Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, March 08, 2023

Israel Says Yes, Poland Says No: On the Resumption of Israeli Youth Trips to Poland (Judean Rose) (update)

One day after the Netanyahu government issued a statement claiming that Israel and Poland had reached an agreement over the resumption of Israeli youth trips to Poland, Poland denied that any such agreement had been reached. The trips were suspended a year ago due to a dispute over security arrangements. Israeli students are accompanied on these trips by armed security guards from the Shin Bet. Poland, however, says that Israel’s insistence on providing its own Israeli security for the students is a slap in the face to Poland, making it look like a hateful, antisemitic country.

Here is the Israeli press release on the supposed agreement between Israel and Poland:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Comments on Resumption of Youth Trips to Poland

After a prolonged stalemate in Israeli-Polish relations, and pursuant to contacts and a round of talks led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, together with Minister of Foreign Affairs Eli Cohen and Education Minister Yoav Kisch, a solution was found today (Tuesday, 7 March 2023), to the crisis that prevented the arrival of youth trips to Poland.

Prime Minister Netanyahu:

"After a wasted year, we are returning the youth trips to Poland. There are many ways to study the lessons of the Holocaust but the best is with one's own eyes. I welcome our success in the resumption of our pupils' trips to Poland in order to study the horrors of the Holocaust from up close.

I thank Foreign Minister Eli Cohen and Education Minister Yoav Kisch for their contributions to the effort. 'Know from whence you came and where you are going.’"

Three years after the halt to the arrival of youth trips to Poland, and pursuant to the contacts led by Prime Minister Netanyahu with the Polish government, the almost to-year stalemate in bilateral relations has ended; the sides have agreed on the resumption of Israeli youth trips.

Pursuant to the round of talks between the two countries led by Prime Minister Netanyahu with his Polish counterpart, and to the talks held by Minister of Foreign Affairs Cohen with the Polish Foreign Minister approximately one month ago, in the framework of which he sought to move forward on a solution for the resumption of the trips to Poland, a representative of the Polish Foreign Ministry announced today that Poland views positively the resumption in the arrival of youth trips to Poland and recognizes their importance to continued progress in bilateral ties.

This morning, however, Tovah Lazaroff, who is no fan of the Netanyahu government wrote:

“Poland denied that Israeli high school trips to visit the concentration camps in Poland are set to resume after a one-year suspension, one day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office announced the return of the trips.”

Lazaroff offers no source for her assertion of Polish denial. What is the truth of the matter? Did Israel and Poland reach an agreement regarding the Israeli student trips? And what is the real reason for what still looks like a stalemate? Is it really about security? Or something else.

Łukasz Jasina, spokesperson for the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted a link to the MFA statement on the affair, an embarrassing slap in the face to Israel/Netanyahu, and likely the source for Lazaroff’s claim.

Statement on the state of arrangements regarding the return of trips of organized groups of Israeli youth to Poland https://t.co/uZl5ShHffY
— Łukasz Jasina (@RzecznikMSZ) March 8, 2023

From the statement:

Although a final agreement has not been reached yet, during talks held in recent days through diplomatic channels we have been observing a convergence of positions, giving hope that a comprehensive agreement on the visits of organized groups of Israeli youth to Poland can be signed between Poland and Israel in the near future.

Poland is sensitive to accusations of antisemitism, hence the passing of a 2018 Polish law penalizing public speech attributing responsibility for the Holocaust to Poland or the Polish nation. The passing of the law appears however to only underscore the idea that Poland is antisemitic, but doesn’t want to be seen as such. Why else shut down free speech on the subject of where blame for the Holocaust rightly lies? To paraphrase Hamlet, Poland “doth protest too much, methinks.”

Back when the Polish law denying complicity in the Holocaust was passed, I argued that parents of Israeli teens should not be sending their children to that country to visit. Not because of the security issue, though I agree that Israel should be allowed to use its own people for this purpose, but because I don’t believe in supporting the economy of a country I see as absolutely antisemitic, law or no law:

This year, when it came time for my son, the youngest of 12 children, to register for the class trip for Poland, I was ready. I sat Asher down for a talk and explained that he wasn’t going, that even if we had the money for such a trip, even if the school were to give him a full scholarship, he wasn’t going. I wasn’t going to allow my son to become a source of income for a country of antisemites . . . why, of all countries, should the Jewish State be propping up Poland’s economy with these trips that have become a rite of passage for Israeli high school students? We’re talking some 30,000 children, spending at the very least, a few thousand shekels each for this “privilege.”

At the same time, I acknowledged the fact that many see the trip as a valuable tool for teaching the Holocaust:

What of the people who say the experience of visiting Poland is moving, and a good way to teach the Holocaust?

I say hogwash. I never traveled there and I have an acute understanding of the Holocaust and so do my children. In fact, I’d say that boycotting the place is every bit as powerful a teacher as going there.

I still believe today that we don’t need to send kids to Poland to make them “feel” the horrors of the Holocaust. And I still believe that Poland is antisemitic to the bone. In fact, the very day that Netanyahu claimed an agreement with Poland had been reached, the Algemeiner reported that the National Bank of Poland will be issuing a special commemorative coin honoring a Polish antisemite:

Poland’s National Bank has announced that it will issue a special silver coin commemorating a leading figure in the post-war anti-communist underground who was accused of murdering Jews in the country’s Podhale region . . .

. . . Several historians have charged that Kuraś was responsible for the murder of dozens of Jews in the Podhale region during his struggle against the communists. In his book “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz,” Prof. Jan Gross of Princeton University described Kuraś as as “legendary outlaw in the mountainous region of Podhale, where he battled the regime by killing Jews who were fleeing Poland by one of the Brikha exit routes.”

Gross specified that Kuraś had recorded the murder of Jews in his diary, citing the killing of twelve Jews near the village of Kroscienko on May 6, 1944.

A separate article by Karolina Panz — a Polish historian based in the town of Nowy Targ, where Kuraś was active — concluded that during 1945-47, “the number of Jewish victims exceeded thirty, including children from Jewish orphanages. Among the perpetrators of those acts of terror were partisans from the group commanded by Józef Kuraś ‘Ogień’ – one of the most important symbols of anti-communist resistance.”

Poland’s leading anti-racist organization condemned the coin’s issuance as another example of the Polish state lionizing wartime figures with established records of antisemitism.

The Algemeiner quotes a response from Rafal Pankowski, executive director of the “Never Again” Association:

“Since the publication of Jan Gross’s groundbreaking books in the 2000s, Poland made a lot of progress as a democratic nation in dealing with the legacy of antisemitism – but over the last years much of that progress has been reversed and a far-right nationalist outlook on Polish history has prevailed in many institutions . . . This is one more instance of a glorification of a notorious antisemitic figure by an important state institution.”

It is obvious that Polish antisemitism is alive and well. Why then does Israel seem so desperate to reach an agreement to prop up the Polish economy with high school trips? Why does Israel want its children to think of Poland as a hospitable country that has learned its lesson, when quite clearly, it has not.

One might argue that Netanyahu has failed to see the true meaning of the quote he used in his statement to the press: “Know from whence you came and where you are going.”

That quote, from Ethics of the Fathers, was used by Netanyahu to suggest that high school trips to Poland are a form of experiential learning: that only by traveling to the land of Auschwitz can one come to understand what happened there. But one could just as easily interpret that quote as a cautionary tale or warning: Know when you go there that Poland was and still is an antisemitic country, even as it makes it illegal to discuss that fact. Know that Poland is a place where the soil is soaked with Jewish blood. Know that Poland, even now, issues commemorative coins honoring as heroes those who murdered Jews. Know that if you go and spend your hard-earned shekels to support Poland and the Polish people, you betray the memory of the millions of Jews who were sent there, not by choice for a learning experience, but to be gassed and burned, their generations to come, ended forever.

UPDATE: After I contacted her on Twitter, Tovah Lazaroff commendably updated her piece to reflect that her source is the Polish Foreign Ministry.

The source should be there now . .
— Tovah Lazaroff (@tovahlazaroff) March 8, 2023

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Ken Roth just created a new international law - as usual, just for Israel

Antisemite and supposed human rights expert Ken Roth made up a brand new rule of international humanitarian law today:

Hamas confirms that the Palestinian man who shot two Israeli brothers last month (& was just killed by Israeli forces) "had been a member of its military wing." That may transform what had been a common crime (not a human rights concern) into a war crime.

Notice how the Hamas terrorist merely "shot two Israeli brothers." Roth doesn't want to mention that they were killed, unlike the murderer himself that he says was killed by Israeli forces.

Beyond that, Roth claims, incredibly, that the execution style murder of Hallel and Yagel Yaniv as they were driving was not considered a war crime and was not even a "human rights concern" until yesterday, when Hamas proudly said that he was a member of that group.

Indeed, as far as I could tell, Roth never tweeted about their murder.

Human rights, by definition, is concerned with protecting the lives and welfare of humans. But when the human victims are Jews, then - according to Roth - we have an additional prerequisite for something to be a human rights concern: the attacker must belong to a known militant group. Otherwise, they don't care.

He apparently is assuming that until a group like Hamas takes responsibility, Israelis who are murdered by Arabs might just be victims of a drug deal gone bad, or a misfired bunch of shots at their heads and bodies.

Does this new international law work the other way around? Of course not. Jewish settler actions are definitely of concern to human rights activists even though they are not members of any organized groups or militias. In those cases, the fact that the attackers or alleged attackers are Jews is quite enough evidence for Roth and the human rights community.

But Arabs killing Jews? Those situations have to clear a much higher bar before "experts" and defenders of "human rights" will deign to give them any attention.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

03/08 Links Pt1: Leave the IDF out of the protest; IDF kill Palestinian terrorist responsible for Huwara attack; Israel slams 'disgraceful' South Africa vote to downgrade diplomatic ties

From Ian:

Overhaul protesters gear up for ‘day of resistance’ throughout the country Thursday

The protest movement against the government’s judicial overhaul plans was set to conduct a second major campaign to disrupt daily life in Israel on Thursday, in what activists are calling a “day of resistance.”

The day notably includes plans to block roads around Ben Gurion Airport in an attempt to make it difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to get there for his flight on an official visit to Italy. This in addition to marches, temporary workplace strikes, the blocking of main thoroughfares, disruption of train services and rallies outside the homes of top government officials.

The protest events were laid out in detail on a dedicated website and map (Hebrew), with organizers promising “many surprises,” indicating there were more planned actions that had not been announced publicly.

“It is a civic duty to resist the dictatorship and this is the only way to return Israel to the path of democracy. This is a great battle for the independence of Israeli citizens against the tyranny that will destroy what we have built here for over 70 years. We call on the entire public to participate in protests,” the organizers said in a statement.

Protest heads have specifically called for demonstrators to block roads around Ben Gurion Airport when Netanyahu and his wife are scheduled to depart on their flight to Italy. The trip previously faced setbacks when national carrier El Al was unable to find a crew to man the prime minister’s flight — an issue blamed on crew shortages but which may have also been affected by growing public anger at the government as it pushed forward with efforts to weaken the justice system.

Some media reports indicated Netanyahu was looking at possibly taking a helicopter to the airport to avoid the expected road disruptions.

A major rally in Tel Aviv was to set off from the city’s Habima Square. In addition, protests by workers from the tech sector were planned at 15 locations around the country.

Police said they too were preparing for the demonstrations, with 3,000 cops set to be deployed across the country.

Ruthie Blum: IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi should call his troops to order

Those who defended Bar’s remarks (delivered several weeks before the Knesset election) did so on the grounds that terrorists apprehended by the Shin Bet told their interrogators that internecine strife in the Jewish state was bolstering their confidence and resolve. In other words, since perception influences enemy actions, security bigwigs have a responsibility to monitor and caution about pitfalls in this realm.

It’s a logical position, particularly in view of the gleeful way in which the international Arab and Iranian media outlets are depicting the present crisis in the country. That they’re being given a serious boost by the Israeli press may be extremely disconcerting, but it’s the price—and privilege—of free speech.

Soldiers don’t enjoy this luxury, however. On the contrary, their individual ideologies are irrelevant to the assignments they are charged to execute. Halevi has the duty to remind them of this in no uncertain terms. His failure on this score only encourages the very foes that the IDF, thankfully, is still fighting on more than one front.

“When we are on the battlefield, we don’t look to the right and left to discern the political views of our brothers and sisters,” said Netanyahu on Monday, after attending a Purim megillah reading at a Border Police base in the Jewish community of Beit Horon. “We [do it] with the knowledge that together, shoulder-to-shoulder, we are storming our enemies, in order to safeguard our security and future.”

This, he stressed, “is the first and most important foundation of our existence in our land. It rests on the deep understanding that whatever the controversies among us, we are always united against those out to kill us. This is how it was during all of Israel’s wars.”

He went on: “Refusal to serve threatens this existential foundation, and thus has no place in our ranks. Israeli society always condemned the refusal to serve.… We never allowed it a foothold—neither in the regular army nor in the reserves; neither in the security forces nor anywhere else. It had no place in the War of Independence, the Oslo Accords or in the disengagement [from Gaza]. There is no room for it now, nor should there be in the future…. because the minute that we give this illness legitimacy, it will spread and become systemic…in controversies to come.”

Netanyahu concluded with a Purim analogy.

“When Haman sought to find the Jews’ weak spot, he said, ‘There is one people that is scattered and divided.’ But…we rose as one; we banded together and achieved victory for generations. We will do it again this time, as well.”

It’s a message that Halevi would do well to hear, heed and repeat.

Ben-Dror Yemini: Leave the IDF out of the protest

This is one of the most legitimate protests in Israel's history.

Some have tried to quash it by pointing out a handful of Palestinian flags flown at rallies, but for every such flag, a thousand Israeli flags were raised, so that fell flat.

Others claimed the protest wasn't about the judicial overhaul at all but rather an attempt to overrule the will of the voter, but that too missed the mark. This protest's success lies in its expansion to more and more audiences, it's not merely a left-wing protest. Prominent religious and right-wing figures have also joined in, and while most of them don't take the streets, they make their voices heard by appealing for dialogue and broad consensus.

Are they too anarchists? Who are you trying to fool?

As for those screeching voices on the margins flying the BDS flag, let them, they clearly do not represent anything.

But the protest also brings the pain. The fissure is here. And 37 out of 40 pilots of the Israeli Air Force's elite 69 Squadron declaring they won't report for training is the closest thing to mutiny.

We must not allow this terrible scourge to become the face of the protest for there is a fine line where a protest shifts from an opposition to the government to an opposition to the state. There are too many elements on the left that had done so, there's no need for the protest to tread the same line.

Crossing that red line would only harm the protest since it draws its success from the fact that it has become a consensus in and of itself, and public opinion polls show as much.

As soon as the protest crosses these red lines, it will become a sectoral protest of the extreme left. This was not the intention of the pilots who declared that they won't report for reserve duty, but this may be the result. So yes, we must apply pressure to prevent harm to democracy. But there is no need for the protest to exacerbate that harm.

The Caroline Glick Show: Politics is poisoning the IDF

Mob violence against Sara Netanyahu; 37 out of 40 elite Air Force reservist pilots refusing to show up to duty. These are, but two of the most recent examples of the protests against the judicial reform proposed by the Netanyahu government.

To discuss the shocking turn of events and the leading role that retired leftist generals are playing in the left’s efforts to coerce the government to shelve its efforts to restore Israeli democracy, the guest on this week’s show is Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

Avivi is the founder and CEO of the Israel Security and Defense Forum (Habithonistim), a social movement and think tank comprised of retired senior officers, soldiers and concerned citizens working to reinstate the Zionist ethos in the IDF. Glick and Avivi also discuss at length the issue of Iran, which the United States now acknowledges had become a threshold nuclear state..

In addition, Glick devotes her opening remarks to an analysis of the central (hostile) role the Biden administration is playing in the events on the ground in Israel.

Dead Jews don't count, either

Two popular books over the past year on the topic of antisemitism were "People Love Dead Jews" by Dara Horn, and "Jews Don't Count" by David Baddiel.

Judging from UN reports, we can combine them into "Dead Jews Don't Count, Either."

The UN issued a list of statements by various leaders concerning events in Israel and the territories during February.

The Table of Contents shows the bias there.

I. UN Human Rights High Commissioner calls for de-escalation
II. Palestinian Rights Committee Bureau rejects Israeli retaliation against PA
III. OIC condemns escalation of crimes in the OPT
IV. ICJ sets deadlines for submissions following request for Advisory Opinion
V. EU appalled by the attack in East Jerusalem
VI. Palestinian Rights Committee Chair participates in LAS Conference on Jerusalem
VII. Status of Jerusalem cannot be altered by unilateral actions, UN Secretary General tells LAS Conference
VIII. EU rejects Israeli government’s decision to “legalize” settlement outposts
IX. OIC condemns the Israeli decision to “legitimize” outposts, calls on the UN Security Council to assume responsibilities
X. UN Special Rapporteurs say Israel should be held accountable for acts of “domicide”
XI. Special Coordinator Wennesland, UNRWA Deputy Commissioner-General Stenseth brief Security Council
XII. Security Council expresses concern, dismay over Israeli settlement expansions, adopting presidential statement
XIII. Palestinian Rights Committee elects Bureau, adopts 2023 Programme of Work
XIV. Special Coordinator Wennesland appalled by the loss of civilian lives in Nablus
XV. EU High Representative Borrell deplores the death of civilians during Israeli military operation in Nablus
XVI. UN Human Rights Commissioner concerned by escalating violence in Israel and OPT
XVII. EU condemns Israel’s approval of more than 7,000 housing units in illegal settlements
XVIII. Palestinian Rights Committee Bureau condemns extreme violence by Israeli forces in Nablus, calls for Palestinians’ protection
XIX. OIC issues communiqué on escalation of aggression by Israel
XX. UN Special Coordinator Wennesland gravely concerned by violence in Huwwara, near Nablus
XXI. EU highly concerned by the latest wave of violence in oPt

During February, there were three terror attacks that resulted in six Israeli fatalities. Only one of those attacks was the sole subject of one of the statements listed without also referring to killed Palestinians for "balance."

That statement, issued by the EU on February 10 after a Palestinian rammed his car into religious Jews at a bus stop, killing two children and a newlywed man, blames no one:

On 10 February, the Spokesperson for the European Union Delegation to the State of Israel issued the following statement.

The European Union is appalled by today’s terror attack in East Jerusalem, which killed a six year-old child and a young man and injured other people.

The EU strongly and unequivocally condemns terrorism in all its forms. We send our deepest condolences to the families of the victims and wish those injured a speedy recovery.

They don't mention that the terrorist is Palestinian. They don't mention that the victims are Israeli. They say it happened in "East Jerusalem" which implies that (if the victims were Jews) they had no business being there to begin with.

The EU did mention the other two terror attacks later in the month - but it wrote more words about the death of a single Palestinian than the deaths of three Israelis in two separate attacks:

The European Union is highly concerned by the continuously spiraling violence in the occupied Palestinian territory. It condemns the terror attack in the West Bank on Sunday, in which two Israelis lost their lives, and yet another attack on Monday claiming the life of one more Israeli.
The EU condemns the outbreak of settlers’ violence, which resulted in the killing of one Palestinian, injuring of several hundreds of Palestinians and burning of houses and shops, causing the unacceptable destruction of Palestinian property

Notice that two Jews "lost their lives" and one's life was "claimed" by no one in particular. But the Palestinian was "killed" by "settlers' violence."

It is clear that the EU, and the UN, is trying to downplay murders of Jews and to highlight the deaths of Palestinians.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The false choice for Jews on Israel, and the Jewish way to fix it

Thomas Friedman in The New York Times writes an op-ed with the headline, "American Jews, You Have to Choose Sides on Israel:"

Ever since Israel’s founding in 1948, supporting the country’s security and its economic development and cementing its diplomatic ties to the U.S. have been the “religion” of many nonobservant American Jews — rather than studying Torah or keeping kosher. That mission drove fund-raising and forged solidarity among Jewish communities across America.

Now, a lot of American Jews are going to need to find a new focus for their passion.

Because if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeds with his judicial putsch to crush the independence of the country’s judiciary, the subject of Israel could fracture every synagogue and Jewish communal organization in America. To put it simply: Israel is facing its biggest internal clash since its founding, and for every rabbi and every Jewish leader in America, to stay silent about this fight is to become irrelevant.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency just ran an article that offered a revealing glimpse into this reality. It quoted Los Angeles Rabbi Sharon Brous as beginning her sermon on Israel last month with a content warning to her congregants: “I have to say some things today that I know will upset some of you.”

Every American rabbi knew what she meant: Israel has become such a hot-button issue that it cannot be discussed without taking sides for or against Netanyahu’s policies.

As Rabbi Brous told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “You have a wonderful community, and you love them and they love you, until the moment you stand up and you give your Israel sermon.” She said the phenomenon has an informal name: “Death-by-Israel sermon.”

Death-by-Israel sermon. Never heard that before.

Unlike how Friedman portrays her, Rabbi Brous has not exactly been an "Israel right or wrong" leader before the current government. She wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2018:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition continues to recklessly enforce its ideological absolutes, passing an anti-democratic nation-state law, denying surrogacy rights to LGBTQ Israelis, escalating personal attacks against the New Israel Fund and other progressive organizations [Brous is a leader in NIF - EoZ], and detaining American journalists at the border, interrogating them about their political beliefs and associations. As an American rabbi, I can’t ignore the message the Israeli government is sending to diaspora Jews: Stick to the playbook. Send Israel your money, your youth, your tourists and your unquestioning loyalty. Don’t talk about the occupation (now in its 51st year) or the millions of Palestinians denied equal protection, freedom of movement, the right to vote for the government that dictates their daily lives. Don’t visit Bethlehem or Ramallah, where you might hear a Palestinian narrative. Pay no attention to Breaking the Silence, Parents Circle or any other group where Israelis and Palestinians speak frankly about the challenges and the possibilities for a shared future

The maddening thing about Rabbi Brous is that she positions herself as a lover of Israel, and I have no doubt that she believes this. This op-ed started off with her description of a tour of Hebron that her family took with Breaking the Silence, and she wrote, "My daughter loves the miracle of Israel. It was time for her to see the other side." And, "We witnessed the harshest effects of the occupation: roadways forbidden to Palestinians, abandoned blocks, Jewish settlements the world deems illegal. We saw the once-thriving Casbah, dead quiet now. All of this, the direct result of Israeli military policy."

Why does her narrative go back only that far? Why doesn't she mention the attacks by Arabs on the Jews of Hebron before Baruch Goldstein that prompted the IDF to divide the old city?

This hints at the real issue.

The problem isn't that American Jews must choose to be either for or against Israel. The problem is not that one side wants debate about Israeli policy and the other doesn't.

The problem is that partisanship is poisoning any chance for a real debate to begin with.

The current discussion on judicial reform in Israel is a perfect example. Lahav Harkov described it very well from the Israeli perspective:

Reports of the demise of Israeli democracy are greatly exaggerated. The proposed changes relate to the balance of power between the judiciary, the legislative and the executive branches of government — a matter of usually staid debate among Israeli academics and wonks for nearly three decades. Today’s incendiary rhetoric on the issue says more about the vicious and polarised state of Israeli politics than the controversiality of the Supreme Court reforms.

People in Israel and Jews in America are looking for excuses to justify their politics and their hate for their political opponents. But the politics and partisanship is what drives the debate, not the facts.

When Tom Friedman describes the judicial reform proposal as a "judicial putsch to crush the independence of the country’s judiciary" he is not engaging in a debate, but in mudslinging. When Breaking the Silence makes up fake stories of IDF soldiers mistreating Palestinians for no reason, they are not engaging in debate but anti-Israel propaganda.

And when people like Sharon Brous claims that she is impartially weighing both sides and soberly informing her congregants that Israel is on the road to dictatorship, I somehow do not think she is giving them access to any articles that argue that the unelected Israeli High Court has been the side that has near absolute power over Israeli law.

Part of the reason for that is that such articles are not easy to find in the American press, which prefer the narrative of a criminal Bibi who wants absolute power to the detriment of the State of Israel.

Not that Bibi isn't a political animal as well - he absolutely is, and his conduct during this supposed debate has also been guided more by politics than by doing what is best for Israel.

So how can Jews - in Israel, America and Europe as well - act responsibly?

The answer is simultaneously simple, extraordinarily difficult and rooted in Jewish tradition.

The answer is to be dan l'chaf zechut - to judge our fellow Jews meritoriously.

This is a fundamental Jewish concept with multiple sources and extensive commentary.

We need to shed the partisanship and honestly believe that the other side is not evil, but that they want the best for Israel and the Jewish world. (This does not apply to those who are irredeemably evil, who in the case of Zionism I would define as anyone who never says anything positive about Israel. Those people, in my opinion, are not acting out of love but from hate. But that's me, and that is part of what makes this mitzvah difficult.)

How many people know that the supposed anti-Arab racist Netanyahu has done more to improve the Arab sector in Israel than any other prime minister, by far? How many American Jewish critics of Israel have spent more than two minutes seeking out the arguments for judicial reform? How many American Jews who have taken Breaking the Silence tours of Hebron have read the criticisms of that organization's methods?

We need to go beyond the reporting of mainstream media - whose entire business model is based on eyeballs that follow controversy and partisanship - and instead do our own research with the assumption that our fellow Jews want what is best for Israel. That they are not terrible people because they voted for Trump or live on the east side of an imaginary line drawn in 1949, and neither are they bad people because they chose not to report for reserve duty or spend hours every week protesting the Israeli government. Assume that they, too, want what is best for Israel and the Jewish people.

Thomas Friedman wants Jews in America to make a choice - love Israel or oppose Israel. That is a false choice, and one that is predicated on wanting to stoke division. The real alternative is to stop looking at everything through the primary lens of us vs. them, right vs. left, and assumptions of bad faith on the part of our fellow Jews who are of the "wrong" political party. Stop being defined by division and have an honest debate.

Moreover, if your political philosophy does not leave room for giving the other side the benefit of the doubt, than you should question that philosophy. (And look at the motivations of those who stoke division.)

"Tikkun Olam" as it is defined today is not a real Jewish tradition - but dan l'chaf zechut is.

People who take Judaism seriously, whether they are religious or not, must realize that dan l'chaf zechut is a fundamental part of Judaism that can and should be embraced by every Jew from the far-Right to the far-Left.

The future of the Jewish people is at stake.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Hallel and Yagel Yaniv

Yesterday, the IDF killed Abdel Fattah Hussein Kharousha, a 49 year old Hamas terrorist who had murdered brothers Hallel and Yagel Yaniv.

Palestinian media are now treating Kharousha as a hero, and their description of the last time his family saw him before the murder indicates that he may have murdered the Jews for Palestinian Authority money.

In his last conversation with his wife before killing Hallel and Yaniv he told her that he was "going to the noon prayer and then looking for a job" that would provide him with a decent living.

Palestinians who kill Jews guarantee their families a handsome income for life, far more than the average Palestinian salary.

He also intended to die. He had spent some time already in Israeli prisons, most recently a 40-month sentence for planning, along with his son, a shooting attack at an Israeli bus. He told a colleague after his recent release in December that he did not want to return to prison, and he wished for "martyrdom."

It seems quite likely that if it wasn't for the "pay for slay" policy of the Palestinian Authority, Kharousha would have had less incentive to kill Jews. Without Pay for Slay, he would have left them in very bad financial shape by dying; with Pay for Slay he ensures their living in comfort as long as the Palestinian Authority exists.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

03/07 Links Pt2: Anti-Semitism Runs Rampant at an Australian Literary Festival; NYTs ‘Deceitful’ Coverage Fuels ‘Violent Jew-Hatred,’ Puts Jews in Danger; Cori Bush's Anti-Semitic Spiritual Guru

From Ian:

Anti-Semitism Runs Rampant at an Australian Literary Festival

Writers’ Week—an annual gathering taking place in the city of Adelaide and considered one of Australia’s most prestigious literary events—has this year been marred by the withdrawal of some prominent participants and sponsors. Provoking these withdrawals, above all, is the participation in the festival of the Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa, who has vocally expressed her support for Russia in its war against Ukraine, and called the leader of the latter country “a depraved Zionist.” Colin Rubenstein comments:

The way organizers of the partly taxpayer-funded Adelaide Writers’ Week have been defending extremist invitees . . . offers a prime example of the way anti-Semitism is excused and even defended in “woke” progressive culture, as long as it is conflated with criticism of Israel—especially if the offender is Palestinian.

Abulhawa, who [was] flown in to participate in three sessions during the event in early March, has form. She keeps a picture above her desk of the Palestinian terrorist Dalal Mughrabi—one of the perpetrators of the infamous 1978 Coastal Road Massacre, which saw the slaughter of 38 Israeli civilians—and has made social-media posts both calling Israelis “worse than Nazis” and asserting that “It’s possible to be Jewish and a Nazi at the same time. It’s called Israel,” while implying all Israelis are legitimate targets for violence.

When pressed in an interview with Radio Adelaide to defend the decision to invite Abulhawa, [the] Writers’ Week director Louise Adler [Master of Philosophy, Columbia Uni under Edward Said] said, “our business is to operate not a safe space, but an open space in which ideas that might be confronting, disturbing, provocative are debated with civility.” However, this isn’t actually true. According to Adler’s own words posted in an open letter on the Writers’ Week home page, this year’s event actually seeks to shut down debate on unspecified issues.

In this year’s festival, at least ten writers listed as Palestinians are on the program—plus the Egyptian-born founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and several other virulent anti-Israel activists. No Jewish Israeli writers were invited, nor, to our knowledge, any author who has defended Israel in his writing or has the expertise to offer attendees anything counter to the Palestinian narrative. It would appear that the Palestinian narrative counts as something “beyond debate” to the organizers.

New York Times ‘Deceitful’ Coverage Fuels ‘Violent Jew-Hatred,’ Puts Jews in Danger, Israeli Ambassador Says

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, accused last week the New York Times of “overt anti-Israel bias,” saying that the Times’ “deceitful” coverage is endangering Jews worldwide.

In a two-page letter to the executive editor of the Times, Joseph Kahn, the ambassador cited a yearlong study of the Times conducted by Bar-Ilan University.

“Despite Israel being a globally-renowned force for good, your publication intentionally and systematically hides the truth from its readership, depicting an utterly distorted and falsified reality in which Israel is the root of all evil,” Erdan’s letter says. “The Times deliberately ignores the facts and opts to falsely brand Israel as a flagrant human rights violator.”

Erdan backed up his claims with numerical evidence that he said demonstrated the newspaper’s “hatred against the Jewish State.”

“For every article that portrayed Israel in a somewhat positive light five demonized the Jewish State. Such staggering disparity cannot be mere chance,” he wrote. “The number of opinion columns condemning Israel was nearly double those condemning Iran, one of the world’s worst human rights abusers and the number one state-sponsor of terror. Could this possibly be a coincidence?”

“The Times actively promoted anti-Israel libels,” Erdan wrote. “The Times had no problem associating an Israeli elected official, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, with terrorism a whopping 20 times in 2022. Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the murderous terror organization Hamas, that sentences Gazans to death without trial and indiscriminately fires rockets at Israeli civilians, was referenced in conjunction with terrorism only twice and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, not even once.”

Israeli ambassador reveals family got caught in pro-Palestine ‘hate convoy'

Israel’s ambassador to the UK has spoken of her family's terrifying experience during the May 2021 Israel-Hamas war when their car got caught in the pro-Palestine 'hate convoy' in north London.

Speaking to The Sunday Times, Tzipi Hotevely, recalled how her husband, Or Alon, had been driving with the couple’s three daughters, aged four, six and eight, when they found themselves surrounded by cars making rape threats against Jewish girls.

“While my husband was driving with my daughters they were surrounded by these cars," Hotevely said. "They were saying horrible things about raping the daughters of the Jewish community, which is really outrageous.

"For him, listening to those megaphones, it was really worrying that it happened in the middle of Finchley Road in London in broad daylight.”

To date, no-one has been successfully prosecuted from the convoy.

Hotovely, a former settlements minister and deputy foreign minister in Israel, has also received extensive personal abuse during her time in London, encountering hostile demonstrators who have tried to break up meetings she has addressed. Two years ago she had to be escorted by police out of a debate at LSE as demonstrators surrounded her official car.

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Every year, Palestinian leaders pretend to be feminist

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas made an announcement for International Women's Day today:

The President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, said that the Palestinian woman has played a pioneering role and continues to play a pioneering role in the struggle and change for the better. About the identity of our people, their existence and their inalienable national rights.

In his speech today, Tuesday, on the occasion of the eighth of March, International Women's Day, His Excellency added that the State of Palestine has taken a number of pioneering steps to enhance women's participation in decision-making institutions, including the approval of their representation by at least 30% in all institutions of the organization, the state and local government bodies. .

The President affirmed the continuation of work to promote the right of Palestinian women to participation and equality, pursuant to the Declaration of Independence, the Basic Law and our international obligations.

Here is your reminder that the Palestinian Authority signed the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in 2014.

So what has Abas accomplished in giving women equal rights since 2014?

Here is the last major meeting Abbas chaired, of the Fatah Central Committee, in February:

One token woman. Which was probably the same in 2014.

Abbas never had any intention to actually help Palestinian women obtain equal rights. Even Palestinians know that they sign every international convention they can just to be considered an international player so they could use that influence to attack Israel. Palestinian law is misogynist, and no one is changing that.

At least now they are paying lip service to equal rights. In the past, on International Women's Day, the entire Palestinian narrative was how Israel is supposedly mistreating Palestinian women -- for example, putting female terrorists in prison.

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03/07 Links Pt1: How U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides Became Israel’s Arsonist-in-Chief; Israel engaging 4 Muslim nations to expand Abraham Accords; IDF kills Palestinian terrorist who murdered Yaniv brothers

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: How Biden Subverts Israeli Democracy

The Movement for Quality Government (MQG) in Israel is the far-left organization at the epicenter of the Israeli left's war against the Netanyahu government. MQG began its current campaign of delegitimization, subversion and demonization immediately after the Netanyahu government was sworn into office on December 29. The next day, MQG petitioned the Supreme Court to prevent Shas leader Aryeh Deri from serving as a minister in the government.

There was no legal basis for the petition. But that didn't bother the lawyers at MQG.

Like MQG, the Supreme Court justices didn't bother giving a legal basis for their decision.... The justices said Deri's appointment was "unreasonable," and with a stroke of a pen, the court retroactively disenfranchised Shas voters.

Building on its success, late last month MQG submitted a new petition asking the justices to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government's proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court.

Someone is paying tens of millions of shekels to rent buses to transport scores of thousands of people to rallies, buy them flags, print banners and signs, rent stages and sound systems, and finance ad campaigns in every newspaper and on billboards across the country.

Whoever is footing the bill, the front group for all of it is MQG.

MQG's only named donor on its annual reports is the U.S. State Department.

Since MQG's primary activity is subverting democracy in Israel by waging lawfare and sowing chaos in a bid to block democratically elected right-wing governments from fulfilling their pledges to voters, it's fairly clear that when MQG refers to "democracy education," it doesn't mean majority rule.

Since its first day in office the Biden administration has demonized its political opponents as "semi-fascists" and threats to democracy. Biden governs without regard for his political opponents, and at least in the case of his open borders policy, in contravention of federal law.

Perhaps Biden is driven by jealousy. Two-thirds of Israelis support judicial and legal reform. Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of immigration and inflation. A large majority of Americans disapprove of Biden's handling of the economy, foreign policy and crime issues. Biden could only dream of having as broad a consensus of support for his policies as Netanyahu has for his.

Michael Doran: How U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides Became Israel’s Arsonist-in-Chief

So what, precisely, is the source of the terror that these people are feeling? The reform is five conflicts in one. First, it is a debate about the proper role of the Supreme Court, which has usurped authorities that rightly belong to the Knesset. Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition, now paints any attempt to change the court as a fascist putsch, but in 2016 he critiqued the court precisely as the reformers are now critiquing it. Indeed, any observer who examines the reforms with a traditional American understanding of checks and balances, cannot but conclude that many of the demands of the reformers are not only reasonable but also desirable.

Second, it is a flash point between the two major political blocs, between the “pro-Netanyahu” and “anyone but Netanyahu” camps. Having bitterly divided over the rise of Donald Trump, Americans are familiar with this kind of tribal split. So too are citizens of Great Britain, who similarly clashed over Brexit. Four elections in two years were fought over Netanyahu’s leadership. This most recent election did not end the fight, which is now being prosecuted by means of the struggle over judicial reform.

Third, the reform is a fight over the two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the issue that, 20 years ago, used to be the dividing line between left and right in Israeli politics. Opponents of the reform argue that it will facilitate the annexation of the West Bank. “I’m a member of an ever-diminishing minority,” my friend the scientist told me, “but the occupation of the West Bank remains the top issue for me. Ruling over another people is destroying us from the inside.”

Fourth, the judicial reform plays on feelings of discrimination among the Sephardim, the Jews from the Arab world, who see the Supreme Court as a bastion of Ashkenazi European Jewish power and privilege. Like the two-state issue, the Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide is no longer the heated political issue that it once was. Intermarriage and socio-economic changes have opened up the Israeli elite, which is no longer an exclusively Ashkenazi club. But old resentments die hard. A taxi driver from Morocco, who was in his late 50s, told me, “Just a few days ago Aharon Barak said that they searched and searched but couldn’t find Moroccans qualified to be judges.” He was referring to the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and the legal mind who laid the groundwork for the expansion of the court’s powers. The quote the driver attributed to Barak is apocryphal, but the feelings of resentment that it expresses are real and still of some importance politically. Chikli, the minister whom Ambassador Nides insulted, offered a related observation when he said that politics is 10% ideology and 90% sociology.

Fifth, and most importantly, the conflict over the judicial system pits secularists against both the ultra-Orthodox and the religious nationalists. The Israeli journalist Amit Segal sparked an animated debate when he suggested that the key indicator of whether an individual will support the judicial reform is whether he or she identifies as a Jew first or as an Israeli—the idea being that those for whom the religious tradition is most alive are the staunchest supporters of the reform. Segal’s dichotomy is perhaps too neat, but there can be no doubt that the most enduring split in Jewish Israeli politics is sociological in nature. The religious-secular split will likely define left and right in the country for the next two generations, perhaps even longer.

The greatest single source of the terror on the Israeli left is the demographic, cultural, and political rise of the religious communities. “We are going to turn into the Islamic Republic of Iran here,” a professor friend of mine said, with no hint of irony in his voice. In historical terms, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the second stage of the Mahapach, the election in 1977 that brought Menachem Begin’s Likud Party to power. Begin’s election broke the monopoly that the Labor Party had exercised over the Knesset since the founding of the state. Yet while the traditional elite—Ashkenazi, secular, and associated with the Labor Zionist movement—lost control of the government in 1977, its offspring have continued to exercise influence over national affairs through the state bureaucracies, the universities, the press, and, importantly, the judiciary. (It is perhaps no accident that the usurpation of power by the judiciary took place in the 1980s, on the heels of the Mahapach.)

Jonathan Tobin: What's worse: Threats by Smotrich or Amnesty Int'l?

Amnesty and others, including some who say they accept the legitimacy of Israel in the pre-1967 armistice lines, believe that all Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are illegal settlements. In order to promote the fiction that the West Bank is historically Arab, they ignore not just the history of the country but the early 20th-century international agreements such as the San Remo Treaty of 1920 and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine that both recognized the right of Jews to "close settlement" throughout all of the country.

Contrary to the mythology in which Israel is depicted as a colonial enterprise, Jews are the indigenous people of their historic homeland. That fact doesn't invalidate the rights of Palestinian Arabs. But the anomalous situation in the West Bank, whose Arab communities are autonomously ruled by the corrupt Palestinian Authority, is a function of their refusal to negotiate a peace in which they would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn.

To note this is not "whataboutism." Amnesty is already one of the principal authors of the "apartheid Israel" smear, a big lie rooted in antisemitism and hatred. But for Amnesty, and others in the "human rights" sector, Jews have no rights. That is the reason why they view the destruction of the homes of several hundred thousand people, including schools and synagogues in places where Jews have lived for millennia, as "justice."

If any Israeli or Jew were to suggest depopulating Arab villages and towns and expelling that many Palestinians, Amnesty would be labeling them racists who should be treated as pariahs. But say the same about Jews, and you can be considered an "anti-racist" or advocate for human rights. That's also why they treat Palestinian terrorist murders as merely a case of Jews getting their just desserts instead of crimes against humanity.

So, perhaps it is understandable that while Smotrich is roasted, Amnesty's call for the mass expulsion of Jews in response to Hawara was ignored.

None of this should get Smotrich off the hook.

The crime of "Judaizing" - what's old is new again

Times of Israel has an interesting article about how crypto-Jews in Mallorca would continue to celebrate Purim by calling it the "Feast of St. Esther."

A brave woman named Ana Cortés admitted to the Church that she was still celebrating Jewish holidays and studying (illegal) Jewish texts.

The crypto-Jews of Mallorca paid a heavy price for clinging to their Jewish faith. Pedro Onofro Cortés was burned at the stake. Ana Cortés was sentenced twice for the crime of “Judaizing” or secretly practicing and teaching Judaism, once in 1677 and again in 1688.

Indeed, historical works about the Inquisition mention the "Judaizing" charge brought against crypto-Jews.

Today, the same term "Judaizing" is still being used as an epithet - when referring to Israel "Judaizing" Judaism's holiest city.

Just as it was then, the term is used by antisemites to make it moral crime to keep Jews or the Jewish capital - Jewish.

It was an insult then and it is an insult now. And in both cases, it is only antisemites who use the term as an epithet.

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The Purim Ball at New York's Academy of Music in 1865 was one of the most extravagant events of the year - and the reviewer in the New York Herald found it extraordinary.

You can expand the illustration above from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper to get an idea of the revelry.

It had jokes and merriment, political spoofs and newspaper parodies, costumes and music, so much so that the poor writer couldn't cover everything.

Perhaps the other Academy of Music Purim balls were comparable, although I haven't found any descriptions quite like this. It did seem that the Purim balls nationwide would typically go all night. Those Jews knew how to party!

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Amnesty Sweden subtly calls for the destruction of Israel

Amnesty Sweden put up this pair of billboards in Sweden, this one was seen in a subway station.

The text translates to, " Women are always right. The right to choose. The right to protest. The right to study. The right to live without violence."

Notice that the girl in the photo has a necklace of "Palestine" that erases all of the Jewish state.

The girl is Janna Tamimi, a member of the Tamimi family that includes terrorists like Ahlam Tamimi, the murderer behind the Sbarro pizza shop massacre who lives as a celebrity in Jordan. The Tamimi family fully supports terrorism.

Janna uses the name "Janna Jihad" and has called herself a "journalist" since she was seven. She spreads fake photos of Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel. And Amnesty has used her in other campaigns, falsely claiming that Israel is threatening to kill her.

Every pro-Israel activist faces death threats. Amnesty doesn't seem to think they need protection.

So with the current Swedish campaign, assuming that most commuters don't recognize Janna Tamimi, Amnesty is telling the world that - at the very least - there is nothing wrong with calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. That isn't a human rights violation of Jews who live there. More likely, the subtle message is that Israel must be destroyed - because women are always right.

Even when they spread vicious antisemitic lies, apparently.

If Amnesty Sweden assumes that most commuters do recognize "Janna Jihad," they are then claiming that it is Israel, not Palestinian leaders, who are limiting her right to choose - even though abortion is prohibited in the Palestinian territories. (I cannot find a single Palestinian campaign or article that calls for Palestinian abortion rights.) And they are also saying that Israel blocks peaceful protests and that it somehow blocks her right to study.

So either way, under the pretense of a women's rights campaign, Amnesty is pushing anti-Israel and antisemitic lies.

(h/t M)

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