Vanesa, a Jewish Israeli lady expresses how welcome she feels inside Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque 🕌
— Loay Alshareef لؤي الشريف (@lalshareef) June 13, 2021
This is what my great religion Islam promotes, and these are the values of the UAE 🇦🇪♥️ pic.twitter.com/guISS9HWGz
Monday, June 14, 2021
- Monday, June 14, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Monday, June 14, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Monday, June 14, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
The destruction, which can be seen across the entire 25-mile strip was concentrated in the north, around Gaza City, and the southeast.
Rights groups decried the targeting of Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Tensions boiled over in May after Hamas fired rockets into Israel in response to Israeli police cracking down on Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem. Israel responded with airstrikes, setting off nearly two weeks of hostilities.
Sunday, June 13, 2021
- Sunday, June 13, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Sunday, June 13, 2021
- Ian
- Linkdump, Richard Landes
Richard Landes: Lethal, own-goal war journalism
The month of May 2021 taught us Israelis many unfortunate things—things we hoped were not true (and continue to hope are not true)—about the sad straights of Israeli democracy; the relentlessly authoritarian nature of Palestinian or, for that matter, Arab and Muslim political culture; the troubled relationship between Jews and Arabs in Israel; the rising strength of religious hatred in the region and the world; and, at least for me, the most senseless yet persistent phenomenon that crops up every time open conflict between Israelis and Arabs breaks out: namely the own-goal, lethal war journalism of the Western media and the wave of hatred it predictably unleashes around the world.Democrats must require Palestinian leaders to do better
A brief preliminary discussion about the three types of unethical forms of “war journalism” is in order. There is patriotic war journalism: reporting as news your own side’s war propaganda; lethal war journalism: reporting as news a foreign belligerent’s war propaganda; and own-goal war journalism: reporting your enemy’s war propaganda as news.
Modern, professional journalism considers patriotic war journalism unethical, a prostitution of its high calling. While reporters sometimes sympathize with one “side” in a foreign war, lethal war journalists systematically give credence to one belligerent’s narratives, depicting the other side as an atrocious enemy. The third category seems wholly improbable, since why would anyone do something that stupid?
And yet, in the 21st century, the land “between the river and the sea” has given birth to a peculiarly virulent case of both lethal and own-goal journalism among Western news providers. From 2000-2002, a wave of the most ferocious and provocative lethal journalism in the history of modern, professional journalism came from Western journalists who published dishonest Palestinian claims about Israeli evil-doing (targeting kids, massacring civilians) and ran them as news.
When those claims were disproven, as they all were, these news outlets did nothing to correct their errors. In the spring of 2002, when lethal journalists filled the global public sphere with reports of Israeli massacres in Jenin (just like the Nazis in Poland), progressives in Europe protested by wearing mock suicide belts in solidarity with an enemy about to attack their own countries. Own-goal journalism scored a massive blow for an enemy whose viciousness was embodied in those very suicide belts that these demonstrators, inebriated with virtue, wore so proudly.
In early June, Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote a letter to Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, asking him to remove a temporary hold on restoring Palestinian aid. That hold was put in place only until the United States can verify, with any sense of certainty, that the recipients will not directly or indirectly funnel the money to terrorists. Releasing it before that happens would be a terrible mistake.David Collier: Gaza, Sky News and the Islamist march on London
The letter, which was signed by a group of Raskin’s Democratic colleagues, was misleading and generally reflective of a failed Middle East approach that they desperately need to abandon.
The letter was misleading because it is full of partial omissions and false promises. For example, it notes that this “humanitarian and development aid was passed in FY20 with bipartisan support and signed by the former President,” but completely fails to mention that there was also overwhelming bipartisan and executive support for the very limitations that Risch is trying to uphold.
Raskin claims that the money “is to be provided in full accordance with U.S. law. It is administered and overseen by our government and by trusted and vetted partners …. Hamas and other terrorist groups will not benefit from our humanitarian assistance.” The truth, however, is that during a May 24 special briefing, a senior State Department official publicly admitted that while the U.S. would be “working in partnership with the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to try and channel aid there,” at the end of the day “there are no guarantees” it would not end up with Hamas.
It is also problematic and unlawful even to pretend (while noticeably declining to mention them by name) that the PA has suddenly become a “trusted and vetted partner” that the U.S. can work with on distributing aid in the region.
Setting aside the fact that as recently as May 19, during the conflict in Israel, the PA released a public statement calling for a unity government with none other than Hamas, the PA itself consistently calls for violent uprisings and intifada. The PA also doesn’t stop at merely glorifying violence; it literally pays for it by guaranteeing convicted murderers a monthly salary for life, with amounts increased according to the number of victims and the severity of the harm. It spends hundreds of millions annually incentivizing terror, much of it from international aid. (h/t Yerushalimey)
In fact, I went back six months on the Sky Twitter feed and there is not a single tweet, not one, about the persecution of Christians.
Instead there is an endless stream of demonising, anti-Israel propaganda.
The BBC, the Guardian all have similar issues and a similar focus. When these news outlets publish a story against Israel, it goes viral. Their advertisers pay more, their subscriptions increase. But they are chiefly speaking to the Islamist crowd who use the material as fodder for new recruits and they are egged on by the same Islamist mob screaming ‘what about Palestine?’
Where is the front cover of the New York Times displaying rows of Nigerian children who have been lost? There isn’t one. Nobody cares.
Muslim footballers hold aloft the Palestinian flag and everyone takes this as a sign that ‘Palestine’ is the real humanitarian issue of our age. It is nothing of the kind and it is a disgrace that the FA took no action. This is people like Liverpool’s Sadio Mane turning it into a religious conflict and publicly using their fame and football clubs to do it. This isn’t about human rights – it is about their ‘brothers’, ‘Islam’ and the ‘Ummah’. Black Lives Matter is being co opted by the Palestinian cause – like the Palestinian cause co-opts every cause. But when it comes down to it – look at those people in Africa who are really suffering that nobody wants to talk about. Black lives don’t seem to matter at all.
People like the Sky News journalist Mark Stone get to feel important. His following increases, people begin speaking his name. The fool even thinks this somehow means he is doing the right thing- so he does it more often and more loudly. The growing applause confirms to him he is on the right track. After all, there are only 1.8 billion Muslims in the world and truth is a numbers game. The level of the man’s stupidity is only beaten by the size of his ego. A sad combination for a journalist.
We are being let down. There is no excuse for the Israel obsession – none. It is part of an Islamist narrative – and it is what these Islamists want to talk about – all the time. Our media have followed these Islamists down the anti-western, anti-Israel, rabbit hole. They run scared of the Islamists in the newsroom. Our police run scared of them on the street. The government knows that if it takes action – it will be labelled Islamophobic. This is a train heading for a crash – and the sooner we stop it – the less damaging the impact will be.
- Sunday, June 13, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- analysis, Daled Amos
And that one sentence got McQuiston in trouble with the Twitter mob:
A handful of Twitter users wrote that even mentioning Israel in fiction “normalizes” the occupation of Palestine. Their complaints were amplified by a fan account of the book, which prompted McQuiston to say the line would be changed for future printings. McQuiston has a new book coming out this year. [emphasis added]
wearing a kippah
speaking Hebrew
- Sunday, June 13, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
INTER - ARAB AFFAIRS TRIPOLI REPORTS RESULTS OF PALESTINIAN CONFERENCE LD291504 Tripoli Domestic ... of keeping the Palestinian revolution ablaze until all the territories of Palestine -- from the river to the sea -- are liberated .
- Sunday, June 13, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
Proud to nominate Gay McDougall for the @UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Her expertise in human rights law and racial equity will help #CERD monitor implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) March 3, 2021
Saturday, June 12, 2021
- Saturday, June 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- humor, Preoccupied
Washington, June 10 - A representative of the current presidential administration assured reporters today that they will do whatever possible to reach an understanding and arrangement with the Islamic Republic over the latter's pursuit of atomic weapons, spread of international terrorism, and goal of destroying the home of six million Jews, no matter how formidable the obstacles to facilitating that arrangement.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki informed reporters at a Thursday press conference that some issues fall by the wayside when larger values come into play, as in the current situation where preservation of Jewish sovereignty and safety must cede priority to the overarching objective of cementing Iran as the hegemonic power in the Middle East by means of genocidal campaigns across the region and a bevy of puppet states and terrorist groups that target opponents of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's regime.
"There are more important values than keeping a Jewish homeland safe," explained Psaki. "One of those is allowing Iran to ethnically cleanse Syria of non-Shiite populations with its multiple militias and colonizers, a similar process to what's been going on in Yemen for the last decade or so. In Lebanon, as well, Iran's proxy Hezbollah has spent the better part of the last forty years cementing Tehran's control over that once-idyllic country and sowing violent discord. These are the values that animate this administration, and that animated the Obama administration, before Trump and his cronies disrupted everything with their peace deals between Israel and Arab states. We decided upon assuming office this year that such irresponsible foreign policy could not continue."
"The point is, Iran might not be the most righteous regime on the planet, but who is, really?" she continued. "We all have our faults to one degree or another. Some people accuse China of doing nothing to curb carbon emissions, which is like the worst thing that country has done in the last hundred years, I think. So we're not talking about nations with pristine reputations in the first place. I'm not comfortable with the way Iran treats women or homosexuals, but every progressive knows that empowering repressive, homophobic, misogynistic regimes takes precedence over getting them to improve their behavior. If we're not going to let those repressive policies get in the way of a deal that legalizes, normalizes, and smooths Iran's path to nuclear weapons, what makes anyone think that the far-less-pressing issue of Jewish safety and sovereignty has any importance whatsoever?"
Anti-Israel rhetoric has always been about the Jews - opinion
The fact that anti-Israel antisemitism is embedded in the halls of power should come as no surprise. When reason abandons the debate, the crazies on all sides feel empowered. Hatred for the Jewish people and Israel is the one thing that the alt-right and the woke Left agree on.The Biden administration’s half-hearted fight against antisemitism
Gaza was just a convenient tripwire for this most recent explosion of rancor. The anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda that has exploded on the allegedly monitored platforms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube recalls the most horrific expressions of hate not seen since the pages of Nazi Germany’s Der Stürmer, or sadly, the type of educational incitement that can be found in a Palestinian Authority first-grade textbook. Social media has spread the three Ds of anti-Israel antisemitism faster than a radioactive release from the burning Chernobyl nuclear reactor. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the words “Hitler was right” were posted more than 17,000 times in just seven days in May. Extremist hashtags against Israel and Jews were trending wildly. The vile knows no bound. Even Lily Ebert, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor who educates the world about the horrors of hate on social media, was overwhelmed on her TikTok account by the most disgusting messages, including countless posts that praised Hitler.
Minimizing the horrors of the past promises that they’ll become part of our future. Synagogues were desecrated last month, and Jewish businesses vandalized. Jews around the world now think twice before wearing a kippah in public or having a mezuzah on their front door. But let’s not kid ourselves: Facebook and Twitter are monopolist businesses, and they’ve made billions off of this latest round of malignant incitement. The social media platforms did not stop designated anti-Israel terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah from recruiting and fund-raising online, so why should calling for the extermination of the Jewish people be any different? As the founder of an NGO that battles terrorists in court and who warned anyone who would listen that hatred on social media would lead to bloodshed, this handwriting was hash-tagged on the wall years ago.
In the hate business, antisemitism was always an easy sell and business is really good now. If hatred can’t be stopped and decency won’t win out over wokeness, perhaps legal liability – even criminal culpability – might be one way of getting the social media behemoths of Silicon Valley to stop their detestable practices. It isn’t a vaccine for the hatred, of course, but it will limit the spread of the contagion. Until then, it’s a certainty that social media will promote more anti-Israel and antisemitic hate. Terrorists will be emboldened and, in the process, many more innocent Jews will have to pay the price in broken bones and shattered lives.
Sometimes, what leaders don’t say, or do, echoes loudest. President Joe Biden’s response to May’s upsurge in antisemitic incidents is a prime example.The progressive imperialism of Keir Starmer’s Palestine policy
The president has been widely praised by major Jewish organizations and many individuals concerned about antisemitism for his May 28 statement, which said, among other things, “These attacks are despicable, unconscionable, un-American, and they must stop.” That was a good sentence.
However, the widely ignored thorn relates to the next sentence: “I will not allow our fellow Americans to be intimidated or attacked because of who they are or the faith they practice.” What matters here is the follow-up. And that’s where people would be wise to pause the cheering until there’s proof that this administration is committed to backing up that promise.
For starters, we’re past the point where lofty words are sufficient. The time to try beating back antisemitism with statements alone was early 2019. At that point, the still new Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, had three antisemitism scandals in quick succession, as she repeatedly violated the taboo against open antisemitism and brazened out censure. Biden chose to remain silent, as did many congressional Democrats. Now, more than two years of shattered norms later, American Jews are living with the very real and dangerous consequences of that collective shrug.
During May, American Jews were assaulted for walking while wearing a kippah in Manhattan and being Jewish while eating sushi in Los Angeles, among numerous nationwide attacks on synagogues and Jewish individuals. Notably, Biden announced no acts of solidarity against this anti-Jewish discrimination.
Consider, for example, that when Germany’s antisemitism commissioner announced in 2019 that he couldn’t recommend Jews always wear a kippah, a German newspaper printed a cut-out kippah that non-Jews could wear in solidarity with Germany’s Jews. In that spirit, Biden could have announced he would wear a kippah for a week and encouraged other Americans to do likewise. Biden could have invited Jewish hate crime victims to the White House for an event. The president could have publicly urged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to send him antisemitic hate crime legislation to sign. As the head of his party, Biden also could have declared that Jew hate has no home in the Democratic Party. He has done none of those things.
Sir Keir’s motives are probably an amalgam of cynicism and idealism, but the latter is where the trouble comes in. Progressives may see unilateral British recognition of a Palestinian state as a century-late penance for the Balfour Declaration — Emily Thornberry said as much in 2017 — but it is in fact a continuation of the same map-carving mindset. Britain knows best and if the natives can’t see it’s for their own good, they will eventually come round. It is progressive imperialism, but imperialism all the same.
There is an enduring myth, fashioned by Arabist historians and naively echoed by Zionist advocates, that Britain has always been the great champion and protector of Zionism. There have been aspects of Zionism to British governments, policies and intellectual traditions but for the most part Britain has been either uninterested in or hostile to Zionism. Even when philo-semitism and proto-Zionism were at their height in Britain in the 19th century, arguments made for Jewish self-governance in the Land of Israel were utilitarian or patrician.
The Spectator was advocating Jewish settlement of Palestine 15 years before Theodor Herzl was born, advising the Ottoman Empire that it would be ‘a gainer in every way were it to invite the immigration of such colonists’ because ‘the Jews would form the nucleus of an industrious, orderly population; consisting of men who have been trained to live as citizens — who know the value of domestic peace assured by laws’. Yet Palestine, it argued, was not to revert to being a sovereign Jewish polity; the settlers would merely be granted ‘considerable immunities’ by the Ottomans and England.
Thirteen years after Herzl’s death, the magazine was still at it, with a 1917 editorial titled ‘Palestine for the Jews’ predicting ‘a little Jewish State in Palestine would serve as a rallying-point for Jews all over the world, and it would confer a benefit also on the Christian and the Moslem worlds, which are equally interested in the Holy Land and its undying religious memories’. Again, even as The Spectator spoke of ‘the revival of Palestine as a Jewish land’, it was at pains to say Jewish settlement must be ‘under the supervision Great Britain, our Allies, and America’ with order ‘maintained by some form of international control’. Far from Zionism, the motive was more strategic:
“‘From the British standpoint, it is essential that Palestine should no longer be in Turkish or German hands; but it is neither necessary nor desirable that we should become solely responsible for the administration of the country.’
Palestine needed a little Jewish state not because it was the homeland of the Jews but because it was a headache for the Brits.
I don’t draw attention to these articles to scold The Spectator for espousing the attitudes of the day, or for advocating exactly the sort of protectorate early Zionists envisioned. That the magazine editorialised, and editorialised so early on, for a Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael is to its immense credit. I simply observe — marvel, really — at how little has changed in the intervening years. Then as now, right as left, Britain speaks about Israel in a proprietorial tone.
Friday, June 11, 2021
Noah Rothman: Journalists Against Truth
The very notion that the news media is somehow unable to “accurately reflect the plight of the Palestinians” is so solipsistic that one has to wonder what reality these reporters inhabit. The Palestinian territories and East Jerusalem are routinely described in the press as “occupied,” though that’s oversimplified to the point of being misleading. In Gaza, every Jew was forcibly relocated by the Israeli government in 2005, and much of the territory presently under “occupation” would be ceded to Israel according to the terms of the many proposed resolutions to this conflict. The American press frames military offensives by Hamas as a response to American diplomatic overtures to Israel, such as moving the U.S. embassy to Israel’s political capital, which ignores the conspicuous failure of the Fatah-led West Bank to similarly erupt. We are routinely treated to soft-focus profiles of the long-suffering Palestinian people who languish under oppressive regimes that devote more of their money and energy to making war against Israel than serving their people. And yet, the villain of this rather straightforward story is always the same and almost never the true malefactor.Another Militant Operative Identified on New York Times List of Children Killed During Gaza Conflict: Report
Indeed, the hunger to promote Palestinian narratives is so all-consuming in the press that they seem willing to fall for anything. At the end of the conflict in May, Sarah Leah Whitson, a veteran of the group Human Rights Watch, which produced the odious “apartheid” report, publicized a claim alleging that an “Israeli pilot revealed that the destruction of residential towers in #Gaza Strip was ‘a way to vent the army’s frustration.’” This admission of a war crime was promoted breathlessly, including by some whose names grace this open letter. The notion that the strategic planners and IDF attorneys who select targets were overruled in the air by overzealous pilots would be shocking, and surely the IDF’s MAG Corps’ General Staff Mechanism for Fact-Finding Assessments will be outraged by this development. Either that, or this never happened, and it could only be believed by those with a burning prejudice against Israel that precludes the potential for anything resembling rational thought.
But perhaps rationality has been subordinated to emotion. After all, as Vox.com reported, progressives in government and the press have come to view the Palestinian cause as an extension of the Black Lives Matter movement. They use BLM’s campaign against police violence as a heuristic to navigate a conflict they don’t understand and which they don’t seem to want to understand. Rather, they want it to comport with a childishly simplistic, Marxist-flavored narrative about how power dynamics explain the world.
Call that what you will, but you can’t call it reporting. What these alleged journalists want isn’t journalism. They are on a “sacred” mission to promote “contextualized truth.” Another way to say “contextualized truth” is “lie.” It even makes for pithier copy, which is what real reporters strive to produce.
A second Hamas military operative was among the New York Times list of children killed during last month’s clashes between Israel and the terror group, according to findings released Tuesday by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC).AP Snubbed as Al Jazeera Wins Hamas Prize for Gaza Coverage
The ITIC identified 16 year-old Muhammad Sabar Ibrahim Suleiman, who was killed on May 11 in an attack in the eastern part of Jabalia along with his father, a commander in the Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades, the Hamas’ military-terrorist wing.
A video released after the end of the 11-day hostilities in May shows Muhammad Sabar Ibrahim Suleiman wearing an Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades uniform learning to shoot a machine gun and train other weapons, according to the report.
“The instructor next to him is also wearing an Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades uniform. Thus despite his young age, he had been recruited by Hamas to its military-terrorist wing,” the report read.
The Times‘ front page “They Were Only Children” May 26 article featured the pictures and names of 67 children under the age of 18 who were killed, two in Israel and 65 in the Gaza Strip.
Since publication, the paper has issued several corrections on the article, and reported that Khaled al-Qanua, listed in the article as a 17-year-old, was a fighter in the Mujahedeen Brigades, a group allied with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and close to Iran. The Tuesday ITIC report claimed that al-Qanua was in fact a 20 year-old terrorist operative, based on a mourning notice issued by the Mujahedeen Brigades, the military-terrorist wing of the Mujahedeen Movement. Al-Quanua was killed on May 13 in an aerial attack on a Palestinian terrorist squad near Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.
Earlier this week, Qatari news network Al Jazeera accepted an award from Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization with which it used to share office space in Gaza City. The terror group praised the "high professionalism" of Al Jazeera's coverage during the recent clashes between Israel and Palestinian terrorists, as well as its demonstrated "affiliation with the cause of the oppressed Palestinian people."
The network's Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, was photographed receiving the award from Khalil al-Hayya, deputy head of Hamas in Gaza. Terror officials praised Al Jazeera's coverage, while also denouncing "the barbaric behavior of the occupation soldiers." According to the Hamas website, the event was "part of a series of continuous visits carried out by Hamas media relations to honor the media."
The decision to award Al Jazeera for its favorable coverage of anti-Semitic terrorism was a humiliating rebuke to the AP's hard work on this same front. For example, the Atlantic reported in 2014 on the AP's extensive efforts to ensure that its coverage did not conflict with the Hamas goal of eradicating Israel.
When the power trio's shared office space was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike last month, AP executives insisted (unconvincingly) they had no idea they were working next to terrorists. National security expert Noah Pollak reported, however, that the office building contained "multiple Hamas operations and offices including weapons manufacturing and military intelligence" and the AP's local reporters "knew about it."
It's possible that Hamas was aggrieved by the AP's out-of-character decision to rescind its job offer to Emily Wilder in response to media reports about her radical anti-Israeli activism in college. The AP has an otherwise impressive record of employing anti-Israeli activists, such as Gaza bureau chief Fares Akram, who previously worked as a consultant for the radical left-wing Human Rights Watch and has said he finds it "difficult to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza."
- Friday, June 11, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
Melanie Phillips: How America is now threatening its allies
This petulance and spite towards a historic agreement that has made a mockery of the Foggy Bottom consensus on Israel and the Palestinians tells us that the Biden administration’s attitude to the Middle East is based not on realism or pragmatism, but on emotion and ideology.Ruthie Blum: Is a bogus Iran deal upstaging the Abraham Accords?
It shows that the administration will deny hard facts in order to preserve fantasies, such as Palestinian “victimhood” and the illusory two-state solution, that define today’s progressive identity.
Israel itself is currently in the throes of unprecedented political convulsions. On Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year stint as prime minister is set to end when an improbable coalition of rightists, leftists, centrists and the Arab Ra’am Party is due to be sworn in as Israel’s government.
With no-one able to say with certainty that such a coalition will even endure, it’s impossible to predict what its policies will be. No one can say whether the rightists will abandon principle and allow themselves to be held hostage by the left; or whether the left will swallow right-wing policies to stay in power; or whether the Ra’am leader really will abandon his Islamist holy war against Israel and settle for the pragmatic priority of improving the lot of Israel’s Arab citizens.
Despite these unknowables, there are hopes in the progressive world that the very existence of such a coalition will soften western hostility to Israel and break down barriers with the Biden administration.
Yet whatever the coalition does, western hostility won’t dissipate because it is based on an irrational hatred that treats any concession Israel may make as merely a further sign of its innate perfidy.
As for the Biden administration, stuffed with officials who either hate or are indifferent to Israel and the Jewish people, the only Israeli policies that would break down such barriers are those that would leave Israel twisting in the genocidal wind.
In Northern Ireland the Republican Sinn Féin Party, which has a history of rank antisemitism, promotes the left-wing Israel demonisation agenda, while the Republic of Ireland is one of the most extreme anti-Israel countries in Europe. In stark contrast, Northern Ireland’s Protestants have long been strong supporters of Israel. They identify with the Israelis’ struggle against existential foes, global disdain and perfidious “friends.”
With the Biden administration’s perverse interference in their own affairs, further endangering their security while doing the same to the Israelis, these two causes are now joined at the hip against an America that has lost the geopolitical plot.
ISRAEL ISN’T the only country wary of the goings-on behind closed doors in Vienna. The Gulf states that openly allied themselves with Israel through the Abraham Accords – and other Mideast countries, like Saudi Arabia, tacitly doing so as part of a joint attempt to curb Iran’s pernicious agenda – are equally concerned.
Their worry is certainly justified, particularly in view of another disturbing development. US State Department staffers were sent inter-office e-mails a few months ago discouraging them from using the official title of the historic peace agreements brokered by former president Donald Trump between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
According to The Washington Free Beacon (freebeacon.com), which reviewed two such memos, no reason was given for the directive. When asked about it, a spokesman told the news site that the State Department “would refer to the Abraham Accords as such.”
Subsequently, an official speaking on background told the outlet, “This administration is not focused on what these agreements are called, but what they mean.”
Kissinger, Kerry, Kushner
A question facing any future historian will be this: was the “Deal of the Century,” with its implicit endorsement of Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank, designed in advance as a throwaway, to facilitate the Abraham Accords? Whatever the answer, that is precisely the purpose it ultimately served. “We had been talking to both sides for 18 months,” said a senior American official, “but the annexation issue created the atmosphere which was conducive for getting a deal.”[6] If it was so designed in advance, then far from being a “dead-on-arrival” plan, it was a strategic feint worthy of a Kissinger. If not, it was a deft last-minute shift of gears.Caroline Glick: The great unravelling
Whatever the back story, however, the Abraham Accords and their sequels have introduced a new vector in the Middle East. The most creative and dynamic shorelines on the Mediterranean and the Gulf are now linked. They are the counter to the forty-year bond between Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which also links the Mediterranean and the Gulf. There is much potential in this fledgling alignment; how much of it will be realized depends on the ingenuity of Israelis and Gulf Arabs alike.
But it also depends on the attitude of the United States. Certainly, it has been hard for the old hands of the Democratic foreign policy establishment to concede that Kushner, wet behind the ears, achieved something that had eluded them. They should get over it. One doesn’t have to believe that Kushner (and Berkowitz) deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, though Harvard emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz has nominated them for one, but one must admit that they got this right.
Remember that Jimmy Carter didn’t toss out the Middle East achievements of Richard Nixon and Kissinger, but built them out into a new security architecture for the Middle East. President Biden should consider that precedent and think hard about how to capitalize on the achievements of Trump and Kushner. That need not mean abandoning the quest for a resolution of the Palestinian question. It need not mean locking the door to Iran forever. It does mean nurturing the cooperative spirit of the Abraham Accords. These US-brokered agreements give the United States a strategic edge. In the Middle East, America needs that more than ever.
Over the past decade, for the first time in its history, Israel developed a strong diplomatic posture in the region and worldwide. Israel developed strategic ties with Arab states, and the states of the eastern Mediterranean. It has built close ties with the EU's Visegrád Group of central European states Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic as well as Austria and Italy. Israel upgraded its diplomatic and trade relations with the states of Africa and Central and South America, as well as with India, Japan and South Korea.
Unfortunately, it is likely that what Israel achieved through painstaking effort may be lost after the new governing coalition led by Yair Lapid takes power next week. This is the case for three reasons.
First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the author of Israel's diplomatic triumphs. They are predicated on his foreign policy vision that diplomatic ties are built on common interests even more than ideology and that Israel has much to offer the nations of the world.
There are many things that divide the members of the incoming governing coalition. But they agree on one thing – they all hate Netanyahu. So, the first reason Israel may soon abandon its diplomatic achievement is because Lapid and most of his partners in the coalition want to erase Netanyahu's achievements.
The second reason Israel's diplomatic position is likely to soon crash is because Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz along with most of their partners do not share Netanyahu's diplomatic vision. Lapid is set to become foreign minister. Like most members of Israel's elite class, which includes the political left, the media, the senior brass of the security establishment and the senior leadership of the foreign and justice ministries, Lapid and Gantz believe Israel's diplomatic position is exclusively a function of its relations with the Beltway establishment. The closer Israel is to the American ruling class, the stronger it is internationally. The weaker Israel's relations with the American elite, the weaker its international posture.
The third reason Israel's decade of diplomatic achievements is likely to end in short order is because America-obsessed Lapid, Gantz and their ilk don't understand the importance or potential of Netanyahu has accomplished. They will not dedicate the necessary resources to maintain the ties he forged with the likes of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz or Brazil's President Javier Bolsonaro, because they don't value those ties. So the ties will wither.
Is #Israel a ‘canary in coal-mine’ for global war on terror? Should you care?
— ???? ?????-???? | Michal Cotler-Wunsh (@CotlerWunsh) June 11, 2021
In light of recent events, thoughts on Israel, the ICC, International Law, & global responsibility, implications & consequences.
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