Al Jazeera got an exclusive look at Hamas tunnels under Gaza, because they are essentially the official news network of Hamas.
Hamas partnered with the Qatari channel in order to "prove" that Israel didn't cause extensive damage to the tunnel system. Israel, of course, notes that the Hamas "metro" is hundreds of kilometers and the IDF never claimed to have destroyed it all.
The IDF says that it destroyed about 100 km of tunnels, Hamas claims to have built over 500 km of tunnels - which must make Gazans feel very insecure.
Last week, Hamas gave an award to Al Jazeera for its Gaza war coverage, for not deviating from the stories that Hamas wanted them to do.
While I cannot understand the Arabic, it seems obvious that the Al Jazeera reporter didn't ask questions like, "If you can build these tunnels, why don't you build bomb shelters for the people you rule?" or "Can you show me a tunnel that Israel destroyed?"
UPDATE: MEMRI translated the report: (h/t kweansmom)
Reporter: "This is the first time that the Al-Qassam Brigades releases such images of tunnels following the recent war. These are rooms, communication devices, and maps that are used by the Al-Qassam Brigades to conduct the battles and operations against the Israeli army."
Jihad, Al-Qassam Brigades fighter: "Now we are walking inside a network of tunnels that spans the entire Gaza Strip. It was used during the recent war to conduct combat operations. This is one of the command and control centers that were used during the war, and it is still being used after the war. As you can see, it is ready with all the equipment and the devices in order to command the operations and organize the troops."
Reporter: "Long and extended passages, ammunition depots, and rocket launch pads, are all part of this underground military and operational complex, as claimed by the Al-Qassam Brigades. The Israeli army said that this complex was one of its main targets in the recent war against the Gaza Strip, and that most of it was destroyed, rendering these tunnels nonoperational. However, Al-Qassam Brigades is talking only about parital damage."
Musa, Al-Qassam Brigades fighter: "We incurred only limited damage. Thanks to Allah, immediately after the war ended, we have renovated this area and restored its readiness."
[…]
Reporter: "Al-Qassam has been building and developing its tunnels for decades, and used them in many combat missions and operations, of which the most prominent was the capturing of Israeli soldiers. Al-Qassam Brigades considers these tunnels to be a strategic weapon in Gaza, and believes that they will remain the main battlefield in any future war against Israel. Hisham Zaqqut, Al-Jazeera, reporting from Gaza, Palestine."
The French used to be extremely proud of their public administration—arguably one of the most comprehensive, efficient, and honest in the world—as well as of their police force and their judiciary. But over the past four decades, they have perceived a steep decline in these institutions. The decline is the result of various factors, including the transfer of governmental jurisdictions to either poorly organized local powers or to the European Union; the advent of the euro and its corollary, budget cuts; mass immigration; the decay of public education; and the descent into a post-industrial, two-tiered society.
The breakdown of public safety, as witnessed in Paris’s 11th arrondissement and in many other places, or more recently by a returning wave of jihadist-inspired assassinations, has been more deeply resented than anything else. However, the French people do not blame the police, who on the whole bravely stick to older standards, but rather a politicized judiciary. The extent to which the French magistracy has succumbed to woke ideologies was disclosed in 2013, when a French TV journalist found a “Wall of Bums” displayed at the main judiciary union’s headquarters. This was a list of “bums,” or citizens demanding justice for themselves or their relatives in cases that the union deemed to be “politically incorrect.” As a matter of fact, many of the offenders or criminals now arrested by the police are released by the prosecutors or the courts on such pretexts as age, inconclusive evidence, or “ethical” leniency.
Political correctness may have been no less crucial in the Sarah Halimi case. As noted earlier, the murder took place in between the presidential election’s two ballots. While Macron stood well ahead of his only challenger, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, in every opinion poll, some people, unbeknownst to Macron, may have been afraid that the brutal assassination of an elderly Jewish lady by a young African Muslim would vindicate Le Pen's anti-immigration platform. Hence, perhaps, a move to sweep the news under the carpet, at least until the second ballot.
This media manipulation may have subsequently comforted the judiciary in their wokeish prejudice and inspired them to shelter Traore from the full consequences of his act. Then, by an all-too-natural process, the more that public opinion—or the head of state, for that matter—insisted on justice, the more the judiciary fought back. Until justice was entirely denied.
The due process of justice means that innocents should be protected against arbitrary charges and that everything should be done to avert judicial errors or unfair sentences. However, it means also that criminals should be eventually punished. Short of that, growing numbers of citizens may be induced to think that there is no Republic and no government anymore. Shortly after the Cour de Cassation issued its highly contested final decision on the Sarah Halimi case, a number of retired generals published a petition asking the president and the government to restore order, law, and patriotic values. According to a Harris Interactive/LCI poll, it was approved by 58 percent of the French.
All this anti-Israel rhetoric from American politicians has tremendous ancillary effects, giving license to bigots worldwide to unleash themselves, spewing invective and vitriol that will undoubtedly have collateral damage.
It’s ironic that this is the same exact kind of criticism that was levelled against Trump. It’s clear that all the rhetoric coming from left circles are beginning to have real world consequences.
This canard that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism is a heaping pile of smoking BS, served on the finest silver platter. You know, it’s like those people who say, but some of my best friends are Jews. Yes, some of my best friends who I speak badly about behind their back.
The Jews who I have been hearing from overseas have been telling me things that I hoped I would never hear, although I knew deep down that it was inevitable. Jews of whatever level of observance or identity sitting pretty here in the United States have no understanding of what’s going on.
My friends, worldwide Jewry is under siege. We are under siege. Like I told you in my earlier articles, I didn’t know what was going to happen with Biden’s presidency. I was hoping for the best when it came to Israel, but I was expecting the worst.
Biden just doesn’t have the spine to stand up to all the anti-Semites that have co-opted the once sane Democrat Party.
Unfortunately, my worst fears have come true. I’m not saying that I’m a prophet or anything, but it seems like you just have to have eyeballs that work to see what’s going on. All the radical activists screaming about Israel, who sound like they are on a religious mission from I don’t know what God, don’t know the first thing about what’s really going on in Israel.
All the journalists who have been covering this tiny sector of the world have been telling the same narrative, the same lie, for so long that any 18-year-old on any American campus thinks that Israel is the antichrist, devil and Charles Manson all wrapped in one.
An activist who sparked outrage after she sprayed “Free Gaza and Palestine” on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto is helping to organise “Understanding Antisemitism” workshops for Britain’s biggest education union.
Ewa Jasiewicz was condemned in 2010 after she daubed slogans on a wall at the site of the former ghetto in Poland where thousands of Jews were imprisoned and starved to their deaths under the Nazis.
Attempting to justify the vandalism – which included the wording “liberate all ghettos” – Jasiewicz said Israel had “co-opted” the Holocaust to serve “agendas of colonisation and repression”.
Jewish News can reveal that in her role as an organiser with the NEU North West Region, National Team, the 43 year-old has been behind three recent sessions called “Understanding Antisemitism”, held for members of the National Education Union (NEU).
Two Jewish NEU members said they were “absolutely sickened” by the decision of the union to allow a controversial figure such as Jasiewicz to organise antisemitism training sessions for members.
One told Jewish News: “This says everything about the NEU’s attitude towards its Jewish members.
“It’s no wonder hundreds of teachers and teaching staff have decided to quit the NEU in recent months.
The 2021 Jerusalem flag march never happened. There was no celebration of the miracles restoring Jerusalem to the Jewish people. No dancing in the streets with flags. And none of this had anything to do with the pandemic.
The cancellation
of the Jerusalem flag march was, instead, a reenactment of David versus
Goliath. But this time, Little David, Israel, was not winning. It was Goliath,
the Arabs, who had the upper hand. This in spite of the blood we shed in 1967,
and despite the fact that the Jews are, 54 years on, still sovereign over
Jerusalem.
Jerusalem Day is that day on which we celebrate the miracles
that made the Jewish people once more sovereign over the Holy City. As is the
case with any people celebrating the liberation of the places they hold dear,
anywhere in the world, a parade is in order, complete with flags. We call our
Jerusalem flag march, the Rikudgalim,
a contraction of “dance” and “flags” and it is the one time of year when Jews
can dance, sing, and mingle freely in Jerusalem neighborhoods populated in the
main by Arabs. But this year the flag march never happened.
Not because the miracle of little David beating the giant
Goliath was any less appreciated than in former years, but because Hamas used
the pretext of the proposed Sheikh Jarrah evictions to make war on the Jews.
Not because Hamas thought it could win, but because the terror organization wanted
to be seen as the supposed defenders
of Jerusalem by the Arabs who live under the Palestinian Authority. To this
end, Hamas provoked riots on the Temple Mount, damaging the Al-Aqsa mosque and setting
trees on fire. They also attempted to lynch Jewish drivers in Jerusalem; torched
cars, shops, and synagogues in mixed Arab-Jewish cities; and shot 4,360 rockets
into Israel’s most densely populated urban centers.
This is how Hamas does it: puts on a show of might for the
people, hoping for the ultimate one-state solution—as per their charter—in which both
Abbas and the Jews (God forbid) are rendered moot. The Hamas show of 2021 was definitely
a show, not completely dissimilar from the sovereignty show we Jews put on during
our annual flag march in neighborhoods we normally are too afraid to visit, and
at a time when we are not free to pray at our holiest site—the Temple Mount—in
our holiest city.
And still, even a show can be quite effective. The proof is
in the pudding for Hamas. The Mufti
of Jerusalem, seen as a puppet of the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, was
thrown out of the Al-Aqsa mosque during his Friday sermon, because he wouldn’t
congratulate Hamas.
The proof is also in the pudding for the Jews. Call it provocative,
but that yearly Jerusalem flag march, the Rikudgalim,
gives us the courage, one year at a time, to hope that one day, Jews will walk,
heads held high and free of fear, anywhere at all in Jerusalem. The Rikudgalim reminds us that one day; we,
the indigenous people of Israel will indeed be sovereign over Jerusalem in
every sense, and that no one will ever be able to question that fact again—that
one day every Jew will feel free to pray aloud from permitted areas on Har Habayit, the site of our holy Temple
Mount, where the Jordanian Islamic Waqf reigns
supreme.
In 1968, we held a wondrous Jerusalem flag march with
thousands of Israeli Jews thronging the streets. Since that time, the parade
has become a more modest event, in which mainly National Religious youth take
part. Others have been vocal in agitating for the parade to be canceled for good, saying
that it is cruel to the Arabs who live in the Old City. “It is like rubbing our
Jewish victories in their faces,” say the left, comprised in the main of
left-wing secular Israeli Jews. “At least,” say they, “let us give them the
dignity to suffer their shame in private.”
IDF parade in front of Damascus Gate, 1968 (photo credit: Moshe Milner)
Even some religious Jews on the right have come to feel this
way. “We have no need for a parade,” they say. “We know to whom the spoils
fell, to whom Jerusalem truly belongs. Why do we need this display of
braggadocio that is so hurtful to our Arab population that is also under the
protection of our Democratic state?”
These people are missing the point. Yes, there are the youth
who take part in the Rikudgalim
precisely to show the Arabs “what’s what,” rather than strictly to celebrate
the restoration of our treasure, Jerusalem, after thousands of years. But most
of the marchers are just celebrating Jerusalem, and happy—thanks to the massive
security presence surrounding this event—to see a part of the city they usually
are unable to visit. And make no mistake: every part of Jerusalem is precious
to us, even when others are living there. We feel it is a mitzvah to walk in
every part of our city and country. So of course, it is a very special day and
event.
With all that was happening with the failed Hamas war on the
Jews/attempted PA takeover, the parade was of course, postponed. Once the Hamas
hostilities died down, some brave souls did attempt to reschedule the Rikudgalim, the Jerusalem flag march,
for Thursday of this week. But it was a foregone conclusion that our Israeli
leaders would nix the event, based on the proposed parade route which part
Damascus Gate. How could the Rikudgalimnot include Damascus Gate, gate to
the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem? It is the one time of year we get to see this
part of the city—revel in every inch of Jerusalem—the jewel in the God-given crown
of the Jewish people, Israel.
What is it that prevents the Jewish people from celebrating
the liberation of their city with flags? Is it institutional laziness? Yes. The
police and city officials don’t necessarily want to deal with the fuss and
expense of renewed violence.
Is it the fear that violence will break out countrywide?
Yes. And it was under this pretext that Defense Minister Benny Gantz put the
pressure on the police to cancel the parade. Something every right wing adult
in Israel knew he would do. Because he is on the side of the left. The people
who placate and appease.
Would the Rikudgalim
have been likely to cause violence to break out at this juncture? Very
possibly, as any reasonable person might conclude. The Arabs do indeed see Jews
bearing flags while marching and singing in the streets of Jerusalem as a reason
to shoot and stab and maim and kill. And currently, after so many years of
literally getting away with murder, they have the courage of their convictions.
But in the years following 1967, as I for one recall, they were cowed.
They were subservient. They’d been licked, embarrassingly so, by a military
midget: Israel. The Arabs were shamed and silenced for more than a decade, and
with few exceptions, they behaved like a people who’d had their comeuppance and should just be grateful to be allowed to live unmolested wherever they choose
to pay rent (and in the case of Sheikh Jarrah, even where they don’t). Violence
was way, way down.
Over time, however, the left and the international community
emboldened the Arabs, made them forget how bad they lost, and encouraged them
to think they could take Jerusalem back, or at least pretend to do so and cause
a lot of death and property damage in the process. This is precisely why the
parade, the Rikudgalim, is so
important.
The Arabs are emboldened. And their hutzpah grows greater with
every passing year. Their pockets filled with EU gold, they are welcomed in the
inner chambers of the ICC, and even Iran comes to line Hamas pockets with cash
and weapons. The US, meanwhile, seeks to strengthen the Palestinian Authority,
setting the stage for internecine war, while at the same time, to paraphrase Tom
Lehrer, “Everybody hates the Jews.”
There’s a reason people the world over, take one day in the
year to march in their cities with flags. Parades and marches are a statement:
This is our march, our statement. We made it ours, and so it shall always be.
But when the march doesn’t take place, this too, is a
statement. And it’s definitely the wrong message to send:
“The march is important as an expression of our sovereignty
over Jerusalem and if the march was cancelled, due to pressures from the Arab
enemy, this shows that maybe in theory we have sovereignty in Jerusalem but not
in practice,” said Nadia
Matar, co-chairman of both Women in Green and the Sovereignty Movement
(Ribonut). “This policy of fear and surrender to Arab threats and terror will lead
to the re-division of Jerusalem, G-d forbid!”
If parades and marches are important everywhere else in the
world as an expression of patriotism, I’d venture to say they are even more
important, perhaps existentially so, in Jerusalem. Patriotism is an outer
expression of what is in our hearts, part love, part pride, and yes, even part braggadocio,
a display. The Rikudgalim is a critical
expression of Israeli patriotism, an annual event that does not distinguish
between bits and parts of the city. The Rikudgalim
declares that ALL of Jerusalem, is ours.
So yes. Is the Rikudgalim
ostentatious, a show? Yes, it’s a display, for crying out loud. And
displays are in your face. And in OURS.
A display? Sure. The very best kind. One that means no harm
to anyone. On the contrary: every citizen of Israel, no matter their religion,
has equal rights and opportunities. The Rikudgalim
reinforces the notion that the good guys are in charge, the terrorists
vanquished. Law and order shall reside among the people, all of the people, of
Israel. Because the Jews sit in government in Jerusalem as the capital of the
Jewish State of Israel.
This is distinct from the false show of Hamas pretending to
defend Jerusalem by showering rockets on Ashkelon in order to woo voters away
from Abbas. We actually DID successfully defend Jerusalem. And now it is ours. Our
flag march says that to Hamas, to the PA, to all the antisemites of the world,
but most of all, to us. And we desperately need that reminder—that we are the
rightful inhabitants of Jerusalem and its rightful sovereign.
Some things you just don’t share. And with the most
important things, you don’t let people play with it or borrow it. You don’t let
it out of your sight.
And the more we walk in the streets of Jerusalem, in EVERY
street of Jerusalem, the more they’ll know it’s ours. And the consequences be
damned. She’s worth it, Jerusalem. She’s just that good.
Nadia Matar can tell you about the importance of walking the streets of
Jerusalem, and what it means. “Twenty-seven years ago we started our annual walk
around the walls of the Old City on Tisha B’Av. In 1994 we asked for a police
permit and were denied. We went to the Supreme Court with the help of Attorney
Aviad Hacohen, who claimed that if Jerusalem is united—then there is no reason
Jews should not walk anywhere in Jerusalem. We won and the
rest is history—we have been walking there for the past 27 years,” says Matar, “But
after the latest capitulations by the authorities—who knows what will be with
our walk?”
Matar is absolutely right. The cancellation of the parade
would set a precedent. Not just for next year’s Rikudgalim, but for other Jerusalem events as well, eventually
spreading to yet other events in other parts of the country. That is how it
happens. How they slice away bits and pieces of our country, our city, our
flesh.
Maybe that’s why there are still rumors
the parade could yet happen. But they are only rumors, and vague rumors at
that. There is little hope.
That’s a pity, for not a small number of holy Jews died that
we might dance, sing, and mingle freely in all of the streets of Jerusalem.
They
would want us to celebrate: a celebration is definitely in order. So we'll do the most we can do this year. But next year?
Next year and every year, in Jerusalem.
UPDATE: One minute before this published, Bibi threw this hot football into Bennett's lap--and of course, the caveat is that the march will probably still not be allowed anywhere near Damascus Gate. From the Government Press Office:
Security Cabinet Statement
(Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ascribed great importance to reaching a broad agreement on the holding of the march; therefore, he called a recess in the Security Cabinet meeting and turned to Defense Minister Benny Gantz in order to reach an agreement. The Prime Minister and the Defense Minister submitted the following decision, which was approved by the Cabinet: The march will be held on Tuesday, 15 June 2021, in a format to be agreed upon by the police and the organizers of the march.
A press release from the IDF belatedly explains the reason that it destroyed the Al Jalaa building, which housed offices of AP and Al Jazeera:
During Operation "Guardians of the Walls" the IDF struck the al-Jalaa building on May 15th, 2021. The site was used by the Hamas terror organization for intelligence R&D and to carry out SIGINT (signals intelligence), ELINT (electronic signals intelligence), and EW (electronic warfare) operations, targeting both IDF operational activity and civilian systems in Israel.
One of the main goals of these efforts was to develop a system that would disrupt the Iron Dome aerial defense system.
The purpose of the IDF strike was to curtail these enemy capabilities, including destroying special equipment, and preventing their use during the operation. According to IDF assessments, the equipment was in the building at the time of the strike. The strike was designed to collapse the building in order to ensure the destruction of the special means.
The target was of high military value to Hamas and was vetted according to rigorous procedures within the IDF, and in accordance with international law.
In light of the nature of the target, prior to the strike, the IDF provided civilians in the building advance warning. Significant efforts were made to enable civilians to evacuate the building. The evacuation process was meticulous, and as a result, no civilians were harmed.
This event should be put into context - Hamas intentionally operates within the civilian population of Gaza and does so in order to hamper the IDF’s operational activity.
The IDF will continue to maintain the security of Israeli citizens, while doing its best to prevent any possible harm to non-combatants.
This is by any measure appropriate under international law. An electronic warfare site is as valuable as any command and control center.
The only possible objection would be if the IDF could have achieved the same aim by only shooting missiles into the floors of the building that housed these offices. It seems unlikely, since a lot of equipment was also on the roof, and if (as has been reported) Hamas controlled three lower floors of the building, then taking them out would have very possibly collapsed the entire building in a way that could have caused many casualties - if it toppled rather than imploded.
This operation does not violate the principle of distinction, since it is a military target. It does not violate the principle of proportionality, because all civilians were warned and not one was injured. THe value of Al Jazeera's and AP's equipment is hardly proportional in value to that of taking down a major Hamas electronic warfare site during wartime.
Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch has tweeted many times that there was no evidence of Hamas presence in the building, and even if they were there, that taking the entire building down was not proportionate.
No one has been able to verify the Israeli military's claim that Hamas was inside the building housing AP and Al Jazeera. (AP denies it.) Even if it was, how does the definite military advantage of the attack justify the enormous civilian (media) cost? https://t.co/zXrGnyMm7Rpic.twitter.com/LpUA9pkhlv
Refuting Israel's claim: "AP’s bureau has been in this building for 15 years. We have had no indication Hamas was in the building....This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk." https://t.co/bfjrpz2la0pic.twitter.com/bO5lXrYNXm
The 12-story building in Gaza that an Israeli airstrike destroyed not only housed major media organizations but also offered a "vantage point for the world" as @AP cameras on the roof captured Israeli bombardments and Palestinian militants’ rocket attacks. https://t.co/7Xvg9G6VV1pic.twitter.com/2Ur1lDNO7h
So either you believe the IDF, which has great disincentive to attack civilian targets, or you believe a "human rights" leader who has demonstrated his hate for the Jewish state and his bias over the years, and who wants to imply that Israel is somehow trying to stop negative news coverage - by attacking news organizations.
The IDF should have released this statement the same day as the attack. I had read weeks ago that Hamas was using the building to try to scramble Iron Dome defenses, so clearly that had leaked. There was very little advantage to waiting this long.
But it does show that in retrospect, the IDF is nearly always correct and its critics are dead wrong.
Still, there is reason for hope. Twenty years ago, the Palestinian cause was priority number one in the region. Now, people in the Gulf see things differently. We still care. We still support support the Palestinians. We believe in the two-state solution. But people in the Gulf no longer believe that this should come at the expense of our national interest. Many activists responded to Hamas- and Jihad- influenced media and social media posts to say, we do care about the Palestinians—but we don't care about these terrorist organizations.
What the public doesn't understand is who is behind so much of the media they read—who is funding this misguided narrative, which only serves to protect Hamas, and ultimately, Iran.
This past conflict with Gaza should be the last war. We should all learn to speak one language: the language of peace. Now is the time to not just talk the talk, but for us all to walk the walk.
Hamas and the Palestinian leadership have hijacked the minds of 2 million Palestinians to sell their political and terrorist agendas. We want the Palestinian people to enjoy what we enjoy, to have what we have and create a better future for a new generation. But we have to do this together, with all the stakeholders in the region, from NGOs to schools, religious leaders and governments. We cannot do this alone.
Dr. Ali al Nuaimi is chairman of the Defense Affairs, Interior and Foreign Relations Committee of the UAE's Federal National Council, a representative legislature whose 40 members, half elected indirectly and half appointed, serve in an advisory role to the emirates' leadership.
The Biden administration is actively involved in encouraging more Arab states to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said Tuesday.
“They fully adopted the Abraham Accords and are eager to expand them,” he said. “There is going to be someone appointed to be responsible for doing so.”
The Biden administration is considering appointing former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro as a Middle East envoy responsible for handling the continuation of the Abraham Accords, The Washington Post reported last week.
The Biden administration does not use the Trump-era name “Abraham Accords,” instead calling them “normalization agreements.”
In a briefing summing up his time in the Foreign Ministry, as a new government is expected to be sworn in on Sunday with Yair Lapid taking his place, Ashkenazi said he is in daily contact with Washington.
Ashkenazi would not say which countries were likely to be next to establish full relations with Israel. But before US President Joe Biden came into office, there was progress with Saudi Arabia, Oman, Mauritania and others.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken declined Monday to confirm that the U.S. recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, when asked directly by Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) about the issue at the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Israel captured the area in the Six Day War in 1967, after the Syrian military had used it to shell Israeli civilians in the Galilee. Israel was prepared to give most of it back to Syria in peace talks in the 1990s, but was rejected by the regime.
The rise of the so-called “Islamic State,” or ISIS, a decade ago, and the subsequent intervention of Iran in the Syrian Civil War, cemented the importance of Israeli control over the Golan Heights as a strategic buffer against invasion.
President Donald Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019. In gratitude, Israel named a town in the Golan after him, “Trump Heights.” Blinken appeared to walk back that commitment, however, in February.
Zeldin asked Blinken directly about the issue, and the two had the following exchange during Monday’s testimony: Zeldin: To clarify one other point: does the Biden administration recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights?
Blinken: With regard to that, as a practical matter, Israel has control of the Golan Heights, irrespective of its legal status, and that will have to remain unless and until things get to a point where Syria and everything operating out from Syria no longer poses a threat to Israel, and we are not anywhere near that.
Blinken’s response echoes the rhetoric of Arab states and radical Islamist movements that refuse to recognize Israel in a formal sense: they recognize that it is physically there, though they do not recognize its legitimacy and permanence. He implied that the territory could, one day, be ceded.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reported this little girl being killed on May 14:
At approximately 21:30, shrapnel of a missile fell on a house belonging to the sons of ‘Issa ‘Obaid on al-Nozhah Street in Jabalia. As a result, a girl with disability namely Buthaina Mahmoud ‘Issa ‘Obaid (6) was killed after being hit with shrapnel in the right side of her head when she was in front of her house.
PCHR doesn't mention where the actual "missile" hit, only that 'Obaid was killed by shrapnel from it. This seems to indicate that she was not killed by an Israeli airstrike but from a terrorist rocket that fell short.
At the same time, the IDF says that 680 rockets fell short in Gaza - ten times the number that landed in Israel's populated areas. If we assume that Gaza's population density is roughly the same as that of Israeli areas where the 60-70 rockets fell, and that the rockets that landed were equally deadly in both places, then we can guess that over 100 Gazans were killed by rockets!
However, the number is almost certainly lower than that. This map released by the IDF showed that while nearly all terror rockets were launched from populated areas, many of them landed in the farmlands that are on the borders of Gaza.
Many - but not all.
Buthania Obeid
Jabalia, where Buthaina ‘Obaid was killed - along with Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Sheikh Zayed, all in the north of Gaza - were heavily hit by rockets from terror groups. So were other towns and villages like Khuza'a in the south.
So these two strikes in Beit Lahiya on that same day that 'Obaid was killed were very possibly the result of terror rockets falling short:
According to PCHR’s investigations, Israeli warplanes targeted an agricultural land near a 3-storey house belonging to Mahmoud Hashem al-‘Attar’s sons in Beit Lahia on the Street beyween al-‘Atatrah and al-Salatin neighborhoods in Beit Lahia. As a result, Lamyaa’ Hasan al-‘Attar (27) and her 3 children namely Islam (8), Amira (7), and Mohammed “Zain al-Dein” (8 months) were killed, and their house was completely destroyed. Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes launched 2 missiles at an agricultural land in al-Amal neighborhood in Beit Lahia near a 2-storey house belonging to Ibrahim Mousa Ahmed Salama (49). As a result, his wife, Faiza Ahmed Mohammed Salama (45) was killed, and the house owner and his son were injured.
There are plenty of populated areas marked at blue on the map where deaths and injuries seem far more likely to have come from terrorist group rockets than from Israeli fire. Here's one:
At approximately 16:20 on Wednesday, 12 May 2021, the dead body of Hammad ‘Ayyad Mansour al-Debari (86), from al-Shokah in eastern Rafah, arrived at Abu Yousif al-Najjar Hospital after he sustained shrapnel wounds in the head inside his house near al-Sabereen Mosque. PCHR’s staff is still investigating the circumstances of the incident, which coincided with the Israeli Iron Dome’s interception of the Palestinian rockets fired from the Gaza Strip along with Israeli artillery shelling.
No one is investigating these strikes, of course. But 680 rockets landed somewhere, and we know they - killed people - and some of them killed many as we know from the first day. They are bigger than the rockets of the past. Israel knows its targets, and it is absurd to think that Israel is targeting random houses with children when we know that the IDF calls residents before attacking rocket launch sites or Hamas command and control centers.
It is not a stretch to believe that a high percentage of the civilians killed in Gaza were killed by those 680 rockets that rained on them.
Buried in a New York Times article about the claims of both Jews and Arabs to houses in Silwan we see this:
In the late 1930s, the site was abandoned. Documents show the British authorities, which then ruled Palestine, evacuated the Jewish residents, fearing they were vulnerable to an Arab insurrection. After the British left and Jordan occupied the West Bank in 1948, Palestinian families moved onto the uninhabited plot.
That is a sanitized way of saying that the Jews were constantly attacked by Arabs in Silwan.
Here is the Palestine Post article about their evacuation, from August 15, 1938:
The British authorities were supposed to protect the homes. They didn't - Arabs broke into a synagogue and defiled the Torah there several months later:
UPDATE: Here is the letter from British officials about the evacuation - and the expectation that the Jews would return shortly. (h/t Stephen)
A Jordanian national table tennis player has withdrawn from an international championship to avoid playing an Israeli player, the Jordanian Paralympic Committee said on Friday
Osama Abu Jame refused to continue participating in the Slovenia International Championship after reaching the quarter-finals where he was scheduled to go head to head with an Israeli player.
Jame is sponsored by a Jordanian software company named ProgressSoft.
It doesn't seem that the rules of the Paralympics are as stringent as those of other sports concerning athletes who refuse to compete.
Jordanians seem thrilled as this show of cowardice.
The Holocaust did not put an end to antisemitism, but it made all its existing forms unacceptable. Had the Nazis entered Palestine and eliminated the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish population of the Land of Israel) anti-Zionism might have followed the fate of its predecessors, but fortunately the Nazis did not. Yet, prior to the Holocaust, Judaism played the role that Zionism plays today. Hatred of Judaism was shared by both the right and the left; though on the left, it took not a religious — as with the Church — but an ideological approach. Karl Marx in his notorious “On the Jewish Question,” written in 1843, proclaimed the antisemitic manifesto of the hundred years that followed: “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Thus Judaism, as an expression of Jewish particularism, as the culture of the People of Israel in the Diaspora, was declared persona non-grata. Hitler’s ideas about the impossibility of peaceful coexistence between the Jews and the rest of the world, and his view of the inevitability of the final solution, stemmed from Marx’s maxim.
After the Holocaust, however, it seemed for a brief short moment that the Holocaust had not only failed to finish off the Jews, but had killed antisemitism for good. Not so fast. As happened many times during the twentieth century, the Soviet Union came to rescue. The 1930s saw the USSR slowly return to the antisemitic roots of the tsarist regime. The pact with Nazi Germany and the dismissal of Maxim Litvinov were the turning points, and the war that followed only injected the Soviets with the rabid antisemitic propaganda disseminated by the Nazis. After the war ended, with the dawn of the Cold War, Stalin, for many different reasons, needed a new internal enemy. With the class struggle being officially almost over, Jews proved to be a perfect candidate.
Yet Judaism proved to be irrelevant, as the Soviet Union was anti-religious, with most religious practices either banned or under strict government supervision, not to mention the association of traditional antisemitism with the Holocaust. Thus Zionism presented itself as an excellent replacement for Judaism, fitting perfectly with Marx’s ideological antisemitism. And for naive or conniving Western intellectuals, the allure of the rebranded hatred proved to be irresistible.
It is important to note that, prior to the Soviet turn to anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism itself as a defined ideology and political stance did not truly exist. There were groups of people, some large, of both Jews and non-Jews who advocated against the Zionist enterprise. However, they did so either on a purely religious basis, like some Orthodox Jews, or because they saw the enterprise as unfeasible and undesirable. Very few argued against the Jewish state as such.
And there is a reason for this: anti-Zionism, as an idea, is absurd. Imagine a political movement calling itself anti-France. It is a laughable idea that one can support only as a joke or due to a mental disorder. So why does anti-Zionism not get similar treatment? The answer is antisemitism. The defining feature of antisemitism is to treat the Jews in a way that is the opposite of one’s treatment of other people: what is allowed to everyone else is forbidden to Jews. What is tolerated in others is condemned in the Jews. And so France is fine, however questionable its long history, but Israel is not.
The general rule when observing the oldest hatred is that if one singles out Jews from among all other nations, then one is antisemitic. Anti-Zionism is no exception.
António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, has described rising anti-Semitism as a ‘multi-headed monster’ of intolerance that’s creating a ‘tsunami of hatred’ across the world, and the UN proclaims ‘anti-racism’ as its defining ideology. But the UN is failing to confront discrimination and violence against Jews — and at times even nurturing it.
The UN special rapporteur on racism, E. Tendayi Achiume, ought to be among the leading global voices speaking out against Jew hate. Last year, she called on Bulgaria to stop hate speech and discrimination against the Roma, she urged the Human Rights Council to address abuses against people of African descent and she appealed to world leaders to confront ‘structural forms of racial and ethnic injustice’.
Yet Achiume has a blind spot about one kind of racial and ethnic injustice. When ‘anti-Zionist’ activists descend on Jewish neighborhoods with calls to ‘kill and rape’ Jewish women, and when Jews were targeted by protesters chanting ‘Zionists are terrorists’ at rallies around the world, Achiume says nothing.
She did, though, produce a report on anti-Semitism in 2019. But that only addressed the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the context of ‘neo-Nazi and related intolerance’. This exposes a fundamental flaw in the UN system, one amplified and promoted by influencers, thought leaders, academics and journalists: Jew-hatred can only be acknowledged when it carries a tiki torch. When it comes cloaked in the language of ‘racial justice’, it’s excused or ignored.
The UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, has also been silent about race-based violence against Jews. Not only that, she’s lined up with the inciters. She recently marked the 20th anniversary of 2001 World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, by endorsing its racist final declaration. Instead of combating racism as it claimed to, the Durban conference became one of the worst international manifestations of anti-Semitism in the postwar period.
The Durban conference featured ugly displays of intolerance, anti-Semitism and baseless claims against the Jewish state. Anti-Israel activists gathered from all over the world to accuse the Jewish state of crimes against humanity. They equated Zionism with racism, threatened Jewish activists, and brandished anti-Semitic caricatures of money-clutching Jews with hooked noses and fangs dripping with blood. Two decades later, these memes recur in the anti-Jewish invective spouted by left-wing activists in the name of ‘racial justice’.
This week, a clip of America's most prominent racial grifter, Ibram X. Kendi, began making the rounds on Twitter. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, has undoubtedly made a fortune by indicting those who disagree with him as complicit in American racism – and by providing partial absolution to those who repeat his cultish ideas.
In one particular clip from a recent interview, however, Kendi was asked to do one very simple thing: to define racism itself. Kendi failed signally in that task. "I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas," Kendi stated.
The audience laughed out loud.
Kendi then reiterated his definition and added: "And antiracism is pretty simple using the same terms. Antiracism is a collection of antiracist policies leading to racial ... equity that are substantiated by antiracist ideas."
This, of course, is utterly nonsensical. No term can be defined by simple reference to the term itself. If someone asked you to define an elephant and you quickly explained that an elephant is, in fact, an animal known as an elephant, you would be adding no new information. If someone asked you to describe anger and you then defined anger as the feeling of being angry, you would leave the listener in serious doubt as to your sanity.
In the wake of the Israel-Gaza conflict in May, an American author was suspended by Twitter for comparing a Boston Globe cartoon to Nazi propaganda. New York Times writers who, in expressing their sorrow over the fact that “most of the children who died were Arabs,” are in fact admitting that they would be happier if most of the children who died were Israeli Jews.
The NYT story did mention that “Hamas and other militant groups fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israeli towns and cities indiscriminately.” It also correctly stated that the Israeli air defense system had managed to stop about 90% of the rockets.
The article also noted that at least two of the children killed in Gaza may have been killed when Palestinian militants fired a rocket that fell short, and that one of the children killed in Israel, Nadine Awad, was Palestinian. “The low toll on the Israeli side also reflected an imbalance in defensive capabilities,” NYT concluded.
All the same, the paper’s pro-Hamas propaganda was deeply problematic in its evasive language. The authors of the op-ed, in expressing their sorrow over the fact that “most of the children who died were Arabs,” in fact covertly confessed that they would be happier if most of the children who had died were Israeli Jews.
Would the West’s underdog-nation romanticists feel better if Israel’s Iron Dome had failed, and Hamas rockets had killed 500 Israeli children instead of two? Is it really too hard to understand that 500 Israeli children were spared not because Hamas did not want to kill them, but because, as the NYT article pointed out, there is an imbalance in defensive capabilities? Is it Israel’s sin to have built the Iron Dome to minimize casualties when it is threatened by thousands of rockets flying over its skies?
If this is the precedent set by the “cradle of democracy,” the lesser democracies of the world will find it much easier to call for more Jewish blood.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday ordered that the family of a Palestinian terrorist who murdered two Israelis be paid more than $40,000 and be given new housing, the Kan public broadcaster reported.
Ramallah Governor Laila Ghannam, an Abbas appointee, met with the family of Muhannad Halabi and gave them some 30,000 Jordanian Dinars ($42,000), reportedly to help them cover housing costs since their home was destroyed by the IDF following the killings, Kan said.
Ghannam also told the family that Abbas had instructed his security services to help them find permanent housing. Home demolitions are a controversial policy that the IDF says helps deter future terror attacks.
The payments are the first high-profile payments to terrorist families since the Biden administration took office, despite claims that the Palestinians were willing to rethink the controversial policy as part of an effort to improve relations with Washington.
Halabi killed two Israelis, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Banita, and injured Banita’s wife, Adele, and their 2-year-old son in a stabbing attack in the Old City of Jerusalem on October 3, 2015.
Muhannad Halabi, 19, the terrorist who killed two Israelis on October 3, 2015 in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem’s Old City. (Israel Police)
He was shot and killed by Israeli security forces.
Ahead of Biden’s inauguration, senior Palestinian officials told The Times of Israel that Ramallah was willing to alter the way it pays stipends to Palestinian security prisoners, as well as the families of terrorists and others killed by Israelis, in a bid to improve ties with Washington and Europe.
Because the PA hands out more money for longer sentences in Israeli prisons, those incarcerated for the most brutal terror attacks receive more funding from Ramallah.
The Arabs are aware that Hamas's only interest is to appease the mullahs in Tehran for the sake of milking them for more money and weapons. The Arabs understand that this just is another farce by Hamas and particularly Iran.
It is... refreshing to see how many Arabs are aware of the dangers of Iran's involvement with Palestinian terrorist groups that seek the elimination first of Israel, then of them.
"The Hamas militias in the Gaza Strip belong to Iran.... Iran wants to use the Palestinian issue as a winning card at the Vienna negotiations..... to force the US to lift the sanctions on Iran in return for ending the security escalation which threatens Israel.... Iran's weapons are for destruction, not construction." — Amjad Taha, prominent Arab journalist, Twitter, May 27, 2021.
"The more killing and destruction, the more Hamas's income increases while the Palestinians continue to suffer from siege and poverty." — Saeed Al-Kahel, Moroccan writer and political analyst, Assahifa, May 29, 2021.
"Iran exploited Hamas and the Islamic Jihad for its own benefit only, and if it wanted the interest of the Palestinians, it would have contributed to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.... Tehran has not contributed or made donations for humanitarian or reconstruction projects in Gaza...." — Samir Ghattas, former Egyptian parliament member and head of the Egyptian Middle East Forum for Strategic Studies, Al-Arabiya.net, May 26, 2021.
The Egyptian expert [Muhammad Mujahid Al-Zayyat, a consultant at the Egyptian Center for Thought and Strategic Studies]... is joining other Arabs in warning the Biden administration and the Western powers against allowing Iran to be rewarded for Hamas's war of terrorism against Israel.
It now remains to be seen whether the Biden administration and the Western powers will heed this warning or continue to bury their heads in the sand, pretending that the mullahs in Iran, in exchange for massive bribes from the US, will magically change their savage stripes. They did not last time; what will happen to the region if they again do not?
Here are some New York Times articles about how the few remaining Jews were jailed, threatened and killed in Arab countries in the wake of the 1967 Six Day War.
Even as these abuses were happening, the Arabs were insisting that they weren't anti-Jewish, just anti-Zionist.
On this anniversary of the Six Day War, it is worth a reminder of what the original PLO Charter said about its goals. Articles 22-24:
Article 22. The people of Palestine believe in peaceful co-existence on the basis of legal existence, for there can be no co-existence with aggression, nor can there be peace with occupation and colonialism.
Article 23. In realizing the goals and principles of this Covenant the Palestine Liberation Organization carries out its complete role to liberate Palestine in accordance with the fundamental law of this Organization.
Article 24. This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, in the Gaza Strip or the Himmah area. Its activities will be on the national popular level in the liberational, organizational, political and financial fields.
Article 22 shows that the PLO considers all of Israel to be "occupied." And Article 24 shows that the PLO did not consider the West Bank or Gaza to be part of the Palestinian state that they said they wanted.
Here's a photo of a PLO meeting in Gaza before 1967, with a map of "Palestine" in the backdrop showing that they didn't consider the West Bank and Gaza to be the same as the part of Palestine they sought:
Only after the Six Day War did the PLO decide that the West Bank and Gaza were part of the Palestinian state they sought.
To summarize: The PLO only wants the parts of Palestine that are controlled by Jews.
(We've discussed many times that "historic Palestine" includes parts of Lebanon and Jordan which the PLO never claimed.)
Another interesting fact is that the Palestinian claim on Jerusalem started well after 1967!
Have you ever noticed that Palestinian officials love to put a photo of the Dome of the Rock as a backdrop in all their offices? Here's Mahmoud Abbas with Secretary of State Blinken last month.
There were no photos of the Dome of the Rock that the PLO associated with itself before 1967 - because Jordan controlled it. In fact, I cannot find any photos of PLO leaders featuring the Dome of the Rock as a background decoration until roughly 1991, when Yasir Arafat placed it in his office in Tunis.
Palestinian claims on Jerusalem seem to have been carefully coordinated with other Arabs (for example, in an Arab meeting in 1982) but it seems that only after 1988 when Jordan renounced its claim to the West Bank did the PLO make Jerusalem a key demand.
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Wednesday, June 09, 2021
Elder of Ziyon
