Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 07, 2023

This week's EoZ cartoons

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This week's EoZ memes and posters

Cartoons in next post....

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07/07 Links Pt1: The story of Jenin: From beacon of peace to terrorism epicenter; The Jenin Operation Showed That Israel Preserves Life; IDF soldier killed by terrorist while preventing attack

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The malevolent reporting on Israel’s Jenin operation

That’s why the demonization of the Jewish people pumped out by the P.A. is resolutely ignored. That’s why the Palestinian aim to destroy Israel is denied. As the anchor of a BBC TV politics show said to me when I appeared on it this week, such things were just “propaganda” of the kind pumped out by “both sides.”

This skewing of the entire narrative is more momentous than most people realize.

The word “Nazi” has become so badly misused to demonize any opponent of the left that it’s been robbed of much of its actual meaning. But in the case of the Middle East, it’s not a vacuous insult. It’s no exaggeration to view the Arab and Muslim war against Israel as a posthumous Nazi front.

In recent years, a group of scholars has been steadily uncovering the depth of the alliance between the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine and the Nazi leadership.

The German political scientist Matthias Kuentzel has argued that the Nazi Party intended to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.

Now Kuentzel writes in the journal Fathom that his new book, Nazism, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East, sets out what’s known about the pamphlet Islam and Judaism, which was first published in 1937 by the director of the Palestinian-Arab Bureau of Information in Cairo. The author is believed to have had many contacts with Nazi agents. During the Second World War, his pamphlet was printed and distributed in large numbers by German forces.

Kuentzel describes it as a shocking text that uses religion to incite Jew-hatred. He writes, “It contradicts the widespread assumption that Islamic antisemitism developed as a response to alleged Israeli misdeeds. It was not the behavior of the Zionists that prompted the publication of this hostile text, but rather the very first attempt to implement a two-state solution for Palestine. This fact suggests that Jew-hatred was a cause, not a consequence of the crises in the Middle East conflict.”

Anyone looking at today’s Palestinian propaganda can identify its Nazi heritage of images and tropes. That’s because the Palestinian cause is a latter-day version of the Nazi onslaught against the Jews.

In the West, this does more than merely conflict with the narrative about the Middle East promoted by the BBC, The New York Times and the liberal intelligentsia. The West doesn’t want to hear about the Holocaust. It doesn’t want to hear about antisemitism. It tells itself the Jews exaggerate them for their own ends.

This is why the truth about the Palestinian war of extermination is never acknowledged. This is why the Iranian pincer movement against Israel is never reported.

It’s because much of the West believes what antisemites have always told themselves: That the Jews are responsible for their own destruction. That terrible thinking is what we’ve heard amplified once again in this week’s reporting of the events in Jenin.

‘Shameful, far-fetched, completely detached from reality,’ Erdan says of UN head’s Jenin comments

Two days after Israel completed a counter-terrorism operation in Jenin—during which it seized bombs, guns and hundreds of thousands of shekels in terror funds—António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, blamed the Jewish state solely for using excessive force.

The U.N. leader was “deeply disturbed” by the operation, he said on Thursday at a press briefing at U.N. headquarters in New York City.

“Israel’s airstrikes and ground operations in a crowded refugee camp” were the worst violence in the area in years, “with a significant impact on civilians, including more than 100 injured and thousands forced to flee,” he added.

Guterres called on Israel “to abide by its obligations under international law, including the duty to exercise restraint and use only proportional force, and the duty to minimize damage and injury and respect and preserve human life.”

The airstrikes were “inconsistent with the conduct of law enforcement operations,” according to Guterres, who blamed Israel for disrupting utility services and for blocking access to medical care—both charges that Israeli officials vehemently deny.

When a reporter asked whether the criticism applied only to Israel or to the Palestinians as well, Guterres replied: “It applies to all use of excessive force, and obviously, in this situation, there was an excessive force used by Israeli forces.” He ignored a question about whether Israel had committed war crimes in Jenin.

‘Are the lives of Israeli civilians not important?’

The U.N. head’s remarks were “shameful, far-fetched and completely detached from reality,” said Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.

Jenin civilians fled their homes because Palestinian terrorists had seized them, and terrorist elements were using schools, hospitals and mosques as weapons caches and operational centers, Erdan said.

Richard Kemp: The fact that the IDF killed no civilians in Jenin is a marvel

The IDF defensive operation in Jenin — the most intensive military action in the West Bank since 2002 — has concluded after 48 hours of fighting without any civilian deaths. That is a remarkable achievement unparalleled in any comparable campaign worldwide. Twelve Palestinians were killed, at least eight of whom have been claimed as fighters by the terrorist groups involved.

In most high-intensity operations in urban areas, even those conducted by Western armies who adhere strictly to the laws of war, more civilians than fighters are killed, sometimes in a ratio of 3-5 to one. This is of course not deliberate but an unavoidable consequence of fighting an enemy among the population who themselves dress as civilians, occupy civilian buildings such as mosques, schools and hospitals as bases of attack, and use innocent civilians as human shields.

Israel’s enemies in Gaza and the West Bank go further still, using tactics that deliberately try to lure the IDF to kill their own citizens. You might wonder why any force that sets itself up as protectors of its people would do that. It is because they know they can never defeat or severely damage the IDF on the battlefield, and they can rely unfailingly on journalists, academics, international bodies and activists to blame Israel for these deaths, leading to vilification, condemnation and isolation.

This tactic was used in Jenin and as a consequence around 100 people were wounded, some of whom were civilians. Despite close surveillance, strict rules of engagement, extensive training in preventing civilian casualties and tight battle discipline, it would have been impossible in these circumstances to completely avoid any uninvolved civilians getting hit. To understand that you just have to put yourself in the boots of a young Israeli soldier in a fast moving and chaotic situation with explosives and gunmen potentially around every corner, bullets maybe with your name on scything through the air and every step you take liable to set off a lethal booby trap. Don’t forget, operating on their own turf, the terrorists had plenty of time to prepare the ground for the incursion they knew would come sooner or later.

YNet reports that the IDF, for the first time, used tiny suicide drones in Jenin to neutralize some of the terrorists and destroy command centers.

For the first time ever, the IDF has dispatched the cutting-edge SPIKE FireFly suicide drone in an operational capacity during this week’s large-scale counterterrorism offensive in the West Bank city and refugee camp of Jenin.

The elite Duvdevan and Maglan units deployed six of these loitering munitions, manufactured by Defense giant Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., which carry a small amount of explosives to target terrorist targets around the Jenin refugee camp, including command centers that housed dozens of explosive charges.

The mini-kamikaze drones managed to destroy the targets from afar, thus minimizing risk to troops. The IDF considers the weapon system’s first baptism of fire a remarkable success and examines its future use for targeted assassinations of terrorists.

According to the arms manufacturer, the weapon, which is known in the IDF as MAOZ, “was designed for the dismounted soldier fighting within the urban arena where situation awareness is limited, the enemy is behind cover, and precision is critical.”

FireFly drones hover silently around alleys or inside buildings. They can be operated autonomously and explode precisely and lethally on the target without endangering soldiers.

The video by Rafael explains it better:

Israel haters love to say that Israel field tests weapons against Palestinians. But when the weapon is designed to minimize collateral damage, and also to minimize the danger to troops, what exactly is wrong with that? If the alternative is a massive bombing from the air, isn't this better?

The objection is simply to invoke an antisemitic trope of greedy Jews stopping at nothing to sell their deadly wares. Any army would do its own extensive testing of any new weapon and not buy them simply because Israel had already used it (and indeed, the US Army tested the Firefly last year, and the British army is also interested.)

Israeli defense contractors build weapons with the primary purpose of minimizing damage to civilian objects while being just as deadly to the terrorists. Anyone who cares about human rights should be applauding weapons like this.

But Israel's critics don't care about human rights.

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!

In my last post, I noted that UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk was upset that the Jenin raid on terror infrastructure earlier this week went beyond "law enforcement," which he (falsely) claimed is all Israel is allowed to do to combat militants under international law.

This morning, Israeli police from the Yamam counter-terrorism unit tried law enforcement in Nablus. Al Jazeera, which cannot be accused of pro-Israel bias, reported the operation this way:

Two Palestinian youth have been killed after Israeli forces raided the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, officials said.

The raid took place early Friday morning, with some locals describing it as an “invasion”, and resulted in the deaths of Hamza Maqbool and Khairi Shaheen, according to Al Jazeera correspondent Alan Fisher.

Israeli forces raided the city in search of the two men, one confirmed to be affiliated with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, said Fisher, reporting from the Occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

The men were tracked down to a house in old Nablus. Israeli forces then used loudspeakers to ask the men to surrender themselves, Fisher said.

They were met with the return of improvised explosive devices, which prompted the Israeli army to call for more reinforcements, he added.

“It appears there was some sort of confrontation between the two men in the house and the Israeli army, and the two men in the house were shot dead,” he said.

The men were suspected of carrying out a shooting attack against police this week, according to Israel’s military.

Israeli police cordoned off the area to avoid any danger to civilians. It called on them to surrender. They responded with throwing explosives. Only then did the Israeli forces respond with deadly force.

Here's what Al Jazeera didn't report:

The men attempted a drive-by shooting of Israeli police on Wednesday.

תיעוד הירי. אותרו פגיעות בחנות ובניידת משטרה pic.twitter.com/1gt9MJyjok
— Carmel Dangor כרמל דנגור (@carmeldangor) July 5, 2023

The men were not "youth" but members of Fatah's Al Aqsa Brigades, Hamza Moqbel (34) and Khairy Shaheen (32.)

Terror groups celebrated them as heroic martyr fighters.

And other militants in Nablus attacked the Israeli forces during the operation.

But that is not the narrative that the Palestinian Authority wants the world to know.

Their official English-language news agency Wafa made up a story that these men, heroic fighters in Arabic, were trying to surrender when they were brutally murdered:

Israeli military units forced their way into the Old Town and cordoned off a house amid the heavy firing of live fire while demanding two youths to surrender. Israeli soldiers opened fire heavily and directly at the youths the second they came out and agreed to surrender, fatally shooting them. They were identified as Hamza Maqbool, 32, and Khairi Shaheen, 34.

The more you research the details of Israel's counterterrorism operations, the more you see how careful they are to not only adhere to the law, but also to go out of their way to minimize civilian harm when often confronting heavily armed terrorists.

But Palestinian propagandists give a completely different story - and the international media often parrots their lies, despite their long track record of literally making things up.

It is not unbiased to favor one side of the story when that side has a better record of telling the truth than the other. But the media, wanting to paint one side as victims, does the opposite.

Consistently.

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!

From Times of Israel:

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Thursday said Israel used excessive force in the counter-terror operation in Jenin earlier this week and blamed Israel for the violence in the West Bank city.

During a press briefing at UN Headquarters in New York City, Guterres said he had been “deeply disturbed” by news of the Jenin operation and “strongly condemns all acts of violence against civilians.”

Asked if his condemnation applied to both sides of the conflict, Guterres said, “It applies to all use of excessive force and obviously in this situation there was an excessive force used by Israeli forces.”

“Israeli airstrikes and ground operations in a crowded refugee camp were the worst violence in the West Bank in many years, with a significant impact on civilians,” Guterres said, blaming Israel for disruptions to water and electricity services, and blocking people from accessing medical care, a charge that Israel denied.

“I once again call on Israel to abide by its obligations under international law, including the duty to exercise restraint and use only proportional force,” Guterres said. “The use of airstrikes is inconsistent with the conduct of law enforcement operations.”

“I understand Israel’s legitimate concerns with its security but escalation is not the answer,” he added. “It simply bolsters radicalization and leads to a deepening cycle of violence and bloodshed.”

The article goes on to quote other UN officials also claiming that the Jenin operation was excessive and disproportionate.

Guterres is the least anti-Israel UN Secretary General in many decades. But his statement reveals the thinking of much of the Western world, even from Israel's putative allies. When they frame their criticisms in terms of proportionality, they are saying that Israel should simply accept that terrorists will kill Jews every few days, and only use token methods to try to stop them.

Jenin's camp had turned into a locus for terror. The PA didn't do anything to stop that from happening. The Jenin Brigades have been building a Gaza-style military center in the midst of a civilian area - just like Gaza. The longer Israel would wait, the more difficult the inevitable counter-terror operation would become, and the more it would affect civilians.

The IDF managed to destroy critical terror infrastructure, something that could not easily be done with only ground troops. The operation took months to plan and clearly the Israeli intelligence on targeting crucial infrastructure was excellent. The additional force and airpower used reduced the number of casualties compared to what a ground-only operation would have done. And every single Palestinian killed was an armed militant - a valid military target.

In other words, this operation was successful by every metric, including proportionality. And while the IDF cannot stop all "lone wolf" operations, it can stop much bigger attacks that were being planned.

But Guterres and much of the Western world, outside of military analysts, simply do not understand the facts. They don't see that the increased firepower is necessary because of the increased capabilities of the terrorists. And they cling to how they pretend things are, not the reality on the ground.

Which brings up another point from another UN official:

On Tuesday, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk decried the cycle of violence in Israel and the West Bank... Turk said the scale of the Jenin operation, including the use of repeated airstrikes, along with the destruction of property, raised serious issues regarding international human rights norms and standards.

Some of the methods and weapons used “are more generally associated with the conduct of hostilities in armed conflict, rather than law enforcement,” he said.

“The use of airstrikes is inconsistent with rules applicable to the conduct of law enforcement operations. In a context of occupation, the deaths resulting from such airstrikes may also amount to willful killings,” he said.

Turk is saying that as an occupier, Israel is only legally allowed to do "law enforcement" and not treat this as an armed conflict.

He has it exactly backwards. Israel doesn't occupy Jenin - if it did, then the terrorists there would never have been able to build such an extensive infrastructure. Jenin is not under Israeli control, and it is clearly not under Palestinian Authority control - it is under Iranian control by proxy. The terrorists are not "criminals." Criminals don't walk around openly with M-16s.

If Israel would wait longer, Jenin would become another Gaza, and the steps necessary to protect Israeli lives would be much harsher. If these UN officials really cared about human rights, they would want terror groups combatted earlier rather than wait until it is too late.

Israel's actions are the only way to minimize civilian casualties (outside of really re-occupying much of Area A.) People whose very jobs are to uphold human rights should understand these basic facts - and when they are so ignorant of the realities on the ground, they shouldn't say anything until they learn the entire story.

(That being said, Israel once again did not do a good job explaining this operation.)

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!

07/06 Links Pt2: Fear and loathing in Paris unsettles French Jews; A Slaughter of Jews in Ukraine; Helen Mirren to Receive Achievement Award at Jerusalem Film Festival

From Ian:

Fear and loathing in Paris unsettles French Jews

Nobody in Paris can be said to be calm about the biggest explosion of civil unrest in France for 20 years. What began with the shooting by traffic cops of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French-Arab with immigrant parents — one of a shocking 17 drivers shot dead by police in the past 18 months — exploded into five nights of rioting, looting and rage.

Spreading across France, rioters from the underprivileged and racially mixed banlieues — the fringes of the country’s prosperous and elegant cities — torched cars, looted shops and targeted town halls, the homes of mayors and state-owned properties or symbols of all kinds.

The statistics are horrifying: more than 5,000 vehicles burned, 3,400 arrests, 1,000 buildings damaged or looted, 250 police stations or gendarmeries attacked and more than 700 police officers injured.

But French Jews woke from the madness more nervous than most. Not only was the Holocaust Memorial in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, the epicentre of the rioting, defaced by anti-police and anti-government slogans, but Jewish shops were ransacked in the community hub of Sarcelles, an ethnically mixed banlieue itself, also on the edge of Paris. Clips circulating on social media showed graffiti warning “we will make you a Shoah” and recorded cries of “death to the Jews”. The deep seam of banlieue antisemitism, while not central, had indeed reared its head.

“What does it mean for the Jews?” is, in Paris this week, not a comic question. So far, community leaders have been keen to point out that, unlike in the 2014 riots, the properties of Jews caught up in the rioting do not seem to have been targeted simply for being Jewish. Instead, the kosher supermarket and orthodox wig shop in Sarcelles that were devastated were part of wider, indiscriminate mayhem. This was a relief to a community which in 2014 saw multiple synagogues targeted by rioters. But in an indication of pessimistic expectations, this in itself is considered positive news for the Jews.

The real worry is what the unrest means politically. The community fears that this third episode of chaos facing President Macron in less than a year marks a moment when a decisive part of the electorate begins to desert the centre ground. Far-right Marine Le Pen, who has spent a decade trying to “de-demonise” herself and her party, is waiting for them. Earlier this year, a few polls showed that the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen would beat Macron in a rematch. She is now perfectly placed to take advantage of his humiliation. This would be a disaster for French Jews, not simply because it would bring a party with a history of antisemitism to power.

Karma for France: Payback for its crimes against the Jews?

Sarah, my sister, remembers it on-the-spot, first-hand, from the family home in Toulouse, which was supposed to be in the Free Zone, but it wasn’t.
Jews were hunted everywhere.
Sarah remembers the day her best friend Incarnaciion called her a dirty Jew, after Hitler and Vichy came to power.
Jews, she remembers, were taken while walking or driving.
“When Father left the house for work,” Sarah says, “imagine Mother’s state of mind. She didn’t know if he’d be back.”
Uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews never did come back.
The French were willing collaborators.
Sarah, Survivor, mother, grandmother, great grandmother of Religious Zionists thriving in Israel, a creative force in music and literature, a Woman of Valor true to her Biblical namesake, still cringes at the mention of France.
I often ask her, “Don’t you ever have warm feelings for France?”
She saw too much.
“Not at all,” she says.
“But Piaf…Charles Boyer…”
“That’s all wonderful when you are over here, not while you were over there” …as she was.
i ask her about Casablanca, that scene where everybody grows tall and gets goosebumps when the lady sings La Marseillaise.
Doesn’t that do something for her?
“Great movie,” she agrees. “But a movie is a movie…and I only love America and Israel. Sing me those anthems.”
“But.” I persist, “the French were not as brutal as the Germans.”
“Yes, they were.”
Not to get overly religious or mystical, but I must ask, is the misery France suffers today a comeuppance for her sins of the past?
Has her cup of iniquities belatedly overflowed?
Jews out, Muslims in, and this is the result.

France on Trial review: The Case of Marshal Pétain - Jewish saviour or antisemite?

Julian Jackson, British born and Cambridge educated, is a leading historian of 20th-century France, much of his work focusing on the wars and depressions by which France was afflicted and the lives of pivotal figures such as Charles de Gaulle. And now Pétain.

The new book is not a formal biography. Rather, it’s a brilliantly researched and vividly narrated attempt to understand and assess a man alternately among the most admired and most abhorred in modern French history.

And to do this, Jackson invites us to sit in on the trial, starting on July 23, 1945, at which the frail and elderly Maréchal was accused of treason.

The three -week hearing seems to have been a little prosaic, Pétain remaining largely silent as witness after witness attested, predictably enough, to either his treacherous collaboration with the brutal German occupants of France or to what others saw as his invincible desire to do all he could to protect the lives of his fellow countrymen.

Yet Jackson manages to engage the reader, adopting a rich literary style with which to communicate not only the data and opinions expressed but also the atmosphere in and outside the court and something of the personality of a variety of characters, from prime ministers such as the Jewish socialist Léon Blum or the vain and dapper Paul Renaud to writers such as the scruffy, antisemitic Céline or Pétain’s passionate young defence lawyer Jacques Isorni.

Pétain was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, General de Gaulle, President of the Provisional French government, agreed to commute the sentence to life imprisonment and Pétain was incarcerated on a small island off the Brittany coast where he died in 1951, aged 95.

The story doesn’t end there. In a riveting final section Jackson shows how the disputes and debates about Pétain continued ever more passionately after the old man’s death. What is true patriotism? What is treason?

Did Pétain preserve the French Empire, only for de Gaulle to preside over its subsequent dissolution?

More specifically, could — or should — Pétain have done more to protect the Jews in occupied France?

To some degree he had stood up to the Nazis.

In May 1942 he rejected their demand that Jews living under the Vichy regime wear a yellow star and the following year, when the Germans ordered the denaturalisation of all Jews in the “Unoccupied Zone”, Pétain refrained, knowing that this could lead to their mass arrest and deportation.

Was it true, as many asserted, that proportionately fewer Jews living under the Vichy regime were deported and murdered than elsewhere in France?

If so, might this have resulted more from the courageous actions of non-Jews who had bravely tried to protect them than from the policies of the Pétain regime?

Before the trial Pétain had proclaimed that, if no longer able to be his nation’s sword, he sought to be its shield. As Jackson shows convincingly, the debate continues to this day.

On this shameful day in 1938, all countries of the world (except Dominican Republic and Costa Rica), at the Evian conference, refused to accept Jewish refugees from the Nazis. The result was the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews. pic.twitter.com/7wlporOpF2
— Avi Kaner ??????? ??? (@AviKaner) July 6, 2023

The British didn't leave Palestine on May 15, 1948 - but on June 30

The last British soldiers did not leave Palestine until six weeks after Israel declared independence.

The British continues to control Haifa's port until June 30, when they finally left and Israel took over.

And within hours of the withdrawal, Israel introduced its new navy. (London Daily Herald, July 1 1948)

It was so small that United Press put the word "navy" in scare quotes.

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!

Israeli Hospitals Perform Genocide On Arab Bacteria

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Haifa, July 6 - Human rights activists accused the Jewish State today of exterminating indigenous groups, in particular the microfauna that populate the interior of Arab bodies, with the death toll exceeding more than a billion lives per day, the activists allege.

Doctors Without Borders, B'tselem, Human Rights Watch, and several smaller groups made the claims yesterday and today in a coordinated campaign to raise awareness of the day-in, day-out massacres of Arab bacteria and other microorganisms by Israeli health care workers by various brutal means: antibiotics, antiseptics, anti-fungal agents, and external detergent materials such as anti-microbial soaps.

"The daily mass killing can only be described as a genocide," stated Btselem spokesman Aretha Meisin. "The indigenous microbiome of this land, dating all the way back to prehistoric times, faces daily killing on the order of tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions, per week - all at the hand of Israel's 'health care' system, which pursues the extermination of Arab microorganisms at a rate that can only be called ruthless."

"The fact that it's medical personnel," added Human Rights Watch Israel-Palestine specialist Omar Shakir, "makes it all the more heinous. These people assert their supposed supremacy and superiority over vast swaths of biota and condemn them to chemically-induced death, with an efficiency and death toll that would put the Nazis to shame. The Nazis also poisoned their victims in the gas chambers, but they didn't kill nearly as many."

"It's not only in the clinical setting where such cruelty is manifest," observed Doctors Without Borders activist Louis Posterieur. "Israel has a plethora of government-funded facilities constantly pioneering more efficient ways to perpetrate this ongoing genocide. the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with Hadassah Hospital. That's just the most prominent ones. Every hospital in the country has laboratories for determining what substances will do the best job of killing most indigenous Arab microbes in the shortest time - while leaving Jewish bodies, often belonging to illegal settlers, healthy in the end."

The activists also accused major international players of bankrolling and benefiting from the lethal research, and even rewarding it with prestigious prizes and grants. They called on governing bodies of scientific and medical organizations to sanction Israeli institutions and official organs of government, plus whomever else in Israel, just in case, to prevent further genocide.

Some of the activists compared the ongoing genocide to Zionist activities a century ago to drain swampland around the country, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of Arab mosquitoes and of billions of innocent malaria pathogens.

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!

07/06 Links Pt1: Surge in Palestinian terror is a preview of a two-state ‘solution’; The U.S. Failure behind Israel's Jenin Raid; Israeli killed in terrorist attack near Kedumim

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Surge in Palestinian terror is a preview of a two-state ‘solution’

Part of this prejudice against Israel and Jewish rights is rooted in antisemitism. But the point here is that rather than enabling an end to the violence, every Israeli withdrawal or concession—whether the Oslo Accords that led to Jenin being a terror stronghold in 2002 as well as today or the 2005 retreat from Gaza—hasn’t encouraged peace or coexistence. It has merely motivated the Palestinians to hold onto to their fantasies about reversing the history of the region and to believe that they still have a chance to eventually succeed in wearing down Israel.

For all of the mistakes he has made in his first 30 months in office, President Joe Biden hasn’t repeated the same one made by all of his recent predecessors by offering his own Middle East peace plan to make a two-state solution happen. Still, the administration’s retreat from its predecessors’ policies aimed at making Palestinians realize that they have lost their war and must accept reality has contributed to the Arab intransigence that makes the current upsurge in violence inevitable.

In particular, Washington’s recent decision to cease scientific and technological cooperation with Israeli institutions in Judea and Samaria like Ariel University does more to fuel violence than building homes for Jews in the region. This embrace of a BDS-style boycott sends a signal to the groups it labels as terrorists and their supporters that they must continue fighting rather than giving up.

Above all, those who deplore both Israeli and Palestinian actions as equally wrong are ignoring the plain evidence that rather the end the conflict, making Jenin a place where Israeli forces would be as unable to enter in the future as Gaza would simply replicate the same situation as currently exists in the Strip. Rather than gaining support because of Abbas’s failure to create a state, Hamas and PIJ are on the rise because they promise to keep fighting Israel until it is destroyed. Two states do not correlate into peace. It would simply make Israel’s already difficult security dilemma even more dangerous.

This isn’t something most people want to hear. The implacable nature of the Palestinian refusal to accept Israel is rooted in religious and cultural ideas that are alien to most Americans. And accepting that there is no answer to this terrible problem in sight is something that also runs counter to Jewish millenarian and utopian ideals that envision the arc of history always bending towards progress, justice and peace. Confronting a future in which Israel will always have to be on guard against forces seeking to destroy it and in which American Jews are obligated to support their efforts is a similarly unattractive vision.

Backing terrorism and the commitment to keep rejecting Israel among Palestinians that has been on display in the territories is a reminder that the international and American determination to double down on working for two states is actually contributing to the problem, not helping solve it. Perhaps sometime in the distant future, it might be possible to imagine a situation where Palestinians have undergone a sea change in their political culture, and two states won’t be a prescription for more violence. Until then, it’s a pipe dream that does far more harm than good.

Jenin Operation Achieved Most of its Goals, but the IDF Will Be Back

A day after the Israel Defense Forces completed its extensive security operation, it appears the goal of squashing Jenin's image as a terrorist safe haven has been accomplished, with some caveats.

The IDF, backed by Shin Bet intelligence and Border Police officers, seized more than a thousand pieces of armament in Jenin camp and surrounding areas, including bombs, ammunition, and guns.

Fourteen command posts and hideouts used to coordinate terrorist activity were demolished, and six bomb-making facilities were dismantled, where security forces found over 300 bombs, bomb-making chemicals, and other weapons. Hundreds of thousands of shekels in terror funds were confiscated, and six underground shafts and two weapon pits were also found, including in a mosque.

The army killed 12 Palestinian combatants and expected to engage many more, but Jenin's terrorists lost their motivation when they saw the IDF's elite forces, backed by selective drone air power, approach them from multiple directions, and fled.

The U.S. Failure behind Israel's Jenin Raid

America's close ally, Israel, launched the largest military excursion in the West Bank in nearly two decades. And a decades-long, bipartisan United States policy failure is partially to blame.

The operation in Jenin really highlights the failure of the Palestinian Authority, the U.S.-backed entity that was created as part of the 1990s Oslo Peace Process. The PA is tasked with preventing terrorism, and its security forces are trained and armed by the United States, among others, to do just that. Instead of preventing terrorism, however, the PA pays tax-deductible salaries to those who carry out terrorist attacks. The PA has also incentivized terrorism in other ways.

PA Chairman Abbas' iron fist masks a brittle hand. The authority's control of key towns has been slipping. Iranian-backed rivals of Fatah, like Hamas and PIJ, have seen growing support in the West Bank. Iran covets the West Bank, hoping to turn it into another front to launch attacks into Israel.

The U.S. has failed to stave off the PA's growing unpopularity and weakness, declining to pressure the authority to uphold the rule of law. Fixated on a "two-state solution" that Palestinian leaders like Abbas have repeatedly rejected, U.S. policymakers have infantilized Fatah's leadership, failing to push for healthy institutions and a stop to the authority's policy of rewarding terrorism.

In the middle of a Haaretz article on humanitarian issues in Jenin, we see:

Another resident of the camp, who prefers to remain unnamed, refused to leave his home with his family of eight. "We will not leave our home even if it falls on our heads," he said. "Our forefathers left in 1948 and were told to come back after a week, and that week has been 75 years. We will not make the same mistake; our generation is ready to sacrifice for its homeland."

The idea that Arab leaders had instructed the residents to flee so they would be free to enter and quickly defeat the Jews has gone out of fashion in recent decades, as many historians cannot find too much primary source material for it. And even among those who accept that it happened, there is much controversy about how many Arabs may have left at the urging of their leaders.

But here is a Palestinian "refugee" who is not ashamed to say that his own ancestors indeed fled because they were instructed to.

Given that most Palestinians are conditioned to push the narrative of being forcibly evicted even when it is provably false, and the current mindset that it would have been shameful to have voluntarily left their homes, it is significant that a Palestinian admits (without allowing his name to be used) that this was in fact what happened to his family in 1948.

(h/t kweansmom)

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The BBC has weakly apologized for presenter Anjana Gadgil saying, as a fact, that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children” during her interview with former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett.

In a statement, the BBC said, “While this was a legitimate subject to examine in the interview, we apologise that the language used in this line of questioning was not phrased well and was inappropriate.”

But how could Gadgil have even thought that Israelis are such monsters to begin with?

The answer is almost certainly - Haaretz.

A review of news articles from the past 20 years finds that it is very rare for even the most extreme haters of Israel to accuse Israelis of happiness at killing children.

During the 2009 Gaza war, in The Guardian, a resident of Gaza writes in an op-ed, "A short message to the pilots in the Israeli F-16s: does it make you feel happy to kill Palestinian children and women? Do you feel it's your duty? Killing every child and woman, man and teenager in Gaza? I don't know what exactly you feel, what exactly you think, but please think of your mother and sister, your son and daughter." But even for a Gaza resident seeing airstrikes, the idea that Israel wants to kill children was not stated as a flat fact.

A satirical Israeli filmmaker in 2012 prompted children visiting a war museum to say that killing Arabs makes them happy, which the Electronic Intifada promoted as if they don't understand how Borat-style filmmakers can elicit the responses they want from people eager to please an interviewer.

But outside of those contrived cases from years ago, I cannot find even the most biased news source making such a libelous claim that killing children makes Israelis happy.

Until this two months ago.

That's when Haaretz published an op-ed by an execrable person named Yossi Klein who wrote, "Killing children is designed to cause pain, to strike the most sensitive place of all. It isn’t designed to stop terrorism; it’s designed to deter the terrorists and make us happy."

The Haaretz headline that everyone saw, since changed, was "Killing children brings Israelis together."

At the time I argued that this was the most antisemitic article ever published. Hitler never claimed Jews relish killing children. Medieval Christians and later Muslims said that the Jews murder gentile children for religious reasons, not out of sheer pleasure.

Only Haaretz made that claim.

Western news professionals rely heavily on Haaretz to inform themselves of the alleged Israeli zeitgeist. It cannot be a coincidence that Gadgil's libelous accusation comes on the heels of Klein's own blood libel. No one would have dared to say something so outlandishly false unless they felt that it was backed up by facts - and Haaretz gave the antisemites of the world the ammunition they need to go even beyond the classic blood libel accusation.

When the Haaretz article was published, I wrote that Klein's words "will be used by antisemites forever as proof that Jews admit their happiness at murdering Arab children."

That is exactly what happened here.

And it will keep happening - because what would be unthinkable to say out loud gets a kosher stamp of approval when a Jew says it.

(Interestingly, as of this writing, Haaretz has not reported on the BBC interview nor on the apology. Could it be that they do not want people to make this connection between their own libel and that of Anjana Gadgil?)

(h/t Benjamin)

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More indication of how absurd the "apartheid" libel is. From Globes:

According to the Labor Market Report for 2022 released today by the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services, over a decade, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of Arab women acquiring higher education, which has translated into greater participation in the labor market.

In 2020, the report states, a quarter of Arab women aged 30-34 held academic degrees, double the proportion in 2010, when just 13% of Arab women in this age group held degrees. In the 29-31 age group, the proportion of those with degrees reached 27% in 2020.

The figures are in line with those of the Council for Higher Education in Israel, which also show a substantial rise in the number of female Arab students. The proportion of women among Arabs studying for a first degree has remained steady in recent years at about 69%, but the proportion of Arabs in the undergraduate student body as a whole has risen from 16% in 2014 to 20% today, almost the same as their proportion in Israel’s population.

There is a correlation between higher education, participation in the workforce, and level of pay for those in work. People with academic degrees are found to earn more than those without, even after control for variables such as occupation, industry, gender, ethnic group, and location. ...

The general level of participation in the workforce by Arab women, which historically has been very low in comparison with women in other sections of the population, has also risen significantly. According to the Labor Market Report, in 2014, the rate of participation in the workforce by Arab women was just 33%....By 2022, the rate of participation among Arab women jumped to 42%.

This is a direct result from increased investment by the government into the Arab sector, a story that hardly gets any coverage in world media.

Needless to say, this is the diametric opposite of what one would expect to see in an apartheid regime. So you will never read about this in Amnesty or HRW reports, because when their lies are contradicted by facts, they try to bury the facts.

(h/t Yoel)

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Did the PA arrest terrorists on their way to Jenin?

The Safa news agency reports that the Palestinian Authority arrested some would-be jihadists on their way to Jenin Tuesday to attack the IDF:

The Jenin Brigade of the Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine, said on Thursday that the arrest of a number of resistance fighters by the Palestinian Authority security services while they were on their way to repel the aggression on the city of Jenin and its camp was a "disgrace."

The battalion said in a statement, a copy of which was received by the Safa agency, that "it is heartbreaking that the fatal stab comes to us from the back, by our people, by the security services of the authority, which last Tuesday did an act that no fighter and defender of this land would accept."

The statement indicated that the Preventive Security Service arrested the resistance fighters Murad Malaisha and Muhammad Brahmin and assaulted them along with a number of resistance fighters who were on their way to support their brothers in the Jenin battalion.

The Jenin Battalion confirmed that the tension is still present with the continued arrest of Malaisha and Brahmin from the authority's apparatus.

The statement continued, "The political arrest of our mujahideen brothers and sons is a disgrace, and it is shameful that we engage in battles with the occupation and are stabbed in the back."

The Jenin Brigade called on the Fatah leadership and movement to stand up to their responsibility in curbing such actions, pursuing and arresting them.

If this is true, it sounds like the PA publicly says that it ended security cooperation with Israel but privately - perhaps at the behest of the US or UAE, or under threat from Israel - has been trying to do at least a minimum of its official security role.

Many times, things are happening under the radar, and all we analysts can do it take best guesses based on parsing statements and trying to line them up with facts on the ground and news from opposing parties.

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07/05 Links Pt2: When Freedom Began to Ring; UK Parliament Passes Anti-BDS Legislation; A two-state solution for terminally ill France?; ‘Exodus’ immigrant’s diary shows hardships of post-Shoah refugees

From Ian:

When Freedom Began to Ring

In his famous 1790 letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island, George Washington wrote that “the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” These words were not the kind of quid pro quo sometimes offered by European Enlightenment leaders of the time to Jews; it was not an implicit warning that they ought to behave themselves if they wanted to be tolerated.

President Washington, under whose leadership many Jews had fought during the Revolutionary War, was simply recognizing that America only required of its Jews what it required of all its citizens. At the founding, America was already not a Christian nation, and this was in large part because of its Jews.

Everywhere else in the world, prior to the American Revolution, Jews were disfranchised, politically isolated, and vulnerable. Even where they were relatively secure, such as in England, they were not full citizens. In 1775, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, English Jews could not vote, serve on juries, serve in Parliament, be military officers, attend a university, engage in some businesses, become barristers, or practice some other professions. Jewish immigrants had to pay special “alien” taxes forever, because they could not naturalize. And as aliens, immigrant Jews were prohibited from owning real estate or seagoing vessels, and from engaging in colonial or foreign trade.

Things had been somewhat better in England’s North American colonies, where momentum toward full equality built as the Revolution grew nearer, in part because of Jewish support for the patriot cause. In 1765, ten Jewish merchants in New York City, along with nearly two hundred Christian businessmen, signed a non-importation agreement to boycott British goods. Jewish merchants in Philadelphia and Newport, signed similar agreements. Others, most famously Haym Salomon, joined the Sons of Liberty. Gershom Mendes Seixas, the spiritual leader of New York’s Shearith Israel—the first synagogue in what became the United States —actively supported Independence. In 1774, Francis Salvador had won a seat in South Carolina’s Provincial Congress. He was reelected in 1776, thus becoming the first Jewish elected public official in the new United States. He served until he was killed in battle that August.

Most Jews in New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah—where the Revolution was brewing—joined the cause early. In doing so, they staked their claim to political equality as a right, not a set of privileges to be granted.

As they did nowhere in Europe, Jews served as officers in the patriot armies. Mordecai Sheftall, a Savannah businessman, was a full colonel, then the third highest rank in the American army. David Salisbury Franks rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, served as a diplomat to France and Morocco during the war, and later became the assistant cashier of the Bank of the United States. Solomon Bush, whose father had signed a non-importation agreement, ended the war as a Lieutenant Colonel and the deputy adjutant-general of the Pennsylvania militia. His younger brother, Captain Lewis Bush, died in combat. There were no Jewish officers in the British army or among the Hessian mercenaries during the Revolutionary War. (However, Alexander Zuntz, a Hessian civilian commissary, served as the Hazzan of Shearith Israel congregation while the British occupied New York City. Impressed with American religious liberty, he stayed in New York after the war, and eventually became president of the synagogue.)

UK Parliament Passes Anti-BDS Legislation Following Debate Amid Israeli Counter-Terror Op in West Bank

British parliamentarians from all parties have voiced unease over new legislation that would impose fines on public bodies, such as local councils, for initiating boycotts of Israel in support of the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) campaign targeting the Jewish state for economic, political and cultural isolation.

As Israeli forces were in the midst of a counter-terror operation in the West Bank city of Jenin on Monday, members of parliament rounded on the legislation during a debate in the House of Commons. The operation, which wound down on Tuesday night, resulted in the deaths of at least 13 Palestinians, according to Palestinian sources, as well as an IDF officer, Sgt. First Class David Yehuda Yitzhak.

The legislation — formally titled the “Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill” — seeks to ban public bodies including local councils from supporting boycotts targeting foreign governments based on moral or political grounds. Speaking in support of the bill, the Conservative government’s Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, argued that the bill would guarantee that foreign policy remained a UK government matter.

The bill was eventually passed after a Labour Party amendment was defeated, with 268 MPs voting in favor and 70 voting against. A significant number of MPs abstained from the vote, including 80 representatives from the ruling Conservative Party.

Addressing the chamber, Gove said there had been an “increase in antisemitic events following on from the activities of the BDS movement.” He said that although there were “legitimate reasons to criticize the Israeli government”, the BDS movement was asking councils to “treat Israel differently from any other nation on the globe”.

“Nothing in this bill prevents or impedes the loudest of criticisms of Israel’s government and leaders,” Gove added.

"Calls to Boycott Ben & Jerry’s Over Claims US Exists on Stolen Land"

It was just in time for the Fourth of July: Ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s called on the United States to return what it called “stolen land” to its original owners, the Native Americans.

The call by the company, tweeted on America’s Independence Day, stated bluntly, “The United States was founded on stolen indigenous land. This Fourth of July, let’s commit to returning it.”

The company suggested the move begin with Mount Rushmore.

“What is the meaning of Independence Day for those whose land this country stole, those who were murdered and forced with brutal violence on to reservations, those who were pushed from their holy places and denied their freedom.

“The faces on Mount Rushmore are the faces of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and ways of life, to deny Indigenous people their basic rights,” the company declared.

Users on the social media site responded by calling for Ben & Jerry’s to give all of its property and land back to the Native Americans “right now,” with several writers urging the company to return its corporate office to the Abenaki people “who have lived in Vermont for 10,000 years.”

“Lead by example,” wrote another. “What locations are you going to give back to the rightful owners of our land?”

Another urged users on the social media site to “Boycott them till they give back the stolen land.”

“Lucky we Jews are indigenous to Israel,” Israeli historian, media analyst and author Yisrael Medad commented. “I wonder to where you guys will have to move.”

The Ben & Jerry’s factory is located in Waterbury, Vermont. I look forward to the board of directors’ voting to turn their property over to the indigenous people who rightfully own this land. https://t.co/6S2UB3ZwBq https://t.co/ideKNZbjbc pic.twitter.com/518vAVsOaw
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) July 5, 2023

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