Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, May 13, 2021

Worse Than Hamas Terrorism: Riots in Arab-Israeli Communities (Daled Amos)

Not so long ago, peace and cooperation were in the air.

And not just between Israel and Arab states.

There was a potential for the Abraham Accords to have an effect not only outside Israel but also inside Israel as well. I quoted from Yousef Makladeh of the consulting company StatNet who reported that "over 60 percent of the [Israeli] Arab population supports MK Mansour Abbas’ approach, that they can work with the [Jewish] right.” And that support extended to the Accords as well:

“The public wants peace, it does not matter with whom, because it will bring them economic advantages,” [Makladeh] said. More trade with the UAE, more UAE investors coming to Israel, and Israeli companies going to the UAE, will mean more opportunities for Arab-Israelis, who will be seen as the logical middlemen. [emphasis added]

I posted that in late December.
Things have changed, not just in terms of the latest terrorist attacks by Hamas -- but in terms of the reaction within the Arab-Israeli community itself.

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin tweeted:

This was already spelled out on Twitter the previous day.

Zilber is a journalist and a fellow at the Washington Institute. Zilber added:

Israel Police Commissioner says govt has declared 'special civilian emergency' in Lod. Additional Border Police units to deploy as soon as tonight. Moving his HQ to Lod. Added that such Arab-Jewish communal violence in mixed cities hasn't been seen before, not even in Oct 2000 [emphasis added]

Lahav Harkov, of the Jerusalem Post, tweeted:

Regarding this apparent progress, Harkov adds:

Of course, if it's so easy to reverse, was there really any progress at all? Something to think about, I guess.

What is happening in Lod seems to be indicative of the larger problem happening in the Arab-Israeli communities, which affect Jewish communities and Israel as a whole.

In a 2018 blog post appearing on The Times of Israel, Sarah Gordon -- of The Abraham Initiatives -- wrote in response to a shooting attack, Lod Shootings Point to Larger Issue of Violence in Israel’s Arab Communities:

Unfortunately, these shootings reflect a broader trend of rampant crime and violence in Arab communities across Israel. According to a report by the Knesset Research and Information Center covering the period from 2014 through 2017, Arab citizens comprised 64% of murder victims and 57% of murder suspects. Moreover, between 64% and 84% of cases related to possession of illegal firearms were of Arab citizens. Relatedly, Arabs in Israel feel a significantly low sense of personal security. The Abraham Initiatives (TAI), a non-profit organization committed to advancing a shared and equal Israeli society for Arab and Jewish citizens, conducted a national survey last year and found that 54% of Arabs believe there is a problem of violence in their town compared to 14% of Jews; 49% of Arabs agree that weapons and shootings are widespread in their town compared to 7% of Jews; and 32% of Arabs consider their town “unsafe” compared to 13% of Jews. [emphasis added]

Gordon suggests that the complex problem can be traced to a number of issues:

o The same Arab communities that rely on an effective Israeli police force to protect them, find themselves as perceived as a threat to that security
o  There is both a lack of sufficient policing due to lack of funding/attention while at the same time too much policing in the form of excessive violence against Arab citizens.
o  The high poverty rates in Arab-Israel communities -- resulting from widespread unemployment, low-paying jobs, weak education systems, and limited access to government services -- correlate with increased violence.
o  Inside the Arab communities, there is a transition from a society rooted in religion, rurality, and collectivism to a modern, urbanized society that values individualism as opposed to group cohesion. This has led to violence against those Arabs who challenge the traditional norms.

As noted above, this article was in December 2018 -- 3 years after the passing of a bill known formally as Resolution No. 922: a five-year Economic Development Plan for the Arab Sector, allocating 10 billion shekels, almost $3 billion.

An article in Haaretz from 2019 describing the bill, noted apparent improvements over the previous years:

o According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, over the past 7 years, the number of Arab students enrolled in universities and colleges in Israel has risen by 80%.
o Over 5 years, the number of Arabs studying computer sciences, and the number pursuing master’s degrees (in all fields) have both jumped 50%
o The number of Arab students studying for a Ph.D. has soared 60%.
o During the last decade, the number of Arabs working in high-tech has increased 18-fold -- and 25% of them are women.
o By 2020, it is estimated that Arabs will make up 10 percent of the country’s high-tech work force
o The proportion of Arab doctors in Israel has climbed from 10% in 2008 to 15% in 2018
21% of all male doctors are Arab, according to the Health Ministry.There is a natural carryover into the ability to get a job. In the private sector, for example, the proportion of Arab civil servants rose from 5.7% in 2007 to 11.3% in 2017.”

Resolution 922 expired in December 2020.
And then it was extended:

The plan, initiated in 2015, allocated NIS 10 billion ($2.96 billion) to reduce widespread inequalities between Arab and Jewish communities in Israel. The extension will add another NIS 1.7 billion ($500 million) to the plan through the end of 2021.

This begins to address the problem of joblessness and self-esteem in the Arab communities, but the issue of crime remains. It is an issue that Mansour Abbas, head of the United Arab List (Ra’am) approached Netanyahu about.

And what about Lod?

In a 2018 blog post for Times of Israel, Alexander Shapiro -- formerly a researcher and activist in Lod and now a member of the Israeli NGO Shaharit -- writes about Lod and describes its demographics as being 70% Jewish and 30% Arab.

The Jews are Sephardi and Ashkenazi, some nationalist and others progressive, from a range of ethnic backgrounds, that include Ethiopians, Russians (nearly half), Indians, Georgians, and Moroccans, among others.

The Arabs community consists of Christians, Muslims and Bedouins. Some of the Arabs are descendants of families that have lived there since before 1948.

Lod has a long history and when newer cities were built nearby, the wealthier families left, resulting in a negative effect on the society. Jews and Arabs share in the resultant social and economic problems of lack of funding, crime and corruption. After various attempts at dealing with the problems, there was enough improvement that companies such as Bank Leumi, Mizrahi Bank, and Migdal Insurance built offices there.

Then, ironically, came the gentrification with wealthier families moving in, which led to further socioeconomic problems. There are claims of favoritism for Jewish families and reports that authorities “issued plans for new industrial zones or roads that are built on areas occupied by long-established but illegally-built Arab homes, forcing the demolition of those houses.”

Sounds familiar?

Shapiro writes that Lod is

one of the few remaining places in Israel that could provide a model for effective Arab-Jewish shared society. It represents a microcosm of Israel as a whole, containing mirror images of the country’s diverse populations, history, struggles, and opportunities.

and concludes

It can provide a model for the Israeli society it mirrors to move forward. But if shared society fails in Lod, there may be few others places it can be born.

Which brings us to today and Harkov's point that if the apparent progress is so easy to reverse, was there really any progress at all?

Polls that indicate that Arab-Israelis increasingly identify as Israeli as opposed to Palestinian are encouraging, and increased and apparently effective funding for Arab education and training are a good sign as well.

It is not news that a major issue in Arab communities is crime.
Will addressing that on a scale similar to addressing education and training help?

Israel needs to find out.
And soon.

The Western media never learns from previous Gaza wars.

A large percentage of Gaza rockets fall in Gaza, and many Gazans are killed because of them. I've documented this for years. I've shown how Hamas' own videos show rockets falling short.

When a family is killed in Gaza, it is very rare that it is an IDF mistake. Most of the time it is because a terrorist operative is in the house - either because he is a member of the family, sometimes it seems because he is using them as human shields. Other times it is because of Hamas rockets falling short. Sometimes it is because the IDF targeted a legitimate target that had a larger cache of explosives than was thought and it caused far more collateral damage than expected.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad is hiding the names of most of those killed. While Hamas admitted that one of its senior leaders, Bassem Issa, was killed in an Israeli attack, they don't mention the names of the other people with him at the time who were also killed. They do this to make it look like a larger percentage of the dead are civilians - and they did it in previous wars, too.

Speaking of, the Gaza Health Ministry and the "human rights" NGOs in Gaza (PCHR and Al Mezan) downplay any mention of terrorist casualties and often call terrorists "civilians" when they report the circumstances of those who have died. (Amnesty's obscenely dishonest "Gaza Platform" with statistics from the 2014 war relied on PCHR's initial reports, and as a result it lists more "civilians" than even the UN does. They know they are lying, I've let them know enough times, and they refuse to correct it.)

Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch is back to what he has done so many times in the past - tweeting against Israel incessantly, often with lies, and only reluctantly saying anything bad about Hamas once in a while. So far this time he is doing exactly he same thing - a huge number of anti-Israel tweets and a token tweet or two mentioning that Hamas rockets are a war crime, too.

The media still has no idea what "proportionality" means in the context of international law. They make scorecards of how many have been killed on both sides as if the results are supposed to be "fair," implying that if only more Jews would be killed, then they can all be happy.

Then again, the media is also part of the problem. Hamas has almost complete control over the media in Gaza. Citizens who speak freely to media know that they will be punished. Everyone sticks to the Hamas-approved script. International reporters know that they will be kicked out if they say anything not to Hamas' liking. Yet the media hardly ever mentions this, giving a false impression that their reporting is objective.

The media will also ignore most of Hamas' war crimes. Using ambulances or "press" credentials to transport weapons, using Gazans as human shields, using mosques as weapons depots, shooting from schools- - I once counted 19 different war crimes that Hamas has done in the Gaza wars, but "human rights groups" somehow only notice and denounce one.

People don't learn.

Then again, most people don't want to learn.

Defense for Children International-Palestine, an extraordinarily anti-Israel NGO which has made bald-faced lies in the past, has unwittingly proven that most of the children killed in Gaza so far have been killed by Hamas - and others are killed because they are human shields.

In their report about Tuesday's events, they say:

An Israeli drone-fired missile killed 15-year-old Mohammad Saber Ibrahim Suleiman shortly after 6 p.m. while he and his father Saber Ibrahim Mahmoud Suleiman were on their agricultural land outside the city of Jabalia, according to documentation collected by Defense for Children International - Palestine. Father and son were both killed instantly. Mohammad’s body was subsequently transferred to the Indonesian hospital in Jabalia where doctors reported there were shrapnel wounds throughout his body.

Mohammad’s father was reportedly a commander in Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, a Palestinian armed group and the armed wing of Hamas, according to information collected by DCIP.

Mohammad was a human shield for his father. But what DCI-P admits next is amazing:

In a second incident around 6:05 p.m., initial investigations suggest a homemade rocket fired by a Palestinian armed group fell short and killed eight Palestinians, including two children. The rocket landed in Saleh Dardouna Street near Al-Omari Mosque in Jabalia, North Gaza, according to evidence collected by DCIP. Mustafa Mohammad Mahmoud Obaid, 16, was killed in the blast, and five-year-old Baraa Wisam Ahmad al-Gharabli succumbed to his injuries around 11 p.m. on May 10.

Palestinian security sources and explosives experts indicated the cause of this explosion was a Palestinian armed group rocket that fell short. Another 34 Palestinian civilians were injured in the blast, including 10 children, according to DCIP’s documentation.

Eight killed and 34 injured from one Hamas rocket.

And then:

Six Palestinian children and two adults were killed in a third blast that occurred around 6 p.m. in Beit Hanoun about 800 meters (2,600 feet) west of the Gaza Strip perimeter fence. Those killed included Rahaf Mohammad Attalla al-Masri, 10, and her cousin Yazan Sultan Mohammad al-Masri, 2; brothers Marwan Yousef Attalla al-Masri, 6, and Ibrahim Yousef Attalla al-Masri, 11; as well as Hussein Muneer Hussein Hamad, 11, and 16-year-old Ibrahim Abdullah Mohammad Hassanain, according to information collected by DCIP. When the blast occurred, members of the al-Masri family were reportedly harvesting wheat in the field outside their home, and their children were playing nearby, according to information collected by DCIP.

DCIP has not yet confirmed the cause of these deaths. At the time of the incident, Israeli drones and warplanes were reportedly overhead and Palestinian armed groups were firing homemade rockets towards Israel. DCIP continues to investigate these incidents to determine and identify the responsible parties.

The deaths of the al-Masri family was already confirmed by Israel on Tuesday as being from Hamas rockets. There was clearly no military target and Israel doesn't randomly target a family - Israel diverts rockets when it sees children in the area, and they were outside.

I do not expect DCI-P's honesty to last. While it identified Mohammad Suleiman as being the son of a terrorist father who was the target, in yesterday's update it did not mention that 15-year-old Lina Iyad Fathi Sharir's father, who was also killed, was the commander of the Hamas anti-tank missile unit.

But from the very first day, we see that most (if not all!) of the children killed in Gaza were either killed by Haas rockets or as human shields for terrorists.

And the media repeats the lies that they were killed in Israeli airstrikes without question.

(h/t kweansmom, also IsraellyCool noticed this.)

05/12 Links Pt2: Matti Friedman: Jerusalem of Glue; Biden failed the Israel-Palestinian rocket and riot test; Kristallnacht in Lod; Gal Gadot, international celebrities speak out over Gaza crisis

From Ian:

Matti Friedman: Jerusalem of Glue

The idea of a complex place is anathema to the current mood in America and the West, where many people seem to be regressing to a world of childhood, of heroes and monsters. As I sit here typing by a window in Jerusalem, many seem to believe that Israel is attacking Muslim worshippers at prayer and ethnically cleansing the Arab population of this city, which is more than a third of our population and growing. For years, Arabic papers have described routine visits by Jews to the Temple Mount, or Israeli policing efforts there, as Israelis “storming” the Al-Aqsa compound; this wording has now spread to the Western press.

In the spirit of 2021, exciting video clips are ripped from their context here and injected into ideological circulatory systems to prove whatever needs to be proved. Explosions in the Al-Aqsa Mosque could mean that Israeli police are firing tear gas inside, desecrating the holy site, or that Muslim rioters are shooting off the stores of fireworks they hoarded inside to use against the police, desecrating the holy site. An Israeli driver hitting a Palestinian man near Lions’ Gate on Monday might be attempted murder, or a driver losing control of his car while escaping Palestinians who were trying to kill him. A video of Israelis dancing at the Western Wall as a fire burns on the Temple Mount is evidence of satanic intent, or of the coincidence that the annual Jerusalem Day celebrations at the wall were going on at the same time that one of the firecrackers set off by Palestinian rioters ignited a tree in the mosque compound above.

The subtleties seem beside the point when the villains and the heroes are so clear. The condemnations of Israel are pouring in from the strange coalition that gathers with increasing frequency for this purpose: the Turkish authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both of whom used the word “abhorrent” in their tweets, the dictator of Chechnya, the Saudis, the Iranians, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s hard to follow whether Israel is supposedly attacking Islam or attacking liberalism; in Israel’s case, the two seem to be oddly interchangeable. When some Westerners see dozens of green Hamas flags in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, they seem to perceive a civil rights protest, and when a Hamas leader calls on his people to buy “five-shekel knives” to cut off Jewish heads, demonstrating with his finger exactly how this should be done, some hear a call for social justice that Israelis should try to accommodate.

It helps that plenty of Western activists, including many who identify as journalists, have spent the past decade or so rebranding this conflict to suit the ideological fantasy world in which they operate. That fantasy world has only expanded in detail and reach with the triumph of social media, which marries elite prejudices with activist fervor and the passion of the mob. Hamas rockets are no longer being fired at Israeli civilians, as they were 20 years ago. Now they’re being fired at “Israeli apartheid.”

Being an observer in Jerusalem always means gauging two opposing forces: the one pulling the city apart, and the glue keeping it together. The former gets plenty of attention from observers, and the latter almost none, but both are always in play in this city of nearly a million people. The glue is on display in malls and taxis and hospitals, the places of no interest to journalists or politicians, where Jews and Arabs of different ideological stripes interact carefully in their daily lives to a greater extent than ever before, moving things forward to a future that’s unknowable but could be better. That has been the trend here in the past few years. But it’s the other force, the destructive one, that we’re seeing now.

JPost Editorial: It's time to stand with Israel against Hamas rockets

Israel must now engage in a public relations campaign to present its case effectively to the world. It has done nothing wrong, except for allowing a terrorist organization to gain the upper hand. It must now prevent Hamas from gaining international sympathy in its hollow attempts to portray itself as the guardian of Palestinian rights in Jerusalem.

In addition, the Palestinian Authority, regional neighbor Jordan, and Arab citizens of Israel – as exemplified by the mob of protesters in Lod on Monday night – shouldn’t be spreading lies that Israel, without provocation, threatened Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount.

Israel’s government is not blameless. Tensions had been mounting during Ramadan, which ends on Wednesday, with ongoing clashes between police and Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem’s Old City and elsewhere.

While Hamas does not need an excuse to attack Israel, the government should have done more to contain the situation and try to defuse it before the violence spiraled out of control. The perfect storm – Ramadan, Jerusalem Day, Sheikh Jarrah, and political instability in Israel – all contributed to the reality that the people of southern Israel now find themselves.

To help Israel find a way to end this and restore peace and security, world leaders need to convey clearly to Hamas that terrorism is not acceptable under any circumstances. If those leaders want to see peace in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the region, they must side with Israel against these blatant unwarranted acts of terror. This is important so Hamas and the Palestinians learn that terrorism does not pay and does not work. Firing rockets into civilian areas cannot be rewarded. Instead, it needs to be punished.

Israel is not responsible for the current escalation, but it should try to end it as soon as possible. This can’t happen without the international community supporting Israel, rather than siding with the real culprits.

Until we assert ourselves, projecting actual power and deterrence, we will be picked apart

As Winston Churchill famously encountered in the 1930’s, there is an inherent reluctance of peace and freedom loving peoples to respond pro-actively to aggression. There are issues of disbelief, often predicated upon the inability of the peace lover to understand the mind set and intentions of the aggressor.

This leads to rationalizations of how the other side might feel and could be dealt with. From this point, it is just a hop, skip and a jump to wishful thinking about how to deal, or not deal, with an aggressor.

Finally, there is the reluctance that is born out of not wanting to disrupt one’s serenity, individually and collectively, in order to take the necessary and potentially costly steps to deal with aggression. Costly steps of course focus on risking the lives of soldiers, but also include risks to civilians, their lives, businesses, assets and lifestyle.

We look at other people as if they were extensions of ourselves. It is both unrealistic, and completely untrue. If all of this sounds uncomfortably familiar, that might be because it pretty well describes the state of affairs in Israel, now and in the past, when confronted with Palestinian Arab aggression.

We live with a functional absurdity. We have invested men, materiel, treasure and brainpower in creating the most advanced - in training, technique and equipment - armed forces in the Middle East, and one of the strongest in the entire world.

Yet, for reasons cited above, as well as the ever present fear of international opprobrium, we hamstring ourselves constantly.

This hamstringing takes at least two major forms: the unwillingness to react, not in equal measure, and not to mention more intensively, in the hope that the aggression can be managed; and second, allowing ourselves to be dictated to by legal advisers and arbiters who are not focused on deterrence, let alone victory, but rather, the sensibilities of our enemies, and most certainly the judgments of the international community.

The “just keep a lid on things” strategy defines much of what passes for geo-political policy vis-à-vis Judea and the Shomron, the Temple Mount, and all things related to Palestinian Arab and Israeli Bedouins. The thought is that, left to their own natural devices, conflicts will subside, as the aggressor will understand that its not in his interest to continue down this destructive, but also self-destructive path.

But this is solipsism, meaning that we look at other people as if they were extensions of ourselves. It is both unrealistic, and completely untrue.

2 Elder Comix: As-a-Jews and Holy Ramadan

Here are a couple of public domain comics that I changed the dialogue for in the past day.

And:

Cobra Kai and the Jewish State (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

My granddaughter, Shai, told my wife that she should make her a “Cobra Kai” shirt. We were mystified, so she told us to watch the video series and we would understand. It turns out to be a continuation of the plot of the movie “The Karate Kid,” in which (as I see it) the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov are personified by the competing dojos of Cobra Kai and Miyagi Do respectively. Keep that thought – I’ll come back to it.

In the real world, the struggle between Israel and her enemies is far more bitter and bloody. For several months now tensions have risen, with demonstrations and riots in several cities by Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel over various issues. Violent attacks on Jews by Arabs were followed by violence against Arabs by militant Jewish groups. The conflict reached a peak on Monday, Jerusalem Day, when hundreds of police and Arabs fought each other on and around the Temple Mount, the Arabs throwing rocks and shooting fireworks, while the police responded with teargas and stun grenades. At the same time, Hamas issued an ultimatum that if the police did not leave the Mount by 6:00 PM, they would fire rockets at Jerusalem. The police stayed, and Hamas carried out its threat, launching seven rockets.

Since then the violence has escalated. Israeli Arabs have rioted in various cities and towns in Israel, attacking Jewish citizens and police. In Lod, local Arabs rampaged in Jewish neighborhoods, burning cars and even synagogues, evoking visions of anti-Jewish pogroms. Riots also occurred in Acco, Yafo, and the Arab towns of the “Triangle,” east of Netanya and Haifa. Hamas has been broadcasting incitement for weeks via its imams and social media, including the perennial “Al Aqsa is in danger” line that has been inflaming Palestinian Muslims against Jews for at least 100 years.

Meanwhile, rocket fire from Gaza has reached unprecedented levels. As of Wednesday morning (as I write) more than 1,000 rockets have been launched at Israel from Gaza, reaching as far north as Hadera. At least 850 of them have reached Israel, with 200 falling short into Gaza (keep this in mind when Hamas blames its civilian casualties on Israeli retaliation). Massive barrages hit Ashkelon, setting a strategic gas facility afire, and keeping inhabitants in shelters all night. Naturally the towns and kibbutzim in the south, the usual targets of Hamas rockets, got their portion too. According to Hamas, 130 rockets were launched toward Tel Aviv. Even here in Rehovot, which is usually spared, we were awakened by sirens several times overnight. As of this moment, five Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets, including two Israeli Arabs whose car took a direct hit in Lod. There have been dozens of injuries and much property damage. The Iron Dome systems have intercepted many of the rockets, but due to their sheer volume it has been impossible to stop all of them.

The IDF – air force, artillery, and navy – has been hitting launchers, weapons factories, underground facilities, and some senior Hamas officials since the rocket fire started. A multi-story building that contained Hamas intelligence services was taken down. Hamas claims several dozen civilian casualties, but the IDF says that most of them are either Hamas operatives who were hit while launching rockets, or victims of their own rockets which fell short.

I think that the events of the past weeks have had a significant effect on the attitudes of many ordinary Israeli Jews. The riots in Lod, and the attacks on Jews in Jerusalem have given rise to a feeling that lines have been crossed. How can it be, they think, when they see a 65-year-old rabbi brutally kicked to the ground by Arab assailants, or Torah scrolls burned, that this can happen in the Jewish state? Although there was large-scale rioting by Israeli Arabs in 2000 at the start of the Second Intifada, the way individual Jews and Jewish shops and institutions were targeted this time was new, and evoked comparisons to the antisemitic violence of the 1930s. Although Arab members of the Knesset talked in ways that verged on subversion, it seemed that most of the Arabs in the street were motivated by economics, not nationalism. Either that has changed, or it was not the case in the first place.

The dimensions of the Hamas rocket attack were worrisome. It is clear that we cannot have enough Iron Dome systems to stop all the rockets that our enemies can launch. In the back of everyone’s mind is the knowledge that Hezbollah has far more rockets and better, more accurate and powerful, ones.

It seems that we always act the same: retaliate in a measured way, being very careful to keep civilian damage to a minimum, after which we are pilloried by the UN, the EU, and the “human rights” NGOs, regardless of that fact. We don’t destroy Hamas, we simply “mow the grass” every few years. We keep supplying Gaza with water and electricity.
There will be other escalations like this one. Each time, Hamas seems to have more and better capabilities. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to try to take over the Palestinian Authority, and to incite subversion among the Arab citizens of Israel. Soon Mahmoud Abbas will retire or die; it could happen today. Hamas will then move to take over the PA, which would make the present situation seem like a picnic in the park.

Is this the best our government can do, we ask?

The problem is that we have no real strategy. But it’s not hard to see what it should be. The Palestinians of the territories and even our own Arab citizens have shown us: they act in a Middle Eastern way.

We want to live in the Middle East because that’s where we came from. But we don’t want to act Middle Eastern. We want to live in an imaginary world, where nations actually adhere to the UN charter. We want to be “a villa in the jungle” as somebody said. That doesn’t work. In the Middle East, you defend your honor or you lose all of your property and then your life. In the Middle East, when someone challenges you, you destroy them or they destroy you. You don’t give them a break because they are weaker than you and you feel sorry for them. Tomorrow they may be strong enough to kill you – or they may sneak up on you and kill you, even though they are weaker.

The Palestinian Arabs have challenged us for the ownership of this land. For more than a hundred years they have made it clear to us that they will do anything and everything necessary to get it. We, on the other hand, keep trying to compromise with them. And they respond with bemusement, take anything we give them, and then continue trying to get the rest.
If they win, they will kick us out. Ask them. They’ll tell you. And that is what our strategy has to be: to remove the Palestinian Arabs from the Land of Israel. We need to do whatever is necessary to achieve that aim.

If that is offensive to you, then you can live somewhere else where at least they pretend to operate according to a “better” morality. It’s up to you.

Now that we’ve settled the strategy, it’s time to decide on the tactics. And in that connection, I come back to “Cobra Kai.” One of the recurring memes in the show is the motto of the Cobra Kai dojo. I am sure that the writers disapproved of it, but it fits our needs perfectly. Here it is:

STRIKE FIRST
STRIKE HARD
NO MERCY

05/12 Links Pt1: It's Time to End the Small Palestinian Victories; Israel rules out ceasefire after Hamas seeks international mediation

From Ian:

It's Time to End the Small Palestinian Victories

On Friday, Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem chanted on the Temple Mount: "We are all Hamas, waiting for your orders, commander Mohammed Deif. Hamas, shoot a rocket at Tel Aviv tonight."

Palestinians think that Israel does not have the perseverance to be victorious. Possibly, there are even Israelis who are beginning to think this way. This is dangerous because it emboldens the violent rejectionists.

Palestinians think that Israel does not have the perseverance to be victorious.

Victory is obviously not won overnight but by a series of smaller victories that wear out one's opponents. With each small victory, many rejectionist Palestinians see the greater victory at hand.

This is the perception, however wild it might seem, which is being perpetuated. Nonetheless, it can be turned back if Israel decides that it will no longer act as if it is in retreat.

Israel needs to start winning some small victories of its own. It needs to push back against the rejectionist Palestinians. It needs to first assert control, then provide deterrence against those who would seek harm to its citizens and act in favor of security.

In the latest conflict with Hamas in Gaza, "Operation Guarding of the Walls," Israel should massively bombard Gaza and even enter and occupy it until the rocket infrastructure has been completely destroyed. While doing this, it should hermetically seal Gaza, cutting off the supply chain to Hamas and other terrorist organizations. It must do what all nations have and are doing to achieve victory, by beating its enemy into submission.

Israel must convince the average Palestinian that it is here to stay and should be accepted in full.

This would be a significant victory and would change perceptions and switch the momentum against violent Palestinian rejectionism. It would convince the average Palestinian that Israel is here to stay and should be accepted in full. This would have the important goal of bringing peace closer because the more Palestinians accept the legitimacy and permanency of the State of Israel, the more pressure would be put on their leaders to give up on their goals of ending the Jewish state.

This is a victory towards which Israel should be persevering.

These Attacks on Jerusalem are Different

The results of these inversions of the expert-driven conventional wisdom were remarkable.

Our key regional allies—Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE—not only grew stronger, but deepened their collaboration.

The Abraham Accords ushered in the first true, warm peace agreement since the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

ISIS was crushed and al-Qaeda neutered—with a consequent reduction in Islamist terror in the U.S. and across the West.

Iran was kept off-balance and at bay. For the first time in recent memory, the Middle East seemed to be pointed in a positive direction.

Over the past 100 days, the Biden administration has retreated—hard—towards the now-discredited "experts," their now-disproven assumptions and their long-failing approaches to the region. Unsurprisingly, we have already seen increased Iranian aggression towards U.S. interests, growing brutality in the Yemeni civil war and Islamist terror attacks here at home (perhaps most prominently the King Soopers massacre in Boulder, Colorado).

The current wave of pretextual attacks against Israel are merely par for the course. When the Biden administration announced it would resume unconditional funding to the anti-Israel, terror-supporting Palestinian Authority—almost certainly in violation of U.S. law—it had to have known what to expect. Biden has returned to Obama-era policies; the terrorists have returned to Obama-era behavior.

It's not too late for the Biden team to undo its catastrophic error. Nor is it too late to appreciate the human suffering that walking away from a successful Middle East policy has unleashed throughout the region—and throughout the world.

The current attacks in Jerusalem have put the young Biden administration to the test. We must hope that these are missteps, not malevolence.

Elliott Abrams: Israel Erupts: Cutting through the Misinformation Surrounding Part of This Conflict

Note again this line in the Kohelet analysis: “The litigation has taken several years, and the owners have won at every step.” Israel’s courts, sometimes viewed as too sympathetic to — or indeed part of — the Israeli “Left,” have consistently applied standard property law, as would courts in any Western country, and consistently found that the rights of ownership have not been obliterated just because people moved into these homes when the Jews who lived in them were driven out.

Now let’s return to the paintings forcibly seized from Jews by the Nazis. There is widespread sympathy for the owners of those paintings, and it is visible in newspaper accounts and in court decisions and international conventions. Why is there so little sympathy for those who own the properties in contention in Jerusalem? Why the bias in most accounts of these eviction proceedings? Even media generally sympathetic to Israel have produced tendentious reporting (see this analysis of Fox News’ reporting).

Good questions. Is the criticism of Israel here explained by the bitter old conclusion that the world likes dead Jews (and their paintings) more than living Jews who are fighting for their rights? Is it the context of Arab complaints about the “Judaization of Jerusalem,” as if that city were somehow naturally an Arab capital where all Jewish presence is alien? Is it the Palestinian propaganda, which makes cases like this part of the battle to protect the Al-Aqsa mosque from imagined Israeli depredations?

Here’s a theory: Israel’s critics here don’t care about law and rights. Yesterday, before his meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Jordanian foreign minister spoke of “provocative measures against . . . the peoples of Sheikh Jarrah” to describe court cases in which ownership rights are being asserted. The theory seems to be that the Jews were downtrodden by the Nazis, so the Jews can recover their stolen paintings — but the Palestinians are downtrodden by the Israelis, so the stolen properties cannot be recovered. In other words: forget rights, forget courts.

Blinken, by the way, commended Israel for postponing those court decisions. But they will come, soon enough, and that will be an interesting test for the Biden administration and many other governments. Will they uphold the rule of law and say Israel has every right to enforce a ruling for the owners (if that is the court’s decision)? Or does the rule of law apply only in Europe, when it comes to old Nazi cases where there’s no political risk in siding with the Jews?

Hamas' own videos show rockets falling in Gaza (updates)

Hamas has been publishing lots of videos showing them shoot volleys of rocket to Israel.

But some of them also show rockets falling short - in Gaza.

Here's one from last night:

And this one from yesterday shows a smoke trail that reveals a corkscrewing rocket:

And here's one more with at least 3 rockets falling short (smoke trail of one or two and two rocket lights going down)

These aren't the small rockets of years past. These are very large missiles that can reach Tel Aviv.

When they fall in Gaza, they will cause damage, injuries and death.

And they have. Plenty of Gazans have been killed over the years from errant Hamas rockets, even much smaller ones.

The IDF estimates as many as 30% of rockets are falling short in Gaza.

When the media parrots the Gaza Health Ministry - Hamas- claims of civilian victims of Israeli rockets, keep in mind that they are very possibly from Hamas rockets.

But they will never admit that.

UPDATE: From the IDF:

WATCH as a Hamas rocket aimed at Israel misfires and falls back into Gaza.

But this isn't the 1st time—Hamas misfired 350 rockets in the last 3 days.

These rockets result in the deaths of innocent Gazan civilians.

It's time for the world to hold Hamas accountable. pic.twitter.com/vmhmXTZrl6
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 13, 2021

Social media has been filled with anti-Israel statements from people who say that their expertise in morality and the Middle East comes because they are Jews by an accident of birth.

Pew Research just released a huge, 248-page report about American Jews that explains this.

A large number of American Jews are Jews in name only.

Fully 27% of Jews do not call themselves Jewish by religion - and the number increases to 40% for those under 30.

Nearly 50% of US Jews hardly ever do anything associated with Jewishness.

25% of US Jews say they have hardly any Jewish friends.

Only 11% of Jews who don't identify with Judaism as a religion give charity to Jewish causes.

Not surprisingly, the Jews who have the least to do with Judaism are the ones who hate Israel the most. 18% of "Jews of no religion" support BDS, far more than the average.

Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask what levels of Jewish education Jews in America had. It seems obvious that those who know the least about their own religion and history are the ones who are the most likely to hate Israel now, and many of those get a thrill out of identifying "as a Jew" to buttress their ignorant opinions of Israel.

The survey is sad. It shows an American Jewish community that has utterly failed at attracting and keeping young people (with the exception of Orthodoxy.) Although most Jews still strongly support the Jewish state, the survey shows a growing disconnect between American Jews and Israel.

It shows exactly where the "As a Jews" are coming from.

I don't think it is going to happen. The people of Lebanon would not tolerate a Hezbollah starting a war now when they are in such bad shape from COVID and the country being on the brink of bankruptcy. They are still upset over the 2006 war.

But Hezbollah follows the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader, and Iranian media has been talking for weeks about how weak Israel is and how it will be destroyed soon. They wrote lots of stories about the Syrian anti-aircraft missile that ended up near Dimona, about a chemical factory fire in Haifa. Iranian media is following the events in Israel on a minute by minute basis. The Ayatollah Khamenei has been tweeting a lot about Israel.

Hezbollah rockets are much more powerful and accurate than Hamas rockets. And they have 150,000 of them, of varying types.

Hassan Nasrallah can invent an excuse to start shooting and claiming that Israel started it. Only last week he warned Israel not to make any aggressive moves.

Let's hope this doesn't happen, but if Israel is too cautious in confronting Hezbollah, Khamenei might interpret that as weakness and think he has an opportunity.

Hamas media: In Arabic, bloodthirsty celebrations of death. In English, liberal rhetoric and victimhood.

This is what the autotranslated Arabic version of Hamas mouthpiece Al Resalah looks like for its Arab audience:

Articles extolling rocket fire, celebrating dead Israelis, exhorting Israeli Arabs to start an uprising, promises for more bloodshed.

Here's the English version, directed at the Western anti-Israel, primarily leftist audience:

Here, the emphasis is on victimhood, quoting Ilhan Omar and Tayyip Erdogan on how awful Israel is, and "defending" Al Aqsa.

The two messages are exactly opposite. And the West insists on believing what Palestinians say in English without realizing that everything is propaganda - in both languages.

05/11 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Washington's agenda is completely wrong – and incendiary; America's Jewish communities are under attack — Here are 3 things Congress can do

From Ian:

Michael Doran: The Realignment

It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the United States of a full-blown Saudi-Israeli peace agreement or even of significant steps in that direction. The 9/11 attacks announced that a doctrine of radical intolerance had taken deeper root inside the Muslim world than we had realized—a doctrine that seeks to wall off Muslim societies from non-Muslim influences. The Emiratis, the lead players in the Abraham Accords, see peace with Israel as part of a multipronged effort to refute this intolerant view of Islam and Muslim history. Saudi Arabia is the most powerful Arab country and, thanks to its guardianship of Mecca and Medina, one of the most influential countries in the entire Muslim world. It has also long been the fortress of conservative Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic literalism. If the country toward which all Muslims pray five times a day, and to which some 2 million make annual pilgrimages, develops openly friendly relations with the Jewish state, the implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere would be profound.

Yet the Biden administration has forbidden its officials from even using the term “Abraham Accords,” which, under the influence of the Realignment, it abhors. Because the accords are politically popular, even in Democratic circles, the administration will refrain from expressing its abhorrence frankly, and will look for every opportunity to claim that it looks favorably on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In reality, however, the Biden team has no intention to expand the Abraham Accords, whose very existence is a blot on the Democrats’ record. It refutes the dogma preached by the Obama administration that peace between Israel and the Arab world must begin with a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.

More importantly, the accords are also a threat to the Realignment itself. The Saudi-Israeli thaw resulted in part from the sense of threat they share about the rise of Iran, and the increasing unreliability of the American security guarantee. A strong partnership between Riyadh and Jerusalem would inevitably become the primary node of opposition to the Realignment from within the American alliance system. A desire to end any unsupervised discussion of expanding the Abraham Accords is probably an additional reason why the Biden administration devoted its first days in office to publicly disparaging Mohammed bin Salman and privately pressing him to kowtow to Tehran. “Do not dare assist Israel” was another implicit command that the Khashoggi values barrage delivered to Riyadh.

When Biden took office, he faced a fork in the road. On one path stood a multilateral alliance designed to contain Iran. It had a proven track record of success and plans of even better things to come, as the recent act of sabotage at Natanz demonstrated. The alliance’s leading members were beckoning Biden to work against a common foe, but also to promote greater cooperation and possibly even an official peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. On the other path stood the Islamic Republic, hated by its own people and, indeed, by most people in the Middle East. It offered nothing but the same vile message it had always espoused. Standing with it were all of the most malignant forces in the Middle East, who either look directly to Tehran for leadership or thrive on the chaos it sows.

Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.

Caroline Glick: Washington's agenda is completely wrong – and incendiary

As Israel Hayom's Ariel Kahana reported, Ben-Shabbat didn't take Sullivan's hostile dressing down in silence. He responded appropriately, "As the sovereign, Israel is handing the events responsibly and in a measured way despite the provocations."

Ben-Shabbat added, "International intervention serves as a prize to the rioters and their dispatchers that had hoped that international pressure would be exerted against Israel."

Less than 24 hours after their phone call, Hamas proved Ben-Shabbat was right. With a tailwind from the White House, Hamas gave Israel an ultimatum: Remove your security forces from the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah by 6 p.m. or you'll live to regret it. In other words: Give up your sovereignty over Jerusalem by six or else.

Lo and behold, shortly after 6 p.m., the air raid sirens sounded throughout Jerusalem and its environs as Hamas attacked the capital with rockets from Gaza. As the evening progressed Arab Israelis in Ramle and Lod and other mixed cities carried out what can only be called a pogrom against their Jewish neighbors. They burned yeshivot, schools and apartment buildings and beat and tried to lynch Jews that fell in their paths. After they were done, they went to the local hospital emergency room, threw rocks at the medical staff and patients and tried to kill the Arab Israeli doctors and nurses on the scene for "collaboration" with the Jews.

The medical staff had to evacuate with the patients to protected areas while the police dispersed the attackers with stun grenades – in the ER.

The official readout of Biden's national security adviser concluded by mentioning that Sullivan, "expressed the Administration's commitment to Israel's security."

A bit more "commitment" like this and Israel will find itself in short order fighting a regional war.

Emily Schrader: How Palestinians lost Jerusalem to Israel - opinion

Since Israel’s establishment, Palestinian leaders have missed countless opportunities to make peace and secure a state because of their rejectionist attitude. From a purely political standpoint, their adamant refusal to accept Israel costs them more in negotiating power every year. For example, the negotiating standpoint after the UN’s Partition Plan would have been far more advantageous for the Palestinians than where it stands today – and in almost every single subsequent peace offer, the Palestinians chose to sabotage their own future in terms of land, self-determination, cooperation with Israel and, yes, Jerusalem.

While the Palestinians never had Jerusalem – even east Jerusalem, which was under occupation by Jordan – their actions today demonstrate why they never will. For that, they have only themselves to blame.

The recent uptick in violence began at the start of Ramadan with a disturbing TikTok trend of Arabs assaulting Jews and filming it. The response was an equally disturbing pushback of far-right Israeli Jews who rioted in Jerusalem, even chanting “death to Arabs.” But neither of these activities came from nowhere. The Kahanist Right in Israel has been emboldened by vile racist leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who maneuvered their way into the Knesset to the great shame of our entire nation.

Yet on the other side, we have entire generations raised on glorifying violence against Jews. Most recently, we see Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority all ramping up their incitement to violence, with the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, Iran, dousing the entire situation with kerosene and lighting the match.

Iran-allied Palestinians even recently put up billboards with Iran’s slogan for Jerusalem Day at the entrance to Kalandiya in the West Bank. This is far from the first time Palestinians have promoted Iranian propaganda, but it is a clear and continued indicator of where Palestinian alliances lie – and they aren’t with their fellow Arab states.

The Palestinian war to feel relevant

The PA prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh is very happy that people are dying, because that has "returned the Palestinian issue to the agenda of the world's priorities."

This is important to understand. Since the Abraham Accords, Palestinians have been feeling irrelevant - the worst feeling for them.

They felt that the world no longer cared about them - which is largely true since they couldn't even fix their own issues and kept blaming everything on Israel. The Arab world has been sick and tired of the Palestinian issue for years, unless it helps their own political agendas.

Instead of working towards peace, the Palestinian Authority wanted to feel important, to be cover stories in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, the PA has worked to incite violence in Jerusalem for weeks before Ramadan. TV music videos glorified martyrdom. They know this stuff works on heir people. Sure enough, it did - starting with the TikTok attacks on religious Jews.

So they again started the "cycle of violence," quite consciously. And this led up to rockets and bombing Gaza - which, interestingly, doesn't hurt the Palestinian Authority one bit.

Now that they easily manipulated the anti-Israel media and politicians to condemn Israel for imagined crimes of "ethnic cleansing #SheikhJarrah" and "targeting civilians in Gaza," they are ecstatic.

How does it help them?

It doesn't. But Palestinians live in a zero sum game world, and they literally believe that anything that hurts Israel helps them.

It is a caveman mentality. The UAE doesn't have it, but many Arabs do - when Israel looks bad, somehow that helps its enemies.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh actually bragged that his rockets managed to disrupt some Yom Yerushalayim celebrations.

It would be a pathetic joke if it didn’t mean that Hamas and other Palestinian groups want to kill Jews to feel relevant. Much better to feel important than to feel impotent.

There are no winners in such a worldview. And until Palestinians realize that Israelis feeling secure is a prerequisite to peace, there will be none.