I recently stumbled upon a photography book shot by the acclaimed Life magazine wartime photographer John Phillips. The large, innocuous-looking book was simply titled, A Will to Survive. After flipping through the pages, I realized I entered a time capsule that memorializes the Arab destruction of Jerusalem’s ancient Jewish Quarter in 1948.Not only is it a dramatic firsthand account of the fall of the Jewish Quarter in 1948, but it documents the Arab Legion’s scorched-earth tactics that razed and burned to the ground every structure there, including all its synagogues and yeshivahs. The Arabs expelled all of the city’s residents, mainly defenseless, old Orthodox Jews. They were given about an hour to vacate homes that most extended families had lived in for centuries.And there never has been a reckoning by any international body about the Arab Legion’s barbaric actions after it captured the Quarter.To get his shots in May 1948, Phillips posed undercover in Jerusalem as a British officer in the Arab Legion. He also smuggled out his photos to avoid Arab censors who were eager to keep the sacking of the Jewish Quarter secret.Phillips faced personal danger to do the shoot. He entered the Middle East undercover and wore the uniform of the Arab Legion, a British-created Arab army led by British officers, many of whom stayed on with their units to fight the Jews. “Mistaking me for a British officer, the Arab populace left me alone,” he wrote.He was appalled about the Arab censorship. “Aware that the sack of the Jewish Quarter would shock the western world, Arab authorities across the Middle East tried to prevent the news from leaking out. Jerusalem could not be mentioned under any circumstances,” he wrote.“I knew my pictures of the agony of the Jewish Quarter would end up in a censor’s wastepaper basket. I did not want this to happen and decided to smuggle them out of the Middle East.”
Friday, August 13, 2021
- Friday, August 13, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- 1948, Arab Legion, East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing, Jerusalem, jew hatred, Jewish Quarter, Jordan, vandalism, zzz
- Friday, August 13, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
From promoting anti-vaccine literature in her own writing, where in one breath she wrote that she doesn’t want to “dismiss” the families who’ve endured horrible tragedies due to being unvaccinated, but in the next defended her anti-vax stance by sharing that a “friend’s brother had an adverse reaction to a vaccination and he is never going to develop mentally past the age of 6 because of it,” seems really tacky and insensitive and wrong (even if true). She conveniently pivoted to admitting that she and her sons are vaccinated more recently, just in time for her Jeopardy! audition.
Then there was her victim-blaming New York Times op-ed about Harvey Weinstein, concluding that she was never a “perfect ten” and therefore wouldn’t be subject to his kind of predation. While self-identifying as a feminist, in a piece written just days after the Times broke the news of Weinstein’s violent and predatory behavior, she wrote, “I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise. I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.”
Bialik loudly proclaimed her donation toward bulletproof vests for the genocidal Israeli Defense Forces back in 2014 just out of “a need to do something.” After facing backlash, she quieted for a time until May of this year, where she self-identified as a “liberal Zionist” who, like many other celebrities, spouted bothsidesism: “Israel deserves to live as an autonomous free and safe nation,” she told Fox News. “The Palestinian people deserve the same. What is happening now by extremists on both sides is tragic. It’s horrendous. It’s unacceptable. And I have to hold out hope that peace and justice will prevail.”
What Shakespeare knew about anti-Zionism
This past week, there was an anti-Israel protest in Brooklyn. It was promoted by, among other groups, Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel group.Joshua Washington: Black Community Pays Dearly for Israel-haters’ Agenda
The demonstrators chanted: “We don’t want no two states, we want all of it.” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The gloves are off; the pretenses, gone.
They want a world without Israel.
Their banners: “Zionism is terrorism”; “We will free Palestine within our lifetime.”
And: “Globalize the intifada.”
“Intifada” is Arabic for uprising or rebellion. In its most current usages, it refers to organized acts of violence and terrorist attacks against Israelis. There have been more than a thousand victims.
The intifada has centered itself on Israel proper.
No longer.
“Globalize the intifada” means that Jews will be uncomfortable and unsafe, wherever they are.
Let me remind you: Jews. Not Israelis. Not Zionists.
Jews.
Let us imagine the scenario. On the Upper West Side, for example. Protesters walk through the streets, accosting passersby.
You think they will ask: “Are you Israeli?”
No. They will be going after Jews. How they will know who is Jewish is a whole other question.
But, let us imagine the frightening dialogue.
“Are you Jewish?”
“Yes, but … ” (guilty with an explanation).
I am a victim of history. This triggers every fear of Jewish vulnerability that is within me.
What else did you think that “globalize the intifada” was supposed to mean? A letter-writing campaign?
Cori Bush rose to power, defeating incumbent Lacy Clay, and running on an anti-Israel, anti-law enforcement platform. One of her positions is that aid to Israel should stop and be used for homelessness in the US, because, according to Bush, “the same equipment that they used to brutalize us is the same equipment that we send to the Israeli military to police and brutalize Palestinians.” This lie is what has been coined by anti-Israel activists as the Deadly Exchange Campaign, in which a lie is propagated about Israel that it teaches the US how to kill Black people in America. Not only is this not true, it disproportionately focuses on the one Jewish state while US police departments work with many other countries as well. Along with this distortion of the truth, Bush also calls Israel an “apartheid state,” and Jews in Israel “occupiers” of their own indigenous land. Now that she is in Congress, she continues to champion these points and policies while violence in her district grows and her constituents, many of them children, are being killed.
This is the anathema that is Black Lives Matter, and all those who bear the “defund the police” slogan. Not only is the slogan not supported by the vast majority of Black Americans, the implementation of this slogan as policy is actually destroying vulnerable black communities. It was not the police that burned down Pastor Corey Brooks’ Project H.O.O.D. facilities in Chicago. It was not the police that destroyed the black business district in Kenosha, WI in 2020. It was not due to the police that parents of Oakland, CA were mourning the recent murders of their children; that mourning was, however, disrupted by an anti-police group called Antifa, who began shouting down the parents who were speaking to further their anti-police agenda. When speaking of tone-deafness, it is difficult to get much more tone-deaf than disrupting a group of people you claim to support to force your narrative of their oppression onto them. Yet, here we are.
Congresswoman Cori Bush is wildly hypocritical and a danger to the black community for the policies she pushes, but she is not a trailblazer. She is simply carrying out the reckless, anti-Israel agenda set by Black Lives Matter. Not speaking the truth about this matter will result in the deaths of more of the people they purport to protect, while using their wealth and privilege to protect themselves from their own failed and destructive policies.
Obscene antisemitism - BLM in NYC tonight equates Zionists with Nazis. pic.twitter.com/oEw6S01y1m
— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) August 12, 2021
Ruth Wisse (WSJ): Anti-Semitism Isn't Merely Another Kind of Hate
The Arab League launched the original pan-Arab boycott of Israel in 1945, defining any Jewish presence in Palestine as an occupation of Arab territory. The U.S. intervened to thwart the boycott because Israel's destruction was inconsistent with American values. But America has changed. At the end of the 20th century, a home-grown boycott, divestment and sanctions movement became an American arm of the war against Israel, uniting a self-defined progressive coalition on the side of Arab-Muslim rejectionism.Unpacked: Beyond Left or Right: Whose Fault is Antisemitism? | Antisemitism, Explained
Anti-Semitism is more than just a form of hatred; people organize against the Jews as part of an ideological struggle. Zionists who thought anti-Semitism was directed against them because of their dispersion were surprised to find it was even easier to blame them in their homeland. Since 1945, the driving force of anti-Jewish politics has been the Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish state, supported by Marxist ideology.
While the Holocaust may be over, antisemitism is still very much alive. So, whose fault is it? And how do we address it? The sad truth is that antisemitism has always been spread by offenders across the ideological spectrum. That's why it is key to focus on the fighting antisemitic ideas and not get hung up on the identities of whoever is perpetuating them. When we learn to rebuke anti-Jewish bigotry no matter who spreads it, we will be one step closer to defeating it.
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- HRW
The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas stressed the importance of what was stated in the report of Human Rights Watch accusing the Israeli occupation of committing crimes that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas noted the need for the international community to move to hold the occupation and its leaders accountable, and to take all necessary measures to stop this continuous aggression and end the occupation.
The group stressed the inherent right of our people to defend themselves and their sanctities, and to resist occupation by all available means, including armed resistance, which is guaranteed by international laws.
It indicated that the resistance, in its defense of our people and the response to aggression, only targeted Israeli military gatherings and targets. However, the Palestinian resistance affirms taking all necessary measures and precautions to avoid targeting civilians wherever they are.She pointed to the resistance's constant keenness to develop its capabilities to enable it to target only Israeli military headquarters and activities, stressing that the occupying power systematically uses civilians as human shields, as it builds its security and military headquarters inside cities near schools, hospitals and civilian airports.
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- humor, Preoccupied
Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.
Check out their Facebook page.
Cleveland, August 12 - More than a week after a Democratic Party primary race for a crucial Congressional seat resulted in the victory of a mainstream, pro-Israel candidate over one favored by the party's vocal left wing, prominent figures in that wing have realized that this latest failure to bolster its representation in the halls of power bespeaks a trend: if others are permitted to run against the progressives' choice, those others will siphon votes away from the progressive in sufficient numbers to deny the progressive the sought-after position, an aide to one of those figures disclosed today.
Members of the progressive Democratic Congressional group known as The Squad - Rashida Tlaib (D-MN), Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MI), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Cori Bush (D-MO), and backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and activist Linda Sarsour - voiced their conclusion Thursday that the August 3 victory by Shontel Brown over Nina Turner in the primary to run for Ohio's 11th District indicates a recurring challenge facing The Squad's endorsements: opponents almost always run rival campaigns that attract enough votes to win, and that phenomenon must cease.
"It's different from their home districts," explained the aide, who requested anonymity. "Each member of The Squad enjoys a solid Democratic safety net; there's virtually no chance for a Republican to take the seat. That's just not the case for all these swing districts, where voters are up for grabs and a candidate has to offer something that's actually appealing to the electorate as a whole, and can't just rest on party loyalties while taking a radical rhetorical tone."
"The problem is there are other people running against our people," stated Ocasio-Cortez in the third group consultation The Squad has held since the 11th District defeat. "I don't just mean Republicans in the regular election - I mean other Democrats who don't share our progressive politics! Can you imagine? And those other people convince voters that in order to attract enough voters in that upcoming election the party needs a candidate with policies and rhetoric that don't alienate large swaths of voters. That's what happened in Ohio. There has to be a way to keep those others from running."
"Not just in the primary," added Omar. "When I ran for my seat, I ran unopposed. The Republicans simply didn't field a candidate. Why can't we prevent them from fielding a candidate in all the other important elections as well? That way we can advance our Justice Democrats agenda more easily, and protect our democracy from those who are trying to destroy it."
Biden Admin Decision to Hide Info About Palestinian Terrorism From Congress Broke Law, Watchdog Says
Biden administration officials may have broken the law when they erased information about the Palestinian government's terror incitement from a mandatory compliance report submitted to Congress in July, according to a legal watchdog group.Murphy urges U.S. to deprioritize Iran, says Saudis should to ‘come to terms’ with Hezbollah influence
The America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) in a letter sent Wednesday is asking the State Department inspector general to investigate the Biden administration's decision to omit references to the Palestinian government's calls for violence, as well as its support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—issues that are being closely monitored by Congress as the Biden administration restarts millions of dollars in U.S. aid to the Palestinians. Information about Palestinian terror incitement and support for the BDS movement were included in the outgoing Trump administration's October 2020 version of the report, but removed by the Biden administration when it came into office, as the Free Beacon first reported.
The AFLF letter says the Biden administration removed this information to downplay Palestinian intransigence as it renews taxpayer aid to the government. Lawmakers, including a large portion of Republicans, criticized the resumption of U.S. aid, particularly since the Palestinian government subsidizes terrorists and advocates for Israel's destruction. The AFLF has also submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department for all internal records related to the decision to nix information from the latest congressional report.
The Biden administration "unlawfully [concealed] multiple material derogatory facts regarding the Palestinian Authority's ongoing economic, political, and ideological support for terrorism; economic warfare against Israel; and opposition to regional peace," Reed Rubinstein, AFLF's senior counselor, wrote to acting State Department inspector general Diana Shaw. "It seems these derogatory facts were deleted, expunged, and concealed not because circumstances on the ground had changed, but rather because officials in the Department's Bureau of Near East Affairs and in the Biden White House decided to cover them up, at least in part to facilitate the planned transfer of hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to the Palestinian Authority in potential violation of U.S. law."
If the information was removed in order to keep Congress in the dark about the Palestinian government's ongoing transgressions, it could constitute a violation of U.S. law, according to AFLF's letter.
The watchdog group says the State Department must "immediately open an investigation" into any decision by officials "to conceal and cover up material derogatory facts regarding the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority from the Congress."
Murphy warned that Lebanon, which has been besieged by a series of crises, is on the brink of becoming a failed state and a source of instability and terrorism that could last decades. He blamed the deteriorating situation in part on a lack of Saudi engagement due to Hezbollah’s influence inside Lebanon.Gaza rockets killed Palestinians, Israelis in 'flagrant' war crimes - HRW
“[The Saudis] are deeply uncomfortable with the role that Hezbollah plays. The Saudis should come to terms with the fact that — at least in the short term — Hezbollah is going to be part of the political infrastructure there,” he said. “It would be much better for the Saudis to be a partner with the United States, with the French and other countries to try to offer the kind of economic support that might provoke political reform that would eventually allow for technocrats and non-sectarian actors to have greater influence in the government. That would lessen the influence of Hezbollah.”
Murphy’s proposals on Iran and Lebanon reflect his broader view of U.S. Middle East policy as severely out of date.
“What we want is to try to midwife a conversation about a regional security architecture, in which the Iranians and the Saudis and the Emiratis aren’t constantly battling with each other through proxy fights,” he said. “I don’t think that our current position in the region — whereby we are essentially giving the Saudi side whatever they need — is actually leading to that détente or to that conversation happening.”
A key part of an altered U.S. strategy must include “play[ing] hardball” with the Saudis,” Murphy continued, dismissing concerns that decreased U.S. influence could create openings for its geopolitical rivals.
“I don’t believe this argument that the Saudis are going to walk away from a security alliance with the United States,” he explained. “They will never get from the Chinese nor the Russians what they get from the United States today… They want us to be tougher on Iran, but they don’t have another potential partner like the United States.”
The report did not mention attacks on Jewish-Israelis that took place in the days leading up to Operation Guardian of the Walls. “Hamas authorities should stop trying to justify unlawful rocket attacks that indiscriminately kill and injure civilians by pointing to Israel’s violations,” Goldstein said. “The laws of war are meant to protect all civilians from harm.”
Abu Hamza, spokesman for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Gazan-based terror group, told Al Jazeera that when the terrorist organization discovered that there were children present at targets, “these missions were stopped,” adding “the enemy knows very well what I am talking about.”
Two Israeli children were killed by rocket fire from Gaza during the operation: five-year-old Ido Avigal and 16-year-old Nadin Awad. Abu Hamza’s statement echoed statements the IDF often makes during operations to explain its policies to avoid civilian casualties. The IDF often calls off missions if civilians are spotted at the targeted location.
Palestinian terrorist groups have repeatedly been found to violate the rights of children and place children at risk.
HRW Executive Director Ken Roth, who in May accused Israel of being an apartheid state, came under fire in July after he retweeted a report on the severe spike in antisemitism in the UK during Israel’s war with Gaza in May, implying that Israeli government action was responsible for antisemitism.
Typical: Even as Ken Roth's HRW belatedly reports on Hamas rocket attacks, he pretends that the terrorist group merely "ignores" war crimes, when in fact the double war crime of attacking Israeli civilians from within Palestinian residential areas is Hamas' entire modus operandi. https://t.co/jPthePdl0H
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) August 12, 2021
HRW’s Inconsistency and Incoherence Continues: EJIL: Talk! Symposium on A Threshold Crossed
On 5-9 July 2021, EJIL:Talk!, an influential international law blog, hosted a symposium on “Apartheid in Israel/Palestine”. According to Marko Milanovic, co-editor of the blog, its purpose is to discuss legal issues related to the “increasing trend amongst human rights activists and NGOs of labelling Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians as constituting apartheid”, and specifically to focus on Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) April 2021 publication, A Threshold Crossed. The symposium does not purport to be a comprehensive examination. Rather, it is intended to explore whether and how the crime against humanity of apartheid, initially proscribed specifically in relation to the situation in southern Africa, might be applied to other situations; additionally, as Milanovic noted, how “labels such as apartheid” are employed to create political narratives to “mobiliz[e] and (de)legitimiz[e] power.”
The charge of apartheid against Israel is not new, nor does it reflect a novel or increasing trend.1 However, the five articles written for the symposium and HRW’s response are illuminating in two respects: first, they provide confirmation that the central agenda of the “apartheid campaign” is to delegitimize and demonize Zionism and the existence of Israel within any borders; and second, that HRW’s Threshold is based on an invented legal definition. HRW’s artificial and manipulative process under the façade of systematic legal analysis is used to provide support for, and mutually reinforces, the political objective – to delegitimize Jewish self-determination. HRW’s response also reflects what can (charitably) be described as ongoing incoherence concerning their methodologies, policies, and control over media coverage.
Predictably, the contributions offered by Noura Erakat (Rutgers University and associated with multiple Palestinian NGOs) and Rania Muhareb (Al Haq) attack Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, regardless of borders. Erakat’s post is an historically false screed, labeling Zionism as “defined by discrimination”. Erakat promotes conspiratorial theories, including that “Israel is manifesting to the world what Palestinians have long known: it wants the land without the people and seeks to remain the sole source of authority from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Erakat invokes the calumny, popularized in the 1920s by the antisemite Henry Ford and later revived by the neo-Nazi, KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, of “Jewish supremacy”. Erakat’s conspiracies, rejection of Jewish self-determination, and characterization of Israel as racist could be considered as antisemitism under the International Holocaust Remembrance Association Working Definition.2 It is hard to imagine that a post expressing similar sentiments directed at any other ethnic or religious group would have been published. For example, how many academics in the field of international law call for the dismantling of India because of the 1947 partition and allegations of ongoing discrimination against its Muslim population, much less advocate for it in a highly respected legal publication.
Carola Lingaas, a Norwegian academic, and Joshua Kern, Barrister at 9 Bedford Row and counsel to the Institute for NGO Research, offers in-depth analyses of the legal definition of apartheid, noting material differences between the standards delineated in international legal instruments and those posited by HRW. Professor Eugene Kontorovich details the factual and political distortions endemic throughout Threshold.
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- analysis, Daled Amos
The controversial demolition of the homes of Palestinian Arab terrorists is in the news again, following a terrorist attack in May:
The Judea Military Court on Tuesday [August 3] convicted Muntasir Shalabi for the terror murder of 19-year-old Yehuda Guetta in a drive-by-shooting on May 2 at Tapuah junction.The demolition itself was done last month, in July.
...Shalabi, 44, was also convicted of multiple attempted-murder counts after he wounded two other 19-year-olds during the attack.
The provision's breadth affords tremendous discretion to the Military Government on a number of levels. First, Article 119 allows the Military Government to issue demolition orders as an exercise of administrative authority, without recourse to judicial proceedings. [p. 15; emphasis added]And Article 119 requires a history lesson, since it is not an Israeli law.
Article 119 is one of the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations [DERs] issued by the British during their rule in then-Mandate Palestine. Article 119 is the regulation the British used to authorize the confiscation and destruction of houses in which security-related laws were violated or where someone who committed such a violation lived.
The roots of Israel's home demolition policy date back to British orders promulgated during the South African Boer War. In June 1900, Lord Roberts, the general in command of British forces in South Africa, issued two proclamations in response to repetitive Afrikaner commando attacks on railroad and telegraph lines. His orders permitted the destruction of homes closest to the sites of such attacks. [p. 8]
According to the article on Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, referring to the book Terror Out of Zion by Bowyer J. Bell:
The British reacted by arresting 35 Jewish political leaders including the mayors of Tel Aviv, Netanya, and Ramat Gan and held them without trial, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar was banned and its headquarters was raided, and the army was authorised to punitively demolish Jewish homes, with a Jewish home in Jerusalem demolished on August 5 after an arms cache was discovered there during a routine search.
Cunningham authorized the British Army to begin demolishing Jewish homes, a tactic it had previously failed to use during the Jewish insurgency. A Jewish home where an arms cache had been discovered in a routine search was demolished in Jerusalem on 5 August.
As to the unequal application of the regulation between Arabs and Jews by the British, issues of politics and publicity were likely the reason.
That leads to an issue raised by Gideon Levy in the current application of the law to the Shalabi home, in his article for Ha'aretz, Israel razed a Palestinian mansion as collective punishment, U.S. intervention be damned:
And hardly anyone protests. Not even when there’s a punishment implemented in the manner of an apartheid state: The Jewish terrorist whose family’s home is demolished has yet to be born. The homes of the murderers of the Dawabsheh family and of the teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir – like the homes of Ami Popper, Haggai Segal and others of their ilk – stand proudly intact. But the home of the Shalabi family in the affluent West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, north of Ramallah, was demolished last week.
Let the Israeli government address the issue of their application of this regulation. But it should be pointed out that over the years the Israeli Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to limit this law. Also, there is a distinction to be made between attacks by Arabs done to undermine the state and attacks by Jews that are hate crimes and are no less deserving of punishment. Also, as pointed out below, by its very nature this law is British penal law -- and so can only be applied in the "West Bank" as local law and has no basis for application within Israel itself.
Levy also deliberately labels the demolition of homes as collective punishment, which the Israeli government has made a point of saying is not the purpose of the law.
Levy is not alone in this.
Similarly, in its criticism of house demolitions, the US also mischaracterizes the measure as collective punishment:
“We attach a good deal of priority to this, knowing that the home of an entire family shouldn’t be demolished for the action of one individual,” [State Department Spokesman] Price said when asked about the matter at a daily press briefing, adding that the US would continue to raise its concerns “as long as this practice continues.” [emphasis added]
Similarly, a spokesperson for the US Embassy in Israel said that
the home of an entire family should not be demolished for the actions of one individual.
According to the Israeli government, the point of the house demolitions is deterrence, and it defends the legal application of the law -- relying in part on the fact it was British law in Mandate Palestine.
According to Simon, in 1971, the then-Attorney General Meir Shamgar gave two supports for the use of Article 119 in accordance with International Law. First:The Demolitions are based on Regulation 119 of the Defense (Emergency) Regulations, 1945, which are part and parcel of the penal law in the West Bank and Gaza.... Article 64 of the [Geneva] Convention leaves the penal provisions of the local law intact insofar as the local law includes rules permitting demolition.In addition,
[Shamgar] asserted that the practice falls within the legal boundaries of Article 53 of the Geneva Convention, which makes an exception to the prohibition on destruction of private property under circumstances of absolute military necessity:Obviously, this has not -- and will not -- put to rest the legal challenges to the policy, but it is important to keep in mind Israel's legal justifications.It is necessary to create effective military reaction. The measure under discussion is of utmost deterrent importance, especially in a country where capital punishment is not used against terrorists killing women and children.... In conclusion, it appears that even if Regulation 119 . . .is regarded as suspended, demolition can be based, in appropriate circumstances, on Article 53 of the Convention." [p. 18]
A military statement did not say why the policy was being changed, but the newspaper Haaretz reported on its Web site that Maj. Gen. Udi Shani, who headed a committee reviewing the matter, had challenged the existing military position that demolitions were an effective deterrent. It said he had concluded that the policy had caused Israel more harm than good by generating hatred among the Palestinians. [emphasis added].
Amos Harel, told me that the committee wasn't primarily intended as an objective evaluator, but as professional cover for the political echelon’s decision. Its recommendation—to end the demolitions—was largely a foregone conclusion.
In 2008, Efraim Benmelech, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and Hebrew University economists Claude Berrebi and Esteban Klor began to collect data on all house demolitions and suicide attacks between 2000 and 2005, relying on Palestinian sources, human rights group B’tzelem, and publicly available Israeli security information (Benmelech says they received “zero help from any government agency”)...
The authors distinguished between “punitive demolitions” (those that target the homes of terror operatives) and “precautionary demolitions” (those justified by a home’s location, for instance posing particular danger of housing sniper fire)...
Precautionary demolitions resulted in a significant increase in suicide attacks, a “48.7 percent increase in the number of suicide terrorists from an average district,” according to the study. By contrast, punitive demolitions led to a significant decrease in terror attacks, between 11.7 and 14.9 percent, in the months immediately following the demolition. [emphasis added]
...punitive house demolitions (those targeting Palestinian suicide terrorists and terror operatives) cause an immediate, significant decrease in the number of suicide attacks. In contrast, Palestinian fatalities do not have a consistent effect on suicide terror attacks, while curfews and precautionary house demolitions (demolitions justified by the location of the house but unrelated to the identity of the house's owner) cause a significant increase in the number of suicide attacks. The results support the view that selective violence is an effective tool to combat terrorist groups and that indiscriminate violence backfires.
But even if the demolitions didn’t deter the terrorist himself, Israeli officials also believe the threat will motivate friends and family members to dissuade or turn in the would-be terrorist. Shaul Shay, head of terrorism studies at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a former deputy head of the Israeli Security Council, told me that he had seen “several examples where [families of a terrorist] tried to convince their relatives, or came to the Israeli authorities saying, ‘better that my son is in jail than in the grave.’” [emphasis added]
...demolitions were a necessary deterrent to offset “a culture of support within Palestinian society,” citing a report showing that the Palestinian Authority paid families of what it calls martyrs nearly $7 million in 2011.
Moreover, the logic of the policy goes, family members of terrorists would be more keen to “keep an eye” on potential terrorists in order to avoid the demolition of the family house (a consideration which may offset the social prestige enjoyed by families of so-called “martyrs” in Palestinian society). [emphasis added]That in itself does not justify using house demolitions, but it may be a benefit.
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- HRW
In late July, Human Rights Watch reported on Israeli strikes in Gaza in May that accounted for 62 of the 129 or more Palestinian civilians who, according to the United Nations, were killed in Israeli strikes. Human Rights Watch found that these attacks violated the laws of war and amount to apparent war crimes. Human Rights Watch will soon release a report on Israeli airstrikes that destroyed or extensively damaged four high-rise towers in Gaza.
The May 2021 fighting followed efforts by Jewish settler groups to evict and confiscate the property of longtime Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem. Palestinians held demonstrations around East Jerusalem, and Israeli security forces fired teargas, stun grenades, and rubber-coated steel bullets, injuring hundreds of Palestinians.On May 10, Palestinian armed groups in Gaza started to launch rockets toward Israeli population centers. The Israeli military carried out attacks in the densely populated Gaza Strip with missiles, rockets, and artillery. Many of the attacks by the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups used explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas. A ceasefire between the warring parties went into effect on May 21.
One civilian living in the immediate area of the attack, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Human Rights Watch that a member of the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, was in the building at the time of the attack.
The wife of one of those killed said:[My husband] ...told me he wouldn’t be delayed, as he was feeling tired. But he never came back.A local shop owner said:People were gathering [on the street] watching the rockets in the sky. I saw a rocket spinning in the air and then it came down and exploded, about 10 meters from where I was standing. There was smoke. I saw the dead and injured. I couldn’t stand what I saw. I broke down.… I saw a child, Mohammed Shaban, whose eyes were bleeding.A relative of another person killed said:At about 6 p.m. I was standing near the entrance to the local market on Martyr Salah Dardona Street....Suddenly, I heard a barrage of rockets being fired and I looked up and saw them rise in the air. I saw one rocket rising in the shape of a spiral and then it came down in the middle of the street about 10 meters from where I was standing.
- Thursday, August 12, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
Wednesday, August 11, 2021
Bret Stephens: The Cheap & Easy Sanctimony of Ben & Jerry
The decision also called attention to the fact, unmentioned by Cohen and Greenfield, that the supposedly independent Ben & Jerry’s board that exists to handle its social mission was in no hurry to bless Unilever’s pledge to keep doing business in Israel.Daniel Gordis: The Bearable Heaviness of Being (Alone)
On the contrary: the Ben & Jerry’s board chair, Anuradha Mittal, is publicly furious with Unilever. NBC News reported that her board tried to put out a different statement “that made no reference to continued sales in Israel,” but that “Unilever released the statement against the wishes of the board.”
As for Unilever, it will be hard-pressed to honor its promise to stay in Israel while keeping out of the West Bank, since Israeli law forbids companies from operating that way. It will also have to seek approval from the ticked-off Ben & Jerry’s board for a new Israeli licensee once the current contract expires next year.
So much for Cohen and Greenfield bravely honoring the principle to distinguish between the West Bank and Israel. What we really have is a feckless political gesture, a corporate fiasco, a de facto boycott of the Jewish state, an enraged Israeli government, and a handful of customers who won’t get their Chunky Monkey cravings satisfied. Just how any of this translates into peace or justice, much less ending “the occupation,” is anyone’s guess.
In his book, Ramaswamy asks, “How did we come to this farcical point where your politics chooses your sandwiches”— or ice cream? “I’m tempted to say that nothing is sacred anymore, but America’s problem is actually the opposite: Nothing is allowed to be ordinary anymore.”
To have to write a whole column about the Ben & Jerry’s founders’ personal political views shouldn’t be necessary. Too bad their sanctimonious, inept, and dishonest attempt at foreign policy makes it so.
Ice cream boycotts themselves aren’t very high stakes. We can live without Chubby Hubby. Yet ice cream boycotts are a potential harbinger of much worse, still to come. If boycotting Israel gets to be in vogue, this could spread. What if it comes to include airlines? Tech companies? Those Israelis and others applauding the boycott because it applies “only” to the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” ought to ask themselves—given that there’s no obvious policy alternative at the moment (though there is much that Israel can and should do to make Palestinian life easier and better)—whether that’s fire they really want to play with.Former Ben and Jerry’s Employee Says Anti-Israel Activist Spoke to Board Ahead of Boycott Decision
The boycott has gotten all the attention in Israel that it has because it’s a reminder of the fundamental loneliness that often lies at the heart of Israeliness. It’s a reminder that a thriving economy, insanely successful tech sector, world class health care, superb universities, Tel Aviv being one of the most LGBT-friendly cities in the world, Jewish cultural creativity exploding in ways that are hard to fathom, Jews in Israel being physically safer than ever before and much more all notwithstanding, it weighs on you, this knowledge that you live in the only country in the world about which there has been—even before it declared independence—a consensus that the world might be better off if you didn’t exist.
As was noted this week in Tokyo, it took 49 years for the Olympics to formally honor the dead Israeli athletes murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Is there any other country that would have had to wait half a century?
Obviously not.
Only one country.
A former longtime Ben & Jerry's employee said the company's decision to boycott Israel was based on advice from a BDS activist who was expelled from Israel for spearheading economic pressure campaigns against the Jewish state.
Susannah Levin, who spent 21 years as a freelance graphic designer for Ben & Jerry's before resigning last month over the company's decision to halt its sales in the West Bank, said the company's board consulted with Human Rights Watch's Israel-Palestine director Omar Shakir, an advocate of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement who accused the Jewish state of "crimes against humanity."
"Omar Shakir spoke directly to the board," said Levin in an interview with Israel's Channel 2 radio on Tuesday. "He wrote the Human Rights Watch report, [which] is what they were basing their information on. It's a report that accuses Israel of apartheid."
"They believed him to be a valid source of information about Israel," she added.
Ben & Jerry's has come under scrutiny for its involvement with anti-Israel activists. The company recently hosted a conference call with anti-Zionist writer Peter Beinart, who has said he supports the destruction of the Jewish state, to address concerns about the boycott from its franchise owners, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Ben & Jerry's declined to comment on Shakir's alleged involvement with its board. Human Rights Watch did not respond to a request for comment.
Shakir was deported from Israel in 2019 due to his attempts to pressure various companies and international organizations, including FIFA, to join boycotts against homes and businesses in contested parts of Israel. He took credit for Airbnb's decision to bar Israelis in the West Bank from renting their homes on the site in 2018. The rental service later backtracked in the face of legal challenges.
- Wednesday, August 11, 2021
- Elder of Ziyon
- Opinion, Vic Rosenthal
(Judean Rose is taking off for several weeks.)
Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal
Jews have always been a minority in their temporary diasporic homes, and so they have usually been at the mercy of antisemites. If at a given time and place they are not actively persecuted, the possibility of persecution always remains, as European and even American Jews are rediscovering today. The commandment to keep one’s suitcase packed is no less apt today than in previous centuries.
Despite the heartwarming (but illusory) feeling of a worldwide solidarity of good people engendered by Yair Lapid’s recent remarks that antisemitism is just a particular form of a much more general collection of religious, ethnic, racial (etc.) hatreds that all those of good will should decry, the pervasiveness of antisemitism over the millennia and its shape-shifting nature show that it is indeed sui generis, a thing by itself. And we learned from the Holocaust that the Jewish people ultimately must stand alone against it.
Early Zionists like Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker, A. D. Gordon, and of course Theodor Herzl thought that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty would remove much of the basis for antisemitism, by ending the parasitic economic life of diaspora Jews and restoring to them their self-respect as productive beings. The world had forgotten that the Jews had a homeland and saw them only as a people who belonged nowhere, and who were permanently aliens no matter how long they lived in a particular place. Of course the Jews themselves never forgot, but that only added to their foreign and exotic nature in the eyes of their hosts.
Gordon thought that through the labor involved in the creation of a self-sufficient state, the Jewish people could be fundamentally changed. With the removal of the restrictions of the diaspora, Jews could now engage in truly productive work, especially agriculture, which would create a “new Jew,” a strong, self-reliant one, different from the cringing targets of diasporic pogroms. A Jew that for once knew how to defend himself! The socialist kibbutz movements that actualized Gordon’s program did in fact create such a Jew (although the loss of Jewish tradition and spiritual motivation that followed did not serve the state well. But that’s another story). Once the Jews became an “ordinary” people, with an ordinary homeland containing Jewish police and Jewish prostitutes, it was expected that antisemitism would die out.
Today Israel has plenty of both police and prostitutes. But antisemitism did not die with the reestablishment of a sovereign Jewish state. It simply mutated, and today its virulent “Delta Variant” is the extreme, irrational, obsessive hatred of the Jewish state that I’ve called misoziony. Hand in hand with traditional religious, racial, and political antisemitism, misoziony became a useful tool for Islamic dictatorships and other anti-Western forces. In particular, the Soviet Union invested a great deal of ingenuity employing it as a tool to develop an anti-American (and of course anti-Israel) bloc in the UN. Today, various forms of antisemitism permeate the world.
Imagine that it were possible to assemble Bogdan Chmielnicki, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Louis Farrakhan, Ismail Haniyeh, Jeremy Corbyn, Rashida Tlaib, Lara Friedman, and Gideon Levy in one room. Antisemites all, albeit of greater or lesser import. They would agree about very little except the vileness of the Jewish people. Their followers and their ideas are everywhere; the initial impetus by the KGB in the 1960s and 70s set fire to latent Jew-hatred whose overt manifestation today is so shocking to those who don’t know the history of the Jewish people.
Most initiatives to “fight antisemitism” rely on some form of educational enterprise. These are doomed to fail, especially “Holocaust education,” which is intended to make people behave better toward Jews by making them feel sorry for them. Psychologically, this has the opposite effect, causing subjects to distance themselves from Jews. Antisemites respond that the Holocaust is either a Jewish lie, or if it did happen, it was because Jewish behavior precipitated it, and they are encouraged by Hitler’s partial success and want to finish the job. They add that Jews are like Nazis. Misozionists insist absurdly that their “criticism of Israel” is different from antisemitism rather than a mutant form of it. They add that Israelis are like Nazis.
Misozionists will also say that the existence of the state is the whole problem. If Israel didn’t exist, there would be no conflict, no terrorism, no hatred. I point to the entire history of the Jewish people prior to 1948 as a counterexample.
One thing that has been learned is that Jews cannot end antisemitism by improving themselves, either by involvement in “social justice” activities to help other oppressed groups (many of whose members don’t like Jews much anyway), or by becoming “new Jews” who drive tractors and milk cows rather than lending money.
Bari Weiss wrote a book called “How to fight Antisemitism.” I liked the book, but the title is a poor one. The enemy is not “antisemitism;” it is antisemites. There is only one way to “fight antisemitism” and that is to instill enough respect for – and fear of – Jewish power in antisemites to deter them from their anti-Jewish activities. The ideology can die out on its own (or not, we don’t care). The real enemy is not an abstract ideology, but concrete and specific: we and they know who they are.
And that is why a Jewish state, even though the fact of its existence does not itself prevent antisemitism, is invaluable in ending it. A stateless people is a powerless one, and the use of power is the best remedy for Jew-hatred. The Jewish state has bombed nuclear reactors in enemy countries, and Israel’s covert services have arrested or killed terrorists all over the world. Jewish police protect Jews in Israel from terrorism, and Jewish diplomacy, backed by military and economic power, can defend them in the diaspora. Ultimately, persecuted Jews can go to the Jewish state; indeed, Israel has preemptively rescued Jewish populations in danger in places like Ethiopia and Yemen.
If there is a problem, it is that too many Israelis have forgotten Jewish history and even the history of their state. They think that now we are a “normal” people in a “normal” state, and so we can relax and live normal lives. We aren’t and we can’t. Our state has a unique responsibility: to protect and nurture our people in a hostile world.