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! |
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Statehood is built into Jewish consciousness. Israel is more than just a place where Jews can be free and safe. As Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of pre-state Israel said: Israel is not external to Judaism but inherently part of Jewish consciousness. To wit: Jews across the religious denominations pray for the return to Zion in their daily liturgy. And religious or not, the vast majority of Jews feel inextricably, soulfully bound to Israel and describe themselves as Zionists.Andrew Pessin: The Emirate of Palestine?
So while anti-Zionists defend themselves by claiming they are not anti-Semites, when anti-Zionists declare “no Zionists allowed,” they are actually saying, “No Jews allowed.” The fact that so many anti-Israel demonstrations are targeting Jewish rather than Israeli institutions underscores this dynamic.
The interfacing of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism was never more apparent than on October 7. The goal of Hamas, like their antecedent Haman, goes beyond destroying Israel; its mission – as articulated in the founding Hamas charter – is to kill as many Jews as possible. Jews worldwide felt personally attacked that day, understanding that if Hamas could, each and every Jew would have been murdered.
This doesn’t mean that every anti-Zionist is an anti-Semite. There are always exceptions to a rule. But the exception doesn’t void the rule. It’s one thing to disagree, even vehemently, with some core Israeli policies. But anti-Zionism goes well beyond that to object to the very notion of Jewish self-determination, and thereby target 7 million Jews, half of the world’s Jewish population who are now living in Zion, and many thousands more who yearn to make “aliya,” or move home to Israel.
Indeed, Zionism is a play on the Hebrew word “tziun-metzuyan,” meaning a stamp of excellence. It is there in Israel that all Israelis living in a sovereign nation have the potential to do their humble share to make this world a better place.
Purim is the story of a vulnerable, powerless Jewish people living in the diaspora threatened with physical and spiritual annihilation. Its unwritten message is the necessity for Jews to be Zionist, to live in Zion, to have a homeland wherein it is in their power to protect themselves with strength, and what Israel’s army calls the “purity of arms.”
According to the Book of Esther, the Jews in ancient Persia were ultimately saved by the grace of the king. But the State of Israel allows Jews to save themselves.
There are many competing ideas about “the day after” the Israel-Hamas war, about how to fill the dangerous vacuum left in Gaza should Israel succeed in destroying Hamas. Overlooked, however, is a particularly intriguing suggestion by the anonymous blogger Elder of Ziyon that deserves wider attention.Ruthie Blum: The Russian dictator’s double terrorism standards
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What are the main possibilities?
Israel doesn't want Gaza back. It doesn't want to govern two million hostile Palestinians, nor take over day-to-day governance. Imagine the suicide bombings at every governmental office. And, of course, it would be "occupation."
Israel has tried empowering local clans as alternate rulers for years and it has never worked out: they fight amongst themselves, there are too many threats from armed Islamists, and no one wants to look like a puppet of Israel.
Some (such as the U.S.) have pushed for a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (P.A.) to reassert control, but the P.A. is corrupt and weak, despised by its own citizens, in fact complicit in terror against Israelis, and “revitalization” is a farce. The P.A. lost Gaza to Hamas once and would likely lose it again, either by election or by force.
Others have proposed a multinational force or rule that would include Arab states, a kind of “Arab mandate.” Though there are advantages, it means that Gaza would become a hot spot for geopolitical rivalries between at least Qatar and Saudi Arabia. But Qatari influence would be disastrous. Qatar supports Hamas both directly and through Al Jazeera, the most influential source of “news” in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia might want more influence, but without peace with Israel, it is limited in what it can do. Egypt doesn't want Gaza. Egyptians hate everything about it. After all, it was Egypt that turned it into a virtual prison for Palestinian refugees after the 1948 war and to this day.
So who should run Gaza the day after Hamas is eradicated?
When Israel left Gaza in 2005, optimists thought it could become a new Singapore. Palestinian incompetence and Hamas ended that fantasy. Hate for Israel was more important than helping Palestinians thrive.
But, as Elder of Ziyon points out, there is one country that could turn Gaza into that wonderful place: the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). Gaza should become the eighth United Arab Emirate.
This is rich, coming from a leader who has been cementing relations with Iran, the globe’s greatest state sponsor of terrorism, and its proxies. One of these is Hamas, whose foot soldiers invaded Israel on Oct. 7, raping, torturing, beheading, burning alive and abducting men, women and babies.
Less than three weeks later, Russia hosted a delegation of their honchos in Moscow. The purpose of the chummy get-together, also attended by Ali Bagheri Kani, deputy foreign minister of the ayatollah-led regime in Tehran, was to come up with ways to stop the “Zionist crimes supported by the United States and the West.”
In other words, the aim of the meeting was to devise a plan to prevent Israel from defending itself and retaliating against the perpetrators of the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. Oh, and to plot the demise of America and Europe.
More recently, Putin went a step further in his pursuit of terrorism ties. Russia’s envoy for the Middle East and Africa, Mikhail Bogdanov, mediated talks in Moscow on Feb. 29 between Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian organizations operating in the region, primarily in Syria and Lebanon.
The goal of the three-day event, which concluded on March 2, was to unify the disparate factions towards the creation of a Palestinian government—for a future state—whose members cease infighting and invest all their energy in the shared objective of annihilating Jews.
So, Putin is pre-disposed to Islamist terrorists, as long as he and Mother Russia are not their target. Meanwhile, the ease with which he slaughters those who get on his bad side doesn’t put a dent in his passing of moral judgment on Jerusalem and Washington. His disdain for the latter, by the way, caused him to pooh-poohed its warning this month about an imminent attack in Moscow.
His hypocrisy pales in comparison, however, to that of Hamas, which on Saturday “condemn[ed] in the strongest terms the terrorist attack that targeted civilians in Moscow, killing and wounding dozens of people.”
Putin’s response to the carnage at Crocus City Hall, like the reaction on the part of the genocidal butchers with whom he sided after Oct. 7, gives the term “double standards” a whole new meaning.
Not only us Arabs, but every non-Jew, from time immemorial until the Day of Judgment, is an “animal” and a servant of the Jews, with divine will, and a legitimate goal for killing....It is rooted in the sacred teachings, and because it is the common doctrinal principle of Jewish theology that is easy to recruit as a ready-made rallying statement.
The Crusades, the First and Second World Wars, and what we are experiencing in our current era, the signs of a Third World War, emerge as the most prominent historical milestones that shaped the course of the global transformations that were planned. The Jewish moneylenders and the criminal Freemasons sought to implement it, and they reaped its fruits at every stage, as we will explain briefly, quoting the author of the book "The Jews are Behind Every Crime", where the Jewish moneylenders achieved huge profits, through loans to finance wars, and determining the victor and the vanquished, according to the Masonic interest. Judaism, just as the Jewish Freemasons achieved more domination, influence and hegemony, leading to the realization of the Zionist idea, in the form of a usurping entity, enjoying sovereignty and political recognition, and carrying out the most heinous crimes and genocides against the Palestinian people, without deterrence, oversight or accountability.
British-Jewish director, Jonathan Glazer, won an Academy Award for his film depicting the Holocaust. In light of this, the Syrian “Dar Al-Fikr” website published an article by writer Elias Khoury, in which he discussed the director’s success in portraying the Holocaust as a human event not only related to the Jews, by pointing out that Israel is now creating a Holocaust in Gaza...
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! |
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From the Jerusalem Post:
"We announce the death of the Zionist prisoner, 'Yagev Buchshtav,' 34 years old, as a result of a lack of medicine and food," Hamas claimed in a statement published to their telegram channel on Saturday.Yagev Buchshtav, 34, and his wife, Rimon Kirsht Buchstav, 36, who worked in alternative medicine, were taken hostage from Kibbutz Nirim on October 7. Rimon was released from captivity on November 28, as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.The terrorist organization remarked, "We had previously warned that enemy prisoners are suffering from the same conditions that our people are suffering from."
After Haman's plot is foiled, the Jews are actually still in danger — because the king's decree to kill the Jews has gone out, and can't be repealed. So instead, they arm the Jews to let them fight back.And they do. And they kill 75,000 people across the empire.
"It's really only in modern times that people sort of refocus attention on it. And say like, wait a second — this is actually kind of bloodthirsty, and a little bit over the top," says Koller.And, he says, for good reason."You take 2,000 years of fantasy violence and marry it to a real world in which people actually have machine guns, and suddenly it gets really dark."Haman is considered to be a descendant of Amalek, the tribe that attacked the Israelites in the desert. And there's a commandment that's read on the Shabbat before Purim to eradicate Amalek and every generation. Rabbi Jill Jacobs heads T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.Jacobs notes there are sadly those in recent eras who have taken this not as satire or metaphor, but literally.Professor Aaron Koller points to Nazis like Julius Streicher who read Chapter 9 as evidence that the Jews were bloodthirsty, and should be eradicated before they attacked. And thirty years ago Baruch Goldstein, an extremist Israeli settler, murdered Muslim worshippers in Hebron — an attack carried out intentionally on Purim."And it's also more recently been invoked by Prime Minister Netanyahu also as a justification for killing Palestinians," says Jacobs.
And so, on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month—that is, the month of Adar—when the king’s command and decree were to be executed, the very day on which the enemies of the Jews had expected to get them in their power, the opposite happened, and the Jews got their enemies in their power.Throughout the provinces of King Ahasuerus, the Jews mustered in their cities to attack those who sought their hurt....So the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon those who hated them.In the fortress Shushan the Jews killed a total of five hundred men. ...They also killed... the ten sons of Haman son of Hammedatha....The rest of the Jews, those in the king’s provinces, likewise mustered and fought for their lives. They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes; but they did not lay hands on the spoil.
It may seem ridiculous, but it is a serious matter in both senses when some queer activists— apparently with suicidal disregard for what they are endorsing—express their solidarity with Hamas. One can only imagine how long a queer solidarity group would survive in the realm of Sharia [it’s worth noting that anti-Israel Palestinian LGBTQ activists have their headquarters in Tel Aviv and not in Ramallah]. But one doesn’t have to use imagination to see the enthusiasm that the annihilation of Israel, explicitly propagated by Hamas and Iran, generates among millions upon millions of sympathisers of these Palestinian ‘freedom fighters.’ The most prominent advocates of Hamas, Yanis Varoufakis and Judith Butler, waited until Israel reacted (as Hamas had no doubt expected) with counter-strikes, which have since resulted in the deaths of an appalling number of civilians in Gaza, before publicly denouncing the Israeli counter-attack while ignoring the gang of murderers who massacred more than 1,200 people on October 7thjust because they were Jews or associated with Jews [the sort of people that the Nazis had called ‘Jew servants’].The US sees situation in Gaza throughout Hamas' optics
Others didn’t wait that long. Like some of her American counterparts, the Austrian Nicole Schöndorfer (who is very prominent on social media) rushed the very first day after the pogrom to celebrate on Instagram the terrorists who themselves died in the butchering of Jews as ‘martyrs.’ One remembers the atheist Foucault, who denounced religious criticism of the Islamist movement; so why should we be surprised by women who explicitly describe themselves as feminists and yet celebrate as martyrs of a just cause the young men who raped, mutilated, murdered or kidnapped Israeli women and presented them as trophies to the mob? A linguistic collateral damage of today’s misery is that laudable terms like anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism are so thoroughly discredited by those who misuse them that one has to ask oneself whether new terms will be necessary in order to make linguistic sense of the old ones—to name them correctly to stand up against racism, colonialism, and imperialism.
A few weeks before the Hamas massacre, I was asked what was the easiest way to fuel antisemitism. Today I would have to answer: by massacring as many Jews as possible. Nothing has fuelled hatred of Jews more than the worst attack on Jews since the Shoah, and because the attack was carried out against Jews, the rapists and murderers can only be called ‘resistance fighters’ motivated by a ‘holy Hatred’ against foreign Jewish rule in Palestine. ‘Heilige Hass’ (holy hatred) is, by the way, a motif that literally comes from Julius Streicher’s Nazi magazine Der Stürmer and which has been taken over in anti-colonial discourse. There are forms of ignorance that are entirely culpable. One of these is when Israel haters, who see themselves as left-wing, simply refuse to acknowledge the political foundations of Hamas.
Hamas has never made a secret of the fact that it is not concerned with national equality, social justice or a so-called ‘two-state solution’, but only with the destruction of Israel—which Hamas says represents the most important stage in the battle for final victory between believers and unbelievers. Its foundational charter from 1988 is a compact collection of anti-Semitic stereotypes and a blatant declaration of intent: that an Islamic theocracy will one day be established ‘between the river and the sea.’
When the Israeli army withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Hamas won free elections. Richly supplied with funds from all over the world, it then had the opportunity to establish self-government for the benefit of the residents of Gaza. But that was not its goal; rather, it quickly set about liquidating its Palestinian opponents and imposing a series of fundamentalist laws on the population. Hamas has done everything in its power to turn Gaza into the ‘largest open-air prison in the world,’ while denying that it was they who had created it. In 1970, after Israel had taken over Gaza, 280.000 people lived there. When Israel withdrew completely in 2005 there were about 1.2 million residents, and after fewer than twenty more years there are now 2.2 million: This is what the demographic development looks like when the ‘Zionist aggressor’ engages in ‘genocide’ for more than five decades.
Forty-five years after Foucault abandoned his intellectual and moral standards to support ‘political spirituality,’ the most sensitive youth in the West are forming an alliance with one of the most brutal terrorist representatives of ‘political spirituality.’ There are some new things that the anti-Zionists put forward between Berkeley and Berlin—such as the rigorous rejection of the Enlightenment legacy, which is denounced in self-loathing as a weapon of white supremacy; but the core of their accusation is ancient.
The administration’s policy is gradually but consistently drifting toward hope-based and optimism-based policy, rather than being pragmatic, which raises serious concerns regarding their ability to develop realistic plans for the conflict going forward.
For the United States, the optics of the situation in Gaza supersedes long-term thinking, which would put in place the conditions for improving the lot of the people in Gaza - in other words, by toppling Hamas' rule in Gaza.
As a terrorist organization and a non-state player, Hamas is able to use the most powerful weapon in its arsenal, which is to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza in order to generate international pressure. This tool of theirs is a force multiplier, which it uses to the utmost effect on world public opinion which, quite justifiably, is shocked by the human suffering there.
In such a situation, a terrorist organization will always be able to extract concessions from the other side. Hamas loses nothing when Gazan civilians die. It can only gain from this. Therefore it has no interest whatsoever in avoiding actions that would exacerbate the humanitarian predicament in Gaza while still maintaining the pretense of fighting for the good of the Palestinian people.
When American humanitarian aid enters Gaza by sea, there is no guarantee Hamas won’t commandeer it. In an extreme scenario, which is by no means unrealistic, Hamas might indeed attack the American warships using the ever-effective excuse - defending the Palestinian people against a Western invasion, rejection of aid from a world power that is aiding the Israeli “occupation” in Gaza or other propaganda-friendly pretexts.
Anyone who has a genuine interest in stabilizing the Gaza situation and preventing Hamas' growth long term, must insist on three conditions: 1. Destruction of Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities. 2. Prevention of any dependency between the civilian population and Hamas, which will exploit its distress to pursue its own goals and 3. De-radicalization of the education system, purging it of incitement, in such a way that it will no longer toxify the next generation of Gazan children, preventing them from becoming tomorrow’s terrorists.
To achieve these goals, and to reduce the number of dead in the long term, Hamas must be defeated at all costs. Failure to get the job done is going to be much more costly to Israel and to the Gazan population in the long term.
The United States, too, was forced to make some highly agonizing decisions during World War II, such as the fateful decision to drop two Atomic bombs on Japan. In the short term, the bombs killed hundreds of thousands, but in the long term, they saved millions of Japanese lives since that country surrendered several days later.
This, according to historical estimates, prevented the unnecessary death of millions more on both sides - American and Japanese. Israel, for its part, is not even seeking to end the war in Gaza in this same painful way - it only seeks legitimacy for the eradication of Hamas’ military and government apparatus and is doing so with the greatest surgical precision possible under the difficult circumstances presented by the battlefield.
To be able to comprehend this simple principle, it is advisable first to begin understanding the Hamas enemy itself - instead of assuming it is ultimately interested in the good of the Gazan population.
Israelis and Jews around the world were stunned by the swiftness and ferocity of the propaganda campaign Hamas’s supporters in the West launched in the immediate wake of Hamas’s orgy of murder and sadism in southern Israel. Less than 24 hours after the news broke, Hamas supporters at Harvard University kicked off the hate campaign by getting 31 student groups to sign a statement blaming Israel for Hamas’s atrocities.Bret Stephens: Directing a Movie Doesn’t Make You a Mideast Authority
As details of the crimes began to flow, Hamas’s supporters in the West responded with violent denials of all of them. No rape. No immolation of children. No torture. No nothing. It was all Israel’s fault, they said. Israel killed and raped its own people. And now the Jews are raping Palestinian women. How do we know? Because they are Jews.
On the face of things, the rapidity and shamelessness of the projection of blame and culpability onto Israel was shocking. Normal people could be forgiven for assuming that in the face of crimes of this enormity, Hamas’s supporters would lay low. But that assumption misses the point.
Oct. 7 was one battle in a larger jihad to annihilate Israel. Propaganda in the form of blood libels is a central component of the war. The libels against Jews and the Jewish state today play the same role as they played in the Middle Ages, just on a national scale. If Jews deserved to be killed because Jews are evil, then the Jewish state deserves to be annihilated because it is the evil Jewish state. Everything that happens to Israel is proof of its evil. Every crime committed against Israel is a crime Israel committed. And if Israel doesn’t commit crimes attributed to it, then that’s because good people like Power and Borrell stood in its way.
The depressing thing, of course, is that Hamas’s strategy is working. The latent Jew-hatred in the West was widespread enough to support their crimes. The propagation of the blood libels by the United Nations, the European Union and the State Department is a disturbing indicator of just how bad things really are.
The question is what can Israel—and Jews more broadly—do in the midst of this avalanche of blood libel? The answer is twofold.
First, Israel must stop trying to prove a negative. No one cares if we are really blood-thirsty vampires. Persuasion doesn’t work with people moved by emotion, particularly hatred. Instead, Israel and Jews worldwide need to concentrate on rallying the people who viscerally understand what is going on and aren’t taken in by anti-Semitic cartoons and Hamas propaganda, even if it is spoken by Samantha Power.
As for the haters, countering them means going on the offensive. On the battlefield in Gaza, it means destroying Hamas completely so that everyone understands that attacking the Jews is a bad idea. And on the battlefields of the United Nations, the European Union, the State Department, Harvard, Berkeley, New York City and London, the answer is to expose the haters with as much vigor and ferocity as they demonize the Jews.
In 1978 the English actress Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for her role in the film “Julia” and used the occasion to denounce “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews everywhere.”At the Anti-Israel Carnival
Later in the ceremony, the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky used his own turn onstage to offer a memorable rebuttal: “I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave,” he said to applause, “that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple ‘thank you’ would have sufficed.”
Forty-six years on, history repeated itself.
Last week, Jonathan Glazer, director of the Holocaust-themed film “The Zone of Interest,” accepted the Academy Award for best international feature film and delivered a diatribe to “refute” having his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”
It took a few days, but the spirit of Chayefsky came roaring back. In a “Statement From Jewish Hollywood Professionals,” hundreds of signatories, including the actress Julianna Margulies and the producer Lawrence Bender, denounced Glazer for “drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination,” arguing that it could fuel antisemitism.
Politically speaking, I’m with the signatories. People can have varying views of the war in Gaza, but comparing it with the Holocaust, as Glazer did, is profoundly wrong. Among other differences, Jews did not provoke the Holocaust by murdering, raping and kidnapping German civilians in a deliberate effort to start a war.
But I’m also allergic to what Eli Lake, in a brilliant recent essay in Commentary magazine, called the “As a Jew” phenomenon: the habit of prefacing political opinions with a declaration of identity, as if an opinion about Israeli politics (usually, an anti-Israel opinion) somehow becomes more credible and significant because the speaker happens to be Jewish.
More disturbing than costumes are the carnivalesque inversions of ideals central to a university education. Thus, when JFAS has sought co-presenters for lectures by entirely mainstream scholars, we have struggled to find a single academic department willing to put its name on a poster. On the other hand, those same departments and university-sponsored research centers present seemingly endless, one-sided propaganda that vilifies Israel. Even the concept of “diversity” is blatantly inverted. In February, a university-sponsored research center hosted a lecture by Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch, who is notorious for demonizing Israel. During the Q&A period, a professor began by saying: “I am speaking as an Israeli, I am speaking as a Jew, and I am speaking as a Zionist. . . . We are here. We want to talk, and we look forward to talking about this issue and all issues with all of you.” The Jewish professor was interrupted and heckled. Later, Students for Justice in Palestine posted a video of the incident, asserting, “This is extremely unprofessional, insensitive, & makes his students and many students across the Rutgers Newark campus feel unsafe.” Dozens of comments on the post predictably agreed that a request for dialogue was really an act of violence, with some stating openly that the diversity of the student population was reason to silence Zionists.
A main feature of the carnivalesque is its celebration of the carnal or profane. True to form, campus protestors have consistently celebrated actual bodily violence. Everyone is, by now, familiar with the rationalization and even cheering of Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. Even more shocking was the promotion of violence that took place at a protest here at Rutgers in January. Shouting into a megaphone, a leader of the protest glorified precisely such violence when she proclaimed, “dying as a Martyr, dying as a hero is one of the greatest sacrifices you can do as a Palestinian and as a Muslim.” She then led a series of chants in Arabic: “Even if you aren’t Muslim, if you say these chants, you are resisting on behalf of the Palestinians.”
Like many cultures, Judaism has its own spring carnival in the holiday of Purim, with all its mandated excesses, masks, and inversions in celebration of the defeat of Haman and his allies. Over the centuries, the rabbinic tradition has been largely successful in curbing and sublimating the darker aspects of the carnivalesque in the service of its higher ideals. Yet Jews are not immune to the violent excesses of the carnivalesque; witness Baruch Goldstein’s massacre on Purim in 1994. Especially now, as Israel’s justified, defensive war against Hamas is being sullied by unsanctioned violence by extremist Jews in the West Bank, we all bear responsibility for ensuring that the levity of Purim is channeled toward “light and joy,” to borrow a phrase from the Book of Esther.
Mikhail Bakhtin thought that the chaotic spirit of the carnival would “free human consciousness, thought and imagination for new potentialities.” Perhaps. But the university is an institution carefully constructed over centuries to advance consciousness, thought, and imagination through the free and open pursuit of truth. It will have to find a way to reject masked intimidation, brazen inversions, and the celebration of violence if it is to remain one.
At Rutgers and on countless other campuses nationwide, the carnivalesque has given license to an ugly hatred that has now been unmasked. Undoing the inversions, lies, and base behavior that this hatred has engendered will require a renewed commitment to the central mission of American colleges. My university would be a good place to start.
STUDENTWASHING: A NEW TERRITORIAL STRATEGY IN ISRAEL/PALESTINEGabriel Schwake &Marco AllegraPages 206-223 | Published online: 05 Mar 2024ABSTRACTThe suffix “washing” refers to the practice of portraying controversial actions in a positive light by leveraging progressive principles, often used by economic corporations, organizations, political parties, or governments. This paper introduces and develops the term “studentwashing” to define the deliberate effort to present Israeli territorial development as an attractive, youthful, and unique experience. This portrayal aims to engage larger segments of society in the national geopolitical project while normalizing its settler-colonial aspects as a means to ensure its continuation. While the constant development of new territorial settlements is dependent either on the right-wing religious sector or on the “quality-of-life” settlers, studentwashing is reserved for areas that are not ideological enough for the first nor sufficiently attractive to the latter. Analyzing “student villages” in the Negev, this paper depicts a new territorial strategy meant to enhance the state’s spatial control over the predominantly Arab periphery inside official Israeli borders. Accordingly, this paper offers a new perspective on Israel’s territorial strategies and enhances the general study of geopolitical and geo-economic spatial development.
Welcome to the new Ice Age. Though the temperatures may be on the rise, and the Middle East is once again on fire, our era will be marked by conflicts frozen in place.Melanie Phillips: The American betrayal of Israel
The good news is that it’s a manmade crisis—anthropogenic geopolitical cooling—and therefore it can be stopped. The bad news is we seem to have lost the will to do so.
It’s very easy to understand why frozen conflicts are increasing: The rogue states that power these conflicts have discovered that an Achilles heel of the American-led world order is that the United States considers a conflict that is frozen to be over, when in fact its status is precisely the opposite. These wars are locked in place in perpetuity.
President Biden claims to understand this, at least as it relates to Hamas’s perpetual war on Israel. But just as we have defended Biden when his actions have been better than his words, so too it’s impossible to ignore the administration’s movement away from its earlier, principled stance that a nation attacked has a right to win, and not merely survive, the ensuing war.
“A major military operation in Rafah would be a mistake, something we don’t support,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken is loudly warning Israel. “There’s a false choice involved. It is possible, and indeed necessary, to deal with the ongoing threat posed by Hamas, but without a major military operation.”
“Deal with the ongoing threat posed by Hamas” is quite the choice of phrase. In fact, the war aim is to destroy Hamas. Fewer words, clearer prose—Blinken needs an editor.
The entire point of this conflict is that there should never again be a threat posed by Hamas. There shouldn’t even be a Hamas. This is what happens when you invade a neighboring country, massacre innocents, take hostages—and then refuse to surrender and return those hostages.
Israel is not just fighting to defend itself against genocide. It is on the front line of the West’s defense against its enemies and the defense of civilization against barbarism.
Western liberals can’t acknowledge this because they can’t allow their unchallengeable orthodoxies of Palestinian powerlessness, “peace processes” and Western iniquity to be destroyed. So they have turned on the Jews. Jewish suffering has to be erased because it gets in the way of the narrative.
That’s why the eruption of Palestinianism throughout the West is so shattering. People wonder why the forests of Palestinian flags at the incendiary anti-Israel demonstrations are in themselves so intimidating.
It’s because the Palestine cause is not two states side by side. Palestinian identity consists entirely of the intention to eradicate Israel by the hijack and appropriation of Jewish history. Palestinianism stands for the erasure of Jewish national identity and wiping the Jewish people out of their own historic homeland.
That’s why anti-Israel thugs have ripped apart a painting in Cambridge University of Arthur Balfour, the British prime minister who gave his name to the 1917 declaration of British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It’s why people across the West have been ripping down the posters of the Israeli hostages. They are all trying to rip Israel and the Jews out of their headspace and their world altogether.
That’s why the betrayal by Schumer and American Jews who still support the Democratic Party and its Israel-bashing agenda is so devastating.
According to the Oxford University Press Dictionary of American Family Names, “Schumer” derives from a German word that means a “good-for-nothing.”
Schumer claims instead that his name derives from the Hebrew shomer, or “guardian”; and so he boasts to be the shomer of Jewish values. “What horrifies so many Jews especially,” he said, “is our sense that Israel is falling short of upholding these distinctly Jewish values that we hold so dear.”
How dare he. He is not a shomer. What has horrified so many is that Schumer and other liberal American Jews who are taking aim at Israel’s “right-wing” are using “Jewish values” as a shield behind which they are betraying Israel and the Jewish people and delivering them to their enemies.
Along with the shills for Israel’s surrender in the Biden administration, they present an obscene and disgusting spectacle.
“In every generation,” say the Jews at Passover, “they rise up against us.” To the enemies of the Jewish people today—Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran—we must add the Biden administration, Chuck Schumer and the liberal Jewish fifth column.
Thousands of our people performed the second Friday prayer of the holy month of Ramadan in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem, despite the strict and unprecedented Israeli occupation measures imposed on the Holy City and its surroundings.The Islamic Endowments Department in Jerusalem said that 120,000 worshipers performed the second Friday prayer of the month of Ramadan today in the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque .The preacher of the Blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Khaled Abu Jumaa, confirmed that our people are committed to their land and will foil all plans to displace and destroy them .He stressed that Al-Aqsa Mosque will remain a purely Islamic mosque with all its prayer rooms and courtyards, and that our people, by attending prayer in the mosque, overthrow the occupation’s plans to Judaize it and the city of Jerusalem .
Huge numbers of Palestinians attend prayers.Israel stops huge numbers of Palestinians from attending prayers.The huge numbers prove that Israel doesn't control the holy site that they restrict so many from attending.
Human Rights Watch documented a strike by Israeli forces on a marked ambulance outside al-Shifa Hospital on November 3, 2023, which reportedly killed 15 people and injured 60. Ambulances are protected civilian objects under international humanitarian law and cannot be targeted when used to treat wounded and sick individuals, both civilian and combatant. Israeli authorities said they intentionally struck the ambulance, contending that it was being used to transport able-bodied fighters. Human Rights Watch investigated these claims and did not find any evidence that the ambulance was being used for military purposes. Furthermore, the high number of civilian casualties caused by the strike suggest that it was unlawfully disproportionate even if the ambulance was being used for military purposes.Human Rights Watch documented strikes on or near several major hospitals between October 7 and November 7, including the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, the Indonesian Hospital, and the International Eye Care Center.Hospitals enjoy protected status under international humanitarian law, and only lose their protection from attack if used to commit “acts harmful to the enemy,” though warnings, proportionality, and distinction are still required. Israel contends that the hospitals were being used by Palestinian fighters and therefore were not protected under international humanitarian law. Human Rights Watch found with respect to the cases it investigated no evidence that would justify depriving the hospitals of their protected status under international humanitarian law.
Like the rest of Israeli society, Alumim’s members were shocked and traumatized by the events of Oct. 7, especially as the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas became known. It was the most fatal day in Israeli history, with 1,200 civilians and soldiers killed, and 253 kidnapped. Not since the Holocaust had Jews been subject to mass murder, torture and rape, and Jewish collective memory across the world was deeply stirred.Hebrew U legal expert to receive Israel Prize for work with October 7 vctims
That said, for all the horror of the day, Alumim had escaped the worst of it, albeit barely: Four members of the KK had been wounded, as had two residents (in addition to Muller, Doveleh Bergstein, the father of the KK’s Yaakov Bergstein, had been hit by a mortar fragment early in the day). Neighboring Kibbutz Sa’ad was not penetrated at all. Like Alumim, it is religiously observant, a fact that entered into portions of the public discourse. Inevitably, word quickly spread about the “miraculous” events at Alumim and Sa’ad, as compared to the horrific destruction at many of the other neighboring secular, mostly left-of-center kibbutzim. The fact that 19 foreign workers and an Israeli civilian had been killed within the kibbutz’s confines, not to mention the soldiers who had been killed beating off the attackers, was ignored. Fake social media posts attributed to the kibbutz’s rabbi, Amit Kula, declared that the kibbutz had been spared because it observed the Sabbath. This included locking the gates, so as to prevent motorized transportation on that day (an absurd notion in and of itself: All the kibbutzim in the area locked their gates). Rabbi Kula responded angrily, calling the idea that God distinguishes between observant and nonobservant Jews an abomination, pointing to the fact that many observant Jews had been killed that day, both soldiers and civilians in neighboring towns. Moreover, the kibbutz itself had failed to protect its foreign workers, hence there was no cause whatsoever for celebration.
As the full story became known, the “miracle” seemed less and less miraculous. In addition to the massacres of the foreign workers and the Nova festivalgoers on Road 232 outside the kibbutz, two members of the security forces had died at Alumim that day, as had the two Slotki brothers and Ofek Atun. Two other members of kibbutz families had been killed as well: Shachaf Bergstein, the brother of KK member Yaakov Bergstein, had been at the synagogue celebrations the night before, and was killed in his home in neighboring Kfar Aza; Lt. Nitai Amar, the son of a kibbutz family, was killed in battle down the road at Re’im; and the sister of a kibbutz member was killed while doing her morning training run with her running club from Sderot. The son of another kibbutz family would be killed in battle a few weeks later.
Alumim’s residents themselves viewed the events of the day through a number of different lenses. Some people did ascribe their survival to overt Divine protection. Most others, though, viewed things similarly as Rabbi Kula, namely that one utters the traditional prayer of thanksgiving in such situations, without any pretense of being able to answer the question: “Why me? Why did I survive?” Alumim’s defenders were acutely aware of how easily the results of the battle could have been radically different, and most of them gave short shrift to the idea that they had benefited from Divine intervention. However, there was no question in their minds that a crucial factor accounting for their success was that they were literally fighting to save their homes and families.
The massacre of the foreign workers remained a sore point for some, and particularly for Hunwald. Could more have been done to save them, for example, by immediately moving them en masse into the kibbutz’s residences, after the first wave of killings? The question gnawed at him, even while he acknowledged that no one had had a clue that the initial penetration of the kibbutz by the 10 terrorists was only the beginning of the ordeal. Some KK members emphasized that the subsequent large-scale massacre and kidnapping of the foreign workers had essentially bought the kibbutz defenders valuable time and even somewhat thinned out Hamas’ ranks, lending a special poignancy to what had happened, and reinforcing their sense of responsibility and indebtedness. As the first shock of the events gradually faded, and the kibbutz members began coping with their new status as displaced persons, the enormity of the Oct. 7 events gradually sank in. Some kibbutz members made sure to publicly and repeatedly emphasize that the Thai and Nepali workers were part of the Alumim community. Assistance was extended to the wounded, and ceremonies made sure to include reference to their sacrifices. By the beginning of February, six of the 10 Thai workers who had survived the ordeal and gone home, as well as one who had left before Oct. 7, had returned and were welcomed with open arms.
What does the future hold? Prior to Oct. 7, a common mantra among the kibbutzniks in the Gaza envelope was that their lives there were “95% paradise and 5% hell.” Nearly all of Alumim’s residents hoped to return home, but on one condition: There could be no restoration of the status quo ante that had included the “5% hell” and ultimately left them vulnerable to marauding terrorists. But after Oct. 7, could the authorities be trusted to achieve this, and if so, how? Kibbutz spokesman Dani Yagil was succinct: “They destroy, we’ll build,” in line with the pioneering ethos that had led to the establishment of Jewish settlements in the area in 1946, two years before the State of Israel was founded, and the founding of Alumim in 1966 by dedicated idealists.
Others, especially those with young children, weren’t so sure. After all, as Eitan Okun related, half of the children in the kibbutz were already in therapy before Oct. 7, owing to the constant stress engendered by Color Red warning sirens. How could they, as parents, have subjected their children to this? And could the destruction of Hamas’ military capabilities and ability to rule, the declared goal of Israel’s war against it, really be achieved? And what about the profound fissures that had opened up in Israeli society in the preceding year, and that were now reappearing again, five months into the war? Overall, there seemed to be a longing for more pragmatic voices that could lead Israel away from the abyss into which it was staring.
The fight for home on Oct. 7 had been won. The fight to keep and renew that home, both the kibbutz itself and the nation as a whole, was far from over.
The prestigious Israel Prize, awarded annually, was granted to Hebrew University of Jerusalem legal expert Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy for her advocacy for the victims of the October 7 attacks.The Growing List of Al Jazeera Terrorists
Elkayam-Levy was awarded in the "Solidarity" (Arvut Hadadit) category.
Following Hamas's massacre of southern Israel on October 7, she established the "Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children," which was brought about to highlight and uplift victims of the attacks. Namely, the Commission shed light on the crimes committed against women, children, men, and entire families that were severely impacted in the wake of October 7.
The work of the Civil Commission aims to promote human rights and gender equality, and she has taken her work to both the national and international stages.
In a statement, Elkayam-Levy, a legal expert at the Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, expressed her gratitude and ardent belief in giving voice to the voiceless and combatting rising antisemitism.
These incidents, along with other intelligence, ultimately prompted the Israeli government to propose a law to shut down Al Jazeera in Israel. And yet, the Israeli government continues to engage with the government of Qatar in the ongoing hostage negotiations. Perhaps it goes without saying, but if the Israelis are convinced that journalists on the Qatari payroll are actively working with terrorist groups in Gaza, engaging the Qatari government to achieve a ceasefire with Hamas sounds insane.
It sounds even more insane given that Qatar has hosted a Hamas headquarters in Doha, and it has been paying Hamas $30 million per month since 2018. These funds undeniably helped Hamas prepare for the assault of October 7.
The Israelis are likely to continue dealing with the Qataris until a hostage deal is reached. But this does not explain why the United States continues to treat the terror-supporting Gulf nation as an ally. The support that Qatar has provided to terrorist groups like Hamas, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and even the Islamic State is beyond dispute. And the string of incidents in Gaza indicating a collaboration between Al Jazeera and Hamas are consistent with what American forces dealt with during the Iraq War, when Bush administration officials complained that Al Jazeera journalists somehow knew exactly where to be and had their cameras rolling during attacks that targeted American servicemembers. Al Jazeera’s fever-pitch incitement against the United States was another challenge that Washington never quite ironed out with Doha.
A reckoning is urgently needed in the United States on the connection between Qatar, Al Jazeera, and terrorism. Intelligence needs to be declassified. High-level hearings need to be convened. It’s time to pull the plug on Qatar’s media asset that provides cover for violent actors in Gaza and beyond. More important, it’s time to end the charade that Qatar is an ally, once and for all.
Allowing passage of these items [food, medicine] is not required by the party controlling the area unless that party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing that:• the consignments may be diverted from their destination;• the control may not be effective; or• a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy.
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The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!