Tuesday, July 26, 2022
From Ian:
Kassy Dillon: Ben Shapiro at Temple Mount: Jews face apartheid there
Kassy Dillon: Ben Shapiro at Temple Mount: Jews face apartheid there
On Sunday afternoon, Ben Shapiro, the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, ascended to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to pray with his parents and a group of followers.David Singer: 100 years ago, the Mandate for Palestine Saga began
Shapiro’s first visit to the Temple Mount was during the holiday of Sukkot back in October 2019. That visit was cut short after someone in his group was found to be carrying a willow branch in his pocket as a mitzvah for the last day of Sukkot, leading to the group’s removal from the holy site.
While waiting for security to clear the group to enter the complex this time around, Shapiro told JNS that he hoped to be permitted to complete the tour this time.
“Hopefully, we actually make it all the way around the outside of the compound this time,” he said. “I wish we could all daven (‘pray’) openly there—the freest thing to do. The only place that Israel is an apartheid state is only on Har HaBayit [the Temple Mount]. That’s the only place.”
While on the complex, Shapiro and his group recited afternoon prayers, and his father said Kaddish for his grandmother, who passed away less than a year ago. During prayers, the group was repeatedly interrupted by Israeli police, who rushed them through their visit.
Shapiro’s group was escorted by five Israeli police officers with one Jordanian Waqf guard watching at a distance.
According to Melissa Jane Kronfeld, founder of High on the Har, a group that prays daily on the Temple Mount, the police presence is typical as protection for groups with religious Jews.
“The Israeli police protects us from Islamic extremists, for which we are grateful,” she said, citing the riots in June as an example.
However the arrival of Abdullah, a member of the Hashemite dynasty, in Transjordan on 21 November 1920 accompanied by a band of armed troops en route to help his brother Faisal fight the French to retain Faisal’s crown in Syria – resulted in:Jonathan S. Tobin: Is the Russian threat to the Jewish Agency a return to Soviet oppression?
- Great Britain - at the Cairo Conference held on 12 March 1921 – stopping Abdullah by creating the Emirate of Transjordan for Abdullah in 78% of Mandatory Palestine East of the Jordan River.-The Emirate remained part of the Mandate until granted independence by Great Britain in 1946 – changing its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan.
- Article 25 being inserted into the Mandate document on 24 July 1922 - restricting the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in 22% of Mandatory Palestine West of the Jordan River
- The Council of the League of Nations approving these changed arrangements on 16 September 1922.
These changes have been preserved until today under article 80 of the United Nations Charter.
The United Nations failure to observe the terms of its own Charter has been the greatest obstacle to achieving the Mandate-contemplated two-state solution.
That two-state solution, as opposed to the one espoused by Biden, has however become politically attainable following a detailed plan for its creation in an article dated 8 June - written by Ali Shihabi a close confidante of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman the next King of Saudi Arabia – and published in Al-Arabiya News –owned by the Saudi Royal Family.
Successful negotiations between Israel and Jordan to implement Shihabi’s plan would result in:
- The merger of Mandate territory located East and West of the Jordan River into one Arab State and the recognition of a Jewish State in the remaining Mandate territory West of the Jordan River including significant swathes of Judea and Samaria.
- The last chapter of the Mandate saga begun on 24 July 1922 is on the diplomatic horizon.
If you’re old enough to remember the darkest days of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, the news last week that the Russian Justice Ministry has asked a court to close down the operations of the Jewish Agency in Israel in that country seems ominously familiar. In the Soviet era, the Communist regime wasn’t just preventing Jews from leaving. It was, as had been the case since the Bolshevik coup in 1917, openly anti-Semitic. Indeed, the Communists were even more oppressive than their tsarist predecessors in terms of suppressing Jewish life and the practice of Judaism.
The Russian move against the Jewish Agency would make it much harder for those Jews who want to leave a country that has become an international pariah due to its invasion of Ukraine. It also could be a harbinger of a return to the Jew-hatred that was so much a feature of life in the Eastern European monolith prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The reason for this seems to be an effort to get Israel to return to a stance of neutrality in the war Russia launched on Ukraine in late February. That’s a position the Jewish state changed after pressure from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the West and many Israeli citizens, who all thought that Israel needed to side with the victims.
These worries about Russia and anti-Semitism were supposed to be buried in the past.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, those Jews who remained were in a country that embraced an authoritarian government led by Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent. Putin was a thug determined to crush anyone who opposed him and his corrupt regime. He was also obsessed with reversing the verdict of history—whereby Russia had been demoted to the status of a second-rate power—and sought to recreate the old Soviet and tsarist empires.
Yet unlike the Communists and the tsars, Putin was seemingly immune to the virus of anti-Semitism. Jewish life in his Russia was allowed to thrive with synagogues, schools and community centers, many of which opened and were built brand-new under his watch.
Equally important, Russia has generally good, albeit complicated, relations with the State of Israel. On the one hand, Putin was happy to cultivate Israeli leaders and to regard the vast number of Israelis with ties to Russia as part of his country’s Diaspora, rather than despised émigrés. Though Putin’s Russia was not the engine driving anti-Zionism and anti-Israel terrorism in the Third World the way the Communist government had been, it also regarded some of the Jewish state’s worst enemies, such as Iran and Syria, as allies. His equivocal stance on the Iranian nuclear threat, which may have had more to do with his desire to annoy the United States whenever possible, was also problematic.
