Whenever someone posts a photo of Palestinian kids with guns, like these:
Israel haters like to respond with photos like these of Israeli kids with guns.
The message they try to convey is that there is no difference.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
As far as I can tell, all the photos they show of Israeli kids are at military museums. The guns aren't loaded, there is plenty of adult supervision, and there is no difference between these kids and kids worldwide who visit their own countries' military museums.
The Palestinians kids are playing with or shooting real (or realistic) guns, without supervision.
In Israel, there is a specific place and circumstance for guns, which are necessary for defending the nation. Killing Arabs does not make one into a hero (unless that Arab was in the middle of a terror attack and killing him saved lives.) There are very strict gun control laws.
For Palestinians, terrorist weapons are meant to be everywhere. Guns are shot in the air all the time. They are shot without aiming. People are encouraged to buy and own their own weapons. There are no rules. There are no Arabic-language manuals on gun safety. There is no NGOs to teach responsible gun ownership or that combat gun proliferation. (But there are such organizations for Arabs in Israel.)
Palestinians who shoot Jews are heroes. You can see kids with guns emulating them in their own homes, streets and even mosques.
We've seen this year Palestinian kids who were recruited to terror groups and killed while trying to attack Israelis. Still, no NGO dedicated to protect children has said a word against this.
Guns aren't evil in and of themselves. They are a tool. Israelis teach kids to use them responsibly and only as a last resort. Palestinians teach their kids that guns are cool and meant to murder Jewish civilians.
Anyone who can't tell the difference between the two has no moral compass.
(h/t Andrew)
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America and Britain claim to be allies of Israel. There is no gainsaying the deep links between them of military assistance, intelligence and trade. Israel is the invaluable strategic asset for America and Britain in the Middle East, a crucial bulwark in the defense of the West.
And yet, both America and Britain undermine Israel's security and defense against existential attack by sanitizing, promoting and funding Palestinian Arabs, whose active cause remains the destruction of the Jewish state.
A recent event illustrated this particularly sharply when British diplomatic officials in Jerusalem effectively endorsed the Palestinian Authority's agenda to eradicate Israel.
Palestinian Media Watch has revealed that at last Friday's annual "Palestine Marathon" held by the PA, seven British officials taking part as "#TeamUK" wore marathon T-shirts displaying the PA's map that erases Israel and represents the whole country as Palestine.
The Jewish Chronicle reports that the team consisted of the UK's Deputy Consul General Alison McEwen and Foreign Office colleagues. A picture of the team was tweeted from the official account of the British Consulate in Jerusalem, hailing "the incredible Palestine Marathon to support #FREEDOMOFMOVEMENT for all Palestinians."
Palestinian Media Watch observes that this hashtag was conceived to support the PA's demand that Israel remove the security measures it has adopted to prevent the flow of Palestinian terrorists from PA-controlled areas into Israel's cities.
According to The Jewish Chronicle, the marathon was organized by a group called "Right to Movement," which campaigns against "the many obstacles that we live daily under fascist racist occupation."
The race was held under the auspices of the Palestine Liberation Organization Supreme Council for Youth and Sports headed by Jibril Rajoub, a man who has been convicted of numerous terrorist offenses and who persistently glorifies Palestinian terrorist murderers.
So these British diplomats took part in an event supervised by a terrorist sympathizer; openly supported the Palestinian Arabs' lie that Israel is subjecting them to "fascist racist occupation"; openly opposed Israel's measures to protect its citizens against attack; and openly endorsed the eradication of Israel altogether.
In return for participating, at least partially, in a China-centric economic sphere, Xi is presenting Beijing to the Gulf Arab states as an alternative to Washington for managing the Iranian threat. The Saudis made their Iran focus clear when, in exchange for normalizing relations with Israel, they recently asked the United States for security guarantees, help in developing a civilian nuclear program, and missiles and drones, the very weapons that tilt the regional balance of power in favour of Tehran. In essence, the Saudis said that if Washington will check the rise of Iran, they will participate with Israel in an American-led regional bloc.
Biden perhaps fears that the Saudis are bluffing, that they will pocket any concession the United States makes and still continue to hedge toward Beijing. Or perhaps he fears that Iran will draw the U.S. into a military confrontation. With a war raging in Ukraine and the threat of war looming over Taiwan, neither Biden nor the Pentagon relish the prospect of an escalation in the Middle East.
But American options are diminishing by the day. In the Middle East, the United States cannot outcompete China economically. The Chinese are now the world’s largest purchaser of oil from the region, and they are rapidly expanding their exports to the Middle East. As a great power patron, the only thing that distinguishes the U.S. from China is its military might.
But the Biden team refuses to check Iran militarily. In that case, what good is Washington to Saudi Arabia? Why wouldn’t Riyadh turn eastward? In contrast to Washington, Beijing at least wields influence in Tehran. It is eager to export drones and missiles, it won’t hesitate to provide assistance with a civilian nuclear program, and it won’t deliver sermons on human rights. Best of all, Xi’s grand economic strategy compels him to woo Riyadh.
America’s refusal to build an anti-Iran bloc is delivering the Middle East to China.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant on Friday against Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of being responsible for war crimes committed in Ukraine, but Moscow said the move was meaningless.
Russia has repeatedly denied accusations that its forces have committed atrocities during its one-year-old invasion of its neighbor.
The ICC issued the warrant for Putin's arrest on suspicion of unlawful deportation of children and unlawful transfer of people from the territory of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
The court also issued a warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's Commissioner for Children's Rights, on the same charges.
Moscow: ICC's arrest warrant has no bearing on Russia
In the first reaction to the news from Moscow, Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on her Telegram channel: "The decisions of the International Criminal Court have no meaning for our country, including from a legal point of view."
"Russia is not a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and bears no obligations under it."
The homes of Palestinians in Lebanese "refugee camps" are literally falling apart.
The Union of Palestinian Right of Return Committees in Lebanon issued a statement this week holding the UNRWA Administration and the Engineering Department responsible for the collapse of houses on its residents in the Palestinian camps.
The real problem is that Lebanon severely restricts building materials into the camps, which are overcrowded and getting worse. Apparently the committee doesn't want to upset the Lebanese authorities so they prefer to blame UNRWA.
A report by a Palestinian human rights group in Lebanon last December says that hundreds of Palestinian families have seen their ceilings collapse. The report prepared by the Palestinian Association for Human Rights noted the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon still live in camps that cannot be expanded despite being there for seven decades. They note the imposition of strict restrictions by the Lebanese authorities on the entry of building materials in the camps.
"Anxiety has become part of the lives of refugees and their daily bread for their children, for fear of their homes falling over their heads and sudden disasters that they cannot bear the consequences of, as happened with the family of the Palestinian refugee Muhammad Atta Azzam from Rashidieh camp, whose roof suddenly collapsed" last November, the report said. In October, the roof of another house in Burj al-Barajneh camp, south of Beirut, collapsed on a family while they were sleeping, and it is getting worse.
Now, imagine this was happening in Gaza. There would be numerous stories about this, all of them blaming Israel (not UNRWA as most of these articles do.) In fact, UNRWA would convene an emergency international donor gathering, and nations around the world would pledge to fix these buildings. we woul see charities asking for money to help the Palestinians - all with an undercurrent of blaming Israel.
Is it because they care about Palestinians, or because they love to find excuses to paint Israel in a bad light? What we see in Lebanon proves that it is most definitely the latter.
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Kan News reports that the Dizengoff terrorist was previously convicted twice of security offenses, and promised the court: "There will not be a third time."
Moataz Al-Khawaja, a 23 year old from Ni'lin, was a Hamas terrorist. He did not have a residence permit and crossed the separation fence illegally in the Maccabim area. Last Thursday he illegally crossed into Israel, arrived at the Gotcha restaurant on Dizengoff Street, and shot three patrons in the area, seriously injuring two before he was killed.
Khawaja was first arrested about six years ago, when he was 17 years old. He was convicted of shooting at a military force, firing ten bullets fired from a distance of about 80 meters, and the Israeli forces returned fire. The child terrorist asked for a lighter sentence so that he could return to school, and was sentenced to a year and ten months in prison. He was also sentenced to a year of probation, with the condition that he not commit any weapons-related offenses in the next three years.
But less than three years later, the terrorist was again convicted - this time for buying a "Carlo" type weapon, for 4,000 NIS. This time the terrorist made a commitment to the court: "There will not be a third time. I intend to start studying at university. I'm engaged and intend to get married."
The military judge who convicted the terrorist warned: "Arms trafficking creates a great danger to the public. A significant concern in the region is the transfer of weapons to hostile hands, and from there it is only a short path to harming innocents. Possession of weapons for the purpose of 'self-defense' should not be taken lightly either."
Even so, the military judge accepted the lenient plea deal, and the terrorist was sent to one year and three months in prison. The judge justified his decision, saying, "The plea agreement actually makes it easier for the accused. The plea bargain is justified by saving judicial time by his admitting to the crime. The accused has difficult circumstances at home, and he suffers from health problems."
Khawaja's father, Sheikh Salah al-Khawaja, is a well known Hamas leader in Ni'lin who has had a number of arrests. It is astonishing that either the judge didn't know this or they ignored it when sentencing Moataz the second time. Moreover, his promise to go to college, that helped ensure his lighter sentence, was a lie - he never finished high school. So was his intention to get married.
The judge's willingness to believe the lies of a twice-caught terrorist helped ensure that Khawaja would have a third chance.
(h/t iTiIL972)
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What is the ruling on a woman who refuses to breastfeed her child?.. Masrawy received and presented it to Dr. Muhammad Ali, the Islamic preacher, who said in his response that Islam cared for young people to grow up safe and sound, and breastfeeding is obligatory for the mother, and the punishment for the one who neglects to breastfeed her child on the Day of Resurrection is that her breasts will be devoured alive in Hell, God forbid.
And Ali added in his response to Masrawy: "It is on the authority of Abu Umamah Al-Bahili on the authority of the Prophet - may God bless him and grant him peace - that he said: "While I was sleeping, two men came to me, so they took my hand and brought me to a rugged mountain, and they said: Climb. I said: I cannot. He said: We will make it easy. So I climbed until I was in the middle of the mountain when I heard loud voices. I said: What are these voices? They said: This is the howl of the people of Hell.
Then behold, I saw a people hanging by their ankles, their mouths slashed with blood gushing from them. I said: Who are these? He said: Those who break their fast before the time is due. ....
Then he took me away, and I saw a people whose breasts were severely distended, and their stench smelled like toilets. I said: Who are these? He said: These are the adulterers and adulteresses.
Then he took me, and I saw women whose breasts were being devoured by snakes. I said: What is the matter with these people? He said. These women prevent their children from being breastfed.
Then he set off with me, and I saw two boys playing between two rivers. I said: Who are these? It was said: These are my offspring of the believers. Then he honored me. honor, and behold, three of them were drinking from their wine. I said: Who are these? He said: These are Jafar, Zaid, and Ibn Rawaha. Then he honored me with another honor, so I was with three men. I said: Who are these? He said: This is Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, and they are waiting for you.
There was a story about Jews and Christians too, but unfortunately I didn't understand it.
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In Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities, the New Statesman’s Emily Tamkin explores American Jews’ “ever-evolving relationship to the nation’s culture and identity, and each other,” as the publisher’s blurb has it. Tal Fortgang writes in his review:
Neither systematic enough to be a serious work of history nor bold enough to work as a pop-sociological provocation, Bad Jews is a book about Jewish identity marked by several identity crises. It wants to be critical of the Jews she clearly thinks are “bad,” but it’s committed to treating all things as equally Jewish; it wants to analyze the particularistic while maintaining Tamkin’s universalistic bona fides; it aims for objectivity but slides into hackneyed leftism without realizing. What it ends up doing is either trailing off before each story ends or reciting the kind of pablum you would expect from a mediocre progressive candidate for public office when asked what her Jewishness means to her.
Trendy activist language eventually seeps through. [Tamkin] frequently fixates on the importance of “whiteness,” but toggles between treating it as a legal, cultural, racial, or other category. Her bible is a 1998 book called How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America, as if a UCLA anthropologist named Karen Brodkin provided the world with the definitive history of the Jewish-American experience, and as if her readers could not seriously challenge that “whiteness,” whatever it is, is the force that moves all of American history.
Tamkin’s brand of emotivist universalism . . . knows only two modes: solidarity with victims and iconoclastic rage at villains. It cannot bear the thought of heroic Jews who are neither.
Views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have shifted sharply among Democrats, who said they sympathized more with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in an annual Gallup survey.
The big picture: Overall, most U.S. adults sympathize more with Israelis (54%) than Palestinians (31%), and two-thirds of Americans continue to view Israel favorably. However, views on the Middle East conflict are becoming increasingly polarized in the U.S. by party and by generation.
Flashback: In 2016, 53% of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Israelis, and 23% with the Palestinians.
- By 2022, that gap had virtually disappeared.
- When Gallup conducted this year's poll from Feb. 1-23, just 38% of Democrats chose the Israelis while 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians.
- That shift has been driven largely by Americans born after 1980, a narrow plurality of whom are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis. Americans from older generations are more than twice as likely to sympathize with the Israelis.
- The progressive wing of the Democratic caucus in Congress has also grown increasingly vocal about the Palestinian cause.
Between the lines: Some Israeli officials and analysts have argued that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made Israel a partisan issue in Washington by aligning so closely with the Republicans.
Yes, but: A majority of Democrats (56%) continue to view Israel favorably. That's down from 63% last year and far lower than the 82% among Republicans, but is broadly in line with previous findings for Democrats over the two decades Gallup has been conducting the survey.
A new survey released by Pew Research Center on March 15 contains positive news for American Jews and certain, but not all, other faith groups stateside.
Among the 42% of non-Jewish Americans who expressed favorable-unfavorable opinions about Jews, 34% were very or somewhat favorable, while 7% were unfavorable. That positive differential—27 points—was the largest of any faith group in the survey.
Among non-Catholics, 26% were very or somewhat favorable and 21% were unfavorable towards Catholics (5 points), while more Americans who aren’t Muslim, atheist or Mormon saw those groups as more unfavorable than favorable.
A total of 17% of non-Muslims saw Muslims favorably, compared to 22% unfavorably (a -5 differential), 17% of non-atheists saw atheism at least somewhat favorably compared to 25 unfavorably (-9 differential) and just 14% of non-Mormons had favorable views of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, compared to 26% unfavorable (-12% differential).
“This survey confirms what we have found repeatedly over the past decade, which is that on the whole, Jews are among the most positively regarded religious groups in America,” Alan Cooperman, director of religion research at Pew Research Center, told JNS. “Overwhelmingly, Americans express either favorable or neutral feelings toward Jews, and relatively few—about 6% in the latest survey—say they view Jews unfavorably.”
No matter how Pew has posed the question about attitudes towards U.S. religious groups over the years, “Jews have topped the list or been tied at the top of the list with a few other groups,” such as Catholics and mainline Protestants, “as the most positively viewed overall,” he said.
The data does not mean that the United States is nearly free of antisemitism. Other sorts of studies show increasing numbers of antisemitic incidents, as well as hate crimes broadly, in the United States in recent years, according to Cooperman.
“In our 2020 survey of U.S. Jews, which came in the wake of violent attacks on Jews at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., we found that 75% of Jewish Americans thought there was more antisemitism in America than there had been five years earlier, and a slight majority (53%) of Jewish Americans said in the 2020 survey that they, personally, felt less safe as a Jewish person in America than they had five years earlier,” he told JNS.
The two findings do not contradict one another, according to Cooperman.
“Both things can be true at the same time—that, on the whole, Jews are well-regarded by their fellow citizens in the United States, and that antisemitic incidents are rising. In fact, when we asked Jewish Americans in 2020 for their thoughts on why antisemitism was rising, relatively few said they thought it was solely because the number of antisemites in the U.S. public had risen. Many more cited a changed atmosphere,” he said.
‘This is the first time we have asked the question this way’
The new Pew analysis is based on a survey of 10,588 U.S. adults, which was conducted between Sept. 13-18, 2022. (The margin of error is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, according to Pew.)
Palestine ranking 2nd amongst the most racist "countries " (I say that lightly as it isn't a country but some people) with around half not wanting any non-Arab neighbours pic.twitter.com/qKe4jzFWM9
— Natalie Zion #EndJewHatred (@natalie_Zion_) March 15, 2023
New York, March 16 - Members of a notorious assembly that Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan denounces with regularity voiced their frustration, especially among the younger set, that their organization's executive displays nepotism in ritual matters, favoring the offspring of prominent officials in the assembly for ritual stewardship tasks during Luciferian services.
Synagogue of Satan attendees complained in private this week that their own children get passed over every week in favor of the synagogue president's son when it comes to leading the medieval hymns to the Devil at the end of the service, among other instances of unfairness.
"His voice isn't even that good," insisted the child of one congregant. "But the gabbai either wants to kiss up to Mr. Rothchild or is simply afraid to assume it's OK to ask someone different to do the chanting. I could do such a better job with 'O Unholy One Who Darkens the Sun'. And he always uses the same stupid tune, when you could totally mix things up."
The few exceptions to the phenomenon over the last several years occurred when wealthy guests attended with children or grandchildren of their own, congregants recalled. "[Sheldon] Adelson brought some grandkids the last few times he was here, and you can bet the most tone-deaf of the little pishers got to lead," spat another member. "The only other non-Rothschild in the last ten years to do the call-and-response chanting of 'Master of the World, Master of the Netherworld' was related to Steven Spielberg."
Observers noted that the phenomenon only occurs with the portions at the end of the service that customarily feature children and are not a core liturgical element of the formal, weekly, goy-child-sacrifice practice that ensures continued Jewish control of culture, finance, and history. The serious, real-world nature of that rite, they explained, demands adults-only participation - though in Jewish practice, "adult" includes girls ages twelve and up, boys from age thirteen. The busy financial and political lives of the synagogue's membership necessitate diverse participation amid numerous possible scheduling conflicts.
Members with the grievance acknowledged that they find the issue a minor insult, but if it increases or persists too long, the training of the next generation in Dark Rituals will suffer from the monopolized policy. None of the congregants who spoke for this article indicated they anticipate any group splitting from the Synagogue of Satan over to worship a different Satan.
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A symposium organized last week by the European Coalition for Israel in the European Parliament brought together stakeholders both from the European Commission and the European Parliament with some of the key states behind the Abraham Accords to discuss the next steps of the normalization process. After the signing of the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel's relations with several Arab states in 2020, the EU had remained on the sidelines.
Israel's ambassador to the EU and NATO, Haim Regev, said, "It took time for us to convince them that this was a deep and dramatic development, that they should be part of it. In the last three months, we see a real change." Last month for the first time, Israel participated in a trilateral workshop in Rabat with the EU and Morocco, financed by the EU, that will lead to water projects, the construction of new desalination plants, and wastewater management.
EU Commissioner for Neighborhood Policy Oliver Varhelyi has allocated 10 million euros to expand those kinds of activities. There is a new steering committee led by the EU embassy in Tel Aviv which together with Israel is looking into additional projects. "Soon we hope to have within the European Parliament an Abraham Accords network. We have also held a joint seminar in NATO that brought experts from Israel, Bahrein, and Morocco to see what we can do together," said Regev. "There is a growing interest and appetite in the EU to be part of the Abraham Accords."
[T]he Biden Administration officials recently proposed a plan "to provide 5,000 Palestinians with commando training in Jordan" and then deploy them to areas under the control of the PA. The 5,000 officers will bring with them 5,000 rifles to Palestinian cities and towns -- where almost every Palestinian already has a weapon.
Any time the US has funded, armed and trained Palestinian militias, the target has invariably ended up not terrorist groups but Israelis. Why is there any reason to think that this time will be different?
In addition, the plan would require Israel "to sharply curtail IDF counterterror operations." The Biden administration, in other words, wants Israel to stop defending itself and rely on the Palestinian leadership and the new Palestinian "commandos" to go after the terrorists. Palestinian officials, meanwhile, are busy glorifying terrorism and paying visits to the families of terrorists.
This would leave the Israelis with the rights to neither self-defense nor hot-pursuit. Terrorists will be able strike inside Israel, then run back to the Palestinian areas where they will be "home free;" instead of being arrested, they will be celebrated.
The Biden plan also reportedly "foresees the deployment of foreign forces, including U.S. military forces, on the ground."
Israel, roughly the size of New Jersey, would have on its border a Palestinian terrorist army, well-trained, well-funded, and "protected" by a superpower.
[The Israelis] would find themselves in the impossible position of risking harming the Europeans and Americans forces stationed there. These troops, mingled among the Palestinians, would essentially be "human shields," deliberately placed in harm's way to prevent Israel from taking any action.
What, then, is the Biden Administration really doing?
An international military presence to help the Palestinians in the West Bank would handcuff the Israelis. This appears to be the real plan.
Hamas Terrorist Chief’s Warning
Saleh al-Arouri, the vice chairman of the Hamas movement and head of its military wing in the West Bank, the man who coordinates in Beirut the activity with Hizbullah, said in an interview to the official website of Hamas on March 14, 2023, that the events to come will be very difficult for the “occupation and its settlers.” The “resistance” in the West Bank is in a state of escalation and it is diversifying its weapons.
Marwan Issa, the shadowy deputy commander of Hamas’ military wing in the Gaza Strip, hinted at the possibility of massive rocket fire from the Gaza Strip towards Israel. He told the Al-Aqsa channel on March 15, 2023, that the “political project in the West Bank has ended; the enemy brought the Oslo Accords to an end; and the coming days will be eventful.”
Issa continued: A political solution in the West Bank “is a thing of the past…. Any escalation in the Al-Aqsa Mosque area will result in a reaction in the Gaza Strip; Hamas in Gaza will not [just] be an observer to events in Jerusalem.”
“The desire to commit suicide among the (Muslim) residents of the West Bank is unprecedented, and the state of resistance in the West Bank is excellent. So is the state of national unity in the face of the Occupation,” the Hamas official claimed.
The Iranian Connection
A spokesman for the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad threatened Israel with a new intifada and a conflict it had never experienced before.
The accumulation of these statements by the heads of the terrorist organizations in the media and intelligence information indicate an impending escalation. The security meeting initiated by the United States in Aqaba on February 26, 2023, has failed, and the fate of the next meeting, scheduled in Sinai, is uncertain. It is very doubtful whether Israel will be able to stop the approaching tsunami of terrorism since this is a strategic decision by the terrorist organizations in coordination with Iran.
The terrorist cells are showing the increasing use of explosive devices in the territories of Judea and Samaria and an attempt to activate them also within the territory of Israel itself. The Shin Bet has recently foiled several attacks using explosive devices by Palestinians from the West Bank who were recruited by Hamas from the Gaza Strip through social networks.
According to officials in the military wing of Hamas, the attack on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv on March 9, 2023, marks the organization’s decision to resume attacks within the Green Line.
Since 2000, Israel has “uprooted, poisoned, burnt and bombed” over three million fruit trees in Palestine, according to the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), which launched an awareness-raising campaign on Monday concerned with safeguarding Palestinian trees.
Under the hashtags #TreesforPalestine and Palestine’s Trees, the six-week campaign will use social media platforms to narrate the Palestinian agricultural struggle using a variety of visual, audio and written material based on extensive research efforts and including testimonies from Palestinian farmers, according to an APN statement sent to The Jordan Times.
That is an astoundingly improbable statistic. But when I went to the website of the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, I saw that the claim was even more ridiculous:
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, more than 3 million trees, mostly olive and citrus trees, were uprooted by Israeli forces between 2000 and 2012.
That would mean that Israel destroyed nearly 700 trees every single day for 12 years!
I cannot find here the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture made that claim. If they did, one would expect them to have widely publicized it. But a 2013 talk by that ministry in Europe on the "Forests of Palestine" doesn't say a word about this.
I did find a 2006 report by the ministry that said that since 2000, "23.2% of the tree horticulture holdings were subjected to damage due to Israeli measures in the Palestinian Territory; in the West Bank the percentage was 22.5% and in Gaza Strip, 33.7%." No source is given and neither is the definition of "damage," which might mean "within three miles of tear gas." Anyway, if that was the source, the number of damaged trees would be closer to four million!
The usual statistic that Israel haters use is 800,000 trees destroyed - but since 1967, not 2000. See this poster (detail) from Visualizing Palestine:
The source given is "Olive Harvest Fact Sheet October 2011, page 2" which they claim is from Oxfam but it is really from OCHA.
Guess what? Even that source doesn't say anything close to what they claim!
To be sure, Israel has uprooted thousands of trees - mostly while building the security barrier and by creating a buffer zone in Gaza where terrorists couldn't hide. Nobody mentions that when Israel uprooted olive trees for the security barrier, they replanted them!
Farmers who cultivate olive and other fruit trees growing within the Security Fence can designate a new site to which the trees will be relocated which has no free access constraints. Contractors assigned by The Ministry of Defense to build the Security Fence are responsible for carefully uprooting and replanting the trees. So far over 60,000 olive trees have been relocated in accordance with this procedure. It should be noted that olive trees require scarce treatment, only three weeks a year.
The haters pretend to count the trees uprooted - but they don't count the trees replanted!
As usual, this propaganda doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Sources are made up or wildly misquoted. And no reporter bothers to do even a modicum of fact-checking.
Which means that Palestinians have learned that lying pays.
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Today is the 20th anniversary of Rachel Corrie's death, accidentally killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she acted as a human shield against a mine clearing operation.
Her death came directly because of the Leftist myth that Israelis are racist - and that Palestinians aren't.
Corrie was brainwashed by her "progressive" teachers at Evergreen College and her International Solidarity Movement colleagues.
A basic tenet of the far-Left, which has now become mainstream, is that Israel is an irredeemably racist entity engaged in "genocide" against non-white Palestinians. This myth is what fueled Corrie and ISM to place activists in harm's way, because of a naïve belief that they were invincible - protected by their "white privilege."
One of Corrie's fellow Evergreen students, Joe Smith, also received independent study credit for his time in Rafah while Corrie was there. "I saw ISM as a way that I could directly use my white, Western, American male privilege to directly serve underprivileged people of color," he said a week after her death.
Corrie's emails to her parents while in Gaza emphasized her unwavering beliefs that white privilege would protect her, and that her anti-Israel activism was penance for her being an American. She emailed that Israel wouldn't arrest her and hold her for a long time because "I am a white US citizen." She wrote about how ISM members could make "serious use of our international white person privilege," and said, "If the Israeli military should break with their racist tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible."
Other ISM activists admitted after Corrie's death that they felt invincible. ISM believed that "the white foreigners were the magic bullet that could neutralize Israel's overwhelming military strength." Smith himself admitted how he and his fellow ISMers felt invincible by their whiteness: "It's definitely easy to get cocky in this war zone when a tank is shooting at people and you walk up to them and shout at them, 'Hey, I'm here!' and they pack up and leave. You get so used to this idea, 'Hey, they won't hurt us.' It has really made me realize how naïve and cocky I was."
Corrie and other ISMers took huge risks with their lives because of this child-like belief that their whiteness is a superpower. In fact, an Irish activist in Rafah at the time named Jenny was nearly run down herself by a D9 that she thought she could stop. “The bulldozer’s coming, the earth is burying my feet, my legs, I’ve got nowhere to run, and I thought, ‘This is out of control.' Another activist pulled me up and out of the way at the last minute.”
Even the Palestinians that these activists befriended considered them crazy. But there were no adults around to counteract the almost religious belief they had that Israeli racism would protect them in a war zone.
Notably, ISM would specifically recruit white kids because of this very assumption. Activists were well aware (and struggled with the idea) that they were promoting the idea of being white saviors of darker Palestinians and complicit in the racism they claim to oppose.
But there was another reason why Corrie took such a risk that day that she was killed. And that was Palestinian racism and misogyny.
Even though these woke, white ISM activists flocked to Rafah to supposedly help Palestinians, there was much mistrust among the oppressed people of color that they deigned to help. ISM members were very concerned over an anonymous letter they had received:
[Corrie] was propelled, in part, by frustration. During the past few days she and the nine other ISM activists had become preoccupied with an anonymous letter circulating through Rafah that cast suspicion on the human shields. “Who are they? Why are they here? Who asked them to come here?” it asked. The letter referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as “nasty foreign bitches” whom “our Palestinian young men are following around.”
That morning [of Corrie's death], the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter’s effects. “We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military,” Richard “Fuzz” Purssell told me by phone from Great Britain.
Corrie, while assuming that Israeli racism would protect her, felt that if she would only take more risks, then Palestinian racism and misogyny would magically disappear.
And that is exactly what she did.
We know now that Palestinians have treated these white international women horribly. There are many reports of how they have been raped by the Palestinians they think they are helping - and the stories are hushed up by the very organizations like ISM they volunteer for. Corrie believed that Palestinians are inherently good and Israeli Jews inherently evil, and she only had to try a little harder to prove it.
The narrative of Israeli racism and Palestinian victimhood is fundamental to the existence of these organizations like ISM. And that false narrative is not only what killed Rachel Corrie, but also promoted a culture of Palestinian sexual assaults on her fellow, invincible, white women.
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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.
There are many methods of the Israeli occupation in the Judaization of the occupied city of Jerusalem, and the promotion of artificial Talmudic narratives and terminology, through its attempts to change the Jerusalemite culture and identity, and replace it with a culture alien to Jerusalemites, in an attempt to prove its alleged sovereignty over the city.
The occupation municipality, in cooperation with several Israeli institutions, plans to organize a Judaizing sports marathon in the Holy City next Friday, with the participation of thousands of Jews from all over the world.
The occupation police decided to close many streets and roads, and some central parking lots in the occupied city, from 6:45 am until 1:30 pm on Friday, under the pretext of securing the course of the Judaizing marathon.
The "Jerusalem Marathon" coincides with the influx of thousands of Palestinians and Jerusalemites to Jerusalem, to perform Friday prayers at the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, which impedes their access to the Old City, as a result of the closure of the streets.
The occupation municipality exploits the name of sports and culture to pass a Talmudic narrative and Biblical terms and names instead of Arabic-Islamic terms, in addition to erasing the Arab identity and diluting the Palestinian culture.
Yes, the "artificial Talmudic narrative" that Jerusalem has always been the center of Jewish life.
I was in Jerusalem five years ago when the marathon was held. I didn't watch it, but forget taking a taxi or driving anywhere - all the major streets were closed, inconveniencing Jews as well as Arabs. I chose to walk to the Old City from my hotel, and had no problems walking - which is how most Arabs go to Al Aqsa anyway.
Palestinian and other anti-Zionist articles all start from the premise that Zionist Jews are terrible people, and everything flows from there.
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For much of the Israeli right, and especially for the intellectuals of the Israeli right, the Supreme Court issue has been a foremost concern for 25 years. And appropriately so. Thus it stood to reason that “judicial reform” legislation that reasserts Knesset primacy—which, in a counterpoint to the American system, features an “override” clause that would allow parliament to overturn a Supreme Court decision—would be taken up immediately.
But they made the mistake most advocates and activists make when it comes to matters of long standing that have consumed them, which is, they found it hard to see what their efforts would look like from the outside to people who haven’t been anywhere near as focused.
For one thing, the courts in general are a particularly sensitive issue at this moment because the newly returned prime minister is under indictment. As it happens, I think the cases brought against Netanyahu are garbage, but that doesn’t matter. If Knesset primacy is achieved, that would allow the new government to push through legislation postponing the cases against Netanyahu until he is out of office. And so, any efforts by the government to argue against the street protests against judicial reform seem compromised by a severe conflict of interest.
Second, while the Knesset should (in my view) have this primacy—at least until Israel hunkers down and actually writes itself a functional constitution—the legislation now moving through the parliament is strictly majoritarian. By which I mean, it would take only 61 votes to overturn a court ruling.
From the moment the street protests began, everyone I know who is sympathetic to the right’s view was saying the solution to the crisis would be to announce a change in the “override” proposal to require some kind of supermajority that would at least be greater than the 64 seats currently held by the coalition. That would focus the minds and limit the arrogance of the Supreme Court when it came to their taste for overreach. And it would keep the Knesset from acting as though anything it does is legal by default—since pretty much any piece of legislation that passes even by a single vote could be upheld by the same voting pattern if brought up a second time after a Court overturn.
The unanswerable question is whether a redrafting of the law to feature some kind of supermajority in the early days of the protests would have quieted the street action. I can see arguments on both sides. But it’s certainly the case that the judicial reforms as they are (at this writing) constituted have kept the government on the back foot and on the defensive, which just makes the protesters taste the blood of their enemies in the water and only encourages them to continue.
So that’s my explanation for what’s been going on in Israel. I have no idea where this goes now, so don’t ask me. Though you probably will.
Aharon Barak’s “everything is justiciable” philosophy transformed Israel’s judicial system in the 1990s. Barak created rules of law that have no counterpart in most if not all of the democratic world. For example, judges in Israel cannot be removed by the legislature, only by other judges and any government action declared unreasonable by the Court is considered illegal.
Such unrestrained judicial activism is largely based on the judges’ best judgment and internal moral compass but not necessarily on the laws of the land. That results in almost unlimited judicial authority and ambiguity where clarity is crucial.
The court’s lack of clarity is coupled with a lack of consistency. For example, in May 1999, when the right-wing government in Israel decided to close the Orient House (the PLO’s headquarters in Jerusalem), an urgent petition was filed and Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner decided that the step was unreasonable because general elections were only months away. And yet, five days before the 2022 general elections, after an urgent petition was filed against an agreement, signed by a left-wing government, yielding areas of what were claimed to be Israel’s territorial waters to Lebanon and the control of Hezbollah, the Supreme Court led by Ester Hayut decided that was reasonable.
An overriding principle of the proposed reform is that laws drafted by the legislators (i.e. the Knesset) can be interpreted by the courts but not drafted by them and that national policy should be determined by the Knesset, as the representatives of the people.
There is little hope for conciliation with reckless politicians and former generals who call for civil war and blood in the streets. There should be no negotiation with those who want to burn down the house. But there is plenty of room for candid compromise with concerned Israeli citizens who have hope and still see “Hatikva” as our national anthem.
Regardless of how the current crisis began, it is important to realize we are, indeed, in a crisis. If managed appropriately, it will enhance the probability for agreeable and effective change.
An agreement is within reach. One amendment to the proposed reform that can relieve concerns is that Supreme Court judges appointed by the new judicial appointment committee will not hear old criminal cases, including the one being heard against the prime minister for the past three years. These cases will be heard by currently sitting Supreme Court judges.
Change is critical and compromise is possible. The people, by means of their elected representatives in the Knesset, can and should work it out now. Let’s agree on how to enhance the proposed legal reform and not how to postpone or cancel it.
Think tank behind Israel's judicial overhaul calls for compromise
Israeli judicial reform bill passes first major hurdle despite massive protests
On Tuesday's "Wake Up America," Israel's controversial judicial reform bill has passed its first major hurdle despite massive protests. Supporters of the bill state that it shifts power back to the democratically elected Knesset. NEWSMAX's Daniel Cohen reports.
One highly effective doomsday weapon deployed by the opposition to the Israeli government’s proposed judicial reforms is the threat of removing large sums of money from Israel. This self-inflicted form of BDS has been orchestrated in large by what came to be known as Mecha’at HaHitechistim, or the High Tech Workers Resistance, who argued that the reforms, if passed, will make Israel’s economy too volatile to merit robust investments in the “startup nation.” The self-fulfilling nature of this prophecy is part of what has made it so effective: As threats to pull money out of Israel destabilize the economy, critics of the reforms can rightly argue that the economy is being destabilized and get more foreign economists and tech investors to express their fears of economic destabilization, which in turn creates an even more negative economic climate, which hits ordinary Israelis in the wallet for voting the wrong way.
Naturally enough, where high tech resisters saw their threats as saving democracy, critics saw them as rich people who were holding the government hostage by threatening to bankrupt the country unless the anti-reformist demands were met. Both sides traded heated accusations. Now, because Israel’s greatest natural resource is irony, comes a new twist on the tale, one that begins, again naturally enough, with a question: Where did the money go?
Many of the Hitechistim who heeded the call to boycott Israel took their shekels offshore. According to reports, at least 50 Israeli startups moved at least $4 billion out of the country since the protests began. Some of that money went into Silicon Valley Bank, which collapsed last week.
Polls can offer valuable insights on public sentiment. But when
pollsters ask leading questions, there are no insights. The public sees only
what they were directed to see: poll results that exactly mirror the bias of
the poll’s designer. Take for example, a recent poll on judicial reform
conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute
(IDI), the subject of a Jerusalem Post report: “Two-thirds
of Israelis oppose Netanyahu government's judicial reform – poll.”
When the piece came out on February 21, I thought, “Oh,
sure,” snorted and went on to read something else. Because I knew it was a
bunch of crap. There’s no way that many Israelis oppose judicial reform.
Israelis voted for the current government because they want judicial reform. We don’t want the court to have the ability
to strike down legislation that reflects the will of the people. It’s
undemocratic. It’s overreach.
Despite my skepticism, not two weeks later, I was prompted
to revisit that Jerusalem Post
report. My token left-leaning friend had posted a photo of himself on social
media getting ready to leave for a judicial reform protest. He was smiling and
holding an Israeli flag. I glanced through the comments to get a feel for the
pulse of this small group of virtual friends. What points were they arguing?
How many were for and how many against? That interested me far more than my
left-leaning friend’s joy in joining the “revolution.”
I found that just as in the recent election, my friend’s
friends were, by far, in favor of judicial reform. I did note one dissenting
voice: that of a writing colleague from my early Times of Israel blogging days. She very politely asserted that most
Israelis are opposed to judicial reform, and cited the Jerusalem Post report.
That’s when I went to take a closer look. Not because I was looking
for a reason to discredit the JPost piece,
but because I became curious about the poll itself: there had to be something
wrong with that poll. Because Israelis had voted forjudicial reform.
The problem, if the first two paragraphs of the report are
anything to go on, appears to be leading language. This definition of leading
questions is as good as any other:
Leading questions are survey questions that encourage or
guide the respondent towards a desired answer. They are often framed in a
particular way to elicit responses that confirm preconceived notions, and are
favorable to the surveyor – even though this may ultimately sway or tamper with
the survey data.
Here’s that first part of the JPost piece (emphasis added):
66% of Israelis agree that Israel’s High Court of Justice should be able to strike down laws that
are contrary to the nation’s Basic Laws, a survey carried out by IDI’s
Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research found.
Furthermore, the survey found that 63% agree that the current system requiring concurrence between MKs and justices for
judicial appointments is appropriate.
The language is quite clearly culled from the IDI report on
the poll, which begins very much the same (emphasis added):
66% of Israelis: Supreme Court should have power to strike down laws that are incompatible with Israel’s
Basic Laws | On Judicial Selection Committee: 63% Support Current Principle Requiring Agreement between Politicians and
Justices.
In both cases, there’s an implied threat to the language—if we
don’t stop judicial reform, the High Court will lose its ability to curb the
rash, illegal actions of the rogue Netanyahu/Smotrich/Ben Gvir government. This,
the respondent is given to understand, would be bad, even disastrous.
More leading language from the IDI poll, here and below.
Well, most people are nice, and they want to please the nice
poll people. So they say what they think the pollsters want to hear—even if
they voted for and still believe in judicial reform. People like to comply. And
that is the purpose of leading language and leading questions. Someone (or even
a great many someones) are led to say something, but that something may or may
not be true.
In a letter to Politico
in 2007, the late MK Dick Leonard related the following anecdote:
On a famous occasion in 1970s, when Britain was about to
join the European Economic Community (EEC), a survey by a leading polling
organisation used a split sample, one half of the respondents being asked the
following question: “France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg
approved their membership of the EEC by a vote of their national parliaments.
Do you think Britain should do the same?”
The other half were asked: “Ireland, Denmark and Norway are
voting in a referendum to decide whether to join the EEC. Do you think Britain
should do the same?”
Each half of the sample produced an overwhelming yes vote.
It is because of this example that reputable polls long ago ceased to use
leading questions and that is why I doubt the validity of the poll conducted on
behalf of O’Brien’s organisation.
It’s a dirty and cowardly trick: the pollster elicits the
desired answer with the specific intent of generating false numbers to be sensationalized
in the news and in the bowels of social media. It’s not even about swaying
those who sit on the fence, undecided.
It’s disinformation. And it’s born of exploiting people’s
niceness; their desire to be kind, to accommodate, whenever possible, their
fellow human beings.
Some people, of course, are swayed into changing course or
becoming apologetic when the issue snowballs out of control. Those people
would include, for example, Noa
Tishby, and Miriam
Adelson.
In reality, however, it doesn’t change a thing. Judicial
reform was a key issue during the election campaign, and the final tally reflects
the current will and voice of the people, vox
populi. Israel voted for a right-wing government, and they want right-wing
policy. They don’t want to be overruled by the side that LOST.
The side that the people did not vote for.
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Elder of Ziyon
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