Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 20, 2023

Palestinian joy at dead Jews

Usually you see Palestinians handing out sweets after terror attacks in Gaza. But on Saturday, they handed them out in Tulkarem in the West Bank, at the news of the murder of a father and son at a car wash in Huwarra.

Palestinians bragged that they mounted 169 terror attacks in Huwarra alone this year.

32 Israelis have been murdered so far this year, nearly all of them civilian. And Palestinians couldn't be happier about it, making infographics to show off how great they are at murdering innocent people.

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08/19 Links: The Left’s cowardly anti-Semitism hides behind criticism of Israel; This black, gay civil rights leader defended Israel; Two Israelis killed in Huwara terror shooting

From Ian:

This black, gay civil rights leader defended Israel. Do you know his name?

August 26 will be the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Civil rights groups have organized a march to mark the historic march. This important gathering in Washington, DC will come at a time when many of the civil rights gains in the years following the original march are being challenged and undermined.

For the Jewish community and its organizations, many of whom are participating in the 2023 march, it presents an opportunity to remember the importance of the 1963 event, to remember the Jewish role at that time, to recognize the great progress that has been made in the intervening years, and to acknowledge that there still is much work to be done. It also is an opportunity to strengthen relations between the Black and Jewish communities, the history of which has been both glorious and complicated.

At the same time, it is also an opportunity for the community to remember an individual who was a behind-the-scenes organizer of the original march, who for many years did not get the credit he deserved for his role and who was a great supporter of a Jewish democratic state in Israel.

I am referring to Bayard Rustin, an important civil rights leader whose work to advance racial justice dates all the way back to the 1940s when he worked with A. Phillip Randolph to organize an early demonstration for civil rights.

Rustin played the key role in conceiving and coordinating the 1963 event. He was, however, generally omitted from receiving credit because, at a time when the Stonewall Riots were still six years in the future, his open homosexuality was perceived as too controversial when Black leadership was struggling to gain acceptance in broader America.

It was only years later, when the movements for civil rights and LGBTQ+ rights had made great strides in America, that Rustin was given credit for his role.

This recognition was a product of the changes in America that came out of the original march. So, it was only fitting that the organizer should particularly reap the benefits, however delayed, of what he had conceived.

At the same time, Bayard Rustin was one of the great supporters of the Jewish community, which was heavily involved in the 1963 march and is likewise fully participating in this summer’s anniversary march. In 1975, a year that saw the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations, Rustin, who was an outspoken advocate against apartheid in South Africa, created BASIC, the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. Also joining him in that effort were other important African American leaders, like Randolph and Roy Wilkins, the former head of the NAACP.

Jonathan Tobin: The problem isn’t Bradley Cooper’s nose

Genuine antisemitic imagery
There are clear and obvious cases where big noses on Jews are intended as more than a caricature and to conjure stereotypes of evil, money-grubbing villains. We don’t have to go back to the Nazis to find them either. They are a staple of antisemitic attacks on Israel that are commonplace in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as on the intersectional left.

Many examples of this can be found in the cartoons of Eli Valley, a Jew who is a bitter enemy of the Jewish state and uses Der Sturmer-style images to bolster his disgraceful cause. Some leftist Jews, like the anti-Zionist columnist Peter Beinart, claim that Valley’s big-nosed Jewish images are a justified use of artistic license to portray the sins of the Jewish state and its American supporters. Sensible persons don’t merely reject that specious reasoning but understand that the cause that Valley and Beinart seek to advance not only aims to deprive Jews of their rights but also to render them defenseless in the face of the genocidal aims of Israel’s anti-Zionist foes.

Any caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli soldier or a stereotypical Orthodox Jew employed as part of an argument to besmirch Israel and the Jews must be assumed to have antisemitic intent. The same can be said of such imagery when it is applied to other Jews in the context of political controversies, even those, like George Soros. The leftist billionaire deserves criticism for his efforts that arguably do more harm to the United States and the world than any other living person. But those arguments should never be framed or drawn in a way that makes it about his Jewish origins.

Those examples have nothing to do with a movie about the man who wrote “West Side Story,” who was one of the great conductors of the 20th century and, via television, became America’s musical educator-in-chief. He was also a great supporter of Israel.

When the film was announced, it was assumed that any associated controversy would concern its portrayal of Bernstein’s affairs with men while married to his wife Felice. His disastrous dabbling in political activism, which Tom Wolfe immortalized in an essay about the dinner party Bernstein threw for the Black Panthers domestic terrorist group was also ripe for comment. That essay introduced the term “radical chic” into the modern lexicon. But instead, we are trapped in a pointless argument about a prosthetic nose that sheds no light on the real dangers that Jews face.

From the trailer, one might argue that Cooper’s cinematic nose seems closer to that of Cyrano de Bergerac (thankfully, Edmund Rostand’s great romantic play has no Jews in it) than Lenny Bernstein. But those who paint with such a broad brush, as Simons and others who agree with him do, stretch the term antisemitism to include actions that were not intended as hatred, and would not have been interpreted by anyone in that way had not the accusation been made.

The danger of false accusations
Ours is a time of rising global antisemitism and mainstreaming Jew-hatred by anti-Zionists and advocates of fashionable leftist toxic ideas, such as critical race theory and intersectionality that brand Jews and Israel as “white” oppressors. There are more than enough examples of actual antisemitism. No one needs to invent them.

Those who can reasonably claim to represent Jewish interests but are eager for the publicity and screen time on news shows that making such accusations will bring them need to understand the consequences of their decisions.

Why should people believe them when they speak out against real antisemitism if the general public is more liable to be exposed to the subject by coverage of fake controversies, like the one about Cooper’s nose? Can we blame those who dismiss the subject entirely if it is brought to their attention when some supposedly credible authority is crying antisemitism against what is obviously a flattering portrayal of a famous Jew like Bernstein?

At this point, the debate about “Jewface” and the Bernstein movie has crossed over from routine slow news cycle foolishness to something that is actually dangerous. The voices driving the Bernstein movie kerfuffle need to understand the unintended consequences of their empty but attention-getting arguments. Those who are undermining the case against actual antisemitism by crying “wolf” over a nose are doing far more damage to the security of Jews than any good they might intend.

The Left’s cowardly anti-Semitism hides behind criticism of Israel

As Jake Wallis Simons’s timely Israelophobia reveals, the Left’s obsession with Israel is simply the oldest hatred under a new name

In the 75 years since Israel’s creation, the Jewish state has made the unwelcome transformation from once having been lionised by the Left as a beacon of social democracy to being demonised as the epitome of racist oppression.

One of the more shameful illustrations of how far Israel’s status has fallen in the standing of British academia occurred in the summer of 2021 when the Israeli ambassador to the UK was abused by a baying mob at the London School of Economics where she had been invited to speak. But then what should we expect when universities worldwide have, since 2005, marked Israeli Apartheid Week, with Jewish students being intimidated by activists staging anti-Israeli rallies and setting up mock checkpoints outside libraries.

Nor, as Jake Wallis Simons notes in his new book, Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred & What to Do About It, is the demonisation of Israel confined to the academic world. At a time when the news agenda is dominated by conflicts across the globe, from Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine to the civil war in Yemen, it is invariably Israel that attracts the major proportion of criticism from human rights activists and Left-leaning media groups over its long-running conflict with the Palestinians.

In 2022, for example, Simons reveals that when tens of thousands of Ukrainians perished in the conflict with Russia and the Yemeni violence claimed 3,000 lives, it was the deaths of 180 Palestinians that attracted the most comment from the so-called neutral human rights activists at Amnesty International.

If you defend liberal democratic values and are bewildered by the number of people, often on the left, who get into bed with jihadists, authoritarians and demagogues, my new book #Israelophobia is for you. Pre-order it! https://t.co/UoY6KWDL1O
— Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) August 19, 2023

08/18 Links Pt2: We Should Be Thanking Bradley Cooper and Helen Mirren for Playing Legendary Jews; Princeton must stop promoting antisemitic blood libels

From Ian:

In the Tradition of William F. Buckley, the Conservative Movement Must Drive Out Its Anti-Semites

Considering the dangerous anti-Semitic trends that have recently emerged from certain dark corners of the American right, Natan Ehrenreich looks to the precedent set by William F. Buckley, the founding editor of National Review who, more than anyone, created U.S. conservatism in its present form. Buckley, in his long career, more than once anathematized conservative writers—including those with whom he had close personal and professional relationships—who developed unhealthy fixations on the Jews. Ehrenreich hopes contemporary rightwing leaders will learn from his example:

I was taken aback by the recently leaked messages from the conservative influencer and [former fellow at the prestigious rightwing thinktank] the Claremont Institute, Pedro Gonzalez. That Gonzalez was an ardent anti-Semite was not that surprising; he has publicly tweeted about “Rothschild physiognomy.” But the sheer hatred displayed toward Jews, especially from someone who dwells in lofty intellectual circles, is nothing less than astounding.

A few samples: “Yeah like not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are.” [Of the alt-right Holocaust denier and social-media personality Nick Fuentes]: “Fuentes does one good thing when he trolls Jews: He shows people how subversive they can be.”

What’s most pertinent to our moment, though, is the fact that today’s popular conservatism has shifted closer to the “paleoconservatism,” [an analogue to neoconservatism], that Buckley thought relatively more likely to produce anti-Semites than the popular conservatism of the 90s. As he notes in [his In Search of Anti-Semitism], the great Irving Kristol predicted this shift, and he was far less confident that Buckley’s crusade against conservative Jew-hatred was complete.

History, it seems, has proved Kristol right (though it would, of course, be a terrible mistake to label most paleoconservatives as inherently anti-Semitic). . . . It is becoming rather obvious that if modern conservatism is to thrive, the work Buckley began must persist as well. Conservative leaders can look to In Search of Anti-Semitism for inspiration that such work can succeed, but also to see why it is necessary.

We Should Be Thanking Bradley Cooper and Helen Mirren for Playing Legendary Jews

Right on cue, the Jewish Whiner Brigade has jumped on Bradley Cooper for his use of a prosthetic nose in his depiction of legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in the upcoming movie, “Maestro.”

Curiously, these serial kvetchers have hardly uttered a word about another non-Jew, Helen Mirren, who also had her nose accentuated in her depiction of Golda Meir in “Golda.” Maybe they saw or heard about Mirren’s extraordinary performance and decided it would be petty or shameful to attack her for playing a Jewish legend with such brio.

In any case, the whiners attacking Bradley are not waiting for the film to come out. They’ve seen his face and that’s enough.

“Hollywood cast Bradley Cooper — a non Jew — to play Jewish legend Leonard Bernstein and stuck a disgusting exaggerated ‘Jew nose’ on him,” the activist group StopAntisemitism said on X, in one of many examples of Jews lashing out at Cooper on social media.

Writing for The Independent, Noah Berlatsky criticized Cooper’s decision and said that using prosthetics “effectively turns Jewish people into their physical characteristics. It makes us caricatures.”

Some critics couldn’t even accept the endorsement of Cooper from Bernstein’s three children, who issued this statement on Instagram: “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that.”

“They may be ‘fine’ with that—but that’s part of the problem,” Malina Saval shot back in Newsweek. “Whatever their reasons for being ‘fine’ with it—internalized shame, self-hatred—their support of prosthetic noses sends a dangerous signal that spinning Jewish characters into caricatures is socially acceptable.”

Notwithstanding her unseemly speculation about the children’s motives, even if we grant some truth to that “dangerous signal,” Saval and other chronic critics have once again overlooked that spinning American Jews into a paranoid, thin-skinned, insecure bunch of scolds brings its own dangers.

For one thing, it reinforces the dangerous antisemitic stereotype of powerful Jews who love to throw their weight around any time something upsets them.

08/18 Links Pt1: Israel Won’t Benefit from a Palestinian Civil War; UNRWA halts services in Lebanon camp to protest Palestinian gunmen on site

From Ian:

Israel Won’t Benefit from a Palestinian Civil War

Last month, the magazine Foreign Policy published a profile of Hussein al-Sheikh, currently the secretary-general of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and one of several politicians vying to succeed the aging Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas. Hussain Abdul-Hussain takes a closer look at Sheikh, noting his unpopularity among Palestinians, and examines the looming succession struggle more closely:

If Sheikh wants to become the PA chairman, he’ll likely have to fend off challenges from stronger and more popular contenders. His competitors, like Sheikh himself, are non-Islamists who have cooperated well with Western and Israeli authorities. While these men should work together to reform the PA and crack down on violent militants and Islamists, it’s doubtful that any of them would settle for anything less than becoming the undisputed PA chief.

When Abbas dies, other armed Palestinian factions—such as Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—could smell blood and try to wrestle territory from the hands of the warring PA strongmen. If Hamas, the PIJ, or both, manage to displace the PA, the West Bank could be turned into another Gaza Strip. But the West Bank has a higher elevation than Gaza, giving Hamas, the PIJ, and ultimately their sponsor, Tehran, a better view of Israel and its strategic and sensitive spots.

Some might imagine that Israel will watch with glee as Abbas’s successors tear themselves apart. But a civil war carries huge risks for Israel and the region, and increases the chances of an Islamist takeover of the West Bank. If that were to happen, Israel might find itself back in pre-Oslo days, suspending Palestinian self-government until Palestinians can figure out how to produce an authority that can run their affairs without threatening Israel’s security.

Stop Blaming Israel for the Weaponization of Children by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad

Recently the UN Secretary General’s annual report on “Children and Armed Conflict” (CAAC) was released, covering January to December 2022. The report’s noble goal of “engagement with parties responsible for violations that might lead to behavioral change, including promotion of accountability and compliance with child protection provisions in peace processes” is one the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) would fully embrace had the UN’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Virginia Gamba, ensured that the “verified grave violations” she included in the section titled “Israel and the State of Palestine” reflected the full, factual facts on the ground.

The key phrase throughout the report is “parties responsible.” Acknowledging who are the actual responsible parties for grave violations against Palestinian and Israeli children is essential in order for all concerned to grow up in a region that respects their rights as children. Prime among these is a child’s right to be protected from violence.

While the CAAC refers to the “State of Palestine,” Special Representative Gamba does not name the Palestinian Authority, instead calling out only Palestinian Islamic Jihad and unnamed “Palestinian armed groups”:

“I am deeply concerned by the increase in the killing and maiming of children by Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades.

“I call upon all Palestinian armed groups to cease indiscriminate launching of rockets and mortars from densely populated areas in Gaza towards Israeli civilian population centers.

“I urge all Palestinian armed groups to protect children, including by preventing them from being exposed to the risk of violence and by abstaining from instrumentalizing them for political purposes.

“I reiterate my call upon armed groups to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children and to abide by their domestic and international legal obligations.”

Welcome words. But then she adds this Orwellian plea :“I exhort Palestinian armed groups to better protect schools.”

Better protect? Somehow lost in translation was UNRWA’s own condemnation of Hamas for hiding terror tunnels and weapons under its school in Gaza in December 2022.

UNRWA halts services in Lebanon camp to protest Palestinian gunmen on site

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said it has decided to suspend all of its services in Lebanon’s largest refugee camp on Friday in protest against the presence of gunmen in its facilities.

UNRWA’s decision went into effect shortly before noon Friday at the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp near the southern port city of Sidon. Services will resume Saturday, UNRWA said.

Days of street battles took place in the camp between the Fatah group of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and two Islamic terror groups, Jund al-Sham and Shabab al-Muslim. The clashes broke out on July 30, after Fatah accused its rivals of shooting dead a senior Fatah military official.

The fighting killed at least 13 people, injured dozens, and caused millions of dollars of damage in the camp, according to UNRWA officials.

Lebanese security forces don’t operate inside the refugee camps, where security is in the hands of Palestinian factions who often compete for clout.

UNRWA said in its statement Friday that armed fighters are still present in its facilities, including schools. It added that UNRWA reiterates its call on armed actors to immediately vacate its facilities, “to ensure unimpeded delivery of much-needed assistance to refugees.”

UNRWA said it “does not tolerate actions that breach the inviolability and neutrality of its installations.” It added that schools are unlikely to be available for 3,200 children at the start of the new school year given repeated violations and significant damage reported.

Ein el-Hilweh is home to more than 50,000 people and is the largest of 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Today, Palestinian Authority prime minister Mohamed Shtayyeh called on the International Criminal Court to find the soldiers who killed Mustafa al-Kastouni this morning and hold them accountable.

He's making it sound like Kastouni was an innocent civilian bystander, just minding his own business.

Yet at the same time, Al Jazeera issued an obituary of al-Kastouni, saying that he has been a "fighter since childhood" and says explicitly that he had a weapon and was engaging in battle when he was killed.

It also says he has been throwing firebombs at Israeli soldiers since he was a child.

I don't think even the ICC would find Israel guilty of shooting an armed man who was shooting at them as they attempted to arrest his brother.

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UNRWA is angry. But they won't say who they are angry with.

UNRWA received alarming reports that armed actors continue to occupy its installations including a school compound in Ein El Hilweh Palestine refugee camp in the south of Lebanon. UNRWA facilities have reportedly been damaged by the recent fighting in the camp.

The compound has four UNRWA schools that normally provide education to 3,200 Palestine Refugee children.

This is a grave violation of the inviolability of UN premises under international law, which compromises the neutrality of UNRWA installations and undermines the safety and security of our staff and Palestine Refugees.

So who are these "armed actors"? And why doesn't UNRWA name names?

It sounds like it is both the Fatah side and the Islamists who are violating UNRWA schools.

AP reports:

A local Palestinian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said militants from both of the opposing sides had taken over different schools, using them as a “safe haven,” and had looted computers and equipment.

When they don't have Jews around to attack, Palestinians attack each other.

Let's give them a state!

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

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Read all about it here!

08/17 Links Pt2: The lessons of Europe’s red-green antisemitic surge; Use the Law to Combat Campus Anti-Semitism; Gadi Taub: Israel’s Elites Revolt Against Democracy

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Can it happen here? The lessons of Europe’s red-green antisemitic surge

One shortcoming of the report is its tendency to downplay half of the problem on the European left. The power of left-wing antisemitism stems from the coming together of two disparate factions—left-wing intellectuals, artists and political activists and Muslim immigrants to Western Europe, who brought their antisemitism and intolerance for Jews and Israel to their new homes.

It isn’t surprising that the ADL wouldn’t want to make that community the face of antisemitism in Europe, and all such immigrants are not Jew haters. But the growth of the Muslim population in these countries parallels the recent antisemitism surge. The parties of the left that tend to accept a narrative about white racism and Muslim victimhood are natural allies of Islamists when it comes to Israel, even though they are diametrically opposed on social issues.

Woke politics and antisemitism
Even more problematic is the report’s final section, which seeks to alert Americans to what happened in Europe and to ensure that does not repeat in the United States.

Some of the ADL’s recommendations are merely anodyne expressions of concern. But its call to block antisemitism online is problematic given it is wedded to the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech and social media companies to censor conservatives and criticism of their policies. That makes it difficult to view any effort on the group’s part to impact online activity as anything but inherently partisan.

Equally problematic is the report’s emphasis on Holocaust education. It is important that people understand the truth about the Holocaust. But the growth of U.S. Holocaust education programs in the last generation hasn’t had the desired impact. Most of the programs seek to universalize the Holocaust or to claim that ordinary prejudice leads inevitably to death camps. This not only robs the Shoah of its uniqueness but also misunderstands the political nature of antisemitism. Moreover, the ubiquity of talk about the Holocaust is more responsible for the proliferation of inappropriate Holocaust analogies on both the left and the right than any amelioration of antisemitic attitudes.

It has become merely a metaphor for anything people don’t like.

But the main problem with the ADL’s recommendations is its failure to point out that the roots of left-wing antisemitism are to be found not just in Palestinian propaganda but in the fashionable ideologies of the left that groups like the ADL endorse routinely.

Just pointing out the antisemitic statements of the left-wing congressional Squad members like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) or the way that protests against Israel during its fighting with Hamas in May 2021 transitioned into violence against Jews isn’t enough. If you condemn that behavior but approve of intersectionality—which falsely analogizes the Palestinian war on the planet’s one Jewish state to the struggle for civil rights in the United States and the antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement from which it sprung—then you don’t understand what is driving the growth of Jew hatred on the left.

If you think critical race theory, which treats Jews as “white” oppressors and Israel as a manifestation of imperialism, you are aiding the antisemites.

And if you accept the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as necessary for all businesses and even the government to adopt, then you reject equality and embrace racial quotas that will inevitably hurt Jews.

Unfortunately, these are mistakes that the ADL has made and continues to make. Its recognition that antisemitism can come from the left as well as the right is a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough. American liberals and their institutions, like the ADL, will remain part of the problem and not the solution until and unless they understand that left-wing Jew hatred traces back to these toxic myths and ideas, as well as open attacks on Israel and Zionism.

Five reasons Jews should worry about Jack Lew as ambassador to Israel - ZOA

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a right-wing Jewish organization, expressed reservations on Wednesday regarding the potential nomination of Jack Lew as the US Ambassador to Israel, highlighting several concerns.

Lew, a former US treasury secretary is the leading candidate to be the new US ambassador to Israel and could be nominated in the coming weeks, the Axios media organization reported on Sunday, citing three people familiar with the matter.

Axios said there was a sense of urgency about US President Joe Biden's choice for the post because the White House was pushing for a diplomatic mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that could include a normalization agreement between the Saudis and Israel.

Lew, 67, is one of the few Orthodox Jews to have served in the US cabinet. He speaks Hebrew, has relatives in Israel, and is an active member of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx, in New York City.

1. Lew's track record on policies:
During his tenure as Chief of Staff, Lew drew criticism from the ZOA, which labeled the administration as “the most hostile-to-Israel US president ever.” They emphasized his support for the UN Security Council Resolution 2334, asserting it “labeled Judaism’s holiest places... as 'occupied Arab land'.”

2. Contention over UNSC resolution 2334:
While many viewed this resolution as echoing US policies, the ZOA interpreted it differently. Their stance was bolstered by the Congressional condemnation through H. Res. 11. They believed Lew, given his influential position, ought to have been more vocal in his opposition.

Gadi Taub: Israel’s Elites Revolt Against Democracy

In his New York Times opinion piece titled “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun,” Thomas Friedman wrote that he likes to say of his job that he is “a translator from English to English”: He takes complex things and renders them understandable. Israel, he explained, is turning its back on the shared values which have underpinned the friendship between the American superpower and the Jewish state. As Friedman explains it, the judicial reform proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition poses a grave threat to democracy because it would “change the long-established balance of power between the government and the Supreme Court, the only independent check on political power.”

It turns out that translating from English to English may not be the most useful skill when you need to understand something that is happening in Hebrew. Friedman is right that Israel’s democracy is in danger, but Netanyahu’s government is not the source of peril. The real danger comes from the court itself, which is now asserting a made-up “right” to remove a sitting prime minister—that is, to nullify the results of a legal election and eclipse Israel’s democratic politics and institutions through its own self-perpetuating fiat. The protest movement that arose to defend the court’s power (and its backers among the country’s economic and military elite) are together attempting to block the redemocratization of Israeli politics, as the reforms intended to do.

This is not some innovative hypothesis. If you read Hebrew, you can hear some protesters and their backers in the country’s establishments announcing their intentions more or less explicitly: Democracy is the very thing they are out to prevent. The movement’s ideologues are longtime staunch opponents of the democratic form of government who have devoted whole academic careers to opposing it; their political leaders in parliament and outside it use the term “democracy” in a deliberately deceptive way, as they sometimes admit; and their street-level ringleaders more or less openly confess disdain for the mass of enfranchised citizens. Most poignantly, when it comes to the rebelling IDF reservists—virtually all of them from elite unites, mostly in the air force—they don’t even bother with lip service to the idea of majoritarian decision-making. Rather, they express open contempt for the majority of Israel’s citizens, peppered with thinly veiled references to ethnicity, religiosity, and class.

At least some of this unabashed condescension must be fairly obvious, even to foreigners—especially those like Friedman who claim to be in touch with Israeli opinion. At around the time that Friedman wrote his piece, it seemed like a military coup against Israel’s democracy was in the making. News stories accumulated about more and more reservists declaring they wouldn’t report to duty unless the reform was shelved. Speculation about Israel’s battle readiness, or lack thereof, filled the news cycle. For the most part the media framed the issue as a story about heroic reservist martyrs determined to fight “the battle for democracy” rather than calling it what it was: a bunch of officers threatening to jeopardize Israel’s security if the parliamentary majority did not yield to their demands. As the title of one Haaretz piece read: “A Military Coup Is Underway in Israel—and It’s Completely Justified.”

Some writers were not content with cheering on the rebelling reservists. Sima Kadmon, a senior political pundit for the popular daily Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote a full-page piece on the paper’s prestigious page 3, calling on the brass to take command of the situation. The title said “Only They Can Make Him Stop” (July 19, 2023). The piece called on the IDF chief of staff, the head of Mossad, the chief of the National Police and the head of Shabak (Israel’s General Security Service) to walk into the prime minister’s office and tell him “Enough!” thereby forcing him to overturn his cabinet’s policy. In normal language, we don’t call that “democracy.” We call it a military coup.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The remnants of a Second Temple era synagogue have been uncovered in Russia, according to a Tuesday archaeological news release.

The remains of a synagogue from the time of the Second Temple were discovered in the ancient Grecian city of Phanagoria, located in what is today Southwestern Russia between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

The finding marks the discovery of one of the world’s oldest synagogues and, according to analysis of fragments found at the site, it likely stood for over half a millennium after being constructed around the beginning of the first century BCE.

Among the findings were the remains of several menorahs that were clearly depicting the menorah in the Temple.

There has been somewhat of a controversy in Jewish circles about whether the Temple menorah had rounded or straight branches. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, apparently based on a drawing by Maimonides, had insisted that the menorah had diagonal straight branches.

But there are numerous examples of depictions of the menorah that date from when the Temple existed, or shortly thereafter, and are - as far as I can tell - consistent in showing the menorah with rounded branches.

This Hasmonean coin dates from Second Temple times:

The Magdala Stone, discovered in a synagogue built while the Temple was still there, also makes no mistake as to its shape:

And, of course, the most famous depiction is in the Arch of Titus, celebrating the looting of the Temple.

Now this new discovery adds even more proof that the Temple menorah had rounded branches, based on artwork of people who lived while the Temple existed.

The earliest (possible) menorah I can find with straight branches comes from a piece of pottery discovered on the Temple Mount from Byzantine times, hundreds of years after the destruction:

With all due respect to Maimonides' picture and the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the overwhelming evidence is that the menorah had rounded branches.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Wait, Is It 'Israel = The Nazis' Or 'Nazis Didn't Do The Holocaust'? (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Wait, Is It 'Israel = The Nazis' Or 'Nazis Didn't Do The Holocaust'?

by Owen Fairchild, Jeremy Corbyn acolyte

London, August 17 - We anti-Zionists who are definitely not antisemites often face a dilemma when formulating our rhetoric regarding Israel's treatment of Palestinians: when we invoke the Third Reich and its treatment of Jews, we want everyone to view today's Zionist Jews as turning into the Third Reich, but that means conceding the comprehensive, historic evil of the Reich's genocidal machine - which in turn contradicts the insistence prevalent in our circles - and widespread in Palestinian society - that the Reich perpetrated a genocide against Jews, because any acknowledgement of Jewish suffering clouds the picture we wish to paint of absolute Jewish perfidy and evil, contrasted with absolute Palestinian innocence and virtue. You see the dilemma.

Allowing that Jews might deserve protection from Nazis opens the way toward allowing that a Jewish State, where Jews can protect themselves and not rely on the whims of host cultures to do so, might have justification. We cannot allow that, because it implies sympathy for Jews and the implication that Jews have rights - Jewish rights necessarily contradict Palestinian rights. To further that point we must portray Jews and Nazis as congruent, which in turn allows that the Nazis were the greatest evil known to history, but that, problematically, concedes that the Nazis did what the Jews claim the Nazis did to the Jews, and that automatically establishes that Jew suffered and need protection.

To put it another way, Holocaust denial, which enjoys a robust adherence in both pro-Jeremy and pro-Palestine circles (yes, the Venn diagram of those two groups would be a circle within a circle), softens the impact of the "Israelis are the new Nazis" charge, because if the Nazis didn't systematically kill all those Jews, then why were the Nazis so bad, or at least, why are they any worse than any other conquering or totalitarian force?

Unfortunately, we try to have it both ways; fortunately, the sympathetic Western media elite seldom call us out on the inconsistency. We have been fortunate enough to have them carry the two parts of our message, which more more less amounts to "The Nazis didn't do to the Jews what the Jews accuse them of doing, but we very much wish they had and are looking for any pretext to accomplish that in the Nazis' stead."

I know that putting it in those terms sounds wrong somehow, but we can count on our friends in politics, journalism, commentary, and the "human rights" community to phrase it more palatable, even virtuous, terms, à la "From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free."

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

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08/17 Links Pt1: The Ransom Payment to Iran Is the Tip of the Biden Administration’s Appeasement Iceberg; Glick: The Israeli Left's New 'Blood Libel' of "Jewish Terrorism"

From Ian:

Clifford D May: Israel’s Long, Hot Summer

So, Israelis face intensifying threats on multiple fronts. What are they doing in response? Quarreling among themselves.

Not since the summer of 2005, when then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw every Israeli soldier, farmer, synagogue and cemetery from Gaza—testing the proposition that ceding land would bring peace—have Israelis been as disunited.

Today’s debate is over “judicial reform,” an attempt by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition—which includes far-right parties—to change how the justices on Israel’s Supreme Court are selected and to limit the power of those justices to strike down both legislation and policies passed by the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral parliament.

More broadly, most Israelis support majority rule but not majoritarianism, and want strong checks and balances as well as a separation of powers. But they vehemently disagree on how to achieve those goals.

Why haven’t Israelis tackled such issues over the 75 years since Israel’s founding? For one, they’ve been busy fighting wars against neighbors committed to their extermination.

For another, they’ve been building a free and prosperous nation-state, one in which Israel’s minority communities, Arab, Muslim, Christian, Druze and others, are guaranteed rights available nowhere else in the region—not to minorities and not even to majorities.

Also: Israel is a diverse nation. Secular Jews, religious Jews and ultra-religious Jews do not see eye-to-eye-to-eye. There are significant cultural differences between Jews from families that spent centuries in Europe before fleeing and Jews from families that spent centuries in Muslim lands before being expelled.

There are other Israeli tribes: Jews whose families somehow remained in the Holy Land despite the empires that came, conquered, enslaved and slaughtered. And there are Israel’s non-Jewish minorities, as noted above.

Mix that with the ideological differences among Israel’s many political parties and the personal feuds among Israeli politicians and you have an exceptionally combustible cocktail.

Israel’s internal discord no doubt pleases and encourages Israel’s enemies. A report released last week by FDD’s Joe Truzman cites evidence that Hezbollah is now making a “comprehensive effort to disrupt Israel’s northern border region.”

The Ransom Payment to Iran Is the Tip of the Biden Administration’s Appeasement Iceberg

To Richard Goldberg, Washington’s decision to release $6 billion in frozen funds to Tehran in exchange for the freeing of five Americans being held illegally will give the ayatollahs more money to spend on weapons and terrorism while encouraging hostage-taking by Russia, China, and other bad actors. Worse still, Goldberg writes, it is only part of a larger strategic mistake:

After more than two years of policy failure—offering Iran massive sanctions relief to return to the 2015 nuclear deal while allowing Tehran to enrich more uranium to higher levels than ever before—the Biden administration faced an increasingly likely prospect that Iran would become a recognized nuclear-threshold regime on its watch by producing weapons-grade uranium. The White House faced a choice: establish a credible military threat to deter Iran from further nuclear escalation and restore a maximalist sanctions approach, or offer to pay Tehran’s price to postpone a crisis for eighteen months. President Biden chose the latter.

In early May, Biden’s Middle East czar passed messages to Ayatollah [Ali Khamenei] through Oman, suggesting both sides agree to a temporary period of de-escalation wherein the U.S. would loosen its grip on Iran’s economy and Iran would hold off on enriching uranium to weapons-grade purity. The arrangement would not be labeled a “deal,” since a “deal” would need to be submitted to Congress for review—and possible rejection. Instead, Washington would open all relief valves it could find without triggering a 2015 law that gives Congress the right to veto such an arrangement.

To access all that and more, all Iran must do is not enrich uranium to a higher level and give the appearance of slowing its production of highly enriched uranium—even though the 60-percent-enriched uranium it produces every day is already 99 percent of the way to weapons-grade. The deal is exactly what Iran wants: maintain the stockpile and technical capacity rapidly to produce weapons-grade uranium until its advanced centrifuges are perfected and its new underground facility completed. When that day comes, the game is over and Khamenei wins.

Richard Goldberg [WSJ]: Iran's Nukes Are a Thorn for Saudi-Israeli Peace

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly made a joint U.S.-Saudi nuclear-enrichment program a top condition for a peace deal with Israel. This is untenable. The U.S. can't discount the potential for a future Saudi leader to use an industrial-scale enrichment infrastructure to produce fissile material as part of a nuclear weapons program. Once Saudi Arabia builds an enrichment program, Turkey and Egypt will want one too. A race to enrich throughout one of the world's most dangerous and unstable regions is a national-security recipe for disaster.

But when any American tells a Saudi official that the U.S. can't support enrichment on Saudi soil, an obvious question comes back quickly: You're saying you can support an enrichment program in Iran, which is trying to kill Americans every day, but you can't support an enrichment program in Saudi Arabia, a close strategic partner? After all, the 2015 nuclear deal and subsequent negotiations have all but normalized illicit Iranian nuclear activity.

The results of a policy that legitimizes enrichment on Iranian soil are on full display. Iran has raced over the past two years to produce enough near-weapons-grade enriched uranium to produce several nuclear bombs in a matter of weeks.

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica explains how Zionism "is the lineal heir" to the age-old Jewish attachment to Israel

From Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition:

ZIONISM. One of the most interesting results of the anti. Semitic agitation has been a strong revival of the national spirit among the Jews in a political form. To this movement the name Zionism has been given. In the same way that anti-Semitism differs from the Jew-hatred of the early and middle ages, Zionism differs from previous manifestation of the Jewish national spirit. It was originally advocated as an expedient without Messianic impulses, and its methods and proposals have remained almost harshly modern. Nonetheless it is the lineal heir of the attachment to Zion which led the Babylonian exiles under Zerubbabel to rebuild the Temple, arid which flamed up in the heroic struggle of the Maccabees against Antiochus Epiphanes. Without this national spirit it could, indeed, never have assumed its present formidable proportions. The idea that it is a set-back of Jewish history. in the sense that it is an unnatural galvanization of hopes long since abandoned for a spiritual and cosmopolitan conception of the mission of Israel, is a controversial fiction. The consciousness of a spiritual mission exists side by side with the national idea. The great bulk of the Jewish people have throughout their history remained faithful to the dream of a restoration of their national home in Judea. Its manifestations have suffered temporary modifications under the influence of changing political conditions, and the intensity with which it has been held by individual Jews has varied according to their social circumstances, but in the main the idea has been passionately clung to.

It is not a bad article, but as with many such articles in the early 20th century, the author simply thought it was impossible, and he gave many reasons to be confident in his analysis:

Remember, today's experts are no more competent in predicting the future (and in fact probably far less competent) than the author of this article. He thought he could see the trajectory of history clearly and Israel had no part in it.

That doesn't take away from his analysis of how Zionism is simply a new manifestation of and ancient desire of Jews.

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!

Professor Boštjan M. Zupančič is a former judge and former president of the Third Chamber at the European Court of Human Rights. He was previously a judge at the Constitutional Court of Slovenia and vice-chair of the U.N. Committee against Torture (Geneva). He graduated from Harvard Law School and now acts as a legal consultant. In 2020,Zupančič joined the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) as an associate research fellow.

He is also a Jew-hater.

Zupančič's hate isn't subtle. He doesn't hide it behind "anti-Zionism." He doesn't insist that he doesn't hate Jews. His hatred is explicit and continuous.

His former Twitter account, bmz9453, had plenty of antisemitic posts. It was closed down but his replacement account is filled with anti-Jewish tweets - even quoting antisemitic sites like The Daily Stormer and the Holocaust revisionists at the Institute of Historical Review.

Here is a selection of his tweets for just the past few months, often direct quotes from antisemitic websites like Unz.com:

He posted a 37 minute film that accuses Jews of systematically engaging in incest with their children.

Since the Ukraine war started, Zupančič has obsessively blamed the Jews for their supposed role in the war.

And he reposts the most vile antisemitic conspiracy theories he can find every day - here are two from yesterday:

Today's leaders of human rights groups insist that they cannot be antisemitic because their fighting for human rights precludes any prejudice. The truth is that no one is immune from bigoted beliefs, and any philosophy can be twisted into Jew-hatred.

Boštjan M. Zupančič was a human rights judge for 18 years. It hasn't stopped hum from openly engaging in spreading hate for Jews every single day. On the contrary - his biography gives his hatred legitimacy.

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 Amnesty International:

The Israeli authorities should release Walid Daqqah, a terminally ill Palestinian prisoner, so he can access specialist medical care and spend his remaining time with his family, Amnesty International said today. Walid Daqqah, 62, suffers from chronic lung disease and bone marrow cancer, and the clinic at Israel’s Ayalon Prison is ill-equipped to deal with his conditions. Following his cancer diagnosis last year, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) denied Walid Daqqah access to a potentially life-saving bone marrow transplant by refusing to transfer him to a civilian hospital.

Amnesty doesn't even hint at his crime until paragraph 13, and even then downplays it:

Walid Daqqah, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was arrested in March 1986. A year later, a military court convicted him of commanding a group affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984. He was not convicted of carrying out the murder himself, but of ordering other members of the group to kill Moshe Tamam.

Amnesty doesn't mention that Tamam was brutally tortured, disfigured, and sexually mutilated by the terror cell led by Daqqa.

Why should their readers know about that? The only torture they mention are Daqqa's own false allegations of being tortured by Israel.

When Daqqa was up for parole, the special committee ruled that his medical condition was not reason enough to violate Israeli anti-terror legislation that forbids early release for prisoners convicted of terrorist acts.

Amnesty didn't mention that either.

It does everything it can to humanize a disgusting murderer while demonizing the country that is attempting to carry out justice for his victim. Any information that shows what a monster Daqqa is, or why his parole was denied, is simply not to be reported.

Not coincidentally, as Daqqa is a member of the PFLP, the PFLP and its associated NGOs have been heavily campaigning to free Daqqa, and Amnesty is quite friendly with many PFLP officials in other "human rights" NGOs.

There is one delicious irony here, though. Daqqa was supposed to be released earlier this year, but two years were added onto his sentence because he smuggled cell phones into prison.

Which means that the likelihood of his dying in prison is his own damn fault.

UPDATE (4/9/24): The mutilation accusation seems to be a rumor.

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!

08/16 Links Pt2: The West’s Long Demonization of Israel; Palestine and the Holocaust: What If?; More Unicorns Founded by TAU Graduates than Oxford

From Ian:

The West’s Long Demonization of Israel

The Western media’s reporting on Israel has been equally unfair, if not malevolent. For example, the corporate media regularly report casualty figures from Israeli defensive operations to stop terrorist violence against their civilians. The coverage always suggests that a “disproportionate” number of Palestinian Arabs have died compared to Israeli casualties––with the implication that the latter are needlessly callous and brutal with no regard for Arab lives, while ignoring the difficult conditions of fighting terrorists who willfully target civilians and sacrifice their own people as human shields

But as Alan Dershowitz explained in his 2003 The Case for Israel, the media rarely discriminate between combatant and non-combatant deaths. Reporting on the Second Intifada in September 2000, the media said that through the end of November, 2497 Palestinians had died compared to 874 Israelis. But according to a statistical analysis by the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism (www.ict.org.il), 911 Palestinian non-combatants had died compared to 679 Israeli: that is, 27% of Palestinian deaths were non-combatants, whereas 77% of Israeli dead were.

Equally preposterous is the specious excuse that Arab terrorist violence is an understandable reaction to the creation of Israel and its alleged subsequent “ethnic cleansing” of “Palestinians” from their “homeland.” Dershowitz surveys the history of Arab assaults and terrorism against Jews decades before Israel existed––including the massacre of 60 Jewish women, children, and other unarmed civilians in Hebron in 1929; and the chronic cross-border raids that murdered thousands of Jews before 1948, to name just a few. Such violence has continued down to the present, committed by terrorist armed not just with bombs, cars, knives, and guns, but with multiple thousands of missiles.

Dershowitz rightly concludes that even taking into account the rare Jewish terrorist attacks, the conflict is remarkable not for Israeli callous indifference to civilian casualties, but for its restraint in the face of a century of attacks on its people by those willing to hide in ambulances, use mosques for armories, sacrifice their own families, indoctrinate their children in Jew-hatred, and dress up as women in order to kill Jews. Indeed, the specious charge of “genocide” regularly made against Israel more accurately describes the incessant, publicly sanctioned, and celebrated attempts to destroy the Israelis.

A typical example of Israeli restraint is its incursion into Jenin in April 2002 after hundreds of suicide bombings. As Dershowitz points out, Israel did not bomb from the air, thereby killing civilians along with combatants. Rather, infantrymen entered the city on foot, searching house by house for terrorists and bomb-making factories. The cost? Fifty-two Palestinians, many of them combatants, were killed, while 23 Israeli soldiers died––a tally that could have been reduced to zero if Israel had simply bombed from the air, as the Allies did in World War II.

Yet the head of the United Nations Relief Agency at the time, Peter Hansen, a long-time shill for terrorists, characterized this restraint that led to those 23 dead as a “human rights catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history.” To this day, the “Jenin massacre” is a staple of Palestinian propaganda like the “documentary” Jenin, Jenin.

The fact is, as Dershowitz shows in his discussion of the remarkable restrictions Israeli forces operate under, no other nation in history before the post-9/11 wars against terrorism has fought against vicious murderers while operating under similar self-imposed restraints. Yet this willingness to risk its own people to reduce non-combatant deaths is ignored, or worse, in Orwellian Newspeak transformed into “massacres” and “genocide.”

For Biden, like his former boss Barack Obama, along with anti-Semitic members of Congress, to demonize with lies our critical ally is a stain on this country’s honor. It took the “racist” and “fascist” Donald Trump to push back against this sorry tradition of Israel-bashing. He cut off funding to the United Nations Relief Works Agency, a long-time apologist for terrorist violence, and a UN hotbed of anti-Americanism. He moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognized the strategically critical Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory, and brokered peace-deals between Israel and several Arab states. The Biden administration undid much of this progress, and the result has been the worst violence in decades.

Palestine and the Holocaust: What If?

In 1903 — 120 years ago, and well before the Nazis existed — a devastating pogrom took place in Kishenev (today Chişinău, Moldava) over two days, during Easter. The pogrom, sparked by the antisemitic libel accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes, resulted in 49 Jewish deaths, hundreds injured, and hundreds of women raped. This was not the first nor the last of the pogroms. But it was one of the first of the 20th century, it received worldwide publicity, and it led to the emigration of thousands of Russian Jews, including 40,000 that went to Palestine.

In 1936, as a result of violence between Palestinian Jews and Arabs, instigated by the Arab leadership to force the curtailment of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the British government created the Peel Commission. The Commission’s report, a 400 page document available online, is a remarkably detailed analysis of the situation in Palestine at that time.

In 1936, the population of Palestine consisted of 400,000 Jews and 900,000 Arabs. The Commission judged that the gulf between the two populations was too wide to bridge, and recommended that Palestine be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish state, constituting only 17 percent of Palestine, would include a coastal strip from Rehovot and Tel Aviv northwards, as well as the Galilee. The Arab state would make up 75 percent of the total; the remaining 8 percent, mainly Jerusalem and surrounding areas, would continue to be governed by Britain.

Prior to World War I, the Near East was under the thumb of the Ottoman Turks and there were no independent Arab states. The Turkish defeat by the British liberated about one million square miles of Arab land. The Peel partition plan would have allocated about 0.2 % to the Jews.

But this was too much for the Arabs in Palestine. They rejected the proposed partition outright. The Arab leadership boycotted the Commission’s deliberations, although they did participate in the final sessions. The partition plan was discussed and debated at the 20th World Zionist Congress and reluctantly accepted. According to “A History of Zionism,” 1972, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion argued in favor of accepting the plan, with reservations.

But the British were not willing force the Palestinian Arabs to acquiesce, and the Peel Commission Partition Plan was quietly shelved. Britain imposed a severe limit on Jewish immigration at a time of greatest Jewish desperation

How many Jewish lives might have been saved if a small Jewish state existed in 1937? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Would such an influx have had a negative effect on the Arab demographic in Palestine as a whole?

This would have been the right thing to do. Instead, Palestinian opposition to a small Jewish state likely helped ensure that countless Jews could not escape the horrors of the Holocaust.

Is The Foreign Press Too Easy On Israel?

Bibi And The “Easy” Foreign Press
Since coming back to power on December 29, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given 22 interviews to the foreign press and only four to Israeli media outlets, including the English language Jerusalem Post.

The explanation given by his media adviser Topaz Luk is “The American media lets you speak. You start a sentence and finish it.”

Netanyahu’s critics, on the other hand, accuse him of speaking to the foreign press to bypass the Israeli media.

“By giving interviews about domestic issues overseas, Netanyahu can often get away with inaccuracies, and sometimes even alternative facts, Haaretz diplomatic reporter Jonathan Lis wrote.

In a podcast last week, former Netanyahu spokesman Aviv Bushinsky said “It’s the easiest for Netanyahu in foreign media because they don’t ask tough questions.”

Veteran Yediot Aharonot diplomatic correspondent Itamar Eichner went further, writing that “[Netanyahu’s] interviews on international outlets allow him to avoid hard questions primarily because the interviewers often lack knowledge of Israeli law and familiarity with recent events, and they have little interest in questions about matters critical to Israelis such as the rising cost of living.”

HonestReporting stays out of politics. We don’t defend or justify policies or decisions of the current Israeli government – or any government. Not even its media strategy.

But our expertise with coverage of Israel by the foreign media enables us to analyze those claims with perspective.

So Is The Foreign Media Making It Easy On Bibi?
Most of the international journalists who’ve interviewed the prime minister are knowledgeable about Israel and cannot be manipulated. He gave interviews to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper, NBC’s Raf Sanchez and Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua, none of whom made it easy on him.

Netanyahu was also interviewed by Fox’s Mark Levin, who praised him and Israel throughout the interview, mocked the prime minister’s critics and was not tough at all. Why Does It Matter?

Perception matters. Nowhere is that more true than for Israel and Israeli leaders. When the foreign press so often spins a narrative about Israel that is blatantly dishonest, its leaders should be allowed to respond by making Israel’s case.

The foreign press is far from easy on Israel, and that is why the media monitoring of HonestReporting is so critical for Israel’s future.

So long as events in Israel continue to have an outsized impact on international media, the world’s top journalists should be engaging with and holding those Israeli leaders accountable. And, HonestReporting will be there every step of the way to hold the international media accountable.