there are no Palestinian individuals on the EU’s “restrictive measures list” which bars funds to terrorists, NGOs would not be penalized if members of terrorist groups benefit from their EU funding. The Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned EU Ambassador Emanuele Giaufret to protest the policy, following Jerusalem Post reporting on the letter.

The new guideline doubles down on the European Parliament’s commitment to prevent EU donations from ending up in the hands of terrorists, by calling for proactive recovery of funds.

Palestinian President Unleashes Profane Rant Against Rest of the World

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas was recently caught badmouthing several countries, including the United States and his Arab neighbors, during a profanity-laced rant that raises new concerns about the 85-year-old leader's deteriorating health.

The Arabic language rant is renewing speculation that Abbas—who is overweight and a heavy cigarette smoker—is in poor mental and physical health as he carries out his 16th year in office. His government is under great strain amid monumental regional shifts that have seen Israel make peace with its traditional Arab foes.

When asked by an unidentified attendee at the Fatah political party's April 19 meeting what his message to China is on the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Abbas went ballistic.

"Fuck the c—t of China with a shoe!" Abbas screamed, according to an independent Arabic translation of his remarks provided to the Washington Free Beacon. "That good for you?"

After pausing for a few seconds, Abbas continued yelling: "And Russia, America, and all the Arabs. What's wrong with you? All of you go to hell!"
Leaked audio recording of Mahmoud Abbas cussing out Russia, the Arabs, and China (Fatah Central Committee meeting April 19,2021) pic.twitter.com/bLngjLMXl8
— Fadi Elsalameen فادي السلامين (@Elsalameen) April 22, 2021

The rant raises new questions about Abbas's health ahead of Palestinian elections scheduled for late May. The president's age and deteriorating health have been a much-discussed topic in the Israeli and Arab media for years, and it still remains unclear who is poised to succeed him. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been mostly dormant in the wake of Israel's landmark peace agreements with leading Arab nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Jonathan Schanzer, a Middle East expert and vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said Abbas is under "immense pressure" and may be reaching his breaking point. Israel's newfound peace with Abbas's traditional Arab allies also could be fueling his anger.

"Abbas has been under immense pressure to hold elections after being marginalized for the last four years by former president Donald Trump and a number of Arab states," Schanzer said. "He has felt alienated. Now he is boxed in. He is lashing out."

Where John Kerry’s truth lies

So which is it: Should we trust Iran or not?

John Kerry is the biggest proponent of the nuclear deal with Iran. We can believe that country to abide by its provisions, he says.

Yet when Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said that Kerry had revealed to him the fact that Israel had conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria, the Biden official bristled. Zarif was lying.

“I can tell you that this story and these allegations are unequivocally false,” Kerry said in a statement. “This never happened when I was secretary of state or since.”

To be sure, the likeliest scenario remains that John Forbes Kerry is guilty of doing exactly what Zarif claims he did. But let’s engage in a little thought experiment: Let’s say Zarif made the whole thing up and the underlying leaked recording was part of a cynical Islamic Republic disinformation operation to create more “daylight” between two of Tehran’s greatest adversaries, the “Big Satan” of America and the “Little Satan” of Israel.

Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at United Nations headquarters.

In this hypothetical scenario, it is not Kerry who is the bald-faced liar — it is Zarif. But in that case, why in the world is Team Biden currently prostrating itself in Vienna before the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, with Zarif himself as that No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism’s leading diplomat, in the quixotic hopes of securing a “longer and stronger” nuclear deal?

Kerry’s Denial on Leaking to Iran Doesn’t Add Up

Either way, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the Israelis had signed off on Kerry revealing this information to Tehran. We’re left where we started: John Kerry knowing about military actions that an allied country had taken in Syria that were not meant to be public knowledge — and sharing information about them with the Iranian foreign minister.

Also note that by speaking this bluntly and critically of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the late Major General Qasim Soleimani, it seems clear Zarif did not expect this interview to go public at this time. Maybe he thought his comments would be revealed far in the future, after his retirement or after his death — if they were ever revealed at all. For what it is worth, the Iranian foreign ministry says the recording was never meant to be released to the public:
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said today that the recording was not supposed to be released to the media. The interview took place with economist Saeed Leylaz, who is a supporter of the Rouhani administration. Khatibzadeh said the recording was a “typical discussion within the administration.” The intention of the talks was a Rouhani administration initiative that all Cabinet members record their experiences in order to serve as documents to help the next administration.

It seems pretty clear that we in the West were not meant to hear this interview anytime soon, if ever — which makes it even more implausible that this is some sort of Iranian misinformation effort to undermine John Kerry’s reputation. However, it does feel as if somebody in the Iranian government wanted to kneecap Zarif, and/or his political allies. Iran is scheduled to have a presidential “election” in June 18. (Those scare quotes are deliberate.) While the final ballot has yet to be set, take a look at who a bunch of the top contenders are:
A number of Iranian military leaders, from both the army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), are among the likely candidates for Iran’s presidential election, which will be held on June 18. Among these candidates are the former IRGC air force commander and former defense minister in the Rouhani government Hossein Dehghan; former IRGC commander and current Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council Mohsen Rezaee; and the former head of the IRGC’s Khatam Al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters Brig. Gen. Saeed Mohammed, as well as other politicians with a military background, including Ali Larijani, Parviz Fattah and Mehrdad Bazrpash.

If you’re the IRGC or an ally of that faction within the Iranian government, and you come across an audiotape of the foreign minister trashing your beloved brigadier-general-turned-airport-highway-speedbump, you’re sure as heck going to release that.

This isn’t a lie designed to smear Kerry. There’s no good reason to think Zarif is lying to the interviewer. Kerry’s reputation is collateral damage in a fight among factions within the Iranian government.

We as Americans have very little ability to influence who runs what within the Iranian regime. But we can decide which people can be trusted with secrets within the U.S. government — and John Kerry isn’t one of those people.

Religious IDF soldiers training in Yiddish (video)

This is interesting:

I don't know if this is completely legit, the video is from Arutz-7 so perhaps they were given permission by the IDF to document this, although the soldiers seem to be hamming it up a little.

One interesting comment on YouTube in both Hebrew and English (I'm combining them):

"Thank God, for 72 full months I was in such a unit over 19 year period as a Chasidic Haredi Jewish soldier. I merited to the revelation of the light of G-d's presence through so many revealed miracles daily, monthly and yearly, that were so strong that I went from simple belief in G-d to truly knowing G-d."

(h/t Yerushalimey, Yoel)

Hypocrite @JohnBrennan bashes Israel for doing things HE supported as CIA chief for Obama

To be a good intelligence officer, one needs to be able to look at the facts dispassionately and without bias.

Based on the editorial he just wrote for the New York Times, former CIA director John Brennan is an incompetent intelligence analyst.

He starts off with describing how humiliating checkpoints are - based on a short fictional film.

I knew that Israel had legitimate security concerns in the aftermath of the 1967 and 1973 wars, worries that had been heightened by attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets by Palestinian terrorist organizations.

Half a century has passed, and the political and security landscape of the Middle East has profoundly changed.

Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. The Abraham Accords, brokered by the United States last year, have paved the way for four more Arab states — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco — to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

There also has been significant progress in reducing violence carried out by Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories. The exception is Hamas, which continues to launch rocket attacks into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The implication is that checkpoints are no longer necessary because the Palestinian security forces are adequate to do the job.

In 2009, Brennan told a newspaper, "the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities have to bat 1.000 every day. The terrorists are trying to be successful just once."

And how does one stop them? Brennan had defended the Bush administration support for "advanced interrogation techniques" and the policy of extraordinary rendition, moving terrorism suspects to countries where they might be tortured.

But suddenly he is critical of Israel's techniques to keep terrorists out of the country. Moreover, he ignores that Israel has spent millions to improve the checkpoints, some of which have reduced the amount of time to cross the border into minutes.

The major hurdle will be to reverse the trend of diminished interest that the Israeli government has shown in pursuing a two-state solution. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has spearheaded relentless expansion of settlements in the West Bank. That expansion has brought along more concrete walls, security barriers and control points.

During the Obama administration while Brennan was CIA director, Israel accepted a peace framework suggested by the US which would have led to a Palestinian state - and the Palestinians didn't only reject that, but they rejected a plan that was much more favorable to them. They even bragged about their rejectionism to Susan Rice, who told them effectively that they were idiots.

Under Netanyahu, there have been virtually no new settlements although existing ones have more people. The amount of space Israel controls is likewise essentially the same as it was during the Oslo process. Israel's policies have not made the two state solution less likely - Palestinian rejection of peace has.

The most offensive thing Brennan wrote, however, was not in the article. It was in a tweet promoting the article. It shows that his years as an Arabist (American University in Beirut, CIA station chief in Riyadh) has given him antisemitic tendencies:

I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged.

This is a polite version of the "Jews are Nazis" trope.

Brennan is saying that Israeli Jews are heartless monsters who don't care about Palestinian human rights It is a pernicious lie. Israeli Jews may be paranoid, but they have good reason for their paranoia.

During this holy month of Ramadan, Palestinian youths are celebrating by attacking religious Jews for fun and TikTok videos. Should this be ignored?

The issue, as always, isn't whether Palestinians deserve human rights. No one argues with that. The issue is how to best balance Palestinian human rights with Israeli human rights.

The reason that the number of attacks has gone down isn't only because of Palestinian security services frustrating terror attacks - it is because Israel created an atmosphere through defensive measures like fences and checkpoints, as well as pro-active attacks on terror cells, to make it less likely that terror attacks would succeed.

It wasn't that long ago that Palestinians were writing their own op-eds justifying terror attacks as legitimate.

And it was only a couple of weeks ago that Palestinian TV heavily promoted a music video inciting terrorism:

Should Israel take these threats seriously - should they try to bat 1.000 - or should they just shrug off this incitement and terrorism?

It is more than condescending for "experts' to tell Jews that the lesson of Auschwitz is to be sensitive to human rights. Guess what - we are, and we were way before Nazi Germany. The lesson of Auschwitz is to take threats to murder Jews seriously and ensure that they are not successful.

When the threats go away, so will the checkpoints.

Here are excerpts from a 2004 article by Stan Crooke which can be read, believe it or not, at the Workers Liberty website.

It shows the origins of the "Zionism is Apartheid" lie, along with many others.

The Stalinist roots of left "anti-Zionism"
In the 1970s the rulers of the USSR launched a sustained 'anti-Zionist' campaign, in fact anti-semitic.

No surprise. But an examination of the publications from that campaign shows something much more shocking than the fact that the old Stalinist despots were ready to use any sort of reactionary prejudice for their own ends. It demonstrates that much of what many British and international leftists - even Trotskyists - say about Israel is an indirect and unwitting copy of the Stalinists' efforts at constructing a Marxist-sounding gloss on old anti-semitic themes.

Zionism equals racism; Zionism equals imperialism; Zionism equals South African apartheid; Israel is the USA's 'watchdog' in the Middle East; Zionism is complicit with, or even promotes, anti-semitism - all these themes, now commonplace on the left, were pioneered by the Stalinists.

The core of the Stalinist argument was their old technique of 'the amalgam'. Zionism, so the Stalinists claimed, was tied up with, allied to, linked with, or responsible for, every reactionary force that right-minded people might detest - capitalism, imperialism, even anti-semitism and Nazism.

The creation of a national home for Jews was the means whereby Jewish-bourgeois hegemony over Jewish workers was to be maintained. "The powerful Jewish bourgeoisie, allied with imperialism, needed the creation of a 'national home'... first and foremost in order to keep under its influence the mass of Jewish workers".

Moreover: "In the West Jewish capital became such a powerful force that it was able to participate independently in the colonial division of the world.

According to the Stalinists: "Zionism and anti-semitism are two sides of the same coin - racism. Zionists greeted the anti-semitic policies of Tsarism in its time and also the monstrous policies of genocide at the time of Hitler."

Zionists "co-operated with Hitlerites and helped them to destroy millions of Jewish lives, attempting to save only the capitalists. The Zionists always regarded anti-semitism, and still do so, as an important means of forcing all Jews to leave their countries and escape to the 'Promised Land' in Israel".

There was, moreover, an overlap between the theories of Zionism and fascism: "As regards the theory of 'racial purity', the treatises on 'lower' and 'higher' peoples, the concepts of the 'Aryan' and the 'superman', here there is really not a little in common between the Zionists and the fascists." The theories of various 'Zionist ideologues' did not differ "at all from the views on racial exclusiveness to be found in the 'collected works' of Hitler, Rosenberg, and other fascist theoreticians." "Zionism is akin to Nazism" because "the ideologues of Zionism and apartheid are related to it (Nazism), (and) are merely contemporary variations of the myth about the supposedly innate inequality of people and races".

For the Stalinist writers, Israel was not only a sort of offshoot or outpost of the USA. It was, with fiendish cunning, simultaneously an offshoot or outpost of South Africa as it was before 1994, under the system of apartheid.

"Israel and South Africa are linked by a common racist ideology and practice, and by reactionary domestic and foreign policies... The union of the racists of Israel and South Africa is a massive threat to the African peoples and to the whole of humanity."

Facile analogies, now prevalent on the British left, featured constantly in the Soviet campaign. Zionism and apartheid possessed 'common ideological roots'. "In the South of Africa, in the Republic of South Africa, and in Palestine, close to the Suez Canal, there arose two platforms of world imperialism, summoned... to put a check to the national-liberation movement of the peoples".

Many of the footnotes for the charge that Zionism is akin to apartheid come from a 1975 book by Valery Ivanovich Skurlatov, entitled Сионизм и апартеид - Zionism and Apartheid, published by the official Soviet Politizdat of Ukraine.

Skurlatov's book is summarized in this article by R. Nudelman:

In his book Zionism and Apartheid Skurlatov sketches the following pattern of Jewish history from ancient times to modern Zionism: even in ancient times the world needed middlemen for trade and in the course of centuries a trade clan or order formed whose most successful embodiment was the upper crust of ancient Jewish society. In ancient times this upper class had already turned into a "transnational Jewish corporation." From then on this "transnational Jewish corporation" has appeared under different guises in world history but always with a single purpose: to win supremacy over the world. With this aim in view, the corporation first created "the religion of the God-chosen," Judaism, a religion created by stealing, in its usual manner, "not only material but also cultural values, from other peoples." Judaism proved to be a very useful religion for gaining world domination, for it "very consistently generates a solid ideology of race superiority and apartheid." Later on, "Judaism's racial concept served as a prototype for European racism," first of all Catholic (because Catholicism posed as "New Israel"), then Protestant ("Protestantism is a version of Christianity pregnant with racism"), and finally Masonic ("Masonry is secular Judaism"). In modern times "the racist God-chosen prescripts of the Jewish corporation proved even more compatible with the bourgeoisie." This was particularly evident in the USA: "The Judeo-Protestant influence made itself distinctly felt in the formation of American imperialist ideology." And now, having inculcated Judaic formulas of conduct throughout the world, "the international Jewish elite already knows no bounds to its world power ambitions." But bourgeois ideologists, "although imbued with Judaic components," proved insufficiently useful for this purpose, writes Skurlatov, and so "the financial-monopolistic corporation of the Jewish bourgeoisie concluded that it was necessary to equip itself with a caste-exclusive doctrine, Zionism." Today, concludes the author, "because it considers itself God-chosen," this corporation "openly lays claim to world domination."

This purely antisemitic drivel is literally the source for today's Leftist antisemitism, including the Human Rights Watch report equating Israel with apartheid - which, as is shown above, really means Judaism and apartheid.