Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, July 08, 2021

The ancient Jewish pilgrimage site of Halhoul that Palestinians try to bar Jews from visiting

The pro-terror IMEMC News reported on Monday:

Israeli soldiers invaded, on Monday at dawn, a mosque in Halhoul town, north of the southern West Bank city of Hebron, to accompany colonialist settlers into the holy site, and injured six Palestinians, in addition to causing dozens to suffer the effects of tear gas inhalation.

Media sources said several Israeli army jeeps invaded the town, at dawn, to accompany dozens of paramilitary colonialist settlers into Nabi Mousa Mosque to perform prayers, after forcing the Palestinians out.

They added that the Palestinians protested the invasion and hurled stones at the army, while the soldiers fired many rubber-coated steel bullets, gas bombs, and concussion grenades.

I was curious why Jews would want to visit Halhoul.

It turns out there are a lot of reasons.

Halhoul is mentioned in the Tanach - Joshua 15:58. It kept the same name all this time.

It has long been considered the burial place of Gad the Seer (2 Samuel 24:11) and Jews have made pilgrimages there for centuries. Rabbi Yitzchak Chelo*, of Aragon, visited Palestine in 1333, and wrote about Halhoul in his book The Ways of Jerusalem (quoted here from the French by Victor Guerin):

From there [from Tekoa '] we go to Halhul, place mentioned in Joshua. There are a number of Jews here, who lead you to an ancient sepulchral monument, attributed to Gad the Seer. This is the third tomb of the seven prophets.

It remained a place of pilgrimage for Jews in 1847, when John Wilson visited.

So we see that Jews lives in Halhoul in the Middle Ages, they venerated it for much longer as the burial place of a prophet, and it is clearly an important Biblical site.

Now we understand why Palestinians try to keep in Jew-free. That's what they try to do to every important historic Jewish place.

*UPDATE: Apparently, the Yitzchak Chelo pilgrimage story was a forgery. See here. But Halhoul was still a place of pilgrimage.

A hat tip goes to someone on Wikipedia who found this obscure mistake in one of my tens of thousands of articles in order to call me "garbage" in the Talk section. He or she could have just emailed or tweeted me with the terrible crime of not researching a 19th century French scholar's sources to see if they have not been debunked. I would have gladly fixed it. Apparently, calling me names is more important than correcting the record.

How Israel-haters became influential (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

How They Did It

Between 1967 and 2021, the enemies of the Jewish state and the Jewish people created in effect an army of anti-Israel operatives in key positions in Western societies, including Israel herself. These operatives are often opinion leaders who influence the behavior of their countries.

Here is how they did it.

The Arab nations failed to defeat Israel in major military conflicts in 1948, 1967, and 1973. At that point, they turned to cognitive warfare, the manipulation of information, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings, in order to weaken their enemy and deny it support from third parties. Thus there were two primary targets: the population of the State of Israel, and the Western nations that might become sources of financial, logistical, diplomatic, or other forms of help for the Jewish state.

The objective of cognitive warfare is to divide, disrupt, and isolate the enemy so that it be finished off more easily by military means. Terrorism is an important part of cognitive warfare, because frightened people are prone to Stockholm syndrome. But this discussion will be limited to the non-kinetic aspects of cognitive warfare.

The cognitive war began around 1967, initiated by the Soviet KGB as a propaganda campaign. The terrorists of the PLO – whose actual ideology was close to that of Nazi Germany – were presented as a national liberation movement, which found approval in the leftist student and antiwar movements that were part of the larger Soviet cognitive assault on the West.

By 1973, the challenges facing the cognitive warriors of the Arab world and their advisors were great. The Jews of Israel had lost the overconfidence of the post-1967 era. The USA had (finally) resupplied Israel with the weapons needed to reverse the advance of her enemies and – although she was prevented from achieving a crushing victory – she had clearly established her military superiority. But the militarily weak Arabs strengthened their cognitive warfare capabilities to include more than mere propaganda. They launched operations to fundamentally change important features of the social landscape of the West.

Cognitive attacks were aimed at the following Western targets:

International institutions; the UN and its agencies (easy targets because of the built-in Soviet/Third World majority).

Major early victories included several anti-Israel UN Security Council resolutions during the Carter Administration (the US abstained), and of course the “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975. Although the resolution was ultimately revoked, the “UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” it created and the annual observance of “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” remain. The UN Human Rights Council has a unique permanent agenda item to discuss Israel’s “human rights abuses” at every session. UN reports on health, the status of women, the environment, and other subjects often wrongly single out Israel as a violator.

International NGOs have been persuaded, by infiltration and financial grants from Arab and left-wing sources, to join the campaign. “Human rights” groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have been particularly useful in accusing the IDF of war crimes. Recently HRW produced a tendentious report calling Israel an apartheid state.

Institutions of higher education (easily bought with oil money).

Starting almost immediately after 1973, Arab states began to make major donations to leading universities, establishing departments of Middle East Studies (where “Middle East” does not include Israel), endowing chairs and fellowships, and so on. This has continued to the present day. Other quasi-academic institutions, such as influential think tanks like the Qatar-supported Brookings Institution, have also benefited.

This is an extremely far-sighted and effective strategy, because influence trickles down to other faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ultimately these students graduate and take their places in education, business, government, and even law enforcement and the military.

Even in Israel, leftist academics produce a constant flow of pseudo-academic material that can be used as support for NGO and think tank documents that call for anti-Israel policies. Israeli NGOs, supported by the international Left and Arab/Iranian/Turkish sources, provide information for use in lawfare against Israel and the IDF, as well as propaganda.

Student and labor movements, liberal churches (easy targets because of left-wing connections).

Since 2004, resolutions supporting the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement against Israel have been debated and often passed by student governments, labor unions, and liberal churches. While there has so far been little effect on Israel’s economy, the debates provide a forum for disseminating false accusations against Israel.

Student organizations have been established on campuses that promote anti-Israel ideas and intimidate anyone who supports Israel. The recent widespread acceptance of postmodern “woke” ideas including intersectionality, critical race theory, and third-worldism has made it possible to connect Palestinism to diverse causes, even some that are clearly inconsistent with it, such as LGBT rights.

These organizations are supported and nurtured by faculty, departments, and administrators that were put in place by Arab (and more recently) Iranian oil revenues, as well as traditionally left-leaning academics.

Corporate interests (easy targets because of their dependence on Arab oil).

Immediately after the 1973 war, the Arab oil boycott caused a spike in prices and supply shortages. Oil companies in the US, who have great influence in politics, began to take public political stances, calling for what they referred to as a “more even-handed” policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict (in other words, calling for the government to stop supporting Israel). They funded propaganda outlets that followed the Arab line.

More recently, large corporations – particularly the very influential and powerful tech companies – have begun to adopt “woke” policies, out of a combination of fear of popular boycotts and the absorption of woke ideas from the academic world that provides their personnel. Infiltration of anti-Israel activists and attitudes into the tech companies that increasingly determine popular culture is especially worrisome.

Social media

Recently someone noted that pro-Palestinian personality Bella Hadid has 21 million Instagram followers, significantly more than the total number of Jews in the world. Social media provides a huge amount of leverage for cognitive warfare, since it reaches literally billions of people throughout the world. Clever manipulation of social platforms can have a massive effect at very low cost. As usual, Russia is leading the world in developing this cognitive warfare technique, using bots and human-operated social media farms. But Iran and other enemies of Israel aren’t far behind.

Minorities (whose grievances could be blamed on Jews and Israel).

As early as the 1930s, Soviet propagandists realized that racial discrimination in the US could be used to sell communism to disaffected minorities. It has also been possible to sell them Jew-hatred, and the closely related hatred for the Jewish state. The racial mass psychosis that has gripped the US lately presents a wonderful opportunity to attach anti-Israel messages to “anti-racist” activities via the principle of intersectionality. Combined with the historically high level of antisemitism in the black community, it’s been possible for Israel’s enemies to spread preposterous lies, such as that “Israel trains American police to be racist” effectively.

Antisemitic politicians

Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, Ilhan Omar, and others are effective propagandists. It’s difficult to defend against them, because opposition can be discounted as politics, and because they have large bases of support (e.g., among Muslim populations) of which the politicians in their own parties are afraid.

For whatever reason, Israel’s successive governments have either been unable to fully internalize the danger posed by cognitive warfare, or have failed to come up with an effective strategy for fighting it. But with each military conflict that Israel is involved in, the cognitive attacks become more and more intense. They have already affected the IDF’s ability to fight.

The solution is to employ a proactive, not reactive strategy; to attack rather than defend. But what would such a strategy look like?

That's the subject of my next post.

07/07 Links Pt2: The Media in the 2021 Gaza War: The New York Times’ Journalistic Malpractice; Diagnosing Ilhan Omar’s Antisemitic Disease; Stabbing of in Boston Is Not ‘Fit To Print’ in NYTs

From Ian:

JCPA: The Media in the 2021 Gaza War: The New York Times’ Journalistic Malpractice

During the 2021 Gaza War, the New York Times published ten articles and features from Gaza written and photographed by local Gazan stringers, photographers, and “fixers.” Since Gaza is controlled by Hamas, no one can report on or photograph Hamas rocket launchers located in civilian neighborhoods or the extensive and expensive Hamas tunnels with weaponry stored inside.

A respected Arab reporter, who reported on Gaza for decades, explained, “They will report what Hamas wants them to write; photograph the pictures Hamas seeks. They cannot write or film anything that will hurt Hamas’ image….I blame the news producers sitting in London or New York assigning stories when they know the fixers’ restrictions.” Thus, they have the main, direct responsibility for the misrepresentation of the war.

On June 24, 2021, the New York Times released a 14-minute investigative video entitled “Gaza’s Deadly Night.” Any Gaza war narrative must deal with Hamas’ underground tunnels – used to move weaponry and personnel – which were the target of Israel’s precision bombing of the Wahda Street area in Gaza City. Yet the video only included a 10-second clip of armed men moving through a narrow tunnel, from a clip filmed by Reuters in 2014.

On June 5, Qatar’s Al Jazeera and Iran’s Mehr News broadcast a video showing Hamas’ elaborate tunnels filled with rockets, guns, missiles, artillery shells, storage areas, and even a command center. But there was no hint of these in the New York Times’ mega-production.

The Times’ video and articles build the case that the collapse of the Gaza apartments on Wahda Street “was a possible war crime.” But it ignores the statement of survivor Azzam Al-Kollek, who described the collapse of his three-story building to the Wall Street Journal. He said engineers who visited the site told him the building dropped some 40 feet below street level as it fell into an underground void – a Hamas tunnel.

With its coverage of the May 2021 Gaza War, the New York Times has honestly earned its reputation as the most prejudiced and biased critic of Israel in mainstream North American media.

Andrew Bolt: Jewish community have 'really had enough' of ABC's 'anti-Israel' stance

Sky News host Andrew Bolt says the Jewish community in Australia have "considerable anger" about the ABC lining up "four critics of Israel" on a recent QandA show – with only one individual to defend it.

"Why does the ABC hate Israel so much," Mr Bolt said.

"You'd think from the absolutely constant hammering Israel was the worst country in the world, rather than the only true democracy in the Middle East – with terrorist neighbours like fascist Iran, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon all threatening to destroy it.

"The Jewish community here has really had enough now, there's considerable anger about the ABC lining up four critics of Israel, no fewer than four, including a Muslim radical on a recent QandA show.

"And only one Liberal MP Dave Sharma, Indian descent – to defend it."

Mr Bolt spoke with the head of the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council Dr Colin Rubenstein on the matter.

Hollywood and the Jews An Urgent Insider Briefing with Noa Tishby

Noa Tishby is on the front lines in the battle of ideas on social media. Regarded as one of the leading voices combating rising online hatred targeting Israelis and Jews, Tishby is the author of the best-selling book Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth and is viewed as Israel’s unofficial ambassador.

An Israeli household name, top television actress, and great-granddaughter of Zionist pioneers, Tishby will help you navigate the world of Israel activism online —and the Jew-hatred festering on the web—educating and empowering you to become Israel’s social media iron dome.

Join several thousand pro-Israel activists from around the world on on Monday July 19, 2021 at 7:30 pm ET for this urgent briefing exploring the dangerous relationship between social media and celebrity influence.

Dozens of Jewish Groups Plan Washington Rally to Raise Awareness of Antisemitism

Dozens of national and local Jewish organizations are banning together for “No Fear: A Rally in Solidarity With the Jewish People,” to be held on July 11 in Washington, D.C., to raise awareness about growing antisemitism in person and online.

The rally will feature Israeli actress and author Noa Tishby; Elisha Wiesel, son of the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel; and Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Groups from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and other major metropolitan areas plan to attend the 1 p.m. event on the west side of Capitol Hill. Free busing is being provided from several East Coast cities.

“As antisemitic attacks have become more frequent without commensurate responses from elected officials or other leaders, concern in the Jewish community and among our allies has reached a fever pitch,” said Melissa Landa, director of Alliance for Israel, which is spearheading the rally. “In my role as the director of a grassroots organization, I am contacted by people all over the country sharing their experiences with antisemitism and their frustrations that not enough is being done. So I decided to do something about it and call for a rally.”

She added that the Sunday gathering “represents a broad coalition of organizations that oppose antisemitism—crossing religious, racial, political and denominational boundaries, bringing together all who want their voices to be heard in the nation’s capital.”

Among the co-sponsors are the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith International, Jewish National Fund, Hadassah, Israel Forever Foundation, the Jewish Federation of North America, StandWithUs, World Jewish Congress of North America, Birthright Israel and the Combat Antisemitism Movement.

Screenshot from the NY Times "They Were Only Children"

Screenshot, New York Times, "They Were Only Children"

Israel is the media’s whipping boy: we’ve come to expect negative coverage on Israel. This is disheartening to those of us who love Israel and/or hate media bias. We feel hopeful when media watchdogs like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), find untruths in articles about Israel and hold the news outlets to account. The feeling that we’ve achieved vicarious victory through CAMERA’s important work is tempered, however, by the knowledge that millions have already read and absorbed the lies. Only a handful will ever read the correction. What then, do such corrections achieve?

Take a recent article by the New York Times, “They Were Only Children,” that abuses sentimentality to drive support for Israel to be replaced with another Arab state. The piece offers little context, no timeline, and only a pretense of balance. It is pure agitprop, a numbers game. We are overwhelmed with photos of dead Arab children, with a single photo of the only Jewish child killed by a rocket. The reader/viewer of this photographic display is directed toward the erroneous conclusion that Israel is the bad guy for killing more children than even Hamas.

This is a stupid idea. If someone attacks you, you’ve got to attack back, harder, to make them stop. That, in a nutshell, is war.

That’s war. But there’s war and there’s war. Hamas fights a dirty war. It embeds militants and rocket launchers in civilian locations and structures: dense residential neighborhoods, schools, apartment buildings, hospitals. Places where they know there will be terrible casualties, including children, the sick, and the elderly, all of whom will look amazing in articles like “They Were Only Children,” and drive public sentiment toward the so-called “Palestinians” and against Israel.

It is an incredibly stupid calculus, of course, to suggest that because more Arabs died, Israel is bad. It would be more accurate to state that since more Arabs died, Hamas is bad. Because Hamas uses human shields.

A child may die because Hamas is operating from an apartment three floors up from her home. Or a child may be taught to kill Jews at summer camp, where they learn Hamas Basic Training 101.

Images of children and teenagers learning military tactics and weapons training at Palestinian Islamic Jihad's summer camp. #Gaza pic.twitter.com/wWDSV5PMYT
— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) July 5, 2021

But the impact of the photos are priceless, as far as Hamas is concerned. So they make more and more photos of dead children to peddle to the New York Times, the Guardian, and CNN. Of course you actually have to have dead children to get those photos, so for them, it’s a mitzvah to help them get dead. The more horrible the death, the cuter the child, the better it is from their perspective. Anything to make the world help them to destroy Israel, and rid it of its tainted Jewish presence.

Well, as you can see, I’m pessimistic about this situation, even jaded. I’m losing my taste for corrections and clarifications. It’s like banging my head on the wall in a world where people just drink in stories like “They Were Only Children” without investing any critical thought into the equation. “THINK, People!” I want to yell at them. “Showering your ‘readership’ with death porn. Gazillions of tiny brown children who are no more. Who is fooled by this?”

Apparently, just about everyone. Here is the circulation of the New York Times according to Wikipedia:

· 5,496,000 news subscribers

· 4,665,000 digital-only

· 831,000 print

· 1,398,000 games, cooking, and Audm subscribers

That’s a lot of people to not stop and think, “Well, how did these children die? How many of them were teenage Hamas recruits? Was there really rocket fire on Israel? What was the timeline?”

And yet, we know that the media no longer appeals to the head, but to the eyes. Hence the human shields, the photos. The more photos the better. Because people can’t read anymore. That is if reading means asking questions as you read. Which it should.

So let’s say this piece, “They Were Only Children” left you unable to get those faces out of your mind, keeping you awake into the wee hours. Your hate for Israel is growing by the minute, by the second. Because of that piece, and your reaction to it, experienced through thoughtless emotion. Manipulated by the Gray Lady to hate Israel, the state of the people they hate, the Jews.

Maybe someday there will be a correction buried in the Times, like it buried the Holocaust, somewhere deep in the paper, where no one will ever see it.

This is how I feel on a bad day.

On a good day, I think: it has to be good that we expose the lies, even after the fact, even if few see it, because you’re putting the truth out into the ether, and that has to be a good thing. Always. And maybe if CAMERA keeps on keeping on, they’ll get sick of us nudging them, and stop telling lies.

Tamar Sternthal, director of CAMERA’s Israel office, suggests that journalists will stop if they know they cannot get away with it. “A correction sends a message to the journalist that sloppy reporting will not be tolerated. Journalists would rather not have to correct their story, and thus will likely be more cautious the next time if they know they will be held accountable,” says Sternthal.

It’s also a smart and sophisticated way to handle a situation. By taking care of one news outlet, you take care of many, in one fell swoop. “We can leverage substantive corrections, especially from leading media outlets, to prompt correction of the identical error or falsehood at other media outlets, even in different countries and languages,” says Sternthal, offering a sense of scope to the broader media impact of a single correction.

As an example of how a correction can be used to leverage other corrections, Sternthal directed me to this AFP correction, prompted by CAMERA on July 5, which cited earlier corrections on the same issue by Bloomberg and the New York Times. “Corrections of wire stories during the same news cycle in which they are originally published are particularly helpful because they preemptively keep misinformation from appearing in secondary media outlets around the world,” added Sternthal.

CAMERA's Israel director says that such corrections are “essential." Corrections are the only way for the media to rectify the erroneous public perceptions it creates. Prompting such corrections is therefore imperative. “In that way, we can ultimately eradicate the error altogether, and thereby elevate the quality of coverage across the board," says Sternthal. "We managed to do exactly that in the summer of 2000, compelling the New York Times to correct three times in three months the falsehood that U.N. Resolutions require Israel to withdraw from all territory gained in the Six Day War, including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.”

Sternthal notes that there is no U.N. resolution requiring Israel to withdraw entirely from these territories. CAMERA kept driving that point home, and guess what? It worked. After that final correction in a series of three in three months(!), the New York Times stopped lying—at least on that particular score—and what was once a common media falsehood has, according to Sternthal, “virtually disappeared from Western media outlets.”

Then editor of the New York Times, Joseph Lelyveld, according to Sternthal, convened his staff after the series of corrections and said to them, “Three times in three months we’ve had to run corrections on the actual provisions of U.N. Resolution 242, providing great cheer and sustenance to those readers who are convinced we are opinionated and not well informed on Middle East issues. Look through the words to the facts.”

He was telling journalists to fact-check.

Tamar Sternthal offered another reason corrections are important. What happens on the ‘net, stays on the ‘net. “Corrections are critical because in the digital era reports linger on the internet indefinitely. So it’s very important to get these stories corrected.

“But print publications corrections buried in inside pages are also important because they are appended to the original article in news databases like Lexis-Nexis. As a result, researchers, journalists, and policy makers looking up articles even many years later will receive the correct information.

“Those of goodwill will not recycle the false information,” concludes Sternthal.

I know she's right. At the same time, it's hard not to think of the others. The ones who lack the goodwill gene.

Hamas summer camp video: "Don't show mercy towards the Jews"

This is one of the videos released to celebrate the Hamas summer camps, showing the first day of the second session.

The song's chorus says, "Oh my people, wage resistance, don't show mercy towards the Jews, advance, as long as there's blood on our path, there's martyrdom..."

What more proof do you need that Hamas teaches Jew-hatred to children in Gaza?

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

07/07 Links Pt1: Biden Admin Deletes References to Palestinian Terror Incitement From Congressional Report; UN condemns use of civilians as human shields, anti-Semitic terror

From Ian:

Biden Admin Deletes References to Palestinian Terror Incitement From Congressional Report

The State Department deleted references to the Palestinian government’s terror incitement in a report sent last week to Congress, highlighting what some see as an effort by the Biden administration to downplay Palestinian violence as it restarts U.S. taxpayer aid to the government.

The Biden State Department's latest report to Congress, issued under a mandatory reporting statute included in the 1990 Palestine Liberation Organization Commitments Compliance Act, omits specific references to the Palestinian government’s ongoing calls for violence, as well as its support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which wages economic warfare on Israel. Both issues, which are being closely tracked in Congress, were included in the outgoing Trump administration's October report, according to copies of both reports viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Officials in Congress say it is notable that the State Department would omit two closely watched issues in the report, which is otherwise nearly identical to the Trump administration version, fueling accusations the Biden administration is whitewashing the Palestinians' bad behavior. The changes come amid a broader push by the Biden administration to renew hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer aid to the Palestinian government, even as it continues to call for Israel’s destruction and lend support to the anti-Semitic BDS movement.

The Biden administration’s pivot on the Palestinian issue has already been the subject of heightened criticism, including in Congress, as the governing Palestinian Authority continues to use international aid dollars to pay terrorists and their families. The Biden administration approved millions of dollars in U.S. aid to the Palestinians earlier this year over congressional objections and a law that prohibits America from sending aid until the PA stops paying terrorists as part of a program known as "pay to slay."

The Free Beacon obtained copies of both reports and found the Biden administration deleted information about terror incitement and Palestinian support for the BDS movement. The State Department declined to comment on the changes.

Dave Vasquez, press secretary for Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), said the State Department wants to downplay Palestinian incitement in order to stifle debate in Congress. Cruz has been an outspoken critic of U.S. aid to the Palestinian government and the Biden administration’s decision to send it.

Demolition of home of deadly terror attack suspect said delayed at US request

Israel has delayed the demolition of the family home of a Palestinian accused of killing an Israeli student after Washington asked for the move to be stopped, Channel 13 reported Tuesday.

Muntasir Shalabi has been charged with killing Yehuda Guetta, 19, at the Tapuah Junction in the West Bank in May. The shooting attack also injured two other Israeli teenagers, one of them seriously.

The Israel Defense Forces subsequently mapped out Shalabi’s home in the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya in preparation for demolition — a controversial punitive measure that the Israeli security establishment maintains can deter future terror attacks.

The Hamoked human rights organization filed a petition against the demolition, noting that Shalabi suffered from mental illness, had been prescribed anti-psychotic medications and had spent time in a psychiatric facility in recent years. Mental illness has in the past been used as grounds by the High Court to cancel planned demolitions.

Moreover, Hamoked noted that for 11 months of the year, Shalabi does not live in the Turmus Ayya home slated for demolition, as he is estranged from his wife and only stays in a separate room during an annual one-month visit. During the rest of the year, he resides in the US where he also has citizenship, along with a large percentage of Turmus Ayya residents. Proof of consistent residential ties in the past has been required for Israeli force to move forward with a home demolition.

Hamoked argued that Shalabi’s estranged wife and children should not lose their home as state prosecutors provided no proof that they had any knowledge of his plan to carry out an attack.

For its part, the state prosecution argued that Shalabi still owned the house and had even renovated it recently. As for the family’s claims of the demolition order being collective punishment, prosecutors said the need to provide a deterrent against future attacks was weightier than the need for consideration of the relatives who may have been uninvolved in the attack.

1. Israel's Ch. 13 reported this evening that the Biden administration "asked" Israel's govt not to destroy the home of a terrorist who murdered an Israeli seminary student as he stood at a bus stop and shot three of his friends.
Here's what this means: ../2
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) July 6, 2021

3. It works out that the terrorist in question is a US citizen. But notably, the Jewish landowners in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem that the Biden administration wants to steamroller are also US citizens.
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) July 6, 2021

This 2013 article from Eve Garrard in Fathom is one of the best I've seen to explain modern antisemitism. If anything, it is more accurate today than it was then.

Excerpts:

Anti-Semitism is fun, there’s no doubt about it. You can’t miss the relish with which some people compare Jews to the Nazis, or the fake sorrow, imperfectly masking deep satisfaction, with which they bemoan the supposed fact that Jews have brought hatred on themselves, especially by the actions of Israel and its Zionist supporters, and that they have inexplicably failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. (The Holocaust was not, of course, an educational exercise; and if there are lessons to be learned from it, we might think that the weakest pupils are those who once again wish to single out Jews above all others for hostile attention.) Like other forms of racism, anti-Semitism provides a variety of satisfactions for those who endorse it, and it’s worth trying to analyse these pleasures, so that we may better understand and combat the whole phenomenon.

There are (at least) three principal sources of pleasure which anti-Semitism provides: first, the pleasure of hatred; second, the pleasure of tradition, and third, the pleasure of displaying moral purity. Each of these is an independent source of satisfaction, but the three interact in various ways, which often strengthens their effects. No doubt the different sources of pleasure appeal to different individuals and groups, so that the appeal of tradition may resonate most strongly with those who are politically on the Right, and the attraction of displaying moral purity may be most strongly felt by those on the political Left, but both varieties can be detected in most political groupings, and the pleasures of hatred are well-nigh universal.

Hatred and its cognates – contempt, rancour, and detestation – offer the seductive satisfaction of feeling our own superiority to the hated object, and feeling also a sense of deep justification and indeed righteousness in taking steps to punish or otherwise hurt him (or her, or them). Hurting others is also fun, for more people than we would normally like to believe (see for example the notorious Zimbardo experiments, and the evidence from those involved in the genocidal killing in Rwanda; but also the ubiquitous phenomenon of playground bullying, and its various adult analogues such as workplace bullying and the kind of political hostilities that sometimes break out in small ideologically overheated groups). So where anti-Semitism takes the form of Jew-hatred, it’s not hard to understand that it offers psychological rewards which are nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of people’s beliefs about Jews. Nor is it hard to see that people would prefer not to be deprived of these pleasures, especially if, as is often the case with those who are formally committed to anti-racism, they don’t recognise themselves to be anti-Semitic, and hence pay no inner price in damage to their own self-esteem.

Since the pleasures of hatred are universal, why, we must ask, do they get realised in Jew-hating in particular, here and now? At this point we can turn to the second main source of the pleasures of anti-Semitism: tradition. There is a Jew-shaped space in Western culture, and the shape is not a pleasant one. Long centuries of tradition have constructed the Jew as a being who is both contemptible and dangerous, the purveyor and transmitter of evil; and various tropes have been deployed to flesh out this picture – in particular the blood libel.

As has often been pointed out, the tradition of anti-Semitism is very flexible, and it generally gets expressed in terms of the preoccupations of the period: so mediaeval Jew-hatred was religiously based; 19th and, even more 20th, century hostility was given a scientific top-dressing in terms of the now discredited theories of ‘race science’; and late 20th century and early 21st century prejudice is generally cast in terms of human rights violations. Although an anti-Semitism which was proud to speak its name became unfashionable on the liberal left after the Second World War, for reasons which are too obvious to mention, it’s a remarkable feature of the persistence of anti-Semitic tropes that they have survived relatively unaltered through these cultural changes. Recent cartoons expressing profound hostility to the Jewish state, on the grounds of supposedly outstanding human rights-violations, reproduce fantasies of sinister control and bloodthirstiness which earlier anti-Semites would have recognised without difficulty.

This takes us to the third source of satisfaction which anti-Semitism provides: the desire for moral purity, especially a purity which is readily visible to others, and can count as a ticket of entry to socially and politically desirable circles. This source of satisfaction is in many ways the most interesting of them all, partly because it seems to be the motive du jour of anti-Semitism coming from sections of the Left, which might have been expected to be hostile to all forms of racism and sadly isn’t; and partly because it’s so supple and flexible, it can accommodate and explain away a very wide range of facts which tell against it.

Such people can present themselves as the champions of the weak against the strong, of the colonised against the supposedly imperialist colonisers, of wholly innocent Palestinian victims against bloody and heartless Jewish oppressors. They can also present themselves as being victimised, both by the way in which powerful forces have imposed silence on them (albeit one of the noisiest silences ever heard), and also by the charge, deeply offensive to their moral purity, that their extraordinarily selective hostility towards Israel and its supporters might constitute discrimination against Jews. Indeed so offensive is this charge that it amounts, so it is claimed, to a further victimisation, of a kind which can only be explained by the deceitful and manipulative nature of those who raise the concerns about alleged anti-Semitism. So people who deploy these tactics against Jews can see themselves, and can hope to be seen by others, as being not only on the side of morally pure victims against morally vicious villains, but also as having the coveted status of victims themselves, slandered by people who are determined to exploit their own past sufferings in order to oppress others. Furthermore, since in this narrative Jews are cast as the powerful oppressors, those who single them out for hostile attention can see themselves as ‘speaking truth to power’. And paradoxically, focussing on Jews for singular criticism can be also be presented as subversive and transgressive, flouting the conventions of polite discourse, and thus conferring on the hostile critic the accolade of being untrammelled by convention, excitingly edgy, possibly even outrageous. All in all, that’s an awful lot of moral bang for your anti-Semitic buck.

(h/t Michael)

The PA, trying to distract from its attacks on civilians, plays up Jews visiting the Temple Mount

Every Sunday through Thursday, dozens of Jews visit the Temple Mount.

And every one of those days, there are Arabic newspaper articles about them, saying they are "settlers" who are "storming" and "defiling" the holy spot.

However, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency doesn't usually decide to feature those articles as one of their top stories - after all, it happens every day.

Except for this week.

For the past few days, those Jews who come to visit their holiest spot have been the top story on Wafa.

Today:

Today, Wednesday, settlers stormed the courtyards of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, under the protection of the occupation police.

Local sources reported that dozens of settlers, including the extremist Rabbi Yehuda Glick, stormed the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque through the Mughrabi Gate in groups, and performed Talmudic rituals, violating the sanctity of the holy place.

Yesterday:

Today, Tuesday, settlers stormed the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, from the side of the Mughrabi Gate, under the protection of the Israeli occupation police .

According to local sources, 44 settlers stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque, and carried out provocative tours in its courtyards, until they left it from the side of Bab al-Silsila .

Monday:

Today, Monday, settlers stormed the courtyards of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, under strict protection from the Israeli occupation police.

Local sources reported that 61 settlers stormed the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque from the Mughrabi Gate, performed Talmudic prayers, and carried out provocative tours.

The reason for the renewed attention on Jews peacefully walking on the Temple Mount is clear.

The PA has been battered with criticism on its brutal attacks on its own people who are protesting its policies, so it is doing what it always does: try to redirect people's anger at Jews.

After all, this is one of the goals of antisemitism - to use Jews as scapegoats for anything and everything. Getting Palestinians riled up over the "Al Aqsa Mosque" has been a major way of controlling them since the Mufti did it a hundred years ago.

It doesn't look like it is working this time, but it will not be the only time the Palestinian leaders have used antisemitism to redirect popular anger away from themselves.

West Point scholar says the IDF strike of the Al Jalaa Tower was legal

I've noted before that the legal analyses given by NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not only biased against Israel but they betray an ignorance of the laws of armed conflict.

One of the incidents in the Gaza war this year that was heavily criticized was the airstrike against the Al Jalaa Tower, which the IDF says housed Hamas intelligence operations. Was this strike legal under the laws of armed conflict? Many claimed it wasn't.

Michael N. Schmitt, the G. Norman Lieber Distinguished Scholar at the United States Military Academy at West Point and a law professor at other institutions, writes about the laws of war in relation to journalists and specifically whether Israel's strike at the Al Jalaa Tower, which housed Al Jazeera and other media outlets, was legal under the laws of war.

After determining that in this case journalists are definitely considered civilians and that their offices are definitely considered civilian objects, and that no one claims that the media outlets were broadcasting propaganda that would make them legitimate targets, Schmitt describes the relevant laws around the airstrike (emphasis mine):

The fact that the civilian media facilities in Al Jalaa Tower were destroyed implicates the rule of proportionality. When aspects of a target are clearly separate and distinct, harm to the part thereof that is exclusively civilian counts as collateral damage factored into the proportionality analysis (AP I, art 51.5(a)).

There is some disagreement on whether a building that contains both apartments or offices used for civilian purposes and others that have been converted to military use should be considered a military objective in its entirety or as consisting of separate and distinct entities. The better view, but one that does not appear to have achieved universal consensus, is that if an attacker can surgically strike that aspect of the building used for military ends, harm to the remaining sections must be factored into the proportionality analysis.

In this case, however, there is no indication that the IDF had intelligence indicating precisely which sections of the Al Jalaa Tower its opponents were using or that the IDF fielded weaponry capable of surgically neutralizing those sections and any conflict-related material therein. Therefore, if the Israeli reports of Hamas using the building are accurate, the entire building constituted a single military objective, damage to which did not have to factor into the IDF’s proportionality calculation.

As to the requirement to take precautions in attack, since the building itself housed Hamas’ material and operations, alternative targets were not on the table. Further, there is no indication that different tactics or weapons could have avoided civilian harm. Indeed, in that the building itself qualified as a single military objective and the attack injured no civilians, collateral damage (as that concept is understood in the law of armed conflict) was minimal. Video footage of the attack, which involved dropping a multi-story building in an urban area without significant damage to other structures in the vicinity, confirms that the strike was an impressive example of careful avoidance of collateral damage by the IDF.

The IDF’s hour-long warning of the attack was likewise a paradigmatic example of an effective warning. If IDF reports that Hamas and Islamic Jihad were able to evacuate the building and remove military material from the facility before it was struck are accurate, the warning appears to have exceeded that required by the law of armed conflict because it involved some sacrifice of military advantage by the IDF.

The IDF has accused Hamas and other Palestinian organized armed groups of using the presence of civilians and civilian media as shields against attack. These organizations have a long history of using human shielding as a tactic against Israeli attack and, on that basis, the IDF’s claim is colorable. However, during urban warfare, it is common to use civilian buildings for military purposes simply because the realities of the urban environment necessitate such use (U.S. Army, Commander’s Handbook, para 2.27). Absent an intent to shield, this practice does not violate the prohibition on human shielding. More facts would be required to confirm the intent of the Palestinian organized armed groups in Al Jalaa Tower before confirming a violation of the law of armed conflict on the basis of human shielding.

I would add here that Hamas didn't take over the offices during the war, but they had been using the offices for quite a while, and deliberately placed them in a civilian building. In this case, saying that Hamas used human shields is definitely something to consider.

Counter-allegations that the IDF used the attack as a ploy to end unfavorable media are unsupported by the available facts. So long as the Israeli assertion that Hamas and other groups used the Al Jalaa Tower for military purposes is accurate, the building qualifies as a lawful military objective that may be attacked. Indeed, even if Israel harbored a secondary motive of putting an end to unfavorable media coverage, the attack would still be lawful, as attackers often have multiple objectives in mounting an attack. Only if the Israeli account was knowingly false would the operation be unlawful as a direct attack against a civilian object. An analogous analysis applies to charges that the attack amounts to collective punishment, for strikes on lawful military objectives are not collective punishment under the law of armed conflict.

Overall, the Al Jalaa strike mission planners appear to have carefully considered the law of armed conflict. The IDF’s Military Advocate General’s Corps’ international law specialists undoubtedly played a key role in the planning and approval of the operation, as they do in all IDF military operations (see here for a discussion of MAG practices). Based on open source information presently available, the strike complied with the law of armed conflict rules governing attacks, including those affecting the media.

Schmitt is someone who knows the laws of war - as he has to, because he teaches that topic to the military. In a previous article, over some 88 pages, he and another military law scholar look in detail at how Israel's military legal system works, and they are uniformly impressed. Unlike HRW and Amnesty, they actually researched the topic, going to Israel and seeing how careful the IDF is to conform to the laws of war.

IDF operations are clearly well-regulated and subject to the rule of law. The IDF has extremely robust systems of examination and investigation of operational incidents, and there is significant civilian oversight, both by the Attorney General and the Supreme Court. With respect to the MAG Corps, the Authors found its officers to be exceptionally competent, highly professional, and well-trained.

In some cases, the IDF goes beyond the law in protecting civilians.

In particular, Israel has adopted an inclusive approach to the entitlement to protected status, particularly civilian status. Examples include Israel’s positions on doubt, its treatment of involuntary shields as civilians who are not directly participating and its view that individuals who ignore warnings retain their civilian status. Although these positions might seem counterintuitive for a State that faces foes who exploit protected status for military and other gain, such positions are well suited to counter the enemy’s reliance on lawfare. In this regard, Israel’s LOAC interpretations actually enhance its operational and strategic level position despite any tactical loss. Along the same lines, in many cases, the IDF imposes policy restrictions that go above and beyond the requirements of LOAC.

In short, the people who claim that Israel targets civilians are ignorant at best, malicious liars at worst.

(h/t Irene)

07/06 Links Pt2: Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir; Meet Orphaned Land, the Israeli Heavy Metal Band With Arab Fans; Tarantino praises his life in Israel, teases movie in Jerusalem

From Ian:

Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir

‘I swam in a sea of antisemitism for years and didn’t notice the water was filthy,’ writes Kathleen Hayes in a memoir of her life in the revolutionary left.

The beliefs that give our lives meaning are passed down to us by people we cherish. For those on the Left, these men and women are often dearer than family: comrades with whom we have worked and fought; shared jokes, drinks and beds; endured a third round of brain-numbing discussion on a glorious summer day while other people thoughtlessly picnic in the park. Our evolving sense of what is true is inextricably entwined with our respect and, most of all, our love for the person who teaches it to us. We think that the things they say and write and the ideas in the books they recommend must be true — because we know them to be honourable, intelligent people and we love them.

I was a devoted Trotskyist for 25 years. My initiation took place at a protest against Natan Sharansky. It was 1987. I was a callow nineteen-year-old Berkeley student and anti-apartheid activist; my soon-to-be comrades were the smartest, funniest, most good-hearted yet irreverent people I had ever known. There was, predictably, a guy in the picture — my genial bespectacled boyfriend who had introduced me to the party — and the uneasy suggestion that my sudden conversion to Marxism wasn’t a purely intellectual epiphany. I had almost certainly never heard of Sharansky (or Shcharansky, as he was at the time), but when an older comrade I particularly admired asked me, a glint of mischief in her eyes, whether I’d like to come to a ‘bright red demo’ against an anti-communist traitor who had spied on the Soviet workers state, I’d heard almost everything I needed. I joined their small picket line in front of the San Francisco hotel where Sharansky was speaking; and when it was over I soaked up my new comrades’ attention and praise like a parched little flower after a long drought.

‘I never saw any antisemitism,’ we so often hear today. And so I didn’t, or seldom did, in the decades of leftist political activity that followed. It was embedded in the fabric, a thread that ran unseen throughout an avowedly emancipating worldview and was inextricable from it. It stitched together a legacy that included Marx’s sometimes-troubling writings about Jews; subterranean beliefs about an association between Jews, trade and capitalism; longstanding hostility to Jewish ‘particularism’; a Marxist heritage that could claim some principled opponents of antisemitism in its ranks but also many who were ambivalent or complacent about it, sometimes with deadly consequences, some outright antisemites, and every shade between. I suspected none of this the day I joined that picket line: quite the contrary, despite all the fulminating against Zionism and the Anti-Defamation League. A prominent sign carried that day — ‘20 million Soviet citizens died smashing Third Reich!’— established beyond all doubt that the party was firmly on the side of good against evil. And, of course, staunchly against antisemitism.

#HappeningNOW: Live interview with @YosephHaddad slaying the ‘Israel apartheid’ lie!

Watch ?? here on @The_ILF Facebook page: https://t.co/IOVMljacvr https://t.co/QfKYXgF2J7
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) July 6, 2021

Jews Should Not Echo the Claim of ‘Systemic Police Racism’

The fantasy that the key to public safety is being kinder to criminals—rather than kinder to the victims of crime—not only sacrifices the physical resources that police need to keep Jews safe. It’s coming back to bite them. The climate of lawlessness that reigns in many of America’s big cities following last summer’s protests against law enforcement appears to have fed the rise in hate crimes. And the increase in violent repeat offenders thanks to “progressive” reforms is feeding this trend. Last month, for example, Brandon Elliot brutally assaulted an Asian woman while hurling ethnic insults at her. Elliot, who was on lifetime parole for fatally stabbing his mother in front of his 5-year-old sister, typifies the violent profile of many of this past year’s hate crime perpetrators.

It is nonsensical to pretend that violent actors don’t often act violently, or that it is “racist” to arrest violent criminals if they belong to certain racial categories. Three back-to-back police shootings in April earned angry accusations of police racism from congresspeople, celebrities, and Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League. But from the evidence so far, it appears the shooting of Daunte Wright outside Minneapolis was a fatal act of negligence. The shooting of Adam Toledo in Chicago was a tragic but defensible life-or-death millisecond decision that an officer was forced to make while responding to shots fired in a dark alley at 2:30 a.m., in a city whose homicide rate is up 22% this year and has had over 1,000 shooting victims since January. The shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant was a heroic fast-action that saved the life of an innocent Black girl who was about to be stabbed. If we say a Black teenager who is about to stab a young girl may not be shot by police, even after refusing to drop her weapon, we are really saying that different rules apply to different races. We are saying that we judge not by actions but by the outcomes we wish to see and the demographic statistics we feel would be fair.

It should worry us to our marrow, as Jews, that false allegations of human evil are being used against people responsible for preventing actual criminality. Practically speaking, it is also stupid to promote an ideology that will be used to discriminate against us, while depriving us of the physical protection we continue to need against criminals and psychopaths of all religions, races, and political beliefs. We should worry that judging rectitude by race and not by behavior will boomerang on us.

And so it already has. No matter how many synagogues fly BLM banners, Jews are lumped together with police in this morality play. Jewish students on campuses have been ousted from BLM-aligned groups on the grounds that supporting Israel makes them intrinsically racist. And that was only a preamble to the nightmare of the last few weeks: Israel widely depicted in America as the racist cop, hated and condemned regardless of the law or the spuriousness of allegations of racism and brutality. The stage was set for the recent violent attacks on Jewish pedestrians in Manhattan and outdoor diners in Los Angeles—and for members of Congress to pile on.

More than ever, we need robust and empowered law enforcement that continues to make intelligent adaptations in order to check the rise in hate crimes and the environment of disorder that supports it. The police racism narrative is false, and Jews need to speak out against it—not only because it’s wrong, but because it’s uniquely dangerous to us.

Orphaned Land

If the heavy metal band Orphaned Land’s message to the world is one of peace and unity, it came through loud and clear at their 30th-anniversary show. The concert took place in June at Heichal HaTarbut (the Culture Palace), also known as the Charles Bronfman Auditorium—the largest concert hall in Tel Aviv, and the home of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. This wasn’t an ordinary heavy metal show—but no Orphaned Land concert is ever an ordinary heavy metal show. Backed by the 45-piece Israel Chamber Opera Orchestra, as well as by the metal a cappella band Hellscore (“If hell had a choir, it would sound like Hellscore,” their website tagline puts it), the veteran Israeli metal band celebrated their anniversary in highbrow style, with an audience of nearly 2,400 witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This certainly isn’t the first time a famed metal band has collaborated with classical musicians: There was Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony and Cradle of Filth and the Budapest Film Orchestra, for instance. But Orphaned Land’s show was not just a mix of metal guitars, growl-style vocals, and classical musicians. Their lead singer, Kobi Farhi, is a dead ringer for Jesus, he frequently sings in a chantlike voice, and the music is rife with Jewish and Arabic influences and biblical overtones. All of this makes for a surreal experience: One minute felt like a bunch of headbanging metal dudes playing klezmer music took over a classical concert, and the next minute felt like the soundtrack to a sweeping biblical Hollywood epic played from the loudspeakers at Ozzfest.

A few days after the concert, I met Farhi and Uri Zelha, the bass player who is the only other founding member still in the band. I’d actually interviewed them before—30 years ago, over the phone, when we were all still in high school. I wrote a column about new upcoming bands for an Israeli teen magazine; they were a high school metal band with lofty aspirations. They were also the only band I interviewed for my column that eventually made it—on a global scale, no less.

During their impressive career, Orphaned Land mixed their progressive metal style with a variety of styles: a few death metal growls, piyyutim (Jewish liturgical poems), and Middle Eastern folk music, becoming pioneers of the subgenre known as Oriental Metal.

This is barely an exaggeration. Amnesty and HRW knowingly hire anti-Israel activists.

The New York Police Department has not yet (as of this writing) released its second quarter hate crime statistics, but the New York Post has the numbers.

While there was a huge increase in anti-Asian crimes, from 21 to 105 in the first six months of the year, anti-Jewish hate crimes remain the most prevalent in New York, with 113 incidents so far this year.

Hate crimes against everyone else mentioned in the article is not even in the same ballpark.

There were 28 anti-Black incidents, 11 anti-white, 4 anti-Hispanic and 5 anti-Muslim.

07/06 Links Pt1: After Palestinians reject deal, Israel to send 700,000 vaccines to South Korea; Israel’s Critics are Repulsed by Jewish Sovereignty and Military Power

From Ian:

After Palestinians reject deal, Israel to send 700,000 vaccines to South Korea

Israel will send South Korea some 700,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine that are due to expire shortly in a deal signed between the two nations on Tuesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced, calling the deal a “win-win” situation for both countries.

The deal comes weeks after the Palestinian Authority backed out of a similar agreement, saying the vaccine doses were too close to their expiration date despite Israel using the same batches to vaccinate its teens.

Under the deal with Seoul, Israel will supply doses for immediate use that are set to expire by the end of the month. In return, Israel will receive the same number of doses from South Korean orders later in the year.

“We continue to protect the lives of Israeli citizens,” Bennett said in a statement.

“The vaccines are efficient and life-saving — that’s a fact. We agreed to an exchange that is a win-win situation. South Korea will receive vaccines from our existing stocks and we will be repaid from their future orders,” Bennett said.

The agreement was negotiated by Israel’s Health Ministry together with the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Council.

The statement said the agreement was made with the cooperation of Pfizer and came after several conversations in recent days between Bennett and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.

The agreement will go into effect in the next few days after South Korea inspects the vaccines, the statement said. The Korean vaccines will arrive in Israel sometime during the fourth quarter of 2021.

The South Koreans chose moving forward, hard work and prosperity, and the Palestinians together with the Arab states used @UNRWA to nourish grievance, hate and war:https://t.co/TG10LOsjua
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) July 6, 2021

Israel's long a brutal occupation of Korea create a fundamentally unequal situation between the countries, where Seoul has no choice but to accept second-hand vaccines in what amounts to medical apartheid. I am doing this right @hrw @btselem? https://t.co/qNCCUzzgYe
— Eugene Kontorovich (@EVKontorovich) July 6, 2021

Israel confirms vaccine less effective against Delta variant, eyes third dose

Israel’s Health Ministry released data on Monday showing that the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine appears to largely prevent hospitalization and serious cases, but is significantly less effective against preventing the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus.

According to the ministry, the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 has dropped by some 30 percent to 64%, given the spread of the Delta variant. The data shows that during May, when the strain was less prevalent, the vaccine was 94.3% effective.

The Delta variant, which is believed to be twice as contagious as the original strain of COVID-19, is thought to be responsible for 90% of new cases in Israel over the past two weeks.

The data, however, also shows that the vaccine is still highly effective against preventing serious symptoms and hospitalization. During May, that figure stood at 98.2%, and during June, it was 93%.

On Monday evening, the Health Ministry said that 369 people had been diagnosed with coronavirus since midnight, bringing the total number of active cases in the country to 2,766.

There were 70 people hospitalized and 35 in serious condition. A week ago there were just 22 people in serious condition.