Friday, February 23, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
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Friday, February 23, 2024
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin: Biden’s ‘help’ at the UN will put Israeli lives at risk
Jonathan Tobin: Biden’s ‘help’ at the UN will put Israeli lives at risk
The double standard involved in this dramatic priority given to Palestinians has only one reasonable explanation: antisemitism rooted in Islamist supremacism and left-wing ideologies that falsely demonize Israel as an “apartheid” and/or “settler/colonialist” state of whites oppressing people of color. What passes for enlightened opinion among the chattering classes in the United States and the international community simply exhibits no concern for Israelis. That’s true whether they were killed, raped or kidnapped—or if they are among the hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes in the south due to Hamas and the north due to Hezbollah until the threat of violence is over. Apparently, only Palestinian suffering, which is the direct result of a culture that values hatred for Jews and an urge for their genocide, seems to count.Douglas Murray: The trouble with defining genocide
The U.S. role at the Security Council has provided Biden with more leverage over Israel to force it to accept a disastrous return to the pre-Oct. 7 status quo in which Gaza is an independent Palestinian state in all but name, or even worse, part of a larger and more dangerous entity.
A large part of the explanation for Biden’s two-faced stance is purely political. The president is desperately worried about the open revolt among Democrats against even his half-hearted support for Israel. More and more, he is folding under pressure from progressives inside the administration and his campaign, as well as from Michigan Democrats under the sway of pro-Hamas, Arab-American politicians like Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud. Biden seems to think that he must end the war if he is to avoid a situation in which left-wing voters either don’t vote or support third-party candidates in November, which will effectively hand the election to former President Donald Trump.
Equally important is this administration’s devotion to the United Nations itself. As Anne Bayefsky of Touro College and Human Rights Voices rightly points out, the problem is the idea that the world body is the proper venue for settling this or any dispute. The American resolution “denies the Jewish member state its U.N. Charter legal right of self-defense,” said Bayefsky.
It also “purports to create a ‘maritime corridor’ to Gaza and foil Israel’s ability to thwart the Iranian weapons supply chain to the terrorists killing Jews,” she continued. But more importantly, the willingness of the United States to let the United Nations be the arbiter of this conflict inevitably works to Israel’s disadvantage. “It buys into the lie that the U.N. is playing the role of do-gooder in this conflict, instead of telling the truth that it is encouraging lethal antisemitism—murdering Jews inside Israel and beyond. It is simply dead wrong for the United States to use the U.N. as a sword of Damocles hanging over Israel’s head.”
The United Nations isn’t merely an institution that is linked to antisemitism and prejudice against Israel. It is the mainspring of a campaign of defamation and lawfare involving its agencies—like the International Court of Justice—that are being weaponized to aid Hamas’s propaganda campaign aimed at making Israel an international pariah. Playing the role of Israel’s half-hearted defender in these forums, in which Washington concedes Hamas’s talking points about the cruelty of the war to defeat them and in which preventing Palestinian casualties caused by the terrorists’ actions becomes the primary goal, shouldn’t be interpreted as proof of the administration’s devotion to the alliance with the Jewish state.
To the contrary, every time Washington treats these discussions as legitimate, rather than debates in which the deck is always stacked against Israel and which discards any notion of fairness, it only serves to help Hamas and its international cheering section. To treat Biden and his foreign-policy team as heroes for merely postponing a disastrous ceasefire is to judge them by an absurdly low standard. The vast majority of Americans support Israel and want it to win its war over Hamas—not be forced into allowing a genocidal foe to survive to go on murdering more innocents. Far from ensuring that Israel is allowed to ensure its security, the U.S. stand at the United Nations is preparing a path towards further appeasement of the terrorists and their Iranian sponsors that will inevitably lead to more bloodshed.
Like a number of ‘anti-colonialists’, William Dalrymple lives in colonial splendour on the outskirts of Delhi. The writer often opens the doors of his estate to slavering architectural magazines. A few years ago, one described his pool, pool house, vast family rooms, animals, cockatoo ‘and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India’s capital city’.Richard Goldberg: Biden’s Hezbollah Plan Is a Win-Win—for the Terrorists
I only mention Dalrymple because he is one of a large number of people who have lost their senses by going rampaging online about the alleged genocide in Gaza. He recently tweeted at a young Jewish woman who said she was afraid to travel into London during the Palestinian protests: ‘Forget 30,000 dead in Gaza, tens of thousands more in prison without charge, five MILLION in stateless serfdom, forget 75 years of torture, rape, dispossession, humiliation and occupation, IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU.’ It is one thing when a street rabble loses their minds. But when people who had minds start to lose them, that is another thing altogether.
I find it curious. By every measure, what is happening in Gaza is not genocide. More than that – it’s not even regionally remarkable.
Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians. In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza.
Then there are the more than 9,000 Hamas terrorists who have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces. As Lord Roberts of Belgravia recently pointed out, that means there is fewer than a two to one ratio of civilians to terrorists killed: ‘An astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.’ Most western armies would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.
For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million. Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once.
Hezbollah gave up nothing in the deal. It didn’t have to withdraw from territory, dismantle infrastructure, or destroy weapons. It just had to hold its fire. The Biden administration’s current proposed deal would require Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—to cede strategic advantages. And that’s something Israel’s top Nasrallah watchers assess has a near-zero possibility.
None of this is to suggest that Nasrallah is rushing to a full-scale war. Indeed, he held his fire after October 7, a moment of unprecedented weakness for Israel when a full-scale attack could have landed an unimaginable blow. Despite multiple escalations by Israel—including a targeted strike against a Hamas leader in a Hezbollah compound in Beirut, and attacks against high-value Hezbollah personnel and facilities—Nasrallah has not responded in a manner that could give Israel international support for an invasion. His objective appears to be twofold: Keep Israel distracted and afraid, forced to stretch itself to defend against the potential threat, while keeping most of his capabilities intact to be ready for the day when Iran really needs them.
To that end, Nasrallah might be persuaded to agree to certain window-dressing concessions as long as he can spin the deal as a win for Lebanon. The threat from Hezbollah’s “Radwan” special forces—a group that’s been training for years to execute a complex invasion of northern Israel like the one Hamas perpetrated on Gaza’s border communities—forced Israel to evacuate all communities close to the Lebanese border. Many of these families might be willing to brave occasional rocket attacks, as they have for decades, but none will return to a border crawling with Radwan terrorists.
In the weeks after October 7, the IDF targeted Radwan leaders, prompting Hezbollah to pull these high-value assets farther back from Israel’s border. Thus, a deal that requires these fighters to stay 10 kilometers from Israel’s border and removes their outposts south of that line would be a meager concession for Nasrallah. But alongside an historic surge of IDF border patrols, it could offer Israel enough of a fig leaf to persuade evacuated communities to return home.
Unsurprisingly, that is exactly the deal on the table from the United States and France. With reports that sweeteners might include a massive economic bailout for Lebanon and Israeli negotiation over its disputed land border with it, too. Who would be responsible for keeping the peace? The LAF and UNIFIL—the same pair that has spent 17 years helping Hezbollah become the threat it is today. That would guarantee that Hezbollah’s commitments will never be verified or enforced.
It’s a win-win for Nasrallah. Many of his fighters live and keep their missiles hidden within 10 kilometers of Israel’s border. They will blend into the civilian population without any mechanism to force their departure. And even if the U.S. or France could verify a movement of weapons to the north, Nasrallah’s arsenal is more than capable of terrorizing Israeli cities from 10 kilometers away. Meanwhile, a bailout of Lebanon will increase Hezbollah’s popularity—demonstrating its tactics against Israel work.
Israel faces a harsh reality in which an American president is saying ‘No.’ President Biden will not come to Israel’s aid in the U.N. Security Council or from the White House podium. He will not approve requests for emergency resupply of critical munitions Israel will need in a war with Hezbollah. Biden felt compelled to support Israel in a war against Hamas after seeing the horror of October 7, but he does not want conflict to continue in the Middle East deep into his re-election. These truths compel the Israeli government to secure whatever agreement can both buy time until Jerusalem is independently prepared for a full-scale war and give its citizens the illusion of security on the northern border.
Whatever the Hochstein process delivers, it will not deliver Israelis the security they need, along the border or in major cities in the north and central regions. Nor will it in any way degrade the robust capabilities of a terrorist group that threatens America as much as Israel. The longer the Hezbollah can gets kicked down the road, the bloodier and costlier the eventual day of reckoning will be.
Friday, February 23, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
Martin Indyk sees a silver lining in Gaza - the resurrection of the two state solution:
10/7 didn't happen because there was no Palestinian state: it happened because Israel failed in its primary job of defending itself. Imagine if Hamas - which would win any Palestinian election - was the head of a real state where it controls its own borders. Imagine it receiving 180,000 rockets from Iran like Hezbollah does, with as little self restraint as the Houthis have.
In the wake of the monstrous attack Hamas launched on Israel on October 7 and the grievous war that Israel has waged on the Gaza Strip ever since, the allegedly dead two-state solution has been resurrected. U.S. President Joe Biden and his top national security officials have repeatedly and publicly reaffirmed their belief that it represents the only way to create lasting peace among the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Arab countries of the Middle East. And the United States is hardly alone: the call for a return to the two-state paradigm has been echoed by leaders across the Arab world, the countries of the EU, middle powers such as Australia and Canada, and even Washington’s main rival, China.The reason for this revival is not complicated. There are, after all, only a few possible alternatives to the two-state solution. There is Hamas’s solution, which is the destruction of Israel. There is the Israeli ultra-right’s solution, which is the Israeli annexation of the West Bank, the dismantling of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the deportation of Palestinians to other countries. There is the “conflict management” approach pursued for the last decade or so by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which aimed to maintain the status quo indefinitely—and the world has seen how that worked out. And there is the idea of a binational state in which Jews would become a minority, thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. None of those alternatives would resolve the conflict—at least not without causing even greater calamities. And so if the conflict is to be resolved peacefully, the two-state solution is the only idea left standing.
And what evidence is there that the two-state plan would result in peace, less terror, a responsible Palestinian government that wouldn't become a Hamas stronghold and an Iranian proxy at Israel's door?
None.
In fact, all evidence points to a Palestinian state being disaster. After all, we saw how well the PA has performed with autonomy - essentially the trappings of a state, land it has full security control over, given to it for free. It didn't stop terror and in fact terror attacks increased during the Oslo process; Fatah's own "military wing" was involved in numerous terror attacks, when their maximal demands weren't met they started a deadly terror spree, the PLO tried to get around the terms of the agreement by paying for smuggling ships to bring in weapons, Hamas was voted into office and a civil war erupted, the Palestinian entity has been divided for over 15 years with no end in sight, Hamas starts wars with Israel every couple of years, and even in Area A under full Palestinian control there are armed groups that walk around freely with weapons with no PA security in sight - or, often, moonlighting for the terror gangs themselves.
How exactly will a two-state solution improve the situation?
No one who is espousing the idea has a real plan, or even thinks about these issues. This exchange between a Biden official who supports a Palestinian state and Rep. Brian Mast is amazing in how it reveals how little the people who repeat the "two state" mantra actually think about what it means.
The status quo is bad. But every other idea is worse.
Except for my Gaza Emirate solution. And as fantastic and crazy as it sounds to turn Gaza into an emirate of the UAE, all that is lacking is political will. Right now, people could be polling Gazans and asking them whether they would rather be governed by Hamas, Fatah, or the UAE. Whether they would rather be stateless or citizens of the UAE. Whether they would rather have constant wars or a peace where Gaza could become a Singapore. Whether they would give up the illusory dream of an independent state for the chance to live normal lives.
The two state delusion is not a solution. It is a disaster in waiting. And those people who saw 10/7 and still consider a Palestinian state to be a "solution" are not pro-Palestinian - they are anti-Israel.
- Friday, February 23, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
The leader of the free world tweeted one of the most deceptive statements I've ever seen from a President:
And in general, 60% of those who have an opinion support Hamas as a political party over all other parties combined.
I won't mince words.The overwhelming majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. And Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.In fact, they're also suffering as a result of Hamas' terrorism. We need to be clear-eyed about that reality.
In a technical sense, there is no lie here. Actual Hamas members - Al Qassam Brigades terrorists and Gaza government employees - are not the majority of Palestinians.
But the majority of Palestinians support Hamas and Hamas-style terror attacks. The majority of Palestinians share Hamas' political goal of destroying Israel.
The most recent PCPSR poll of Palestinians show these facts clearly.
72% of all Palestinians supported the October 7 attacks. In the "moderate" West Bank, the number was 82% - nearly a 7-1 ratio over those opposed to mass murder and rape.
A similar percentage of Palestinians are satisfied with how Hamas is acting (as of December.)
A Hamas presidential candidate would win over Mahmoud Abbas by a nearly 5-1 margin if there were elections today. Before October 7, Hamas would "only" have enjoyed a 21 point victory.
Other opinions also align perfectly with Hamas positions. Support for a two-state solution stands at only 34%, but support for an armed terror uprising in the West Bank is double that, 68%. And as we've seen in previous polls, support for a two state solution is considered by the majority of Palestinian supporters to be only a stage towards a Palestine from the river to the sea: it is a phase of the conflict, not the end.
Biden's tweet can only be seen as setting the stage for recognizing a Palestinian state. it is designed to gaslight Americans into believing that most Palestinians support peace instead of murdering their Jewish neighbors. The truth is the opposite.
The "two state solution" is a cult that would make things worse, not a solution. Awarding the most pro-terrorist people and the most antisemitic people on Earth with a state is not smart diplomacy but the slavish adherence to an idea that was proven to be deadly wrong with the outbreak of the second intifada. Just because he world doesn't have the imagination for anything better doesn't make it better than the status quo.
We need creative solutions, not rehashing of discredited 30-year old conventional wisdom.
There is nothing "clear eyed" about this tweet. It is knowingly deceptive. And a president who tries to deceive the American people does not deserve to be president.
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- Friday, February 23, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
In 2012, to some fanfare, a history textbook meant for high school students was published called "Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine." On the left pages of the book is an Israeli (leftist) narrative of the the history of Zionism, and on the right hand pages is a corresponding Palestinian history, meant for people to compare and juxtapose both with each other.
Because of the parallel structure, there is no room for the "Israeli" side to mention anything about the 3,000 year Jewish history in the Land, the centuries of Jews sacrificing everything to return, the two millennia of Jews praying for the era when they can all return. Which means that the book was a failure before it began, by framing the history of Israel to start shortly before the Balfour Declaration - a framework that ignores thousands of years of history and that makes it look like Jews are strangers in their own homeland.
On the Palestinian side, on page 3, we see a narrative that I had never heard before. And it is one that Arab historians have apparently been teaching as fact for a long time.
PARTITIONING OF THE ARAB EASTIn light of the strong European colonial competition, Britain called for the formation of a high committee of seven European countries. The committee submitted its report in 1907 to British Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The report asserted that the Arab countries and the Muslim-Arab people living in the Ottoman Empire presented a very real threat to the colonial countries. The report made the following recommendations:1. To promote a state of disintegration, division and separation in the region.2. To establish puppet political entities under the aegis of the European imperialist countries.3. To combat all kinds of unity (intellectual, spiritual, religious, or historical) and find practical means to divide the region and inhabitants from each other.4. To ensure the implementation of the previous recommendations, to create in Palestine a "buffer state" which would be populated by a strong, foreign human presence hostile to its neighbors and friendly to European countries and their interests.It could be strongly concluded, beyond any doubt, that the recommendations of the Campbell-Bannerman High Committee did in fact pave the way to Palestine for the Jews. They also gave British foreign policy and the Zionist movement the green light to annex Palestine from the other Arab lands and thereby create the nucleus of a colonial entity that would ensure the colonialists' influence in the region.
So the British secretly conspired to wrest Palestine from the Arabs and give it to the Jews a decade before Balfour? That's big news! Why don't the Jews know about this?
I looked up what I could about Campbell-Bannerman and the 1907 Imperial Conference that he chaired. I found a two volume 800 page 1911 book that goes into great detail about Campbell-Bannerman and the Conference.
Not a word about Palestine. Not a word about the Arabs that were supposedly a "threat to colonial countries."
How can something this important be first mentioned in English in a 2012 textbook, given the intense interest in Palestine?The answer can be found in a 2017 article in Al Zaytouna by Dr. Mohsen Mohammad Saleh. He says that many respected Arab historians have referenced and even quoted this document in their history books over the years, but none of them ever gave an actual reference to it, always quoting their colleagues.He traced the origins of this "document" to an Arab historian who says that an Indian fellow he sat next to on a plane in the 1940s told him he once heard about such a document.
From that secondhand rumor came an entire branch of false Arab scholarship!
Saleh is careful not to say that the document is fiction, even though there is not the slightest bit of evidence for it. But he does caution Arabs not to reference it anymore because it makes Arab "scholars" look silly.
This is the state of Arab scholarship in the history of pre-war Palestine. Nobody until 1917 bothered to verify the document because it was too good to check. The most basic thing any amateur historian does is look for the sources, and for decades no Arabs bothered.
(After I wrote this I found that Maurice Hirsch of Palestinian Media Watch discovered the same thing in a 2022 article.)
(h/t Irene)
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Thursday, February 22, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: A Test of Jewish Civil Rights in America
Seth Mandel: A Test of Jewish Civil Rights in America
“Our German laws and our ethical outlook admit Jewish equality,” the German economist Werner Sombart advised a century ago, “but if you Jews want to preserve it, do not take it too seriously. Always stick to the second place.”Seth Mandel: The Ivy League Doesn’t Want To Be Saved
Sombart did not say this menacingly. It was more like a friendly reminder that equal rights in law and equal rights in practice are two very different animals.
The great Zionist thinker and minority-rights champion Vladimir Jabotinsky quotes this Sombart line in a disquisition on assimilation. Jabotinsky notes that in reality, you can’t ask humans to succeed less than they are capable of doing. And when the Jews are successful, “equality” begins to mean “proportionality,” which inevitably gives way to the quota system. Jabotinsky says he’d heard Westerners defend this from the standpoint of “social congeniality,” when in fact it should really be called what it is: “racial purity.” Writes Jabotinsky: “The harm of such phraseological disguises is in their insidious plausibility: they lend themselves gracefully to inclusion in a system in full accordance with liberal treaties and democratic constitutions.”
Sound familiar? It should, because when Jewish history doesn’t repeat, it at least rhymes.
The laws of civil rights and the rules and norms of educational institutions are well known and all-inclusive—as written. But the major problem for Jews is that, in our time as in Jabotinsky’s, it varies as to whether these laws and rules are worth the paper on which they are written.
But here’s an important test. A century ago, insisting on the rights Jews are nominally provided (in Europe primarily) would invite state-sanctioned violence and mass exodus. What would happen today if the Jews of America stand our ground on the legal claim that we are equal citizens?
That is the idea behind numerous private civil-rights lawsuits against universities, such as the one against Columbia that I mentioned yesterday. But there’s another angle to this: When it comes to the denial of equal rights, the federal government has a responsibility to act. And it might actually be doing so.
Coincidentally, this appears to be an accepted faculty attitude at Columbia as well. Mackenzie Forrest, an Orthodox Jew who faced religious discrimination at Columbia, including being removed from her academic program, is suing the school. After the October 7 attacks, Columbia became, like plenty of other schools but especially those in the Ivy League, one big hate rally. Harassment of Jews on campus was rampant. The school sent an email to all students offering “special accommodations” to deal with the chaos on campus, and Forrest decided to take them up on it, requesting to finish her semester over Zoom, as other students have done at the school. Forrest, though, was denied permission to do so and told that she “is the only person feeling unsafe.”UNRWA Is the Tip of the Iceberg at the UN
Her attorney told National Review that the faculty retaliated for her complaints by threatening to fail her if she didn’t leave the program. Earlier in the year, the administration had responded to her request for seeking a Sabbath exemption by encouraging her to ask her rabbi for permission to break the Sabbath instead.
Columbia’s contempt for Jewish students is a pattern. On February 12, Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House education committee, sent a letter to Columbia’s president and trustees as part of its investigation into campus anti-Semitism. The letter makes for bracing reading: it recounts two decades of incidents at the school, very much including harassment and intimidation by faculty, and the administration’s unwillingness to take action. It is a fairly shocking document.
The committee letter then requests from Columbia all manner of documentation from the past three years—anti-Semitism complaints and responses, disciplinary action, internal investigative documents, foreign funding, changes in recruiting and enrollment of Jewish students, plus everything it can find related to October 7 and its aftermath.
I look forward to seeing what they find, but I know what they won’t find: the slightest bit of effort to make Jews feel anything but unwelcome on campus. You would think, in the wake of October 7 and the spectacularly embarrassing congressional testimony of some elite school presidents, these institutions would at least go through the motions to appear to act consistent with their professed rules, norms, and values.
But they cannot be bothered. And you can’t save an institution that doesn’t want to be saved.
Since freezing UNRWA funding in January, after evidence emerged that the agency’s employees participated in the murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians in the Oct. 7 massacre, the United States said it will instead send money to other U.N. bodies and nongovernmental organizations in Gaza.
This is premature, ignoring the fact that the serious problems with terror support, incitement and antisemitism at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees are replicated throughout the entire ecosystem of U.N. agencies and NGOs active in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. While freezing funding was a laudable first step, stronger, broader, long-term action is needed before continuing to fund any organizations in Gaza or restoring funding to UNRWA.
At the heart of the problem is that, in addition to providing health care, education and other humanitarian assistance for Palestinians, UNRWA engages in advocacy in response to what it calls “the needs of Palestinian refugees affected by the Israeli occupation.”
This political advocacy work, which is often based on the delegitimization of Israel and questioning the Jewish state’s right to exist, is carried out in partnership with NGOs and other U.N. agencies.
A primary anti-Israel channel is via “clusters” of NGOs and U.N. agencies that work together on various issues. Inevitably, each cluster has an advocacy component.
For example, UNRWA partnered with Palestinian NGOs, including Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, or PCHR, to carry out a project of “advocacy, monitoring and documentation of HR and IHL violations” in Gaza and the West Bank. In other words, UNRWA and the NGOs level accusations of “war crimes” and “violations of human rights” and seek condemnations of Israel from international bodies and governments.
The involvement of these particular NGOs is deeply problematic in two ways. First, they are the leaders of anti-Israel legal warfare, or “lawfare,” seeking to exploit international courts with baseless allegations of Israeli wrongdoing. The biased reports and claims from UNRWA and its NGO partners are often cited among the “evidence” in U.N. investigations of Israel, lawfare cases around the world, and empty accusations of “genocide” and “war crimes.”
The proceedings against Israel at The Hague — in the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court — originate with this type of lobbying.
- Thursday, February 22, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
This morning there was a terror attack in Ma'ale Adumim, with three gunmen shooting anyone they could find including a pregnant woman.
An Israeli Arab MK in 1992:
The response from Hamas was the same as the Palestinian responses to hundreds of previous terror attacks: it was a "natural response" to perceived Israeli crimes.
2012 bus bombing in Tel Aviv:
2006 suicide bombing:
2002 by the PLO's Jibril Rajoub:
1997, referring to a 1989 terror attack:
There is nothing "natural" about terror attacks for normal human beings. But for Palestinians, literally every such attack - no matter how heinous - is called a "natural response" to Israeli actions.
The narrative is so entrenched that no one even questions the "naturalness" of blowing up Jews. Peopel in sub-Saharan Africa or Myanmar and many othe rplaces live much worse lives than Palestinians have, but no one expects violence from most of them.
Only for Palestinians are terror attacks routinely called "natural."
If I would say that Palestinians are naturally oriented towards violence and terror, people would call me a bigot. But what about when Palestinians themselves consistently say that very thing about each other?
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- Thursday, February 22, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
humor, Preoccupied
Yeroham, February 22 - A group of elite members of the Va'aknin household infiltrated their parents' bedroom while the latter lay sleeping, noiselessly opened the cabinet where candy lay sequestered in punishment for fabricated offenses, liberated the contraband, and emerged from the premises while suffering only minor injuries, family sources reported today.
Adi, Moshe, Yair, and Hodaya Va'aknin, ages 8-15, staged a clandestine operation last night to rescue the chocolate, lollipops, and caramel chews that Mr. Va'aknin had confiscated from them two days ago after believing a false report regarding his children's behavior at school. Adi and Moshe briefed reporters this morning following the success of the extraction and the safe ensconcing of the sweets in a secure location that the senior Va'aknin will never find, the children assured journalists.
"It was imperative that we conduct this operation, and I commend all involved for their courage and professionalism," stated Hodaya. "We have known about the location of the imprisoned snacks almost since the beginning. We had a plan in place for some time already to liberate them - but to work best it required the right set of circumstances. Last night the right set of circumstances fell into place."
According to information the children disclosed, the raid began with a discreet scouting mission at around 10 pm. Parents Adelle and Daniel had sent the younger four - which included a four-year-old and six-year-old not involved in the mission - to bed. The eight-year-old kept his mother distracted with complaints of discomfort while an older sibling occupied their father with questions about ominous noises from one of the toilets. These diversions enabled yet another sibling to scout the master bedroom and confirm the exact location of the mission quarry - and, if time permitted, to attempt an extraction.
However, a lookout posted outside the bathroom alerted the scout of Mr. Va'aknin's imminent return, and the team settled in for Plan B. "Plan A was never considered realistic," acknowledged Moshe. "It wouldn't take long for Abba to determine we were only hearing normal tank-refilling noises."
Thus, the older children pretended to go to bed, when in reality one of them had positioned herself with her bedroom door cracked open, lights off, to monitor her parents' movements and launch the second phase of the mission. At 11 pm, the lights went off in the kitchen, then living room, as Adelle and Daniel readied themselves for bed. Hodaya listened for the sounds of the toilet flushing twice, knowing that indicated both adults would soon lie horizontal. She woke and alerted the other three, who tiptoed to just outside the master bedroom and listened.
Earlier, Yair had switched their parents' dinnertime coffee for decaf.
The team ascertained that their mother's breathing had slowed, and that their father's snores had assumed its deep-sleep rhythm, data gleaned from previous scouting missions. An unfolded, three-step ladder with rubber feet was brought from the kitchen. The team worked slowly but quietly to open the bedroom door.
The children recalled barely breathing as one of them - they declined to disclose which one - made a daring foray into the master bedroom, carrying the ladder and placing it in front of Dad's closet. Bare feet sounded like booms to the anxious observers, but did not noticeably alter the sleep of the recumbent couple just a meter away.
Another two children tiptoed into the room to form a relay team to which the point man handed each item, with extreme care not to crinkle any of the plastic wrapping. Inside of four harrowing minutes, the entire stash of captive treats had exited the room. The stepladder returned to its original location. The treats were taken to the bedroom of the two youngest, uninvolved children, and stowed inconspicuously for subsequent retrieval.
Children everywhere cheered the successful mission and the blow it struck for justice. "This is the moral boost we desperately needed," gushed Tony Gutierrez, a children's rights activist.
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From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Joe Biden’s Dueling Personas on Israel
Seth Mandel: Joe Biden’s Dueling Personas on Israel
Late in The Court Jester, the beloved 1955 film parody of the Robinhood tale, Danny Kaye’s traveling jester, Hawkins, is hypnotized into thinking he is a confident, swashbuckling swordsman: the Black Fox. At the sound of fingers snapping, he reverts to his jester persona—though a single snap will put him back in the mind of a hero. He goes back and forth like this several times during a swordfight with one of the movie’s main villains.To Win Votes, President Biden Should Appeal to Israel’s Supporters, Not Its Enemies
I find myself of late listening carefully for any snapping when President Biden or top administration officials are addressing the question of U.S. Mideast policy. Will we be hearing from the Black Fox or from Hawkins?
Luckily, this morning at the UN’s kangaroo Court of Justice, the Black Fox showed up. The “Court” is being asked to “rule” on whether Israel should immediately withdraw from all territories over which the Palestinians may one day establish sovereignty. It is an effort by a large group of nations to enable Hamas to take over the West Bank before the group is defeated completely. The Hamas lifeline would also result in a purge of the Palestinian Authority, several rounds of bloody chaos, and the death of the two-state solution.
The U.S. State Department’s legal adviser, Richard Visek, testified today at the Hague that this would in fact be a bad idea. “Hamas’s attacks, hostage-taking and other atrocities, the ongoing hostilities and the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the violence in the West Bank reinforce the United States resolve to urgently achieve a final peace that includes the full realization of Palestinian self-determination,” Visek said.
Visek also, correctly, pointed out that you cannot solve this conflict “through an advisory opinion addressed to questions focusing on the acts of only one party.”
This attempt to sabotage the peaceful resolution of the conflict on behalf of the Palestinians is being supported by dozens of governments around the world. On the pro-peace side is… the U.S.
The only thing that might stop the IDF from taking Rafah, short of Hamas’s surrender, would be U.S. pressure for a temporary ceasefire. Recently American officials have begun speaking of just that, a shift from the “humanitarian pause” that has until now been the key diplomatic buzzword. The U.S. has even circulated a draft ceasefire resolution at the UN.Gadi Taub: U.S. Scheming for a Palestinian State Unwittingly Strengthens Netanyahu
Noah Rothman believes such moves are intended to appeal to the Democrats’ progressive, anti-Israel wing, and even more so to Arab-American voters in Michigan. In his view this isn’t just morally and strategically incoherent, but also bad politics:
Though it reads like an act of statecraft, the resolution is intended for the consumption of Biden’s monomaniacally anti-Israel domestic critics. Little else explains the administration’s willingness to sacrifice U.S. national interests but its political investment in self-preservation.
Because none of this makes any sense absent a consideration of the domestic political pressures a wildly unrepresentative class of activists are putting on this presidency, we must conclude that Biden has prioritized his reelection prospects over America’s permanent interests. If the Biden campaign genuinely believes its success hinges on a small number of malcontents in Michigan, it is in deep trouble well beyond the state’s borders. Biden would be better served appealing to the majority of Americans for whom Israel’s cause is a vital extension of American grand strategy abroad. At the very least, his administration would go down without putting American national interests on the chopping block in a cloying effort to appease the unappeasable.
If the news that the U.S. is going to recognize a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist was intended to break up Prime Minister Netanyahu’s wartime coalition, it’s unlikely to work. Contrary to what the Biden administration assumes, the obstacle to the “two-state solution” is Israel’s electorate, not its prime minister. The more the administration tries to ram this misguided plan down the throat of traumatized Israelis who are in no mood to compromise their security, the more the country’s prime minister will recover political support.
The calculation here is not a difficult one to make: Netanyahu’s coalition is united in the belief that promising the Palestinians a state in the middle of a war for national survival would be a declaration by Israel’s government that murdering, raping, and kidnapping Israelis is the way for Palestinians to achieve their national ambitions. Even the prime minister’s rivals in the coalition, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, have had to publicly support this consensus.
If this is not clear to the White House, it may be because the administration is clinging religiously to its failed “regional integration” policy—its appeasement of Iran—while relying on a uniformly leftist Israeli press that is eager to tell it what it wants to hear, about a nonexistent moderate electorate that will deliver a moderate two-statist coalition, if only Netanyahu can be removed from office.
One can imagine Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calculating that by replacing Netanyahu with a leader who is willing to “courageously” agree to the two-state model, however far in the future it may be, the recent disasters of U.S. regional policy will turn out to look like a success: A new Palestinian proto-state backed by the U.S. would not only help to rescue Biden’s reelection prospects in Michigan, but also would prop up the administration’s Iran policy, forcing Israel to “de-escalate,” i.e., accommodate Iran’s wishes. And then, a newly moderate Israel and a revitalized Palestinian Authority would be incorporated into the supposedly stabilizing mission of regional integration, as U.S. allies “learn to share the neighborhood” with Iran and its proxies. Remove Netanyahu, and all will be well.
If that’s the plan, it’s a fantasy from start to finish.
From day one, Israel’s war against Hamas has threatened to discredit the Middle East strategy of three Democratic administrations. It was precisely this strategy, the appeasement and “integration” of Iran, that invited the war in Gaza in the first place and threatens to escalate armed conflict with Iran’s other regional assets—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and IRGC-led militias in Syria and Iraq. Had the U.S. not paved the way for Iran’s rising power and regional influence, Iran’s Palestinian proxy would have had neither the confidence nor the means to perpetrate the Oct. 7 massacre.
The longer the Gaza war continues, the greater the chance that it will bring down the failed “regional integration” policy. That is why from day one, the administration’s policy has been to circumscribe the conflict, both geographically and politically. According to the White House, the Oct. 7 attack was just the latest chapter in the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not the Iranian-Israeli war that it really is. In support of this false framing is a false answer: The Israeli-Palestinian problem demands an Israeli-Palestinian solution.
- Thursday, February 22, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
As I was researching my previous article on the myth of "Palestinian territory," I came upon one argument that the territory has been "Palestinian" since the end of the Ottoman Empire.
I found it in a UN document, "The Legal Status of the West Bank and Gaza," written in 1982.
It is quite biased. While it pretends to look at all the legal aspects of who owned the title to Palestine between 1920 and 1948, it doesn't even mention the San Remo Conference, later ratified by the League of Nations, that confirmed the Balfour Declaration and said that the area of Palestine is meant for a Jewish national home.
In fact, the document relies almost exclusively on the legal arguments of a certain Henry Cattan, quoting from a book of his called Sovereignty and Palestine, The Arab-Israeli Conflict.
I couldn't find that book online, but I did find a 1973 book of Cattan's where he gave the same legal arguments that ignored everything the League of Nations did. He conflates the word "Palestine" from before 1948 with the Palestinians of 1973, even though the Arab residents of Palestine showed little interest in a state of their own. An expert that ignores all the counter-arguments is not a real expert but a propagandist.
But what is worse is that Cattan also argued, in 1973, that Israel was an illegitimate state even then. In fact, that is the title of one of his chapters.
Which means that the UN, in 1982, issued a document using the the legal arguments of an antisemite who claimed that most Jews in Israel in 1948 were there illegally and could not be counted as legal residents, and who argued that even the UN was doing something illicit when it recognized Israel, quoted him approvingly about the legal status of the area of the British Mandate.
His arguments that Israel is illegitimate in whole are the arguments that we can expect would be resurrected if the world recognizes a Palestinian state. Such a recognition would not be the end of the conflict, as is fervently hoped by the Western world, but it would be an accelerant.
As soon as the question of "occupation" would be settled, the Israel haters would bring up antisemite Henry Cattan's arguments that Israel itself has no legal basis for existing.
The UN committee that drafted this document of their position of the legal status of the territories certainly also accepted Cattan's more expansive anti-Israel arguments. They just stayed quiet about them because they would not have been accepted in 1982 and in fact would have cast doubt on the rest of the document.
But we can expect that Henry Cattan's anti-Israel opinions will be resurrected very soon.
- Thursday, February 22, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
YNet reports:
It is perfect hypocrisy, and it is given a stamp of approval by European justice system.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France unanimously ruled that the ban on kosher or halal slaughter in the Wallonia and Flanders provinces in Belgium does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights. The decision follows a legal challenge by Belgian citizens and organizations representing Muslim and Jewish communities who argued that the provinces' rules prohibiting the religious slaughter of animals violated their freedom of religion.The court justified its ruling, saying that "the protection of public morals could not be understood as being intended solely to protect human dignity in the sphere of interpersonal relations," and that the ban is "proportional to the aim pursued, namely the protection of animal welfare as an element of 'public morals.'"
Wallonia and Flanders are the only two regions in Belgium where hunting game is allowed (it is banned in Brussels.)
Even bowhunting is allowed in Wallonia.
Game is considered a delicacy in Belgium. People are encouraged to visit Belgium during hunting season to experience eating animals that were shot.
A high percentage of animals that are hunted do not die immediately, but get injured and suffer tremendously. . No one seems to be too concerned about the pain that animals in Wallonia and Flanders feel when being shot.
The very regions where hunting is celebrated are the ones where kosher slaughter is banned.
Doesn't this seem a bit inconsistent?
Not to mention that animals suffer tremendously in the "humane" Belgian slaughterhouses.
In 2020, the Court of Justice in the EU upheld the ban on kosher slaughter, and justified the incongruity of allowing hunting because painfully killing animals in "cultural or sporting events" is completely different than food production. Even though high end Belgian restaurants are filled with game on their menus during hunting season.
There is no question of "public morals" when it comes to killing animals with bullets from a distance. People who shoot arrows at animals are celebrated for their skill, while Jews who carefully and painlessly slaughter food for their tables are guilty of violating "public morals." And, of course, those who specifically seek out and eat game in expensive Belgian restaurants are considered gourmands, the elite of society, not immoral people who care not one bit about the humanity of the act of eating animals whose deaths were very possibly long and painful.
- Thursday, February 22, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Surprisingly, Joseph Goebbels did not make up the concept of "the Big Lie." Adolf Hitler did, in Mein Kampf, claiming that this was a propaganda method of the Jews:
All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.
Hitler, of course, used this method against the Jews. In the very next paragraph, he wrote:
From time immemorial. however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, whereas in reality they are a race?
The Holocaust was based on this Big Lie, that Jews are an inferior race.
Israel haters have used The Big Lie method liberally. we are seeing it today with their applying the terms "genocide" and "apartheid" to Israel. They don't even pretend to defend these absurd accusations anymore - they believe that by just repeating them, and "thinking past the sale," they can plant the association between Israel and these crimes against humanity in people's minds, so the lies become accepted as self-evidently true. No one can believe that they are being lied to so brazenly.
But before these libels, there was another lie I have documented previously - the lie that Israel is on "occupied" or ("stolen") "Palestinian Territory." That lie is so entrenched that the very title of the of the current International Court of Justice case against Israel is "Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem."
Many have discussed Israel's official (and correct) position that the territories aren't "occupied" but "disputed." But not as many have discussed whether the territories are "Palestinian."
Practically no one called them "Palestinian territories" in 1967. Even though Jordan's annexation of the West Bank in 1949 was almost universally not recognized, suddenly in 1967 the West Bank became "Israeli-occupied Jordan."
The UN didn't start using the term "occupied Palestinian territories" in its own reports until 1983. Before then they were "occupied Arab territories."
We know that the land was Ottoman before 1917. We know that the British controlled it but didn't annex it before 1948. We know Jordan controlled it and illegally annexed the west bank before 1967, and maintained it had a legal claim on the territory until 1988.
So when did it become "Palestinian" in the juridical sense?
Under international law, territory can be legally acquired in a limited number of ways, and Palestinians never acquired any land using any of those methods except by agreement with Israel for Area A in the Oslo Accords and Gaza when Israel withdrew from the sector. Outside of those areas, the Palestinians never had any legal title to any land. They certainly never had title over Area C or "east" Jerusalem, indeed not over any areas that Israel has controlled since 1967.
When Jordan gave up its claim to the West Bank in 1988, it had no right to do so since it never had legal sovereignty over the territory. If you look at their actions in July 1988 closely, you can see that Jordan severed all ties with the West Bank but I do not see any formal, legal transfer of the territory to the PLO. King Hussein's speech on July 31 is not a legal treaty. If anything, the official decision by Jordan to stop its fiction of control over the West Bank made Israel the only legal entity that had any claim on the West Bank before Oslo.
Which means that the very basis of the ICJ discussion is based on a Big Lie - the lie that these territories are Palestinian to begin with. There was never any title or transfer of the title of the land to the Palestinians.
I am afraid that the same method that was used to normalize the Big Lie that there exists "Occupied Palestinian Territory" is fast being used to normalize the "apartheid" and "genocide" lies.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Are American Jews Prepared for the Return of History?
Seth Mandel: Are American Jews Prepared for the Return of History?
This sentiment has become the norm in the literary world. PEN America (to its great credit) faced down a torrent of protest for inviting Mayim Bialik to speak at an event. The American writer Randa Jarrar had to be removed from the event, so insistent was she on disrupting the Jewish speaker. This is not the first time Bialik’s Judaism has made her a target. In 2021, when Bialik was chosen as one of the two new Jeopardy! hosts, the Daily Beast ran a story taking aim at her “sketchy” support for Israel’s existence. The piece was updated with a note at the bottom that still makes me laugh: “This story has been updated to replace the word genocidal in reference to the IDF.”Does Antisemitism Explain Feminists' Failure to Condemn Oct. 7?
According to JTA, two award-winning writers “broke ties” with PEN America in response to Bialik’s appearance and blamed Bialik for “ongoing slaughter” in the Middle East.
There was a similar campaign, JTA reported, to pressure a subscription service into dropping a promotion for a special edition of the novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. I enjoyed the book immensely and racked my brain to try to figure out the activists’ beef with Zevin. I assumed it had to be because one of the characters is Israeli. But it appears to have been even dumber than that: Readers objected to, believe it or not, Zevin’s having participated in events with the Jewish group Hadassah.
The New York-based writer Erika Dreifus told the reporter that the organized literary world’s response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 and their aftermath “certainly distances me from any sense of really belonging to a wider literary community.”
I asked Dreifus for the running list she’s been keeping of literary institutions’ responses to Gaza. I noticed some had incorporated them into their writing guidelines. An example from the Feminist Press: “We define our feminism as anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, and decolonial, and we intend to make that explicit with not only our work, but also our practices of solidarity.… In 2023 and beyond, we particularly hope to collaborate with and center Palestinian authors, in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the century of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine.”
I mention all these to make clear that the problem stretches far beyond academia and journalism and politics and, as I have noted previously, global sports. It’s everywhere. It’ll get worse, and the American Jewish community is going to have to be ready and willing to advocate for itself. It certainly won’t be able to rely on anyone else to do it.
The relationship between feminism and antisemitism leaves women in an uneasy alliance with a movement that began with boosting noble conventionalities such as achieving workplace equality yet has now been manipulated by and grouped with a troubling social justice pedagogy.
The reluctance to reckon with intersectional discourse's role in driving gender biases against Jews contributes to the rise in the number of women central to the promulgation of antisemitic trends in American society. First elected in 2018, the congressional "Squad" was initially composed of four women and is still overwhelmingly dominated by female lawmakers.
While running for office, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., invoked themes of overcoming adversity in a male-centered system. During former President Donald Trump's 2020 State of the Union Address, Democratic women doubled down on the atmosphere of empowerment by wearing white and declaring solidarity in achieving "equality for women across the country."
The victories of far-left lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez and comrade Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., led seasoned female politicians, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., anxious to indulge in this unsavory feminist revival by welcoming their entrance into the political arena with a Rolling Stone cover photo depicting the former Democratic House Speaker grinning alongside politicians whose positions would have made them unworthy contenders for a congressional seat decades ago.
As media outlets explore the shift in attitudes among young Americans towards Israel, with a Harvard-Harris poll released last December finding 51% of respondents 18 to 24 years old believing "Israel should be ended and given to Hamas," it may be worth exploring why embedded within a generational change, are gender disparities under which more women are seduced into taking hostile positions against Israel.
It bears mentioning that Within Our Lifetime, the organization responsible for sowing much of the anti-Israel chaos in NYC, is led by pro-Hamas and female activist Nerdeen Kiswani, whose litany of antisemitic invectives did not stop the City University of New York (CUNY) from platforming Kiswani as its 2022 Law School commencement speaker.
Whether at pro-terror protests unfolding across the U.S. or in videos displaying the tearing of Israeli hostage posters, women are a steady and growing presence at the center of these disturbing scenes.
It's a phenomenon advanced by a philosophical sorting that grants progressives the freedom to falsely frame Jews as oppressors while leaving less ideologically inclined liberals ill-equipped to navigate the feminist landscape and confront the distortions that have captured today's contemporary moment.
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