Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, January 03, 2024

U of Illinois Excluding Israeli Voices and Platforming Vile Propagandists (guest post)

(Guest post from someone who prefers to remain anonymous)

Various departments and programs within the University of Illinois (UIUC), including Women & Gender in Global Perspectives (WGGP) and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (HGMS), have gone through extreme and sometimes dishonest lengths in order to repeatedly propagate pro Hamas voices from some of the most notorious and vile propagandists, and to avoid allowing any alternative voices, since October 7^th.

Here are some examples:

   On October 27^th, WGGP and HGMS (along with the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) hosted a “Teach-in” panel with Josh Ruebner (who was recently Managing Director of American Muslims for Palestine and the Policy Director for US Campaign for Palestinian Rights), Hasan Ayoub (Al-Najah National University in Nablus/Member of Global Network on Question of Palestine), and anti-Zionist Israeli Ayelet Ben-Yishai (University of Haifa). As will be a running theme, the session consisted strictly of lies, misrepresentations, and double standards geared toward condemnation for Israel.

On November 8^th, Zachary Foster (ubiquitous pro-Hamas historian at unaccredited Academia.edu) led a “Gaza Teach In” sponsored by WGGP. It was entirely a twisted historical backgrounder on Hamas and rationalization for recent and current Hamas activities.

WGGP was approached by locals and staff requesting a balanced panel that offers perspectives from both sides. WGGP agreed to sponsor, in collaboration with HGMS, a panel on December 7th that would consist of Israeli Professor Yifat Bitton and Palestinian activity Hyam Tannous (former Senior Supervisor in Counseling for Women Wage Peace). Promotional material was drawn up (see below) for these two to discuss, but without the knowledge of the panelists or others, WGGP invited 2 additional (and notorious) Palestinian panelists, Susan Abulhawa and Laila El-Haddad, who are both known for supporting terror (Abulhawa has repeatedly celebrated October 7th). The original panelists and those who solicited WGGP for a balanced panel found out about the additional activists only when new promotional material was added. Disappointing as this was, those wanting a voice for Israel were still content to go through in order to have a voice heard. But then Abulhawa sent a letter refusing to participate on a panel with a Zionist. It’s unclear whether El-Haddad was still intending to participate. In any case, instead of following through with the event as planned, WGGP canceled it. When locals objected, WGGP responded to each person with a form letter that stated WGGP and HGMS couldn’t hold the event due to “an incredibly complex series of events which led to one of the panelists canceling.” WGGP then suggested reaching out to Jewish orgs CUJF and Hillel to host an event. Would they suggest Palestinians go to their local Muslim orgs to host an event? Ultimately, they were not willing to allow an Israeli voice unless it was almost entirely drowned out by extreme voices in support of Hamas terror.

·       In addition, a panel event was organized by Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) under the title, “A Panel to understand the historical roots of recent events in Palestine and Israel.” The audience included some pro-Israel students and community members who were hoping for a dialogue. According to a number of attendees, the panel never referenced the October 7^th massacre or the hostages, which apparently were not part of “recent events in Palestine and Israel.” Instead, the following were some key comments:

    Ø  Prof. Augustus Wood (, Labor and Employment Relations, UIUC):
-          “This violence (of Hamas) is not merely strategic in their war for liberation, but also a cleansing of oneself, of anxieties, of the occupation, of exploitation.”
-          “Despite what the propaganda is saying, none of this violence (of the Hamas) is unprovoked.”
-          “The armed resistance (Hamas) should not be referred to in crude inhumane terms such as terrorists.”
-          “The US and Israel began to publicize Hamas’s calls for truce and new borders for a free Palestine as anti Jewish, essentially creating a new weaponized form of antisemitism, to demonize anybody who calls for independence.”
-          “The state of Israel proved their worth, and the US swept in (to Israel) like the vampire it is, to extract as many resources as possible.”
-          “We need to dismantle the oppression, and put the humanity back in the discussion.”

Ø  Sara Hijab (SJP):
-          “Herzl chose Palestine for various reasons. All those reasons go back to anti-Arab rhetoric and bigotry.”
-          “I hope you realize the evil that Zionism is, and that it has no place anywhere in the world.”
-          “Israel has no interest in creating a safe haven for Jews. It only sees it for its financial gain, as does America.”
-          “We must all become anti-Zionists, the world needs nothing short of that”

Ø  Justin Holmes (PhD Candidate, Dept. of Sociology, UIUC)
-          “When we say “from the river to the sea,” we are not talking about genocide, or ethnic cleansing. We are talking about the elimination of a dominating structure and the equal protection and the enjoinment of rights and privileges.”

Ø  Prof. Corinna Mullin (John Jay College, CUNY - Labor for Palestine)
-          “In Gaza the armed resistance refuses to submit to Israel’s designs for ethnic cleansing.”
-          “It’s amazing how in their statements and resolutions and protests, students are unapologetic about the Palestinian national liberation by any means necessary.”

Ø  Prof. Bikrum Singh Gill (Political Science, Virginia tech):
-          “We need to begin by strongly and loudly saying that currently Israel is conducting a genocide in Gaza.”
-          “There is a genocide happening, and the Palestinian armed resistance is fighting against this genocide”
-          “We need to be very clear: On one side we have a genocidal war. On the other side we have armed resistance against genocide, against colonization, which is essentially a liberation war. There are 2 wars right now – the war of genocide, and the war of liberation.”
-          “As we formulate tactics and strategies to oppose this genocidal war, it’s imperative that we do not throw the armed resistance under the bus in Palestine.”
-          “We cannot play the game that the Zionists are playing, trying to distinguish between the so called humanitarian civilian space and the political power of the armed resistance in Palestine.”
-          “What the armed resistance in Palestine is challenging is the primal, the fundamental equation that underpins colonialism.”
-          “I heard the first speaker speak about violence and the way it can be cathartic and a means to decolonize, but there is also a much more direct purpose to armed resistance, as it hits at the core, at the heart of colonial power.”
-          “From southern Lebanon, Hezbollah uses armed struggle to end the occupation from southern Lebanon.”

The moderator concluded, saying that: “We heard of the role of the armed resistance in fighting a war against genocide, a war of liberation, even that terminology is just extremely important. I appreciated the analysis of the root causes of the problem, and provided historical context of Zionism I think was particularly important”.

Local supporters of Israel raised questions regarding the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries, and noted that many Jews lived in Israel for generations. They asked the panel if it would denounce Hamas, and whether the panel seeks a peaceful and equal solution (something Hamas does not seek). And they asked why the organizer of the panel did not offer any alternative voices other than those siding with Hamas. And finally, they asked why events of October 7th were not mentioned.

The panel answered as follows:
-          Jews were not cleansed from Arab countries (and that it is propaganda to say so).
-          “What happened on October 7th did not happen in a vacuum. It did not start any new war, any new deaths. Palestinians have been relentlessly murdered and relentlessly bombed since 1948 and so we should talk about what happened before October 7th. The reason why Hamas launched their reaction is because Jewish settlers went and harassed Muslim worshipers in their mosque, in one of the holiest sites for Muslims.”

When pressed on what happened on October 7^th, the response was:
-          “On October 7^th, Hamas went and made paragliders, and then flew to where Israelis were holding a concert, a festival, right next to Gaza, an open air prison. They took Israeli settlers as political pieces, to exchange for all the Palestinian prisoners who are wrongfully imprisoned with no basis.”

The panel stopped the discussion when asked how many were murdered on October 7^th, and whether a 9 months-old baby is a political prisoner. They did not answer the questions about the composition of the panel, and reiterated that Hamas should be referenced only in terms that make clear it represents justified armed resistance.

Beyond this, the Jerusalem Post published a story of another Jewish UIUC student who attended an interfaith dinner wearing her Jewish star necklace and one of the men said he refuses to sit next to a Jew.

There is a serious problem at UIUC.

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!

Gisha is an Israel-based NGO that says:

Gisha is an Israeli not-for-profit organization, founded in 2005, whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. Gisha promotes rights guaranteed by international and Israeli law.

Since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel’s military has developed a complex system of rules and sanctions to control the movement of the 4.5 million Palestinians who live there. The restrictions violate the fundamental right of Palestinians to freedom of movement. As a result, additional basic rights are violated, including the right to life, the right to access medical care, the right to education, the right to livelihood, the right to family unity and the right to freedom of religion.

If we take them at their word, then Gisha must be incensed that Egypt has built a huge new wall to block Gazans from fleeing, and that both Egypt and Jordan have insisted that they will not allow any Gazans to take refuge in their countries.

But Gisha, whose very purpose is to allow Palestinians to have freedom of movement, has not said a word about this. They've called for a ceasefire and for more aid to Gaza, but nothing demanding that Gazans who want to leave be given that option. Which is a strange position for an NGO that is dedicated to freedom of movement to take.

This is par for the course for Gisha. They hardly ever have said anything negative about Hamas restrictions on movement, and in previous times that Egypt prevented people from coming from Gaza Gisha blamed - Israel!

Neither has any other human rights group demanded freedom of movement for Gazans to anywhere but Israel. No calls from Amnesty, or Human Rights Watch, or Oxfam to open Egypt's and Jordan's borders to refugees. UNRWA, whose entire purpose is to help Palestinian "refugees," does not want to help any of these Palestinian refugees who want to leave a war zone. They could easily welcome Gazans in Jordanian - or even West Bank - camps if they wanted to.

Nothing on this issue from the Refugee Rights website. The International Rescue Committee is not advocating for the rights of Gazans to take refuge elsewhere should they choose to.

And now it isn't only Jordan and Egypt, but the Palestinian Authority as well.

I had reported on a proposed "humanitarian corridor" by sea that Cyprus has proposed to bring aid to Gaza, which Israel approved. - but the PA rejected it. On Tuesday, PA president Mahmoud Shtayyeh gave his reasons for this rejection to the Greek consul: "stressing the complete rejection of the waterway that Cyprus talks about under the slogan of transporting aid to the Gaza Strip for fear that the ships will displace our people out of the Strip."

This is a remarkable statement. The PA could simply tell Cyprus that they approve the aid with the condition that no Palestinians be allowed to leave on those ships. If we take Shtayyeh at his word, he is saying that it is better that Gaza forego desperately needed aid completely rather than even having the theoretical possibility of Gazans fleeing via the boats that bring aid.

The people who pretend to care about Palestinian lives - Egypt, Jordan, NGOs, pro-Palestinian advocacy groups, and even the PA itself - are all dead set against allowing any Gazans from leaving Gaza.

Egypt has allowed hundreds of thousands of refugees from other Arab countries. So has Jordan. They specifically exclude Palestinians. And not one NGO has said a negative word about this discrimination. Why not?

Who, exactly, is making Gaza into an "open-air prison" nowadays?

Human rights is not what these NGOs care about. Attacking Israel is.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Hezbollah-linked Al Mayadeen details "Arab, Islamic condemnations of al-Arouri's assassination."

The list is pretty pathetic:

- Iranian Foreign Ministry

- President of Iran, Ali Akbar Velayati

- The political bureau of Yemen's Ansar Allah (Houthis)

- Prime Minister of the Yemeni Government in Sanaa(Houthi)

- Yemeni Foreign Ministry

- Iraqi Kataib Hezbollah

- Secretary-General of the Islamic Action Front Party in Jordan

- Moroccan Observatory against Normalization

- Movement for the Society of Peace (Algeria)

- Hamas

- Islamic Jihad

Their Arabic version of the article adds:

- Head of the Lebanese caretaker government, Najib Mikati

- Lebanese Communist Party

- Iraqi Islamic Supreme Council

Not a single word of condemnation from a country that is not in Iran's pocket. Nothing official from Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia.

They don't say it out loud, but most Middle East leaders want to see Hamas destroyed.

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!

01/02 Links Pt2: Seth Mandel: ‘Squandering Sympathy’ By Surviving; America’s Mainstreaming of Hamas, Antisemitism, and Terror; Harvard Pres. Claudine Gay Resigns in Disgrace

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: ‘Squandering Sympathy’ By Surviving

These observations about Israel’s squandering nature are offered not in anger but in sadness, of course. Why can’t Israel ever do anything constructive with sympathy?

It’s not as though there’s some mysterious equation to solve here. Israelis gained all that sympathy on Oct. 7 by dying horrible deaths. What’s more important, sympathy or survival? The world is very disappointed in the Jewish state’s choice.

It’s an old story. After Germany’s 1938 annexation of Austria, Jews were desperate for escape. President Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t willing to effect any change in U.S. immigration policy, either by executive action or pressuring Congress. But he was willing to organize a conference of nations who would talk and talk and talk about how sad it all was, because that at least could “show our sympathy with the victims of those conditions.”

“Sympathy” for the Jews usually means a death sentence. And FDR ensured it would be so, as Rick Richman writes in And None Shall Make Them Afraid, his recent book of key moments in the life and work of various Zionist figures (also reviewed in Commentary’s July/August issue here): “The text of the invitation included an assurance that no country would be expected to change its laws to admit more refugees or to provide any funds to resettle refugees; any financing, the invitation noted, would have to be provided by private organizations.”

FDR also instructed the State Department to prevent any consideration of sending the fleeing European Jews to Palestine. Other Western democracies were no better.

In attendance to watch all this unfold was Golda Meir. She was both dejected and resolute. The lesson was that “Jews neither can nor should ever depend on anyone else for permission to stay alive.” The conference inspired one of her most famous comments: “There is one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore.”

Meir would return to this theme time and again after the establishment of the state of Israel and her rise to the prime minister’s office. The world, she repeatedly recognized, was full of sympathy for dead and defeated Jews, and the Jews would squander that sympathy by surviving. What has changed isn’t the world’s preferences but the Jewish people’s ability to render those preferences irrelevant.

Dr. Dan Diker and Khaled Abu Toameh: America’s Mainstreaming of Hamas, Antisemitism, and Terror

We are currently witnessing the mainstreaming of Hamas in the U.S. Thousands of protesters across American cities and more than 200 university campuses have been calling to destroy the small, democratic, Jewish-majority state instead of advocating for a peaceful Palestinian one alongside Israel.

Since Hamas' Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, tens of thousands of American university students, faculty, and supporters have been chanting, "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free," a call to replace the only Jewish-majority state with the 23rd Muslim Arab-majority one. Behind many of the demonstrations is Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas-linked group which quotes or echoes slogans and rhetoric from the 1988 Hamas Charter and Hamas leaders.

Hamas' jihadi rhetoric and extremist ideology is inciting violence against Jews and Jewish institutions across North America today. Senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar has threatened to target Jews "wherever they are." In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, Israel and diaspora Jewry are both targeted for elimination.

Why do feminists turn a blind eye to Islamists?

Other professional feminists and ‘thought leaders’ have been similarly silent on Hamas’s actions. A widely circulated open letter, entitled ‘Feminists for a free Palestine. Stop the genocide. End the Occupation’, neither mentions Jewish women nor condemns Hamas. By early November, over 1,200 ‘scholars who work in feminist, queer and trans studies’ had signed the letter.

Two things are at play in the warped response of Western feminists to the atrocities of 7 October. Firstly, their embrace of the ideology of ‘decolonisation’ and their simple-minded view of Israel as a ‘settler-colonial’ state has prevented them from standing in solidarity with Israeli women. They see them as part of an evil occupying force and therefore as less than human. Secondly, they are unwilling to criticise Islamist terror and violence, largely for fear of being labelled Islamophobic.

Indeed, Western feminists’ unwillingness to condemn Islamist violence against women extends beyond Hamas’s rape and mutilation of Jews. They have also shown themselves incapable of standing up for women persecuted by Islamist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan.

It is over a year since 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed by Iran’s religious police for violating Iran’s hijab law and failing to wear the veil ‘properly’. Amini’s killing may have prompted mass protests by brave, hijab-free women in Iran. But it has prompted very little in the way of solidarity in the West. In November, the death of teenager Armita Geravand, also apparently at the hands of Iran’s morality police, passed by with even less comment or outrage. It seems that Western feminists are too frightened of appearing Islamophobic to do what Iranian women have bravely been doing – challenging a misogynistic state that compels women to wear a veil.

Western feminists have shown a similarly curious reluctance to criticise the Taliban. After all, the Taliban ought to be an obvious target of feminist ire. Since it regained control of Afghanistan in 2021 it has banned Afghan women from any form of political participation, prevented them from dressing how they choose and banned them from education and most forms of work. Yet you will struggle to find much condemnation of this medieval sexism from Western feminists and ostentatiously ‘progressive’ organisations this year. After reports emerged that the Taliban has been imprisoning survivors of domestic abuse ‘for their own protection’, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan meekly said that the Taliban’s handling of ‘gender-based violence complaints’ was ‘unclear and inconsistent’. Which is one way of describing a movement that systematically degrades and oppresses women.

There does seem to be a massive Islamist-shaped blindspot here. Feminists and their progressive apologists are only too happy to call out relatively trivial acts of sexism in the West. Yet they show a repeated unwillingness to stick up for women suffering at the hands of Islamists, from Iran to Israel to Afghanistan.

If we want to advance women’s freedom around the world, then we cannot ignore the misogyny of the Islamists.

In October, Egypt's Youm7 - considered close to the government - published an article calling Israel's action in Gaza a "holocaust."

Israel's Institute for National Security Studies noted this and other Arab articles using that terminology, pointing out how outrageous it is.

Now Youm7 seems to have just discovered the INSS article and they are ecstatic. They claim the terminology was "a media bullet that pierced the heart of Israel."

And in a new article, they urge all Arabs to adopt this terminology, while tossing in some Holocaust denial:

After the Youm7 newspaper article “The Gaza Holocaust” raised a state of strategic anxiety for the Israeli entity, there is a question, which is why the Arab media - new and old - did not employ these terms that hurt and worry Israel, so I call on everyone who has a media platform, even a page on social networking sites [to us that term.] . ...We must be aware of the importance of terminology. Especially since it has become a weapon no less important than the weapons of field wars

The Zionist state developed and perpetuated the narrative of the Jewish Holocaust to serve its strategic goals, as a means and justification to blackmail the world under the name of anti-Semitism and international terrorism and an excuse to attract the sympathy of the international community to justify killing and aggression against the Palestinian people.

This is why they are concerned about describing what is happening in Gaza as a Holocaust: It is a new Holocaust, which is more credible and more horrific than the Holocaust of the Jews that they claim, because there are many Western and American voices that have begun to doubt the occurrence of a Holocaust of the Jews as it is portrayed by the Zionists, or at least that there are those who consider what happened to the Jews a Zionist exaggeration in numbers and the descriptions.

There is agreement by many experts, researchers, and international research communities that the Jewish Holocaust is nothing but a Zionist industry that has been exploited over many decades as a scarecrow, an attraction for immigration to the land of Palestine, and a means - as we mentioned - for global and moral blackmail and for achieving strategic gains for the Zionist entity.

Besides the obvious antisemitism, note that the only reason they give to use that terminology is not accuracy, but because it upsets the Jews and because it frames the war to be other than what it is.

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!

Benjamin Moser, who is of course anti-Zionist himself, writes in the Washington Post that anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitism because anti-Zionism was created by Jews:

Anti-Zionism, after all, was a creation of Jews, not their enemies.

Before World War II, Zionism was the most divisive and heatedly debated issue in the Jewish world. Anti-Zionism had left-wing variants and right-wing variants — religious variants and secular variants — as well as variants in every country where Jews resided. For anyone who knows this history, it is astonishing that, as the resolution would have it, opposition to Zionism has been equated with opposition to Judaism — and not only to Judaism, but to hatred of Jews themselves. But this conflation has nothing to do with history. Instead, it is political, and its purpose has been to discredit Israel’s opponents as racists.

The article is dishonest on a couple of levels. The main deception is that Moser conflates pre-1948 anti-Zionism with today's - and they are not the same at all. After Israel was reborn, anti-Zionism changed from being against creating a Jewish state to wanting to dismantle the only Jewish state. It is the desire to see a recognized nation destroyed - and by remarkable coincidence, only the Jewish one. Not the Christians ones, not the Muslim ones - just the Jewish one. What are the odds?

Secondly, he quotes early Reform Jewish thinkers on the topic:

“This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our Temple,” said Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski of Charleston, S.C., in 1841. A century later, during the Holocaust and World War II, Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Temple Emanu-El in New York declared that “The essence of Reform Judaism for me is the rejection of Jewish Nationalism, not necessarily the eating of ham.”

But the Reform movement disavowed its anti-Zionist position before 1948. Its 1937 "Columbus Platform" said, " Judaism is the soul of which Israel is the body." Its 1950 statement said:

The Union of American Hebrew Congregations in Convention assembled send affectionate greetings to our brethren in the State of Israel. We take pride in your heroic achievements. We offer prayers for your continued success. We pledge continued aid for your historic task of rehabilitating the homeless of Israel.

We favor the extension of aid to Israel by the United Nations and the United States Government in order to sustain and strengthen a vital democratic State in the heart of the Near East.

Thirdly, there have always been different flavors of antisemitism. The vast majority of Jews overlapped in each of them, but a few outliers didn't. That doesn't make it any less Jew-hatred.

Racial antisemitism claimed it had nothing against the religion per se the way Christian antisemitism did. I list a whole bunch of different flavors of antisemitism here.

Just because anti-Zionists swear up and down that they aren't antisemitic doesn't make it so - just as the phrase "anti-semite" was coined to make hating Jews sound scientific and not bigoted. Antisemites over the centuries always claimed that they had solid reasons for their hate, it was never capricious. Just read Martin Luther.

If the effect of your beliefs is to demonize the vast majority of Jews by any definition - racial, religious, or political - then it is, in reality, Jew-hatred.

Even when done by Jews themselves.

Anti-Zionism is part of a long tradition of finding new reasons to hate Jews. When you look at anti-Zionism through the lens of historic antisemitism you see that it is an old wine in a new bottle.

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!

01/02 Links Pt1: Israeli drone kills Hamas deputy chief al-Arouri in Beirut; Top UN official ‘breached’ guidelines over liking series of anti-Israel tweets

From Ian:

The Peace Processors Return, Having Learned Nothing from Their Mistakes

Among Western opinionmakers and policy experts—even those supportive of Israel in its war against Hamas—there is a widely held belief that after the fighting ends, Washington must renew efforts to get Israel and the Palestinians to agree to a two-state solution. Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, both former State Department officials, recently made such a case in Foreign Affairs, despite the repeated failures of this approach, and the bloodstained results. Elliott Abrams comments:

Our two peace processors . . . acknowledge that “addressing legitimate Israeli security concerns” must be part of the picture—but they give no sense of what they think those concerns might be and how they might be “addressed.” They acknowledge that “even if Netanyahu leaves office, no other current top politician in Israel appears eager to embark down a path of peace. And there are no Palestinian leaders with the gravitas and political weight to engage seriously with Israel in the aftermath of the conflict.” But they do not draw the obvious conclusion from those two sentences: well, okay, so that’s dead. . . .

From everything we can see about Palestinian politics and public opinion, basing Israeli security on dreams about Palestinian pacifism is nuts. Moreover, Iran has under way a vast effort to build proxy forces and strengthen every terrorist group—from the Houthis to Hizballah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to Hamas—to attack Israel by stocking the groups with guns and money. That is the problem with the two-state solution: no one can explain how a sovereign and independent Palestinian state will not constitute a grave security threat to Israel (and Jordan as well, by the way). Kurtzer and Miller certainly don’t explain it; like all the peace processors, they wish it away, conjuring up a mythical Palestine that loves peace. If you believe, clap your hands!

This is going to be a hard sell in Israel. It ought to be an equally hard sell in Washington.

Inside the tunnels of Gaza

The types of sandy or loamy soils common in Gaza made it both easier for Hamas to excavate the tunnels and harder for Israel to destroy them, two experts said.

The three main types of soil in the 365 sq. km. enclave are:

An illustration of the three types of soil in the Gaza Strip: Dune sand, loess, fluvial and eolian, and calcareous sandstone.

Even in the trickier areas - such as the dunes near the Mediterranean coast that are prone to water infiltration - Hamas had enough building materials and resources to adjust to the type of soil they were dealing with, said Professor Joel Roskin, a geomorphologist and geologist with Israel's Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, who has studied the tunnel network.

“What we've seen is that there are so many tunnels that have been reinforced with concrete,” Roskin said, adding that Hamas had invested considerable money and manpower in construction.

“To dig deeper demands more resources, more energy. The deeper tunnels are of course more difficult to detect.”

A map of the major exposed rock types across Israel and Gaza. Alluvium (gravel, sand, silt, clay, and rock), sand, and calcareous sandstone, red sandstone, and loam are the types found in the Gaza Strip. In the east, towards Jerusalem, the area is predominantly covered by chalk, limestone, dolostone, and chert. Next to the map sits two charts visualizing a cross section of the rock layers below the surface. One for the Nirim area in the Gaza Strip and another for the area surrounding Jerusalem.

John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute and a founding member of the International Working Group on Subterranean Warfare, said the sandy nature of the soil had certainly made it easier for Hamas.

“I have seen many videos of them digging by hand or using simple power tools,” he told Reuters. “The soil is conducive to rapid and unskilled digging.” By contrast, he said, the Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah had to dig through solid rock in south Lebanon to build cross border tunnels into northern Israel.

Hezbollah has not confirmed the existence of the tunnel network but, in 2019, the Israeli military put on display one tunnel that, it said, reached depths of 80 meters (265 feet) as it ran from a kilometer inside Lebanon into Israel near Zar’it in the Upper Galilee.

The relative softness of the soil in Gaza is also a disadvantage to the IDF teams seeking to clear and destroy the network, Spencer said.

“The loose soil actually reduces the IDF use of explosives to destroy tunnels as the soft soil absorbs explosive force. Add the blast doors in the tunnels we’ve seen, and that further reduces the effects of explosive force traveling through the tunnel.”

An illustration showing the steps for building a tunnel. Initial excavation is usually done manually, with the help of shovels and other tools. In areas where the terrain is tougher, pneumatic hammers are utilized. Lastly, the illustration shows that as progress is made, the walls are reinforced with prefabricated cement or wood slabs.

On Nov. 22, the Israeli army showed some news organizations a concrete-lined tunnel near Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City that, it said, was a command post for Hamas fighters. The tunnel complex, which the IDF said was at a depth of around 10 meters below ground, featured a bedroom, a tiled bathroom, kitchen and meeting room.

Reuters photographer Ronen Zvulun went inside the tunnels. “The tunnel floor is sand but the walls and roof are lined with concrete, like a tiny road or train tunnel. And just about high enough for someone to stand upright.”

Expert: Hezbollah has built a vast tunnel network far more sophisticated than Hamas’s

Two weeks ago, the IDF spokesman revealed one of the biggest attack tunnels in the Gaza Strip — four kilometers long, wide enough for vehicles to drive through, and running from Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, up until some 400 meters from the Erez border crossing into Israel.

While the tunnel did not cross the border, it presumably could have enabled terrorists on motorcycles and other vehicles to drive underground from the Jabaliya area and exit close to the border before IDF surveillance soldiers or patrols could block them. The IDF did not specify whether this was the case when 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists poured into Israel on October 7, slaughtering 1,200 people and abducting 240.

The uncovering of this vast tunnel, of which there are several more in Gaza, has revived discussion of similar tunnels near, at and under the Lebanon border — especially amid the ongoing clashes there with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist army, the forced evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli residents of the north, and the Israeli leadership’s repeated insistence that Hezbollah must be forced back from the border and deterred.

The Lebanon tunnel project was begun and developed long before the one in Gaza. Existing intelligence indicates a vast tunnel network in southern Lebanon, deep and multi-pronged.

At the Alma Research and Education Center, which focuses on the security challenges on Israel’s northern border, researchers have spent many years investigating Lebanon’s underworld. Tal Beeri, the director of Alma’s Research Department, who served for decades in IDF intelligence units, has exposed that subterranean network in material based on considerable open-source intelligence.

Several years ago, Beeri managed to track down on the internet a “map of polygons,” covering what he called the “Land of the Tunnels” in southern Lebanon. “The map is marked, by an unknown party, with polygons (circles) indicating 36 geographic regions, towns and villages,” he wrote in 2021 paper.

“In our assessment, these polygons mark Hezbollah’s staging centers as part of the ‘defense’ plan against an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Each local staging center (‘defense’) possesses a network of local underground tunnels. Between all these centers, an infrastructure of regional tunnels was built, interconnected [with] them.”

Beeri assessed that the cumulative length of Hezbollah’s tunnel network in south Lebanon amounts to hundreds of kilometers.

In an interview, Beeri recalls that the research paper on Hezbollah’s “Land of the Tunnels” was published immediately after 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls — where the IDF had engaged in tackling Hamas’s underground “metro” in Gaza, an operation that in retrospect did not achieve its goal of destroying the tunnels in the enclave.

The paper also featured a map assessing the likely 45-kilometer route of one “attack tunnel” in south Lebanon.

Israeli drone kills Hamas deputy chief al-Arouri in Beirut

An Israeli drone strike on a Hamas office in Beirut eliminated top terror chief Saleh al-Arouri on Tuesday night, Hamas’s Al-Aqsa Radio announced.

The explosion rocked the south Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah stronghold. In addition to al-Arouri, at least three other Hamas operatives were also killed in the blast, Reuters reported.

Al-Arouri, the commander of Hamas operations in Judea and Samaria, as well as the deputy politburo chief under Hamas chairman Ismail Haniyeh, had been based in Lebanon in recent years.

He was one of the top Hamas leaders on Israel’s target list following the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre of at least 1,200 people in the northwestern Negev.

In a statement cited by Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya channel on Tuesday, Hamas described al-Arouri as the “architect” of the massacre.

Al-Arouri was informed of the impending invasion half an hour beforehand so he could alert Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, French outlet Le Figaro reported last week.

Local media said Nasrallah canceled a speech scheduled for Wednesday following the reports of al-Arouri’s death.

Israel is anticipating a response to the alleged assassination, according to Hebrew-language media, including possible long-range rocket fire.

During a Nov. 3 speech, Nasrallah threatened the Jewish state, telling Israelis that a preemptive strike against Lebanon would be “the most foolish mistake you make in your entire existence.”

The Hezbollah leader has repeatedly warned that any assassination in Lebanese territory would be met with a “strong reaction.”

We've seen plenty of idiotic anti-Israel Western celebrities like Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon and Cynthia Nixon.

But Arab celebrities may be even dumber.

A Kuwaiti singer known as "Shams" gave an interview on an Egyptian TV channel.

She said, “We are in a time that repeats itself every 2,000 years, and we are currently living in the Age of Aquarius, and these are astronomical and scientific calculations. Over the next 2,000 years, which will begin in 2024, there will be frightening scientific and technological development and high-level achievements, but they will be years of fraud, falsity, lies and deception."

Shams added, “I see that starting in 2024 the world will be divided into slaves and masters based on the dualities of good and evil, male and female, and black and white.”

Shams continued "The reality is that 7 million Jews rule humanity, which numbers 7 billion people, because they control medicine, the media, banks, science, and all the oxygen of life."

Well, there you have it.

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Jordanian newspaper Sarrah News reports that a "blacklist" has been created of five brokers who are selling tomatoes and cucumbers from Jordan to Israel.

The Jordanian Agriculture Ministry has no tools to stop anyone from selling or reselling those vegetables to anyone who wants them, and according to the article, Israel has suffered a shortage of the vegetables since the Gaza war - both because of no imports from Gaza and the reduction of shipping through the Red Sea. There is also a looming shortage of locally produced vegetables because of fewer foreign workers on farms.

Among the five names on the blacklist are two Palestinian brokers who are linked to a former senior security commander in the Palestinian Authority.

The Minister of Agriculture, Khaled Hanifat, told the brokers that they should be ashamed of themselves. But the law does not allow him to interfere in exports of tomatoes and cucumbers.

The free market always finds a way.

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Since antisemitism in the Arab world is hitting record levels, one can expect that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" myth would be widely referred to again.

Sure enough, it is. Here are some mentions in Arabic media in the past month alone.

Popular Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published a summary of a book in which the Protocols are assumed to be legitimate:

We have reached a stage of weakness and humiliation that is not hidden from anyone. But we are facing the most dangerous people, and even the most hostile, the Jews, who have opposed God Almighty. The Zionist Jews worked to establish a law and a charter of their own, which they called the Protocols, in which they laid out their approach to controlling the world.. which is what the thinker Dr. Mustafa Mahmoud reveals to us in his book. Nazi Israel and the Language of the Holocaust, in which he talks about the Zionists and some of their issues.

Guess what "Zionists" means?

Another popular Egyptian news site, Youm7, shares a recent video where one of their writer describes the "Protocols" in five minutes.

The same site reviews another book, called "International Zionism," which is summarizes this way:

The book International Zionism includes 25 sections: As follows: Zionism before Christ, Zionism from birth to the nineteenth century, Zionism since the Balfour Declaration, International Zionism, International Zionism...their crime against themselves, International Zionism...the claim of persecution, International Zionism and genius, International Zionism and its fifth columns in the fields of politics and economics. , International Zionism and its fifth columns in the fields of culture, International Zionism and its fifth columns in the parliaments, International Zionism and its fifth columns in Eastern politics, International Zionism... its methods in the present era (1), International Zionism... its methods in the present era (2), Zionism Internationalism... its methods in the present era (3), the fanaticism of Zionism in the field of culture and politics, the fate of international Zionism and international causes, the fate of global Zionism and its threatening influence, the fate of global Zionism and its contradictory structure, international Zionism... their fate in their eyes, the fate of international Zionism in the eyes of their friends The fate of global Zionism and the boycott of the Arabs, Zionist colonialism, Zionism and the future, global Zionism. In conclusion, a commentary on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

See? He has nothing against Jews, just Zionists who have been around for 3000 years.

The forgery is also mentioned as fact in this Oman op-ed,

This Lebanese newspaper admits that the Protocols might be fake, but that doesn't really matter:

Regardless of whether the book "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a real or a fake document promoted by opponents of the Jews to distort them and justify their persecution in Europe, it is certain that some religious leaders and even politicians in Israel are repeating a speech surprisingly similar to what was contained in that book..

Apologists for Arab antisemitism love to say that they didn't treat Jews as badly as Europeans did. This is generally true. But the Arab world really embraced the worst components of European antisemitism, and today they are the main purveyors of the "Protocols."

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!

01/01 Links Pt2: How "Antiracism" Becomes Antisemitism; French Students: Make Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism’; How Qatar Bought the Ivy League

From Ian:

WSJ: How "Antiracism" Becomes Antisemitism
Freelink How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

Over the past 2 1/2 months, Jew-hatred has rocked elite college campuses. Tony neighborhoods in blue cities have witnessed marches calling for the elimination of the Jewish state and protests outside Jewish-owned businesses - this in response to the systematic butchering and kidnapping of Israeli Jews by terrorists.

To these expressions of bigotry, high-ranking public officials and university administrators have issued bland disavowals of "violence" and "hatred in all its forms." The Biden administration, though so far pursuing a broadly pro-Israel policy in the Middle East, responded to the rash of antisemitic marches and assaults on Jews by announcing a "National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia."

For several years a variety of academics and writers have argued that Jews are "white" or "functionally white" or "white passing." The words "white" and "whiteness" came to be used as though they signified a disease. "White," in this usage, has nothing to do with genetic characteristics. It signifies allegedly unjust privilege and legacies of oppression. Calling Jews "white" was a way of depriving them of any cover as a racial minority and classifying them with persecutors and exploiters.

Assaults on Jews go almost without comment in most of the mainstream press. For weeks after Hamas took hundreds of hostages, including Americans, the U.S. news media showed minimal interest in their whereabouts. It was only when Hamas offered to return some of them in exchange for a ceasefire that reports on their plight began to circulate - almost as though the hostages' usefulness lay exclusively in stopping Israel from just retribution.

French Students Launch Appeal to Make Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism’

One of France’s leading Jewish intellectuals is promoting a petition initiated by a group of students, several from Muslim backgrounds, calling for Oct. 7 — the date of the Hamas terrorist pogrom in southern Israel in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and over 200 taken hostage — to be named as the “World Day Against Antisemitism.”

Marek Halter, a Polish-Jewish novelist and film-maker, announced his support for the petition over the weekend. “I was contacted by a few young people, mostly from immigrant backgrounds,” Halter said, according to the news outlet Valeurs Actuelles. “Upset by the events of Oct. 7 on the Gaza border, they wished to launch an appeal for this date to become a world day against antisemitism.”

Added Halter: “I admit I was embarrassed not to have thought of it myself.”

The petition’s main initiator, 23-year-old French Muslim student Hichem Mouttaki, explained in an interview with broadcaster CNews that young people had little sense of the nature of Hamas.

“More and more students, middle and high school students, for lack of information or dialogue, refuse to see Hamas as a terrorist organization,” Mouttaki said.

Following the interview, Mouttaki was reportedly inundated with hateful messages and threats from supporters of Hamas.

The petition warns that antisemitism has returned with a vengeance. “The hatred of the other, the hatred of the Jew, is again at work,” the petition states. “In the absence of a collective dream capable of mobilizing our hopes, the rejection of the Jew again becomes, as before World War II, the only answer to the political and social frustrations that confront our societies.”

The petitioners said they were calling on “all international organizations to declare Oct. 7 ‘World Day Against Antisemitism.'”

Latest EoZ cartoons

I think I'm finally caught up....

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Naharnet (Lebanon) reports:

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi on Sunday said he rejects the spread of the Gaza war to south Lebanon, calling for a halt to the cross-border clashes and for "the protection of the Lebanese and their homes and properties."

"We demand the removal of any rocket launchpad planted between homes in the towns of the South that might draw a destructive Israeli response," al-Rahi urged in his Sunday Mass sermon.

"Let everyone respect (U.N.) Security Council Resolution 1701 and all its articles for the sake of Lebanon's welfare," the patriarch added.

For him to say this out loud, that means every Lebanese citizen knows that Hezbollah is placing its rocket arsenal in the middle of the civilian population, just like Hamas does in Gaza.

A comment on the story is interesting:

This is exactly what happened in the sunni-village Chebaa on October 14th. An elderly couple was killed after Hezbollah-members had fired against an Israeli position from near their home. They were spotted by Israeli drones and were fired upon immediately. The Hezbollah-members sought cover in a random house and the Israelis fired a direct hit at the house. Paramedics tried to reach the house after the bombardment ended, but other Hezbollah-members had cordoned off the area until they could remove the bodies of their soldiers and their equipment. When the paramedics finally were allowed to enter they found the dead bodies of the couple embracing each other in a corner of the kitchen.

I couldn't verify all the details, but the details I could verify all jive with this. A couple was killed and Israel said that it hit the source of the rocket fire. One Hezbollah member did get killed that day in the Shebaa Farms area and the group did not admit the circumstances of his death.

And Hezbollah's cynical use of civilians as defensive weapons gets exactly as little condemnation as Hamas does.

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!