Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, February 05, 2024

By the logic of Israel haters, the Allies' side in the Pacific War in World War II was a racist endeavor

The president of a new Columbia Law School group formed to combat rising antisemitism on campus told Jewish Insider that its adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism played a role in the Law School Student Senate’s vote to reject it as a recognized university group.

“A group of students were strongly opposed to our formation from the very beginning,” Marie-Alice Legrand, president of the Law Students Against Antisemitism, recalled, noting that some condemned its use of the State Department-adopted IHRA definition.

The article goes on to say that an anti-Israel group, “Concerned Jewish Students at CLS,” sent a letter against the proposed student group. In that letter, they wrote:

Many individuals accurately believe that the creation of a State of Israel was a racist endeavor because doing so involved killing more than 15,000 Palestinians, expelling more than 700,000 Palestinians, and creating a refugee crisis that has resulted in over 2 million Palestinian refugees worldwide.

The "15,000 Palestinians" killed, "700,000 Palestinians expelled" and "2 million Palestinian refugees" are all lies.

But let's set that aside. By their own definition and false figures, virtually every major war is racist, since it involves killing and displacing the enemy's civilians.

Let's pretend that we are woke college students and we want to say that the United States is racist.

Let's take accurate facts about the Pacific Theater in World War II.

3 million Japanese were killed, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. And there was plenty of anti-Japanese racism in America. Here's a typical cover of a comic book from that era, and there are scores more.

Not only that, but the US rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps. Moreover, the US occupied Japan for years after the war.

If those are the only facts you know about the war between the US and Japan, you would conclude that the war was a racist endeavor by the US, just because Americans hated Japanese people and coveted their land.

But anyone with even a passing knowledge of history knows that this doesn't accurately describe the war. It is just a highly selective set of facts meant to bring an ignorant reader to a foregone conclusion.

In this case, unlike the anti-Israel group at Columbia's letter, all of the facts are 100% accurate. But they ignore Pearl Harbor, Japan's partnership with Nazi Germany, Japanese expansionism, Japanese war crimes and inhumane war practices. If the facts I listed are all you know, your conclusion would be wrong even though, in this case, the facts are accurate.

This is how anti-Israel propaganda works. The Israel haters hate context. They don't want anyone to know anything besides their own highly curated version of events.

And they also lie, knowing that most people won't bother to publicly correct them. Think about it: they sent this letter to the senators, presumably the top leaders at Columbia's law school, secure in the knowledge that none of them would point out that the letter was filled with lies not only about history but also about the IHRA definition. They have learned from the Palestinians (and the Soviets) that lying is an excellent strategy, especially when you claim to be supporting a supposedly oppressed group. Instead of being treated worse than cheaters and plagiarists, they are rewarded by their fellow students.

Propaganda works. Lies work.

If Columbia's law students accepted this letter and its implications as truth, they are going to be spectacularly poor lawyers and judges in the future.

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!

02/05 Links Pt1: Biden's 'Two-State Solution' To Reward Palestinian Terrorism, Destroy Israel; Palestinians have no future with UNRWA; Un-Hijack Human Rights

From Ian:

Bassam Tawil: Biden's 'Two-State Solution' To Reward Palestinian Terrorism, Destroy Israel

The declared policy... of the US and Britain since the 1993-95 Oslo Accords has been that a two-state solution should come as part of a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

If the Oslo Accords are so cavalierly abrogated, what do any international agreements mean, and why would any country sign one in the future?

The assumption that normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia in return for the establishment of another failed and corrupt Arab state would bring peace, security and stability to the Middle East is a deadly fantasy.

The Americans and British are evidently no longer demanding that the Palestinians halt their homicidal incitement against Israel and Jews or stop paying financial rewards to Palestinian terrorists who murder Jews.

The Americans and the British are also ignoring the fact that most Palestinians are opposed to the idea of a two-state solution because they want a Palestinian state to replace Israel, not have a state next to it.

Those who are promoting the idea of creating a Palestinian terror state next to Israel -- again capitulating to terrorists and rewarding terrorism -- are paving the way for more October 7-like massacres. They are essentially asking Israel to commit suicide at a time when its soldiers are fighting to eradicate Hamas and ensure that the Gaza Strip will no longer serve Hamas, or its terror master Iran, as a base for murdering Jews, Americans or anyone else in the West.

Israel's Long War for the West

The common thread weaving Hamas, Hezbollah and the Shia militias together is the significant funding and support each receives from Iran, which has in turn received it from the Obama and Biden administrations. When the Biden administration came in, Iran had $6 billion of reserves; it now has, according to former US Army Gen. Jack Keane, more than $100 billion-- which is presumably what it used to finance its proxies and its nuclear program.

The Biden administration now appears about to compound the problem with another catastrophic retreat: there are reported to be discussions about the US pulling its troops out of oil-rich Iraq – just as the Iranian regime has been trying to force the US to do since Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979.

"Israel didn't start this war. Israel didn't want this war.... In fighting Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror, Israel is fighting the enemies of civilization itself.... While Israel is doing everything to get Palestinian civilians out of harm's way, Hamas is doing everything to keep Palestinian civilians in harm's way. Israel urges Palestinian civilians to leave the areas of armed conflict, while Hamas prevents those civilians from leaving those areas at gunpoint." — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Wall Street Journal.

Iran's former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi recently confirmed that the "the confrontation between Iran and Israel will continue as long as [Israel] exists... even if a Palestinian state is established."

Israel is actually well on its way to winning. The least we can do is to enable it to have whatever it needs to complete its mission, and the time in which to do it.

[P]rotecting our borders and protecting our allies is not an either-or choice.... America's outstanding troops are fighting abroad not because the US is irresponsibly gallant, and not recklessly to fund the military-industrial complex, but to defend us here at home better.

If you have a strong military, you will not have to use it: no one will test you.

Palestinians have no future with UNRWA

As a UN agency, UNRWA is supposed to remain impartial and work solely on humanitarian efforts for Palestinians. However, UNRWA has a history of promoting antisemitic violence in its school systems, glorifying terrorism and teaching students to become martyrs.

Hamas has regularly used UNRWA schools as military bases, weapon storage facilities and rocket launching pads. How can an organization call itself impartial when it actively promotes Hamas’s ideology in the Palestinian school curriculum and gives the terror group the ability to launch an assault against Israel?

Since the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, more and more evidence has emerged on how Hamas has infested itself within the agency. UNRWA teachers can masquerade as ordinary civilians with legitimate UN employee IDs, then simultaneously work as military combatants for Hamas.

The initial evidence came about after one Israeli hostage who was released in the first hostage-prisoner swap revealed that he had been held captive in the attic of a teacher employed by UNRWA (who was also a father of 10 children). The former hostage said he had been locked away for nearly 50 days and was barely provided with food or any medical needs. A month later, UN Watch, a Geneva-based nonprofit that monitors the UN, revealed that 3,000 UNRWA educational employees celebrated the October 7 massacre and called for the execution of the hostages in a telegram channel.

All of these are terrible revelations on their own and prove that UNRWA is far from impartial and, at the very least, complicit in aiding Hamas. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg, as more evidence has come out over just how involved UNRWA staff were in the murder and kidnapping of Israelis. What we can confidently say is that the United Nations is using global taxpayer money to fund the salaries of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Israel has exposed that 12 UNRWA employees in Gaza were directly involved with Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli civilians. It is difficult to wrap your head around how the crimes committed by these 12 individuals and the fact that the UN pays for their salaries. The allegations against them include kidnapping hostages, participating in the actual murder of Israeli civilians and filming hostages being taken captive. One of the twelve is an UNRWA elementary school teacher who has been accused of being a Hamas commander and of having participated in the massacre in Kibbutz Be’eri.

At the same time, another is a UNRWA social worker who was involved in the kidnapping of an IDF soldier’s body on October 7. Israel’s revelations summarize that six UNRWA employees infiltrated Israel as part of the massacre, four were involved in kidnapping Israelis, and three additional UNRWA employees were “invited via an SMS text to arrive at an assembly area the night before the attack and were directed to equip themselves with weapons.”

Ilan Pappé is a fraudulent historian who has been found to falsify sources numerous times to twist history to fit his anti-Zionist ideology.

He attended a Zoom call over the weekend where he apparently made up another "fact" out of thin air:

The Israeli historian who supports the Palestinian cause, Professor Ilan Pappé , said that it is not possible to coexist with Zionism because it is “an evil that must be eradicated,” and peace cannot be reached with the Zionist entity, but rather it must be dismantled and eliminated.

In a Zoom symposium for intellectuals, most of whom are Palestinians, Pappé said that Zionism, since its inception, has been working to eliminate the Palestinian people and their cause and not to coexist with them.

Pappe continued in his lecture: “Zionism has tried to displace and kill the Palestinian people since 1929, during the Nakba in 1948, and after the Nakba and the (1967) Naksa and all the attacks that followed until this day. This was clearly demonstrated in the aggressive war on the Gaza Strip, and they will continue their aggressive approach. But the Palestinian National Movement and the Palestinian people always surprised the Zionists and rose again despite the endless financial, military and political support from Western colonialism for Zionism and the Zionist entity.”

Everything he says is a lie, and an easily proven lie. Indeed, most of what he claims has already been debunked.

But this little speech includes something seemingly new: the claim that Zionism has tried to displace and kill the "Palestinian people" since 1929.

Where does he get that from?

In the book that made him famous, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine," Pappé only mentions 1929 in romantic terms. He classifies the horrific 1929 pogroms where gangs of Arabs murdered every Jew they could find and raped and dismembered women as a mere "uprising." And he writes it was an uprising against British policy, not Zionism.

If the ethnic cleansing of Arabs began in 1929, wouldn't his 384 page book about supposed Jewish ethnic cleansing of Arabs even make a passing mention of this root cause?

What seems to have happened is that there has been an attempt by Israel haters to say that "history didn't begin on October 7." But if you look at the history of who has killed whom first between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, the Arabs win that contest hands down - murdering Jews in Safed in 1834, murdering Jews in Palestine in 1920, 1921 and especially 1929.

As a fake historian, Pappé must show that the murderous 1929 rampage of Arabs against Jews in Hebron, Jerusalem, Motza and Safed were justified, just as he attempts to justify October 7. So he makes up a new accusation, that the righteous Arab rapists were not engaging in ethnic cleansing but responding to one.

This is an accusation that Pappé himself has apparently never made before, even though this is his main area of supposed expertise.

How convenient!

An additional irony is that the 1929 pogroms resulted in the actual ethnic cleansing of Jews from a number of communities that they lived in. No Arabs were forced to leave their homes - only Jews.

Pappe isn't concerned with that ethnic cleansing.

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!

Egypt has said that it would suspend its peace agreement with Israel if even one Gazan goes to Egypt to flee a war zone.

As we've seen, Egypt constructed a huge wall and other barriers to block any chance of Gazans escaping.

In every other war zone, human rights groups are solidly on the side of refugees and displaced persons. They show zero sympathy towards the nations that restrict entry of refugees.

Except when the refugees are Palestinian.

Last July, Human Rights Watch condemned Egypt for making it more difficult for Sudanese refugees to enter Egypt. It wasn't a ban, just additional procedures:

Egyptian authorities have claimed the new entry visa rule would reduce visa forgery. As of late June, thousands of displaced people remained stranded in dire humanitarian conditions as they attempted to obtain an entry visa from the Egyptian consulate in Wadi Halfa, a Sudanese town near the Egyptian border. Some have been compelled to wait up to a month as they struggled to secure food, accommodation, and health care.

“The need to combat visa forgery does not justify Egypt denying or delaying entry to people fleeing Sudan’s devastating conflict,” said Amr Magdi, senior Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Egyptian government should rescind its entry visa rule for Sudanese nationals during the current crisis, permit them swift entry, and facilitate access to asylum procedures or treat them as the refugees most if not all are.”

Amnesty similarly said:

“Allowing swift passage across borders for all people fleeing the conflict and providing immediate access to asylum registration would ease the dire humanitarian situation along the borders,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s regional director for East and Southern Africa
“States should not deny access to those fleeing a conflict based on a lack of identification documents or visas. Yet, the stringent entry regulations on those without valid travel documents or visas have created insurmountable barriers for individuals in desperate need of safety, leaving them at serious risk.

But when it comes to Egypt (and Jordan) creating far more draconian measures to stop every single Gazan from escaping, literally making Gaza into a prison for those who want desperately to flee, , suddenly these human rights groups and others are mute. These righteous words about the rights of desperate people in war zones are never, ever applied to Palestinians in Gaza.

All of these groups issue more and lengthier reports on human rights for Palestinians than for any other group in the world. But their concern for Palestinian human rights suddenly ends if helping them also helps Israel destroy a terrorist group with fewer casualties.

Hamas has built its entire war strategy on using innocent Gazans as human shields. HRW, Amnesty, Oxfam and Gisha are on Hamas' side: they all agree with Hamas that Gaza civilians should protect the rapists, kidnappers and mass murderers of Jews.

Indeed, the only reason for their silence is that they would prefer thousands of Gazans die than Israel defeating Hamas.

The hypocrisy cannot be more obvious. These groups discard human rights when it conflicts with their anti-Israel agendas.

The real irony is that if these so-called human rights defenders would treat Palestinians the way they treat Sudanese and Eritreans in danger, the world would pressure Egypt - and hundreds of thousands of Gazans could be out of danger. Gazans are in the headlines far more than these other groups, and a single word against Egypt's reprehensible behavior would be widely publicized and start a serious debate that could easily result in Egypt's caving to pressure, or at the very least negotiating a way to leverage the crisis into helping Egypt's economy to handle the additional influx - something that other nations would be glad to fund.

This is a case where human rights groups could actually save lives. And they are making an active choice that they'd rather see Gazans die so they can write up more reports about how monstrous 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!

Arabs say Jewish challah covers were a factor that forced them to murder Jews in 1929. This is the "logic" of today's terrorist defenders.

A tweet of mine went viral last week:

How is it that
* Hamas attacks Israel first
* Hezbollah attacks Israel first
* Iranian backed Syrian groups attack Israel first
* The Houthis shoot rockets at Israel first

And Israel is framed as the aggressor?

There were hundreds of furious responses, most saying that Hamas' pogrom was a reaction to Israeli actions and Israel was the original aggressor, that "history didn't start October 7." (I even saw one person made a poster twisting even these facts against Israel with the caption, "Only Israel can bomb four countries and still be perceived as the victim.")

To which I responded:

To the idiots who say Israel started - either in Jerusalem over the past few years, or in 1967, or in 1948. No doubt you would also claim that the Jews started the riots in 1929 as well.

Some reacted with astonishment that I should bring up 1929 - ancient history - when thousands of Palestinians are being murdered now. In other words, some people who say history didn't start October 7 also say history started on October 8 when one takes them at their word and looks at history.

Others responded that Jewish "colonialism" started before 1929 - implying massacres of Jewish rabbis, women and children was justified.

In other words, no matter what argument they use, they lose. But their attempts to justify the most horrific crimes prove their antisemitism.

I looked at Wikipedia's entry on the 1929 massacres, and found a "reason" for them I had never seen before: Challah covers.

For some time, Jewish institutions of Jerusalem had given their supporters abroad items such as Challah covers and Passover Seder tablecloths featuring imagery of the Dome of the Rock either below or emblazoned with Jewish symbolism such as the Star of David and the Temple menorah. Zionist literature published throughout the world had also used provocative, Judaized imagery of the Dome of the Rock. One Zionist publication featuring a Jewish flag atop the Dome of the Rock was picked up and redistributed by Arab propagandists.

Here is one of the challah covers from Jews in Jerusalem circa 1925, where the Dome of the Rock is shown behind the Kotel (Western Wall) which is featured.

Even as early as 1863, way before modern Zionism, the Dome of the Rock is depicted in a challah cover designed in Jerusalem (detail):

Yet here is how antisemitic site Palestine Remembered characterizes another covering:

"Zionists place the Israeli flag and Jewish emblems over the Dome of the Rock and other Muslim holy places, documenting their plans for destruction and usurpation of these sites to build a Jewish Temple."

There is not even a hint of a desire to destroy the Dome of the Rock shown here. The Hebrew quotes the Psalm 137:5 "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning." Under that it says "The place of the Temple." Which it is.

The same site shows another picture, not sure whether it is also a challah cover, a picture for the wall or maybe a Simchat Torah flag.

It also shows the Dome of the Rock as the holy spot, as a place for veneration, and there is nothing close to a call for its destruction. If anything, the Jews who drew these pictures are showing extreme respect for the building. One cannot imagine Jews publishing pictures of churches to beautify their homes but this Muslim site was a central decorative motif in thousands of Jewish homes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Arabs behind the site are upset at the Dome being shown underneath a Temple menorah.

So even today, Arabs are claiming that table coverings and other innocuous illustrations by Jews who consider the Temple Mount to be the most sacred spot in the world are justifications for murdering Jews.

No matter how far-fetched, today's antisemites will always find some supposed crime that Jews did to justify their being slaughtered. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas has used that same logic to justify the Holocaust, more than once, saying that how Jews acted brought it about. And it is the same logic that blames events in Jerusalem, or a "sirge" that had largely already been ended before October 7, for mass murder and rape and kidnapping of Jews.

There is no daylight between antisemitism and today's anti-Zionism. And you can see it in a challah cover.

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!

Another indication that perhaps dozens of the @UNRWA workers killed in Gaza were linked to terror

The Telegraph examines some statistics about the number of UNRWA workers killed in Gaza, and the timeframes. They are trying to imply that Israel was targeting UNRWA workers in the first weeks of the war when the bulk of them were killed.

But while they report another anomalous statistic, they don't speculate as to the reasons.

The article says that there are 13,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, of whom 59% are women. Yet among the UNRWA casualties, only 38% are women.

Why would so many of the UNRWA deaths be military age males?

Moreover, as the article points out, the UNRWA deaths in the first weeks were evenly divided between the north and south parts of Gaza, even though Israel's general bombing campaign was far more concentrated in the north.

Either Israel was targeting UNRWA males - which seems highly unlikely, since there is nothing to gain from that.

Or Israel was targeting Hamas and other militants, and a high number of UNRWA males killed were moonlighting as Hamas operatives.

The Telegraph unwittingly supports that theory by saying that 148 out of the 150 UNRWA employees killed through mid-January were off-duty - it was after hours. It does not say how many of them were at their homes and how many were elsewhere - and I doubt that UNRWA would ever share that information.

Anyway you look at it, the difference between the 61 males expected to be killed if Israel was targeting all UNRWA workers, and the 93 males actually killed who were UNRWA workers, is statistically significant. Chances are that many of the UNWRA male casualties were in proximity with Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants - or were terrorists themselves.

Another possibility is that some of the UNRWA workers killed, including women, were human shields.

UNRWA told the Telegraph that Israel knows where UNRWA workers live and implied that any airstrikes on them were deliberate, but that is not how the IDF works. However, from the 2014 war we know that Hamas terrorists were found killed in the houses of families with different last names.

Top Hamas commander Ahmad Sahmoud was killed in 2014 in an airstrike along with 19 children of the Abu Jame' family. Why was he staying with so many young children?

Is it not possible that Hamas, knowing that UNRWA employees enjoyed some level of protection in previous wars, had some of their people use UNRWA homes as safe havens?

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!

02/04 Links: Mike Freer and the Islamist assault on democracy; Israel caught by surprise by leak of UNRWA's October 7 allegations

From Ian:

Mike Freer and the Islamist assault on democracy

Spot the difference? Cox’s murder was instantly treated as political. Indeed, commentators went far beyond blaming far-right ideology and laid much of the blame at the door of Nigel Farage and Vote Leave, given Cox was murdered during the EU referendum campaign. The day of Cox’s death, Polly Toynbee accused Brexit campaigners of stirring up ‘anti-migrant sentiment’ and emboldening fascists. ‘Rude, crude, Nazi-style extremism is mercifully rare. But the Leavers have lifted several stones’, she wrote.

By contrast, Amess’s murder was drained of any political content. MPs were exhorted to stop the partisan bickering. Articles gestured vaguely to our ‘toxic political discourse’, online and off. And so it has been with Mike Freer. House of Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle responded to his resignation this week by urging MPs to ‘treat each other better’. That’ll show those Islamists.

The glaring double standards in how we talk about far-right and Islamist terrorism would be weird enough were it not for the fact that Islamist terrorism is the bigger threat by a country mile. Despite desperate attempts to pretend otherwise, the fact remains that, from the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 to David Amess’s murder in 2021, 94 people were killed in Britain by Islamist extremists. In the same period, three people were killed in Britain by far-right extremists.

We shouldn’t be picking and choosing which flavour of fascist violence – Islamist or far right – we are more bothered by. But that is precisely what the great and good are doing when they downplay Islamist terrorism while fluffing up Britain’s far right – which has long been pathetic and marginalised – into some existential threat.

This has consequences, not least for counter-terrorism. William Shawcross’s 2023 review into the Prevent scheme, aimed at stopping people being drawn into terrorism, argued that officialdom has become obsessed with right-wingers and soft on Islamists: the boundaries around what is even considered Islamist extremism are ‘drawn too narrowly’, concluded Shawcross, ‘while the boundaries around the ideology of the extreme right-wing are too broad’.

Of course, we shouldn’t be complacent about the far right. In 2019, neo-Nazi and paedophile Jack Renshaw was convicted for plotting to murder Labour MP Rosie Cooper. He said he was inspired by Cox’s murder. While Cooper courageously carried on serving her constituents for a few years after the trial, she decided to step down as the member for West Lancashire in 2022, admitting that ‘events I have faced have taken their toll’.

But nor should far-right extremism be used as a means to distract attention away from the much bigger threat to British life posed by Islamist extremism. The constant deflections are grotesque – and bred of a perverse, genuinely bigoted notion that to talk too much about Islamist extremism is to risk offending Muslims and / or radicalising the white working class, effectively treating both groups as volatile terrorist sympathisers.

That Mike Freer’s resignation has elicited little more than a sad-eyed shrug shouldn’t really surprise us. Our ruling elites have become so paralysed by political correctness and plain old cowardice that they would rather prattle on about civility in public life than name the barbarous movement that is menacing their colleagues.

No one can blame Mike Freer for feeling he had no choice but to step down. He has been abandoned by a political and media class who would rather throw one of their own to the wolves than risk having some uncomfortable conversations.

Stephen Pollard: Mike Freer is not alone. I too was targetted by Islamists

Most chilling of all was when we were told what to do if we opened the front door by mistake to someone threatening: run, with our children, as fast as possible to the back into the garden and then through a gap in the fence, while alerting the police. Let me tell you – it is no way to live, always on the lookout for something suspicious, never fully able to relax when outside.

The security minister, Tom Tugendhat, confirmed last year that Iran uses organised criminals to spy on prominent British Jews for a potential assassination campaign. “We know that the Iranians are using non-traditional sources to carry out these operations, including organised criminal gangs. They are paying criminal gangs to conduct surveillance … I do not issue these warnings lightly.”

Last month the Government proscribed the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. That was important. But it is the tip of the iceberg. Despite programmes like Prevent, which is meant to stop radicalisation, the UK is rightly regarded worldwide as a haven for Islamists, which makes us a breeding ground for terror. Even in supposedly mainstream mosques there are many examples of preaching which is clearly designed to radicalise and which is often unambiguously anti-Semitic. These are not hidden or underground – you can see them on social media.

We let the Islamists off the hook as if we have no choice. When a teacher at Batley Grammar School attempted to lead a discussion on free speech and showed a cartoon of Mohammed, a mob descended on the school and he was forced into hiding – where he remains, three years on. We neuter ourselves from acting, in the name of “community relations”.

Nothing I have written is new or in any way surprising. I could have written it at any point in the past 20 years and it’s a near certainty that I will be able to write it for years to come. For all the bluster we hear about refusing to accept intimidation or Islamist threats, as a nation we still refuse to take radical Islam seriously. (Not, I should say, the police and security services, who continue to do brilliant work keeping us safe.) Until a few months ago, for example, the Government was – this would be funny if it wasn’t so appalling – attempting to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s leading funder of terror. And Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has still not been proscribed.

Now an MP has decided to stand down because he is unwilling any longer to subject his family to the risks. The sentiment should be “enough is enough”. Except history shows exactly what will happen: nothing.

Dr. Muhammad Saber Arab is a professor of history at Al-Azhar University.. He was also the former Egyptian Minister of Culture and former chairman of the board of directors for Egypt's National Library and Archives.

And he believes that Jews murder gentiles to use their blood in Passover matzah.

Writing in the Arabic edition of the Oman Daily Observer, the historian quotes other Arab historians claiming that the 1840 "Damascus Affair" where Jews were falsely accused of the murder of Father Thomas and his Muslim servant after their disappearances. Jews were arrested and under extreme torture several of them "confessed" to murdering them and using their blood for Passover matzoh.

Dr. Arab says that he personally reviewed the archived letters between Damascus and Egypt and finds the accusations credible. He says that the prisoners were only released under intense pressure by Europe under Jewish influence but that they were undoubtedly guilty.

Muhammad Saber Arab concludes:

Despite the passage of more than one hundred and eighty years since these events, the influence of the Jews in American and European societies is still strong. Even today, these forces are involved in supporting Zionism, which practices genocide hour after hour in Palestine, under international cover, and with the support of the same European and American powers. However, this issue and many other issues cannot be subject to statute of limitations.

Yes, he wants to re-open the case against the ethnically cleansed Jews of Damascus. Their descendants? Jews altogether? Perhaps he wants to go to the International Court of Justice? They might take the case seriously!

Dr. Arab is not a marginal figure at all, but a mainstream Egyptian historian. Only a few days ago he spoke at the Cairo International Book Fair promoting his latest book. He has written dozens of books and articles. He is highly respected.

This is how endemic and widespread antisemitism is in the Arab world - not only among the masses but among the intellectuals and the elites.

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 Providence Journal reports:

Brown University student activists announced Friday they were undertaking a hunger strike ahead of a critical meeting where school could consider divesting from weapons manufacturers amid the Israel-Hamas war.

But so far, there are no signs it will.

A group of 19 students under the name Hunger Strike for Palestine said it wants Brown to fully divest "its endowment from companies enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza."

The striking group...said it "will refuse food until the full body of the Brown University Corporation hears and considers a divestment resolution, introduced by President Christina Paxson and presented by student representatives of the Brown Divest Coalition, in their upcoming meeting on Feb. 8 and 9."

The Brown Daily Herald student newspaper reports President Paxson wrote a letter to the students telling them that if they want divestment, there are procedures and rules they must follow:

President Christina Paxson has declined to meet the demands of 19 student protestors who began a hunger strike Friday afternoon, according to a letter Paxson sent to the demonstrators and reviewed by The Herald.

In her letter to the protestors, Paxson wrote that the first step toward requesting divestment “is not a Corporation resolution, but rather to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management.”

Paxson also wrote that she will “not commit to bring a resolution to the February 2024 Corporation meeting or any future meeting of the Corporation.”

“The bar for divestment is high,” Paxson wrote to the protestors Friday. “It requires a demonstration that the University’s investments in the assets of specific companies create social harm, and that divestment will alleviate that harm.”

“Our campus is a place where difficult issues should be freely discussed and debated. It is not appropriate for the University to use its financial assets — which are there to support our entire community — to ‘take a side’ on issues on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree,” she added.

The dictionary definition of "privileged" is "of a person, or class of people: having or enjoying certain privileges, rights, or advantages; treated with special favour."

Paxson is saying that there is no problem with the university considering divestment - it has divested from other investments in the past - but the students must follow the rules. The same rules that she had spelled out for them during previous divestment demands. The same rules that apply to all students.

The protesters know the rules. They are saying that the rules don't apply to them.

That's privilege.

They also plan not to attend classes this week at a school where their parents are paying over $65,000 tuition for them to learn.

That's privilege.

The y spend their parents' money not on sending food and supplies to Gaza, but on custom T-shirts.

The hunger strike is largely performative. There is little risk involved - the only photo of the protesters shows them all wearing masks, with two of them having even the rest of their faces blurred out.

As the Journal reports, the students will end the strike on February 9, after the corporation meeting, whether their demands are met or not.

They aren't exactly Gandhi. They are more like children who hold their breath to get their toys.

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!

Last week, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the IDF Arabic language spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a video on all his platforms comparing Hamas with the Nazis. It's title was "Woe to those who are against us."

He said, "This year, Holocaust Remembrance Day occurs while the State of Israel is at war with an enemy challenging its existence. The goals of the Nazis and the October 7 terrorists are the same, to exterminate the Jewish people."

Adraee went on to say that the difference between the two events is now Jews have an army to defend themselves.

Then he spoke in ways that Arabs speak about Jews all the time, saying, this is “a holy war, and that the Jews will remain in Israel.” He added, "We swear by the souls of the martyrs that we will remain and be rooted in this land, because truth and justice are supreme and unsurpassed.”

There is nothing inaccurate about these statements. This war to defend the Jewish people is indeed considered a mitzvah in Jewish law, and the Jews will remain in their land no matter what.

But one usually only hears such language among religious Zionists, not IDF spokespeople.

Adraee is speaking in a way that Arabs can relate to and are comfortable with when used against others, and the message resonates - even if the responses are predictably angry.

Al Jazeera published an op-ed about this video, and of course misinterprets it as a threat against the entire Muslim and Arab worlds. It isn't at all: it is only a threat to Hamas and anyone else who tries to destroy the Jewish state and Jewish people.

The author, Mahmoud Abdel Hadi, pretends to give the Zionist he hates friendly advice: "Adraee made a mistake, whether intentionally or not, in directing such provocative content, which harms peace and normalization efforts, and feeds the roots of hostility and revenge. Such a speech is not in the interest of the Jewish people in the future, as circles turn, and time does not remain the same, and history is the best witness to that."

But Hadi is against any normalization with Israel! He should be happy if Adraee is hurting Israel's relationship with its Arab peace partners, shouldn't he?

That is the best indication that Adraee knows what he is doing. Hadi is upset not because the short video hurts peace, but because it restates what the Abraham Accords said, that Jews are an indigenous people in the Middle East and are not going anywhere - a message to the Arab world signed by the UAE and Bahrain. He is upset because he knows that Arabs respect a message that is clear and straightforward: the Jews are rooted in the land and are not going anywhere, and will go to any lengths to protect themselves.

When Arabs threaten Jews with this exact kind of language, it rolls off our backs - we've been hearing it for a hundred years. But when Jews use that same language back to the Arabs, they are aghast: how can this be? But they understand the language and the message, and they respond with exactly the anger and despair that they try to force the Jews to feel.

It is the only language many Arabs understand.

Adraee's message is important for another reason. Palestinians and other anti-Israel Arabs harbor a fantasy that Jews are fearful foreigners who will run away as soon as things are a little difficult for them. Adraee is forcefully saying that not only are Jews not going anywhere, but they are also not afraid of war. Wars are sometimes necessary.

Hadi of course supports slaughtering Jews, making him exactly like the Nazis that Adraee compares Hamas to. Right after October 7, Hadi wrote, "Throughout the Islamic world in the four corners of the globe, you will not find anyone among the two billion Muslims who was not happy with what the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades accomplished in their flood on Saturday, unless they are a hypocrite or a dissenter. "

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!

02/03 Links: Israel’s Obligations Under the Genocide Convention; 10 myths about UNRWA you may have mistakenly believed; I was in Hamas captivity – don't keep my husband there

From Ian:

Israel’s Obligations Under the Genocide Convention

I. Obligation
Israel’s war in Gaza is not a violation of its commitments as a contracting party to the 1948 Genocide Convention. It is, in fact, a fulfillment of its obligations under the treaty.

For Israel to do nothing in the face of Hamas’ actions on October 7, or to cut its actions short and somehow acquiesce to a reality where that orgy of murder, rape, torture, and abduction would recur, would be a violation of the first article of the Convention, which states:

“The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”

The Second Article of the Convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

When Hamas Einsatzgruppen swept into southern Israel on the morning of October 7, their rampage spared no one they were able to reach. It was not a military campaign targeting only security installations or key national infrastructure or targets of political, economic, or religious symbolism. Nor was it a terrorist attack on random civilians designed to shock or pressure others.

It was an attack on every Israeli they could get to. There are no stories of people spared for any reason. Wherever Hamas forces made contact with Israelis, they killed. And if they didn’t kill, it was to kidnap. Villages on the border that weren’t scenes of fire, looting, and murder were those where Hamas forces were either repelled successfully or which they never managed to penetrate before their forces were overcome. Wherever Hamas militants could kill Israelis, they did so, making no effort to distinguish soldier from civilian, man from woman, adult from child, or even Jew from Arab.

None of this is inconsistent with the basic ideological and theological commitments of Hamas as an organization or of the larger movement of which it is only one manifestation. Its Charter evinces a pathological and conspiratorial conception of Jews and openly calls for their physical annihilation. And its spokespersons openly boast of their intention to execute more October 7-style actions in the future.

These beliefs and actions meet all the minimal requirements of the definition in Article II of the Convention. There is the intent to destroy a national group, and that group is targeted “as such.” That is, the killing of civilians who are members of the target group is not a side effect of other acts war, but the goal itself, stated in words and observable in deeds.

If a Jewish state has any purpose at all, it is to prevent this. And if the State of Israel has any obligation under the Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, the year of Israel’s birth, and conceived largely as a response to the genocide of the Jewish people which had just concluded three years before, it is to act forcefully against it.

At this moment, Israel stands accused of violating its commitments under the Genocide Convention, not because it hasn’t acted forcefully enough against the Hamas regime which has controlled the Gaza Strip for the last 17 years, but rather because it is acting at all.

ICJ genocide case shows the world is upside-down and perverse

Deuteronomy 28:32 states “They are an upside-down generation... ”

While this verse refers to the warning Moses gave to the Israelite nation before he died and handed over leadership to Joshua, the concept of a world behaving in an irrational and 180-degree perverse manner is evident today.

Moses warns of an upside-down world, a concept strikingly relevant today as we witness the absurdity surrounding the accusation of genocide brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The parallels between ancient warnings and contemporary events are stark, prompting us to examine the perplexing nature of our current reality.

The claim of genocide against Israel becomes increasingly transparent as the antisemitism it really is, when one considers the deliberate steps taken by Israel to protect civilians in conflict zones. Unlike historical instances of genocide, Israel has established humanitarian corridors, allowing civilians to leave harm’s way voluntarily. This raises a fundamental question: How can it be genocide when the so-called “victims” are granted the opportunity to escape the conflict?

The antisemitism in accusing Israel of genocide
Israel’s commitment to minimizing civilian casualties goes beyond mere rhetoric. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) dropped millions of leaflets, providing explicit warnings to civilians before initiating military action. Such preemptive measures are unprecedented in the history of conflict, challenging the very notion of genocide.

Furthermore, Israel has put its own troops at increased risk by employing targeted strikes to avoid collateral damage. This commitment to precision strikes and the protection of innocent lives reflects the IDF’s dedication to ethical conduct in the face of adversity. Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, has even gone so far as to describe the IDF as the most moral army in the world.

The absurdity of the genocide claim becomes glaring when one considers the alternatives Israel could have pursued. If Israel harbored genocidal intentions, it could have resorted to indiscriminate bombings similar to the Allies in Dresden or employed nuclear weapons as the US did in Japan. However, Israel’s strategic decisions have consistently prioritized minimizing civilian harm, not just raising doubts about the validity of the genocide accusation but demonstrating the upside-down attitudes of the contemporary world.

10 myths about UNRWA you may have mistakenly believed

Myth 8: UNRWA is the most efficient way to deliver assistance to Palestinians.
No, it certainly is not, and not just because UNRWA lets Hamas run off with lots of goods. There are far more efficient, less corrupt, and less grossly political aid agencies, some of which already are present in Gaza (and the West Bank), that can be mobilized to replace UNRWA. This includes USAID, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme. They could all do the work without succumbing to Palestinian legerdemain.

Myth 9: UNRWA can be fixed.
UNRWA needs more than an “urgent audit,” as the EU reluctantly mumbled this week, and much more than “enhanced due diligence and other oversight mechanisms,” as one unfriendly-to-Israel congressman grudgingly called for.

UNRWA needs to be abolished so that Gaza’s transition away from aid and toward economic development, and away from genocidal fantasies and toward peace building can begin quickly. It is certainly true that the current division of labor – UNRWA services above ground, Hamas terror operations below ground and from within UNRWA facilities – cannot continue.

This requires different international actors that can develop productive industry and jobs in Gaza, and that can lead the construction and operation of civilian services. International funding may still be necessary, but it should be administered by foreign governments directly and by different organizations that are subject to continuous oversight and rigorous accountability.

Myth 10: Wartime is not the right time to shutter UNRWA.
Now is the perfect time to do so. As Israel liberates Gaza from Hamas, the international community can unshackle Palestinians from UNRWA. At the same time Israel can unchain itself from destructive dependency on UNRWA and its problematic Israeli counterpart, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories – COGAT.

Then the rebuilding of Gaza can advance, free from rank corruption, destructive indoctrination, the coddling of terrorism, and overall moral rot that for too long has contaminated international aid politics for Palestinians.

02/02 Links Pt2: Elliott Abrams: The Two-State Delusion; Seth Mandel: The Lazy Fantasy of a ‘Palestinian Mandela’; Britain’s Jews are being terrorised

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: The Two-State Delusion

Everyone knows what to do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Arrange the “two-state solution.” That has been a commonplace for decades, going back to the Oslo Accords, all the international conferences, the “Roadmap,” and the efforts by a series of American presidents and their staffs of ardent peace processors.

In the West, the call for a “two-state solution” is mostly a magical incantation these days. Diplomats and politicians want the Gaza war to stop. They want a way out that seems fair and just to voters and makes for good speeches. But they are not even beginning to grapple with the issues that negotiating a “two-state solution” raises, and they are not seriously asking what kind of state “Palestine” would be. Instead they simply imagine a peaceful, well-ordered place called “Palestine” and assure everyone that it is just around the corner. By doing so they avoid asking the most important question: Would not an autocratic, revanchist Palestinian state be a threat to peace?

No matter: The belief in the “two-state solution” is as fervent today as ever. The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said it’s the “only solution” and Britain’s defense minister chimed in that “I don’t think we get to a solution unless we have a two-state solution.” Not to be outdone, U.N. Secretary General Guterres said, “The refusal to accept the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians, and the denial of the right to statehood for the Palestinian people, are unacceptable.” The EU’s Foreign Minister Josep Borrell said recently, “I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore. We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.” What if Israel does not agree, and views a Palestinian state as an unacceptable security threat? Borrell’s answer was that “One thing is clear—Israel cannot have the veto right to the self-determination of the Palestinian people. The United Nations recognizes and has recognized many times the self-determination right of the Palestinian people. Nobody can veto it.”

In the United States, 49 Senate Democrats (out of 51) just joined to support a resolution that, according to Sen. Brian Schatz, is “a message to the world that the only path forward is a two-state solution.” Biden administration officials have been a bit more circumspect in public. At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, Secretary of State Blinken told his interviewer, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that regional integration “has to include a pathway to a Palestinian state.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called for “a two-state solution with Israel’s security guaranteed.” And President Biden meandered around an important security point: “there are a number of types of two-state solutions. There’s a number of countries that are members of the U.N. that … don’t have their own military; a number of states that have limitations, and so I think there’s ways in which this can work.”

The Biden administration, then, joins all enlightened opinion in saying there must be a Palestinian state, but adds that it must not have an army. No other precondition seems to exist for the creation of that state once the Palestinian Authority has been “revamped” or “revitalized” so that it becomes “effective.” And most recently, Blinken has asked his staff for policy options that include formal recognition of a Palestinian state as soon as the war in Gaza ends. This would be a massive change in U.S. policy, which for decades has insisted that a Palestinian state can only emerge from direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But the pressure is growing, it seems, to skip niceties like negotiations and move quickly to implement the “two-state solution.”

There are three things wrong with this picture. First, none of the current proposals even acknowledges, much less overcomes, the obstacles that have always prevented the “two-state solution.” Second, the “effective governance” reforms fall very far short of creating a decent state in which Palestinians can live freely. And most important, any imaginable Palestinian state will be a dangerous threat to Israel.

Joe Biden Hates Israel

A second, almost as atrocious, low point in Blinken’s speech was his reiteration of Biden administration policy that Israel not allow Gazans to leave Gaza. In what war is the population of the war-torn country not allowed to leave? Much like the U.N. has been falsely claiming refugee status for Palestinians for 75 years so that they can continue to be used as political pawns, the United States’ refusal to allow Gazans to leave serves only one purpose: to make it harder for Israel to “de-Nazify” the radicalized Palestinian population, to allow whatever remains of Hamas to survive, and to add fuel to its obsession with a “two- state solution.”

The U.S. wants all areas depopulated because of the war to be repopulated, thereby making it impossible for Israel to repopulate its southern towns/cities. So effectively, a security zone with Gaza would mean a reduction in Israel’s territory.

Blinken also demanded that no action be taken in the North against Hezbollah, effectively turning Northern Israel into a similar security zone, precluding 80,000 Israelis there from returning to their homes.

Lastly, he invoked the atrocious line about a “cycle of violence” and reaffirmed the administration’s demand for a “two- state solution.”

It's not a “cycle of violence” when thousands of animalistic, sub-human, monsters murder, brutally rape, and mutilate thousands of civilians, followed by a war targeting those responsible for the atrocities. And, at this point does anyone seriously believe that a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, in the heart of central Israel, plus territory in Gaza, wouldn’t be a death sentence for Jews?

More recently, Blinken was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. While there, he was interviewed by the New York Times’ resident Israel hater, Thomas Friedman. Incredibly, Blinken seemed to say that the Israelis of today are the terror loving Palestinians of yesterday:
“The profound difference now, I think, is in the mindset of leaders throughout the Arab world and in Muslim countries, and in a way it’s a reversal, it’s a flip, as you know so well better than anyone. When in previous times we came close to resolving the Palestinian question, getting a Palestinian state, I think the view then – Camp David, other places – was that Arab leaders, Palestinian leaders, had not done enough to prepare their own people for this profound change. I think a challenge now, a question now: Is Israeli society prepared to engage on these questions? Is it prepared to have that mindset?”

Did you get that? After thousands of Israelis were murdered, raped, mutilated, and wounded, America’s Secretary of State is blaming Israel for not being as gracious as the Arabs who murdered us for decades before 10/7.

Israel, after decades of giving up territory, not utterly destroying Hamas and Hezbollah, not attacking Iran and its proxies (another demand of the Biden administration), prioritizing Arab civilian life at the cost of IDF soldiers, all while 136 Israelis are still being held hostage and brutalized, is not enough for this administration.

Israelis have the wrong “mindset.”

Some friend to Israel.

Seth Mandel: The Lazy Fantasy of a ‘Palestinian Mandela’

Hamas’s latest negotiating ploy is to ask for Israel to release Marwan Barghouti, a popular Fatah leader who is serving a handful of life sentences for murder. Barghouti is often compared by the press and his Western admirers to Nelson Mandela, because his admirers have very active imaginations.

Freeing Barghouti is the “break glass in case of emergency” option for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The belief is that he has become both popular enough and moderate enough to lead the Palestinian Authority after Mahmoud Abbas, who is still alive and refuses to hold elections and therefore cannot be replaced by the Palestinian Mandela or the Australian Ghandi or the Ecuadorian Martin Luther King or the Scandinavian Dalai Lama or anyone else.

In the absence of any other changes, therefore, what freeing Barghouti would accomplish is the further destabilization of the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank. Hamas thinks this is a great idea. The Israelis are unconvinced.

Barghouti’s advocates in the West like to tout his support for a two-state solution. But Barghouti’s starting position is at the 1967 lines, from which Israeli-Palestinian negotiations moved on a decade and a half ago, so perhaps his supporters like him because he’d actually undo some of the progress made toward a two-state solution.

The other pro-Barghouti talking point has long been his renunciation of some violence in some places. (This is why calling him “the Palestinian Mandela” is deeply insulting to Nelson Mandela.)

Barghouti was the most prominent signer of a coalitional letter known as the Prisoner’s Document back in 2006. It was a manifesto of sorts for incarcerated Palestinians of various parties and stripes, including Hamas. That manifesto trumpets “[t]he right of the Palestinian people to resist and to uphold the option of resistance of occupation by various means and focusing resistance in territories occupied in 1967 in tandem with political action, negotiations and diplomacy whereby there is broad participation from all sectors in the popular resistance.”

This is the great compromise document. It boils down to: Kill Jews in the West Bank, Gaza, and at the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, but inside “Israel proper” just call general strikes and marches intended to bring the economy to a halt. Because Barghouti is a man of peace who has learned his lesson, apparently.

How could anyone say no?

02/02 Links Pt1: Biden is playing politics with the Gaza war, not Bibi; Gaza hostage deal not coming soon, if ever; UNRWA's crypto wallets investigated over Hamas ties

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: It’s Biden who’s playing politics with the Gaza war, not Bibi

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a master political schemer and a cynical seeker of power is so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that there is literally nothing he can do without being accused of acting only to seek some sort of advantage over his opponents. Yet in the current crisis as he seeks to lead his wobbly unity government to achieve what may well be two mutually exclusive objectives—the elimination of Hamas and the freeing of the remaining hostages still being kept captive in Gaza—while being besieged by criticism at home and abroad, it may be that Netanyahu is not the one who is really playing politics.

While no one should ever underestimate the prime minister’s capacity for maneuvering even at a time when, after the Oct. 7 disaster, the end of his career would seem to be in sight, it’s not he who is cynically using the hostage negotiations or the talk about what would follow the end of the war in Gaza to score political points. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu’s character or policies, or whether he should be forced out of office because of the catastrophe that occurred on his watch, the person who is playing politics with the security of Israel and the fate of its citizens is President Joe Biden.

Netanyahu probably still hopes to salvage his reputation and serve out the rest of his term after being returned to office in November 2022. But the widespread characterizations in both the Israeli and the international press of his stand on the hostage negotiations, the conduct of the war and what will happen in Gaza once the fighting ends, as merely another example of his desperate attempts to cling to office is largely inaccurate. He may be pursuing two goals that cannot both be achieved as well as clinging to his pre-war strategic objective of getting Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. Yet the real scheming going on right now is in Washington, not Jerusalem. It is Biden who is playing a double game in which he seems willing to ensure Hamas’s survival in power in order to settle scores with Netanyahu, as well as to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.

A hostage deal trap
That’s the context for the discussions about the latest proposal for a ceasefire and the release of 136 hostages—some living and some presumed dead—in which the double-dealing government of Qatar is playing a central role. Whether or not this effort, like previous ones, will be shot down by Hamas, Netanyahu will continue to face enormous pressure from both the families of the hostages and the United States to either pause or end the war.

Netanyahu’s government is currently beset by a host of domestic and foreign critics. The hostage families understandably want it to do anything to save their loved ones and will—like anyone in that awful position—demand concessions in the form of freeing terrorists or halting the Gaza campaign, whether or not it’s in the country’s best interests. They are being boosted by Netanyahu’s political foes. Most of the Israelis who spent the months before Oct. 7 demonstrating for Netanyahu’s ouster and against judicial reform have put politics aside in the name of a unified effort to defeat Hamas. But the hard-core anti-Bibi resistance has shown that, if given the opportunity, it will try to return to the streets with the aim of forcing the prime minister out of office.

At the same time, Netanyahu is also under fire from those Israelis who fault him for not prosecuting the war against Hamas more vigorously. In particular, they blame the prime minister for bowing to American and international pressure to allow aid to flow into parts of Gaza still under Hamas control, which, though ostensibly a humanitarian gesture, is almost certainly sustaining the terrorist forces and enabling them to continue to hold on. His right-wing critics are correct that the hostage deal is a trap for both Israel and Netanyahu.

Israeli ministers: Gaza hostage deal not coming soon, if ever

Israeli ministers said that no plan for a hostage release deal has been presented to the cabinet, stressing that any such deal isn't coming soon, if ever, N12 reported on Friday.

The ministers, who remained unnamed in the report, told N12 that "the feeling that the plan is coming is unfounded. The deal is still far away and it is not certain that it will come to fruition."

The ministers stressed that it would be very difficult if not impossible to get a deal approved if it includes a ceasefire for longer than a month, the release of terrorists with blood on their hands, and the release of large numbers of terrorists. The ministers added that the members of the cabinet are demanding to be involved in the continuation of negotiations.

Qatari Foreign Ministry says Hamas gave initial approval for hostage deal
The report comes after the Qatari Foreign Ministry said that Hamas had given its initial approval for a ceasefire and hostage deal in the Gaza Strip, although both Hamas and Israeli officials have stated that there is still a long way to go until a deal is reached.

Hamas was unlikely to reject a Gaza ceasefire proposal it received from mediators this week but will not sign it without assurances that Israel has committed to ending the war, a Palestinian official close to the talks said on Thursday.

Qatari and Egyptian mediators presented Hamas this week with the first concrete proposal for an extended halt to fighting in Gaza, agreed with Israel and the United States at talks in Paris last week. Hamas has said it is studying the text and preparing a response.

The Palestinian official said the Paris text envisions a first phase lasting 40 days, during which fighting would cease while Hamas freed remaining civilians from among more than 100 hostages it is still holding. Further phases would see the release of Israeli soldiers and the handover of the bodies of dead hostages.

"I expect that Hamas will not reject the paper, but it might not give a decisive agreement either," said the Palestinian official speaking on condition of anonymity.

"Instead, I expect them to send a positive response and reaffirm their demands: for the agreement to be signed, it must ensure Israel will commit to ending the war in Gaza and pull out from the enclave completely."

The only pause in the fighting so far, at the end of November, lasted only a week.

John Bolton: Abolish UNRWA

The truly humanitarian strategy for Palestinians is to settle them in locations with sustainable economies. To that end, we should realize that Gaza is very different from the West Bank, and the futures of Palestinians should be separated accordingly. On the West Bank, there may well be prospects for long-term stability with the cooperation of Israel and Jordan. That possibility does not exist in Gaza. Assuming Israel and Jordan can agree on a political solution, circumstances on the West Bank are far better for long-term settlement of the existing Palestinian population than in Gaza, which is merely a high-rise, long-stay refugee camp.

Ironically, precisely because of the way prior enemies of Israel abused the Palestinians, there is enormous reluctance to accept them for resettlement. Egypt and Jordan, the real countries of first asylum, are the most vocal in rejecting the option. Indeed, no country in the Middle East has shown interest in permanent refugee resettlement. Surely, however, all can see that simply rebuilding Gaza is a guaranteed failure, perhaps leading quickly to a repetition of Oct. 7.

In any case, Israel is physically reshaping Gaza to ensure its own security, and new Israeli buffer zones and strong points are not going away soon. All parties with a stake in the conflict must accept that the two-state solution is dead. Not only is there no viable economic future in Gaza alone, but connecting it with an archipelago of Palestinian islands on the West Bank won’t improve prospects.

Abolishing UNRWA and replacing it with UNHCR will be difficult, but UNRWA may be collapsing under its own weight. Firing all UNRWA’s roughly 40,000 employees, well over 90% of whom are Palestinians, may be impossible, but whoever is reemployed must be vetted carefully and supervised for a probationary period before receiving job security. UNRWA’s mindset must be eliminated and replaced with UNHCR’s.

There must be a dramatic shift in expectations and policy objectives for the Palestinians as a matter of humanitarian priority, no matter how wrenching and disappointing. For decades, the two-state policy has been tried and failed. It’s time for a new direction.