Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, January 11, 2024

01/11 Links Pt1: Genocide case: Should Israel participate in ‘kangaroo court’?; The Al Jazeera ‘Journalist’ Israel Killed Was an Islamic Jihad Terrorist

From Ian:

Former supreme court judge says Hague case is an ‘insult to meaning of genocide’

A former supreme court judge and experts on the laws of war have lined up to voice their outrage over the attempt by South Africa – which has a history of support for Hamas – to prosecute Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

As proceedings got under way this week in the Hague this week, Rosalie Silberman Abella, a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School and former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, wrote that the ICJ move was an “insult to what genocide means”.

“This case represents an outrageous and cynical abuse of the principles underlying the international legal order that was set up after the Second World War,” she wrote.

“Hamas’s explicit and unapologetic goal is to eliminate Jews. The elimination of Jews is genocide. That is why Hamas murdered, raped, beheaded, kidnapped and tortured Jews on October 7, 2023: to eliminate them, because they were Jews. It is a legal absurdity to suggest that a country that is defending itself from genocide is thereby guilty of genocide,” Abella added.

Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights attorney and CEO of the International Legal Forum, a coalition of pro-Israel lawyers, called the move a “subversion of international law” that could incite further violence against Jews around the world.

Ostrovsky, who flew to the Hague this week to attend the hearings, said: “Israel, and supporters of the Jewish state, are fighting this war on multiple fronts, not only against Hamas in Gaza, but a war of narratives as well, where a toxic combination of misinformation and subversion of international law, is being used to attack and vilify Israel.

“This pervasive discourse also has very real effect in shaping discussions, leading to policy actions, as well as even inciting alarming surge in antisemitism and Jew hatred we have seen in the UK and across the world, since October 7.”

Genocide case: Should Israel participate in ‘kangaroo court’?

Acknowledging that the danger of participation is that it grants legitimacy, he said that it’s not always the case. For Bell, the issue is not whether to go to the court so much as the clarity of purpose in doing so.

“Our mission here is PR, it’s not law,” he said, adding that a report that Israel’s Foreign Ministry sent a message to Israeli missions worldwide asking them to convince their countries to publicly denounce the ICJ case suggests Israel is working along the right lines.

Bell’s argument is that participating gives Israel a platform, “a reasonable opportunity” to refute South Africa’s arguments not in the court at The Hague, but in the court of world opinion.

Bell isn’t very optimistic about the outcome of the case. “The judgment that’s going to come from the court is politics, not law, and it’s politics from a body that is already biased against the Jewish state. It, therefore, seems to me quite likely to accept the morally obscene arguments of South Africa,” he said.

Ziv Bohrer, senior lecturer for international law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law and a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said that “from a moral perspective, [the accusation] is detestable. It falsely accuses the Jewish people of genocide.”

Nevertheless, the case has serious implications and Israel must be there in court to defend itself, he said. For one thing, the court will issue a ruling, and not an advisory opinion as it did in the security barrier case. The ruling will be binding.

There are three main ways a country can find itself bound by a ruling of the ICJ. One is when disputes regarding a specific convention are referred to the court.

“The Genocide Convention states that any disputes between signatory countries regarding the fulfillment of the treaty can be adjudicated in the ICJ, meaning any member state can sue any other member state claiming that it has violated its commitment according to that convention. That is the situation now,” Bohrer said.

While the ICJ has no enforcement mechanisms and its rulings have been ignored in the past, including by the United States, in Israel’s situation there’s the matter of the ongoing lawfare against it.

“The ICJ ruling in and of itself can be potentially very harmful, but when you look at it in the context of other things that are advancing as well, the risk is greater,” Bohrer said.

He listed the war crimes investigation at the International Criminal Court (not to be confused with the ICJ), and an earlier ICJ case looking into the “legal consequences” of Israel’s supposed “ongoing violation” of “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”

“All those things together are maneuvers that jointly have the potential to eventually mark Israel as a pariah state,” Bohrer said.

Deborah Lipstadt and Michèle Taylor: Israeli women and girls have suffered horrific sexual violence from Hamas. Where is the outrage?

We feel compelled to ask: why is this situation any different to when other women have faced similar violence? What accounts for the clear reticence to speak out? The only difference is the perception that these were Jewish – and were perceived by some as somehow deserving – victims. (The victims included non-Jewish women, but the vast majority were Jews.)

The silence that followed was more than just concerning; it suggests a deeper issue of antisemitism that must be acknowledged and addressed. This apparent reluctance to believe the accounts of Jewish women, a stark deviation from the global commitment to believing survivors and condemning such acts, mimics patterns of Holocaust denial, perpetuating a cycle of antisemitism by furthering the stereotype of Jews as untrustworthy. Such denial of Jewish women’s experiences is a significant anomaly and needs to be called out for what it is: a stark manifestation of deep-seated antisemitism.

The use of sexual violence as a tool of war is undeniably on the rise. Ignoring or delaying a response to credible reports of such horrific acts inadvertently validates the acts. It not only denies justice to the victims, but also emboldens the perpetrators.

This fight transcends borders and cultural divides. In recognising the horrific experiences of Israeli women, we also need to manifestly acknowledge that Palestinian women and girls are victims and survivors of gender-based violence. Rape and mutilation of women are never acceptable. There is no “but” when it concerns gender-based violence. The use of sexual violence in conflict to coerce, terrorise, sow fear, or for any other reason is no exception. This is something on which we must all agree – regardless of our position on the broader conflict.

Three months on, as we reflect on these events and the responses to them, it’s time to confront the uncomfortable reality: the silence around the reports of sexual violence on 7 October and the discrediting of accounts are not just a failure of justice, they are indicative of deeper biases that we must collectively address. Let this serve as a clarion call for change, a moment to reaffirm our commitment to all survivors and victims of gender-based violence and to challenge the underlying and often unconscious prejudices that hinder our pursuit of justice and equality. In the fight for human rights and against gender-based violence and antisemitism, believing women’s voices is not just a matter of justice – it’s a matter of urgent necessity.

Sheikh Muhammad Nasir al-Din, known as al-Albani, was a Salafist who was acknowledged as one of the most prominent Islamic scholars of the 20th century.

He was asked for a ruling:

Does a Muslim have the right to kill Jewish children if they fall under his hands, since God says "If you punish, then punish with the same as you were punished"?

The answer given is - yes, of course:

Yes, it is permissible, without a doubt, even if that is contrary to the basic principle of Islam, as evidenced by His saying, Blessed and Most High, in the Qur’an : “And We have not sent you except as a mercy to the worlds” (which) also forbids them to kill women and children. This is the principle, but every principle or every rule has exceptions in which wisdom and purpose must be taken into account. When the Muslim scholar wants to deviate from the rule, this rule is very reasonable because it brings justice and mercy to the elderly, to women, and to children...

...We say as a matter of reciprocity, this is permissible. Here the answer ends, but we say that if a Jew, a Jewish man, kills a Muslim man, is it not permissible for us to kill a Jewish man in exchange for him? I say that it is permissible for us to kill men for one man because he is one Muslim man who is not equal to thousands upon thousands of disbelievers, according to the words of the Lord of the Worlds : "Shall we make the Muslims like criminals? What is the matter with you? How do you judge?"

...As for the Jews, they are people of war, so if they kill a Muslim and we are able to kill them all, this is what is obligatory.

But there is a caveat: The Jews are powerful.

Unfortunately, the severe, painful reality reminds us that Muslims today in all Islamic countries are weak, and this is a fact that a person needs to delve into....I say that if a Jewish man other than a soldier killed a non-combatant Muslim from the people of Palestine, and the Muslim or Muslims were able to kill dozens against him, so it is permissible because the Jews are people of war. But is it in the interest of the Muslims now who are oppressed and humiliated in their own backyard, that if a person falls among their ranks, that they take revenge on the Jews, and they have the right to do so, as I mentioned above, but does reality indicate that this is considered a victory for the Muslims, if they kill a Jew in exchange for a Muslim? Or will this open the door to revenge against Muslims?

Instead of Muslims killing one in exchange for a Muslim, they will kill dozens of Muslims in exchange for this Jew.

Hence, we say that it is not permissible now to apply the rule as long as we are weak on earth to repel the greater evil with the lesser evil, not because it is not permissible for a Muslim. To kill a Jew in exchange for killing a Muslim is permissible, and it is permissible for us to kill dozens of Jews in exchange for a Muslim, but the reality indicates that if Muslims kill a Jew, and even if they wound a Jew, then you know in the news what they do to Muslims.

Therefore, we do not think that we should return evil with evil here, because reciprocating evil with evil will expand the circle of evil against the oppressed Muslims on earth. Therefore, we see, according to the rule that we have been reassured by, that we should prepare ourselves for the day when we can eradicate the Jews and expel them from our country, and not be captivated by avenging one, two, five, or ten Muslims who were killed.

Even though Hamas is not a Salafist organization, this fatwa shows their logic and the logic of the Palestinian Muslims. Poll after poll shows that they support the murder of Jews; the only issue is whether they can successfully destroy Israel. When they think they can, they attack; when they know that Israel will respond, it deters them.

There is not a shred of morality in this fatwa, nor in the Palestinian position towards Jews living in our historic homeland. There is only practicality. And while Israel would rather live in peace, at this point peace is only possible with overwhelming strength.

It was Hamas' correct perception of an Israeli weakness along the Gaza border that prompted their pogrom of October 7.

While the world is in an uproar over Israel's response, the Arab world understands it. This is their language, and like it or not, it is the only effective response for anyone who truly wants peace.

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!

Antisemites have been accusing Israel of "genocide" since the term was coined

1982:

1978:

1977:

1974:

1968:

1967:

1956:

It has always been a tool of antisemites against Israel because the term "genocide" was created to describe the Holocaust. The delicious irony of accusing Jews of genocide, implying that they are just like the Nazis, has always been its main motivating factor.

And nothing has changed.

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!

Spot Shot is an online Lebanese TV station that has several hundred thousand followers on YouTube and Facebook.

They had an interview with Dr. Magdi Khalil, an Egyptian political scientist, where he said things that were ....sane.

In an interview on “Spotshot” within the “Point of View” program, Khalil said: “Asymmetric wars are very complex wars and take time, and Israel has so far killed more than 8,500 Hamas fighters and destroyed all of its military structure in the north.”

He added, "In all wars, a large number of civilians are killed more than military personnel, especially in asymmetric wars. This is normal when an army faces a military militia in densely populated cities, where this militia lives underground and under hospitals and schools. I say this with my regret for the loss of life."

He said that "Lebanon is controlled by Hezbollah, which operates under an Iranian agenda, and Israel is ready for peace with Lebanon, but what it rejects is Hezbollah, which is using the conflict with Israel in order to control the Lebanese interior, and Iran is feeding the party in order to use it in its major battle."

He pointed out that "Hezbollah is not authorized to negotiate with Israel. This is the task of the Lebanese state, which must first negotiate with Syria about the ownership of the Shebaa Farms, and then with Israel to close this file, but Hezbollah does not want that, and it controls the entire state politically, economically and everything else, which is the main burden on Lebanon.”

He added, "Force, weapons, and imposing a fait accompli is not legitimate. If the party gives up its weapons, its actual political size will appear. Israel assaulted Lebanon after it turned into a theater for the Palestine Liberation Organization. If the Lebanese state adheres to neutrality, it will not have a problem with Israel."

He explained, "Israel is a state recognized globally and by the United Nations and cannot be removed. I call for liberation from two illusions in the Arab imagination. The first is the illusion that God promised to eliminate Israel, and the second is to completely expel the Jews from this region.”

He continued, "The Palestinian issue, as defined by the United Nations in 1947, is a land dispute between Jews and Arabs. Therefore, the decision came with a state for the Jews and a state for the Arabs. The Arabs rejected the partition decision and then refused to join Camp David and everything after that. Those who did not adhere to the Oslo Accords were the Palestinians. They are themselves at the hands of Hamas and evil forces that do not want a solution to the Palestinian issue. They have destroyed all chances for peace and caused the Israeli right to come to power in Israel. There is no solution to this issue except through peaceful negotiations.”

He expressed his optimism that a solution would be reached immediately after the end of the war and after the end of Hamas, the main obstacle to peace, “since serious peace talks will begin to reach a demilitarized Palestinian state under security supervision by Israel for years, but there is not yet a qualified party to enter into these negotiations.”

He stressed that "Israel announced its endeavor to eliminate everyone involved in the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, as it did previously after the Munich operation in 1972. It has reactivated the assassination squad and the spy teams that had been neglected, and will carry out many assassinations."

He called for "Arab vigilance so that the Arabs know who their real enemy is. ...Iran, through its arms inside the Arab countries, has destroyed these countries without affecting anything inside them."

Khalil concluded by saying, “The Jews have been in this land since the days of the Prophet Abraham. This is their land, even if their number decreases or increases according to persecution. The region has not been devoid of them throughout history, and there was no state called Palestine and no Palestinian people. "

It is a breath of fresh air to see an Arab, speaking Arabic on an Arab TV station, saying things that are ...normal.

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!

01/10 Links Pt2: What Would Ben-Gurion Do?; As Liberal Jews Feel abandoned by the Left; Blaming the Victim: NGOs, the Apartheid Libel, and the Hamas Massacre

From Ian:

What Would Ben-Gurion Do?

Normaliyut and the Return of Statesmanship
Perhaps the opposite of mamlakhtiyut is the English-derived word normaliyut, normalcy. Widely used in the country since the 1990s, it connotes a wish to lead normal lives after all the travails of the Jewish and Israeli past. This desire is natural. Yet, fed by economic and cultural success, over the last couple of decades it grew into something of a seductive fantasy—a belief that Israel had become a high-tech utopia living in the so-called “End of History,” or at least had become strong and powerful enough that it could afford to view life and politics through cultural or spiritual lenses rather than political ones. For despite the growth in prosperity, despite the Abraham Accords and other regional breakthroughs, the dangers were there all along. Now that they’ve been revealed, normaliyut will have to be put on hold yet again.

As the war continues, there are signs that some Israelis are replacing the desire for normalcy with a steely mamlakhti resolve. Asaf Zamir, the former consul-general in New York, recently summed up Israel’s grave challenge in language that could have been ripped from David Ben-Gurion:
If this war ends without it being completely safe to return to live on the border of Lebanon, and around Gaza, and if it’s impossible to return and hold festivals and events in the entire country without any fear, we lost. Not the war, the country. Want to know what the goals of the war are? These are the goals of the war. No less. Otherwise it’s over. Maybe slowly, but over.

Some prominent politicians have made substantive expressions of national solidarity. In the first days of the war, the former prime minister Naftali Bennett volunteered near the front, packing supplies. The fact that Benny Gantz, now a minister in the emergency war cabinet, named his party the Mamlakhti Camp likewise indicates that the concept retains at least rhetorical power, and perhaps even political force. In mid-December, Gantz announced that he is moving to the western Negev, clearly attempting to follow in Ben-Gurion’s footsteps. Ben-Gurion had moved to the arid region in the 1950s not only to exemplify the pioneering spirit but also because he knew that a civilian presence in the area was ultimately essential for Israel’s national defense: if Israel’s periphery wasn’t safe, its center ultimately wouldn’t be either. The stories of heroism and leadership from the front have been too numerous to count. And who can now say what future leaders are at this moment being formed on the battlefield in Gaza and in the command rooms in Tel Aviv?

Ben-Gurion demanded a great deal from Israelis. As he put it in his final public Bible lecture:
We are the smallest of nations and, thus, we must be an exceptional people. Only our superior quality has sustained us. We succeeded in the Six-Day War because we succeeded in building an exceptional army. And we need not fear evil if we also succeed in establishing an exceptional government. The Jewish people has the needed traits to be an exceptional people, but to achieve this, more than any other nation in the world, we need an exceptional government.

Yet perhaps Ben-Gurion expected too much from his countrymen. Designing America’s government, the American founders soberly understood that “wise men will not always be at the helm,” and thus instituted a system of checks and balances to compensate for the inevitable failings of human nature and to channel human energies in constructive directions. Israel is not blessed with such a system. After the war, Israelis may be forced to examine ways the design of its governing institutions has failed to account for these failings and how it can be strengthened, though the bitter experience of judicial reform may forestall that task. In any case, even if Israel boasted exemplary institutions, it could ill afford a sustained run of mediocre leadership. Ben-Gurion’s mamlakhtiyut ought to be one cornerstone of an Israel that emerges stronger from this great test. Following the example of its indispensable founding father, the Jewish state must learn again to bear the burdens and embrace the splendors of statesmanship.

The Dissonance of Being Israeli

On Tuesday morning the country woke up to the crushing news of more fallen soldiers in Gaza. Nine soldiers were killed in one horrible day. As if that were not enough, the British Daily Mail published "before and after" photos of four Israeli teenaged girls in Hamas captivity. Their bloody, beaten faces taken from a Hamas propaganda video filmed a few hours after they were kidnapped on Oct. 7. At the same time, more rockets were fired from Gaza toward Israel with the intent to murder and maim.

On Thursday, Israel will be dragged to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accused of committing genocide, and not Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization that has the destruction of Israel as the cardinal tenet of its founding charter and which started the war by attacking us, killing 1,200 people and destroying entire communities.

Therein lies the dissonance between what Israelis are feeling and the perspective from the outside. Israelis, traumatized and embattled, feel that they are fighting a quintessential war of no choice, one of - if not the most - just and justifiable wars the country has ever fought. It's as if part of the world's moral compass has gone haywire, as if we live in parallel universes.

This dissonance would, indeed, be unbearable were it not for the sense of justice that most Israelis feel in their country waging this war and the way it is waging this war, regardless of what judges at the ICJ from those beacons-of-light countries such as Russia, China, Somalia, Lebanon, and South Africa may determine.

Adam Milstein: As Liberal Jews Feel abandoned by the Left

The Reality Check
In recent years, Critical Race Theory (CRT), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement carved out large pieces within the left’s agenda. Many liberal Jews have supported these developments believing that they’re the next phase of a long tradition of liberal activism. They were mistaken, no allyship with CRT, DEI, and BLM will protect them. Jews who tirelessly fight for acceptance and admittance in the intersectionality coalition will remain disappointed. We are not welcome.

Enamored with the seemingly laudable goals of DEI: to promote the representation, participation, and fair treatment of historically marginalized groups, liberal Jews ignored DEI promoters, and CRT advocates, as they advanced a radical agenda to fundamentally undermine American values. For years they have been promoting equality of outcome over equality of opportunity, collective identity (race, gender, etc.) over individual character, censorship of opposing viewpoints over freedom of speech, and a “victimhood Olympics” culture that crudely bifurcates society into oppressors and oppressed.

Liberal Jews failed to recognize how CRT and DEI initiatives, and intersectional theory would be weaponized against them. And today, we see how Jewish students are maliciously portrayed as wanton oppressors and colonialist abettors. American universities who fully adopted these doctrines are now hotbeds of antisemitism due to embedded leftist orthodoxy.

The Next Steps
So, where do liberal Jews go from here?

The “October 8th Jew” as Bret Stephens coined it, recognizes their home as a centrist. The October 8th Jew knows that the extreme left, like the extreme right before it, is no political home. The October 8th Jew is united in the mission to fight enemies of America, who always come first for the Jews. “Never again” must be backed by action and Jewish unity.

First, no more blind voting for Democrats or Republican for the sake of historical precedent. All Jews, including liberal Jews, must adopt a litmus test for candidates and support only those determined to fight antisemitism and support the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Second, pull support from organizations and academic institutions that promote the erasure of Jewish suffering and tacitly endorse Jew-hatred.

And finally, unite and support American organizations that protect and promote equality and inclusion rather than division and an ideology that aims to destroy Jewish life and American values.

A Jewish Marxist shamelessly denies the Oct 7 Hamas atrocities. pic.twitter.com/s9L6xe5LIs
— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) January 10, 2024

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

Israel left Gaza in 2005, and now Israel has returned. Not to grow peppers and tomatoes, but to obliterate monsters. Many want to know what will happen the day after, when the war is over. Some hope and pray that Israel can once again make Gush Katif area bloom and grow, and that beautiful Jewish children can be born to live there in peace, without fear of sirens and explosions, or having their heads cut off. Is this a realistic scenario?

Probably not. Objectively speaking, it seems unlikely that the Israeli government will allow the Jews to return to Gaza. Also, the majority of Israelis may not be in favor of such a move, believing that there will be some sort of creative solution that will allow the Arab refugees to return home. Others even call into question whether the Jews have a right to this territory. Not because they want to give Gaza away to the Arabs, but because some question whether Gaza is really Jewish land: whether this territory was part of the original Land of Israel, as described in the bible.

In the months and days leading up to Disengagement, or as those of us on the right call it, “The Expulsion,” we needed a way to express our distress over this traumatic event. Orange was the color chosen to symbolize Gush Katif. You’d see orange ribbons tied to car antennae and side view mirrors, and people wearing orange t-shirts, wristbands, and other assorted orange apparel. In addition to the color orange, a slogan was adopted, “Lo nishkach, v’lo nislach.” We will not forget, and we will not forgive.

I recall a bar mitzvah I attended not long after the Expulsion. The celebrants were twins. Their mother had crocheted yarmulkes for them in Gush Katif orange, with the “we won’t forget or forgive” slogan winding its way around the border. I said something to the mother of the boys, along the lines of, “Ha ha ha. Even their ‘kippot’ are patriotic.”

The mother did not find this at all funny. She said, “Yes. We feel very strongly about this,” with a serious expression on her face.

I had made a faux pas. And I should have known better. My entire community, including me, felt very strongly about the Expulsion, and until today, pray and hope and dream to return. We don’t forget and don’t forgive. But what constitutes the Jewish right to inherit this particular territory, Gaza?

In the real estate world, it’s all about location, location, location. One could make the case that the same is true of Gaza. If it’s part of the biblical land of Israel, then it’s Jewish land, if not, not. Perhaps that why author Toby Klein Greenwald begins The Significance of Gaza in Jewish History, with an indisputable fact: “Gaza is located within the boundaries of Shevet Yehuda,” or the land belonging to the tribe of Judah.

Then, and only then, does Klein Greenwald begin to detail for the reader the marvelous history and presence of the Jews in Gaza:

Avraham and Yitzchak lived in Gerar, located near Gaza. In the fourth century, Gaza was the primary Jewish port of Eretz Yisrael for international trade and commerce. Yonatan the Hasmonean (the brother of Yehuda HaMaccabi) conquered Gaza and settled there in 145 BCE. At various times throughout the centuries, Gaza was a center of Jewish learning (a yeshivah in Gaza is mentioned in the Talmud), life and commerce. King David is featured with his harp in an elaborate mosaic in an ancient synagogue in Gaza

Rabbi Yisrael Najara, author of “Kah Ribon Olam,” served as Gaza’s chief rabbi in the middle of the seventeenth century. Rabbi Avraham Azoulay of Fez wrote his mystical work “Chesed l’Avraham” in Gaza. Other well-known scholars and mystics lived there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sadly, this glory period was not to last:

The Jewish presence in Gaza was cut short in 1929, when Jews were forced to leave the area due to Arab riots, after which the British prohibited them from living in Gaza. Some Jews returned, however, and, in 1946, established the religious kibbutz Kfar Darom. A Jewish village by the same name existed there in the times of the Mishnah.

The Jewish Virtual Library entry on Gaza tells us that originally, Gaza belonged to the Philistines:

Gaza first appears in the Tanach as a Philistine city, the site of Samson's dramatic death. Jews finally conquered it in the Hasmonean era, and continued to live there. Notable residents include Dunash Ibn Labrat,* and Nathan of Gaza, advisor to false messiah Shabtai Zvi. Gaza is within the boundaries of Shevet Yehuda in Biblical Israel (see Genesis 15, Joshua 15:47, Kings 15:47 and Judges 1:18) and therefore some have argued that there is a Halachic requirement to live in this land. The earliest settlement of the area is by Avraham and Yitzhak, both of whom lived in the Gerar area of Gaza. In the fourth century Gaza was the primary Jewish port of Israel for international trade and commerce.

We also learn that even the “glory period” of the Jewish presence in Gaza, was not so glorious or uninterrupted as one might have hoped. Over the centuries, various occupying powers found they liked nothing better than to expel Jews—just as today’s Arab occupiers of Jewish land hope to push the Jews into the sea. But just as many Jews hope to return to Gaza after the war on Hamas is ended, so too, the Jews returned to Gaza, again and again:

The periodic removal of Jews from Gaza goes back at least to the Romans in 61 CE, followed much later by the Crusaders, Napoleon, the Ottoman Turks, the British and the contemporary Egyptians. However, Jews definitely lived in Gaza throughout the centuries, with a stronger presence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And now we learn the bitter history of what happened next:

Jews were present in Gaza until 1929, when they were forced to leave the area due to violent riots against them by the Arabs. Following these riots, and the death of nearly 135 Jews in all, the British prohibited Jews from living in Gaza to quell tension and appease the Arabs. Some Jews returned, however, and, in 1946, kibbutz Kfar Darom was established to prevent the British from separating the Negev from the Jewish state.

The United Nations 1947 partition plan allotted the coastal strip from Yavneh to [Rafah] on the Egyptian border to be an Arab state. In Israel's war for independence, most Arab inhabitants in this region fled or were expelled, settling around Gaza City. Israeli forces conquered Gaza, and proceeded south to El-Arish, but subsequently gave control of the area to Egypt in negotiations, keeping Ashdod and Ashkelon. In 1956, Israel went to war with Egypt, conquered Gaza again, only to return it again.

With the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli forces reentered Gaza and captured it. During the war, Israel had no idea what it would do with the territory. [Prime Minister Levi] Eshkol called it “a bone stuck in our throats.”

There is a tendency to think of the Labor Party as the party of land giveaways, but in actuality, it was a Labor government that built the first of the Gush Katif settlements:

The initial settlements were established by the Labor government in the early 1970s. The first was Kfar Darom, which was originally established in 1946, and reformed in 1970. In 1981, as part of a peace treaty with Egypt, the last settlements of the Sinai were destroyed, and some Jews moved to the Gaza area . . .

. . . There were twenty-one settlements in Gaza. The most populated Gush Katif area contained some thirty synagogues plus Yeshivat Torat Hachim with 200 students, the Hesder Yeshiva with 150 students, the Mechina in Atzmona with 200 students, Yeshivot in Netzarim and Kfar Darom, 6 Kollelim, a Medrasha for girls in Neve Dekalim and more. All of the settlements had their own schools, seminaries, stores, and doctors.

All of this was destroyed in 2005. The vibrant communities of Gush Katif are no more. We even dug up our dead—many of them Holocaust survivors—to move them out of Gaza.

From then until now with this war, the only Jews present in Gaza were captives, some of them alive, like Gilad Shalit, and some of them almost certainly dead, like Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul.

Will the Jews be allowed to reclaim and rebuild Gaza? Like so many Israelis, I wish it with all my heart, but have little faith that this will happen—even though it should. The centuries’ long Jewish presence and history in Gaza is indisputable, and certainly long predates that of the Arab latecomers.

Jews lived in Gaza long before the Arab people ever existed. In fact, the first reference to the Arabs as a distinct people comes only in 853 BCE, by the hand of an Assyrian scribe as he recorded the details of a battle. How fitting a beginning for a people who worship war and death.

Jews have more of a right to Gaza than any Arab ever did. And if return should prove impossible in the days following this wretched war, forced on us by cruel Arab two-legged beasts, I have faith that the return of the Jews to Gaza is inevitable, if at some unknown point in the future.

***

*I see no evidence to support the idea that Dunash Ibn Labrat lived in Gaza. After looking at many sources, it seems clear he lived only in Spain and Morocco.

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 the PA's official Wafa news agency:

Jordanian King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and President Mahmoud Abbas affirmed today, Wednesday, their opposition to any Israeli plans to displace Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the need to condemn them internationally and confront them.

At their summit, which was held in the city of Aqaba to discuss the dangerous situation in Gaza, the leaders stressed their complete rejection of all attempts to liquidate the Palestinian issue and separate Gaza and the West Bank, which constitute an extension of the one Palestinian state.

They're getting better at their doubletalk. But they mean the same thing they have said since October 7: no Gazans will be allowed to flee to safety, no matter how much they want to.

The position of the United Nations is that freedom to emigrate is a human right, part of the right to freedom of movement. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

Travel bans are considered a major infringement of human rights.

By any sane metric, banning Gazans from leaving if they want to is a massive violation of their human rights. But the PA, Egypt and Jordan enthusiastically support such bans on travel, as do NGOs that otherwise are dead-set against it.

Amazingly, they all claim that this is for the Gazans' own good. Equally amazingly, no one is asking Gazans themselves what they want to do and what they think of these leaders who decide for them what they are allowed to do.

Even though there are articles showing that many Gazans are desperate to leave.

The only, and I mean only, reason why no one is concerned over this massive violation of Gazan human rights is because they hate Jews more than they hate Gazans, and they think Israel would benefit from this mass travel ban on 2 million people. That is enough to damn them all to potential death and injury as Israel fights a terrorist group that uses those same civilians as their main line of defense.

The world's hypocrisy knows no bounds.

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01/10 Links Pt1: South Africa is inverting reality by accusing Israel of genocide; Victory is more important than US support; Intimidating tactics are backfiring on hardcore protesters

From Ian:

Irwin Cotler: South Africa is inverting reality by accusing Israel of genocide

In asserting standing before the ICJ, South Africa has emphasized “its own obligations as a State party to the Genocide Convention to act to prevent genocide.” But by launching a baseless proceeding against Israel for the crimes of genocide and incitement to genocide, it provides protective cover to Hamas and its related Iranian terrorist proxies, who themselves are the ones guilty of those crimes. South Africa thereby inverts reality and subverts the rules-based international order. This subversion is dangerous, and deeply concerning, following the pattern set by Vladimir Putin’s Russia — with President Putin using false accusations of genocide in his “Nazification” libel as the pretext for launching his criminal aggression against Ukraine.

Indeed, South Africa’s cynical weaponization of international law was further demonstrated when, on Jan. 4, less than a week after launching the ICJ proceedings against Israel, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa welcomed the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) to his home in Pretoria. The RSF, complicit in the Darfur genocide 20 years ago, is once again perpetrating mass crimes against humanity in Sudan, including the massacre of innocent civilians and the systematic use of sexual violence. Recently, over 100 legal experts warned that Sudan sits on the precipice of another genocide.

Genocide, the “crime of crimes,” constitutes the most abhorrent of human acts. The 153 state parties to the Genocide Convention have both a moral and a legal imperative to take action to combat genocide — and incitement to genocide — wherever they may occur. But, rather than upholding this legal obligation, South Africa’s application at the ICJ undermines it, inverting both fact and law, and threatening the international rules-based order by doing so. As was most recently demonstrated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this inversion is most dangerous, and it is crucial that the community of democracies, including Canada, is steadfast in opposing it.

Alan Baker: South Africa’s genocide charges against Israel: Cynical abuse of the ICJ

South Africa's genocidal claim echoes Palestinian charters
IRONY IS not lacking from the specific terms of the South African application to the International Court of Justice, alleging that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention. This is especially in light of the deliberately distorted and misleading interpretation given by South Africa to the terms of the Genocide Convention.

The criminal component of the Genocide Convention is based entirely on one very central tenet requiring a distinct intention to commit genocide. South Africa is alleging that Israel’s acts are “intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial, and ethnic group.”

If such a specific and distinct genocidal intention cannot be proved and does not exist, then the complaint by South Africa has no basis and the convention cannot be invoked.

A thorough perusal of the complaint reveals a curious tendency by South Africa to attribute to Israel a broad and clearly false 75-year genocidal intention to destroy the Palestinians. By so doing, South Africa basically is echoing the messages of the PLO and Hamas charters, and as such is utterly distorting the very nature of the present limited conflict against the terror activity of Hamas.

Clearly, rather than harboring a 75-year-old genocidal intention, Israel has, throughout its short history, consistently sought to achieve peaceful coexistence and bon voisinage with its neighbors, including the Palestinians.

This is borne out by the many agreements reached, including the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1991-1993 Madrid process that led to the 1995 Oslo Accords.

One may ask why would Israel have committed itself to such a declared and agreed peace negotiation process with the Palestinians, witnessed and endorsed by the leaders of the international community and the United Nations itself, if it harbored any basic intention to commit genocide against the Palestinian people?

South Africa's cynical use of the term genocide
Through quoting in its complaint a lengthy collection of irresponsible statements by minor Israeli politicians, and even through quoting Israeli pop songs, South Africa is in fact cynically ignoring the very central issue of the conflict between Israel and Hamas: Israel’s inherent and legally justified prerogative and international right to defend itself and its population against terror through removing Hamas’s terror capabilities, weaponry, fortifications, and ammunition.

To claim that Israel’s actions to combat terror constitute the crime of genocide is clearly absurd to the point of being a frivolous accusation. No logical and serious analysis of the conflict between Israel and Hamas could indicate any genocidal intention on the part of Israel.

To burden the International Court of Justice with such a false and misleading allegation undermines the very integrity of the Genocide Convention and is both an insult to the Court, to the countries whose judges serve on the Court’s bench, as well as to the United Nations as a whole.

Paywalled: The genocide case against Israel is an abuse of the postwar legal order

The International Court of Justice is about to hear arguments in a case, brought by South Africa – the country that in 2015 refused to send former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir of Sudan to the International Criminal Court to stand trial for his contribution to war crimes in Darfur, and instead facilitated his return to Sudan where he continued his crimes – that alleges that Israel has not complied with the Genocide Convention and calls on the Court to order Israel to stop committing acts of “genocide” in Gaza.

To me, this case represents an outrageous and cynical abuse of the principles underlying the international legal order that was set up after the Second World War.

Hamas’s explicit and unapologetic goal is to eliminate Jews. The elimination of Jews is genocide. That is why Hamas murdered, raped, beheaded, kidnapped and tortured Jews on Oct. 7, 2023: to eliminate them, because they were Jews. It is a legal absurdity to suggest that a country that is defending itself from genocide is thereby guilty of genocide.

The end of the Second World War prevented Hitler from fully implementing his genocidal plan to eliminate Jews. And the world signed the Genocide Convention 75 years ago to make sure it never happened to anyone else. Now, we find ourselves in the perverse situation where a genocidal organization such as Hamas is able to escape legal scrutiny or sanction for committing genocidal acts, while the country that is the intended target of its genocidal intentions is being called upon by the International Court of Justice to defend itself from allegations of genocide.

This is an insult to what genocide means, an insult to the perception of the ability of international courts to retain their legitimacy and transcend global politics, and an insult to the memory of all of those on whose behalf the Genocide Convention was created.

Rosalie Silberman Abella is the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She served as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada from 2004 until her mandatory retirement in 2021.

UN Watch reports:

A Telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza is replete with posts celebrating the Hamas massacre of October 7th minutes after it began, praising the murderers and rapists as “heroes,” glorifying the “education” the terrorists received, gleefully sharing photos of dead or captured Israelis and urging the execution of hostages.

“This is the motherlode of UNRWA teachers’ incitement to Jihadi terrorism,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the Geneva-based non-governmental organization that monitors the world body.

The Telegram chat group is meant to support UNRWA teachers, and contains dozens of files with UNRWA staff names, ID numbers, schedules and curriculum materials.

In addition, UNRWA teachers regularly share videos, photos and messages inciting to Jihadi terrorism, and openly celebrating the Hamas massacre and rape of civilians.

Read the whole thing - they list a lot of specific examples.

I looked at the group myself (UNRWA will probably take it down in the coming hours) and saw a number of celebratory posts.

'"Umm Youssef" wrote a number of pro-jihadist posts ("Yousif's Mother" above), including "I want a mother from the mothers of these heroes to teach me how to raise my children."

"Shams Al-Shamousa" praised the terrorists: "They were taught in mosques with the established faith.

They breastfed jihad and resistance with their mothers’ milk."

"FR Mohamed" added, "They were raised on the sound faith and the Qur’an...and that death for the sake of God is our highest wish."

"Ibrahim Ibrahim" wrote, "After these scenes, there is no worry that people will die. These are historic moments. It doesn't matter what comes after that."

"Israa Mahmoud Abu Rizq" also praised the terrorists: "Decorations and the best of the youth of the sector, no women, no drugs, no corruption, no Tik Tok dancing, most of them are well-off, between newlyweds and couriers, memorizers of the Book of God, attending mosques, hearts as white as snow, fasting and standing. They are better than all of us. May God accept them in Paradise.♥️"

There were also rumors the next day that Hebron youth would repeat the attack in Kiryat Arba, with much anticipation.

Only one person I found seemed irritated, saying that the purpose of the group was not war news but UNRWA jobs. Everyone ignored him.

These are the people teaching the youth of Gaza, paid by the West. Are they any better than Hamas teachers?

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

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The people who block bridges and highways and the Houthis have a lot in common

Tim Black wrote on Spiked:

The Houthis’ attacks might not have had a significant military impact so far, but they have severely disrupted global trade. More strikingly, they have slowly started to thrill some Western leftists. After news broke that the Houthis had seized an Israeli-linked ship in early December, socialist magazine Jacobin painted the Houthis as an honourable anti-imperialist resistance movement. ‘They felt obliged to act’, it opined, ‘because of the strong, historically rooted support for Palestinians among the Yemeni people’.

Since then, the Houthi cheerleading among the left has only become louder. Self-styled ‘progressives’ have taken to expressing pro-Houthi sentiments on social media (Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King even managed to have his X account taken down for doing so). And on New Year’s Eve, pro-Palestine protesters decided to fill the New York City air with a new pro-Houthi chant: ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud! Turn another ship around!’

"Yemen Yemen make us proud... turn another ship around"

A substantial protest in midtown Manhattan, expressing solidarity with Palestine and calling for a ceasefire in #Gaza. pic.twitter.com/Vpbsq4EiNH
— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) January 7, 2024

Isn't it wonderful that the socialists who support Hamas also support another woman-hating, gay-hating, Jew-hating Islamist group? A group that has, incidentally, been responsible for the deaths of some 150,000 people?

Sounds like genocide!

But the parallels between the far-Leftist antisemites and the Houthi antisemites don't end there. After all, they share the exact same methods.

The socialists disrupt normal travel in America and Europe, including an attempt to block all traffic to the city with the most Jews in the world. The Houthis disrupt normal commercial traffic in the southern Red Sea. As one news report says, "their targets have increasingly tenuous — or no — relationship with Israel and imperil one of the world's crucial trade routes linking Asia and the Middle East to Europe."

And both of them claim to do it "for Palestine."

We are reaching the point where anyone can do anything they want and they can expect to be supported by the significant number of Jew-haters as long as they claim to be doing it "for Palestine." There doesn't have to be any relationship whatsoever between their actions and helping Palestinians, but the claim is enough to warm the hearts of leftist antisemites.

We have reached a point where the socialists can explicitly support a group whose very slogan says "Curse the Jews."

We are not too far from this. As long as they say it is "for Palestine."

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

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The Guardian really outdoes itself:

The planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, new research reveals.

The vast majority (over 99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2 equivalent) estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days following the 7 October Hamas attack can be attributed to Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers in the UK and US.

According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal.

The analysis, which is yet to be peer reviewed, includes CO2 from aircraft missions, tanks and fuel from other vehicles, as well as emissions generated by making and exploding the bombs, artillery and rockets. It does not include other planet-warming gases such as methane. Almost half the total CO2 emissions were down to US cargo planes flying military supplies to Israel.

Wait, what? Half of this supposedly huge amount comes from US cargo planes flying to Israel?

If that is true, then every airplane in the skies is putting out huge amounts of CO2 - which indeed they really do. A single transatlantic flight generates hundreds of metric tons of CO2.

So a little research shows that all aviation traffic worldwide puts out over 1 billion tons of CO2 every year. That comes out to about 2.8 million tons from aviation every day. According to these calculations, Israel is directly and indirectly responsible for less than 5000 metric tons of CO2 a day - which is about 0.17% of what is used by all airplanes every day. It is the equivalent of about 25 flights from London to New York. And aviation is responsible for about 2% of CO2 emissions worldwide, meaning the war in Gaza is adding roughly an additional 0.0034% of all CO2 emissions.

Looking at it another way, the world generates about 36.8 billion tons of CO2 a year, which is 100 million tons a day. If the Gaza war generates 5000 tons a day, that increases the amount of CO2 by 1/20,000th.

Does that sound like it has an "'immense' effect on climate catastrophe"?

This article is just manipulating numbers to make Israel look bad. And, let's face it, anyone who looks at a map of the world and thinks that anything happening in Gaza is having an "immense" effect on the CO2 worldwide is an idiot.

This is especially disgusting because Israel contributes more to helping the environment on a per capita basis than probably any other country in the world, with Israeli environmental innovations being used around the world.

Now, why would people spend so much time calculating Israel's, and only Israel's, carbon footprint - and vastly exaggerating it - during a war for its survival?

One doesn't have to wonder about that too hard.

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01/09 Links Pt2: Restoring the Zionist Iron Wall; Exposing the lie about Palestinian journalists; Rashida Tlaib Named ‘Antisemite of the Year’

From Ian:

Despotism Goes Global

Like the Covid shutdowns and the riots of 2020 before them, the Hamas atrocities of October 7 revealed the ongoing moral and political catastrophe of the West. Hamas initiated a war against Israel that immediately turned into a war against Jews everywhere. That much was clear when its opening salvo—an orgy of rape, torture, murder, and kidnapping—received fervent support among leftists worldwide. From London to Sydney and points in between, the intifada, as Lee Smith observes, has gone global.

But what does the global intifada stand for, besides the brutal hard core of Hamas? It’s hard to say, because Hamas stands purely for the violent annihilation of what it hates. And what it hates is anything that impedes worldwide Islamist domination—especially Western civilization.

The twin roots of the West are Athens and Jerusalem, where philosophy, science, politics, law, and the love of God emerged as pillars of civilization. Hamas’s reference points are totalitarian-era Moscow and Berlin, which, in the twentieth century’s darkest hours, gave us the Gulag, the Iron Curtain, and Auschwitz. From its inception, the Muslim Brotherhood—of which Hamas is an offshoot—embraced fascistic Jew-hatred. And Hamas’s international support is the bitter fruit of a Soviet campaign, launched more than 60 years ago, that used the Palestinians, left by their Arab neighbors to languish in refugee camps, as an ideological bludgeon against the West.

After October 7, Hamas’s war against the Jews enflamed the demoralized remains of a free world that is now tearing itself apart. No people in history has proved more vital and resilient than the Jews. The irrepressible Israelite spirit is announced in the first words of Exodus, where Pharaoh feels threatened by an explosion of Israelite births. Freed from the Egyptian yoke, the desert-and-God-formed Jews fought and conquered, remembered and reflected, and recorded what they’d learned in the Torah, a wellspring of wisdom and cultural creativity. They survived the destruction of Solomon’s Temple and built a new one after returning from a lifetime of captivity in Babylon.

When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and evicted them from Palestine, the Jews should by all odds have withered away. Instead they reconfigured their religion from the ground up. In the absence of the Temple, they found a new locus of contact with God in the Torah. Rabbis skilled in scriptural interpretation replaced the priests, and self-sacrifice substituted for the offering of animals. In subsequent centuries, the Jews produced the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, monumental works of intellectual imagination. A prodigious number of great thinkers followed, including 214 Nobel Prize winners. And after a third of the Jewish people were murdered in the Holocaust, the survivors founded a new homeland, defended it with courage and conviction, and made the desert bloom.

Jewish success is an imperishable monument to the accomplishment of the West, the civilization they helped to birth and, as much as any other people, to build and sustain. The Jews reflect the best of the West: the promise of freedom, peace, prosperity, and creativity it holds for those willing to work for these things. And it is just this happiness and human flourishing that is intolerable to Islamists and their nihilistic allies.

BESA: Restoring the Zionist Iron Wall

A hundred years ago, in the article "The Iron Wall," Ze'ev Jabotinsky laid the cornerstone for the foundations of Israel's security perception. In 1923 he identified the motivations behind Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise in the Land of Israel and proposed a strategic approach to achieving Zionist goals.

First: Arab resistance and struggle against Zionism express a religious-nationalist struggle with enduring motivational roots. The idea that a positive, lasting solution to the conflict can be arrived at through suitable compensation and willing compromise has been repeatedly revealed as overly optimistic.

Second: The Arab struggle and adoption of terrorist methods and violence do not stem from economic hardship, poverty, and despair. Instead, it arises from the Arab hope that Zionist dominance can be consistently challenged and weakened until its ultimate demise. It is not despair that generates Arab terrorism but hope.

Third: In recognizing these two statements as true, the concept of the "Iron Wall" negates the Arab hope of achieving gains through incessant resistance to the Zionist Israeli presence. Jabotinsky wrote: "As long as the Arabs have even a glimmer of hope of getting rid of us, they will not give up on this hope."

The goal of the current war should be to restore the Zionist Iron Wall and establish it with renewed strength for the next hundred years.

Jonathan Tobin: Don’t look away from primary cause of antisemitism epidemic

To put that into perspective, this outrage is taking place in a country in which truckers protesting COVID-19 policies by parking their vehicles paralyzing traffic in the capital of Ottawa in what they called a “freedom convoy” were treated as insurrectionists. Their bank accounts and those of their supporters were frozen, and their leaders are being tried now on a variety of charges that could land them in prison, even while pro-Hamas protestors were given kid-gloves treatment in the same city.

It’s all part of the same mindset that led to a private Jewish high school’s girl basketball team withdrawing from a game being played in Yonkers, N.Y., against Roosevelt High School—a college-prep magnet school—after they were repeatedly subjected to antisemitic taunts and rough play by their opponents. One Roosevelt High player screamed at the Lefell School players, “I support Hamas, you f**king Jew.” Roosevelt forfeited the game. One player was suspended a day later, and the coach was fired. But again, just imagine, if one of the Jewish girls or any non-minority had yelled, “I support the Klan” at an African-American player. It would have made the front page of the Times and become a national cause-célèbre. But as of this writing, the Times has yet to even acknowledge it in much the same manner that it was late to account for the antisemitic riot that took place in a Queens high school that targeted a pro-Israel teacher.

These incidents and the growing total of opinion surveys that point to a spike in antisemitic attitudes are not just a result of indoctrination in the intersectional lie about the Palestinian war to destroy Israel being analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. It’s also a product of the mainstreaming of anti-Zionist invective and barely disguised prejudice against Jews in publications like the Times and the willingness of pop-culture outlets like the “Saturday Night Live” show to take the side of those justifying the advocacy of genocide of Jews rather than those calling it out.

The problem is that the people who are committing the growing list of antisemitic acts on the streets and on college campuses are not part of a tiny radical fringe like the tiki-torch-bearing neo-Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville. These demonstrators are educated “progressives” who claim to support human rights and are often connected in one way or another to the elites who run the institutions of academia, the media, the arts and liberal politics. In other words, the new shock troops of antisemitism are people that liberal Jews are used to considering as allies. That’s why it is so hard for even groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, which is supposed to be protecting the Jewish community, to stop defending DEI policies that are behind this rise in antisemitism.

Jews cannot afford to look away from the main cause of their current woes. Instead, they must focus on why it is that progressives think that Jews are the one minority group that can be discriminated against with impunity. The community needs to mobilize its resources and demand that political leaders start treating those who are carrying out these antisemitic hate crimes in the name of supposed sympathy for the Palestinians with the harshness they deserve. It must also insist that mainstream publications go back to treating anti-Zionism as a form of hatred against Jews. Only then can we hope to quell this dangerous surge of hate.

Al Jazeera lists the countries which have officially backed the South African case before the ICJ claiming Israel is engaged in "genocide."

It starts with the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC). And then it lists three countries - Malaysia, Jordan and Turkey - which all happen to be members of the OIC themselves. (If those countries calling out their support separately is significant, then one must wonder why the other 54 members of the OIC have not.)

The only other country that publicly backs the case is Bolivia, which has a pretty poor human rights record itself.

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!