Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, April 07, 2024

The origin of the watermelon symbol for Palestinians was a 1984 Israeli satirical newspaper article

The New York Times reported in 1993, in the initial heady days of the Oslo agreement, that "In the Gaza Strip, ...young men were once arrested for carrying sliced watermelons -- thus displaying the red, black and green Palestinian colors."

The story received some attention, since it was the first time anyone had heard of it. But Israel duly spent weeks checking the allegation and found no basis for it. An Israeli government press office spokesperson wrote a letter to the NYT saying, " Having investigated the matter with the proper authorities, I can state that such arrests have never been official Israeli policy. If such an isolated and unsanctioned act did occur, no individual was ever prosecuted under such innocent circumstances. As part of the confidence-building measures taken by Israel, a large number of Palestinian prisoners are now being released; none of them were put behind bars for carrying fruit."

How did the watermelon become associated with Palestinians?

The National tried to find the origins in 2021:

Another story involves artists Sliman Mansour, Nabil Anani and Issam Badr, whose exhibition at 79 Gallery in 1980 was shut down by the Israeli army as the artworks were deemed political and bore the Palestinian flag and its colours. Confronting the officer, Badr asked, “What if I just want to paint a watermelon?”, to which he replied, “It would be confiscated”.

Mansour, now in his seventies and living in Birzeit, remembers the incident, but clarified a few details for The National. He recalls that the exhibition in 79 Gallery was open for only three hours before soldiers cleared out the space and locked it up. Two weeks later, Israeli officers summoned the three artists, warning them to stop producing political paintings, and perhaps paint flowers instead.

“They told us that painting the Palestinian flag was forbidden, but also the colours were forbidden. So Issam said, ‘What if I were to make a flower of red, green, black and white?’, to which the officer replied angrily, ‘It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated.’ So the watermelon was mentioned, but by the Israeli officer,” Mansour explains.

He does not recall artists during this period using the watermelon as a political motif in their work.

It seems odd that both artists who were there at the time remember the events so differently.

The earliest I can find any Palestinian using that symbol was from the same Mansour, who painted "Watermelon Boy" in 1987:

But the earliest recorded association between Palestinian Arabs and watermelons comes not from Palestinians themselves, but from a satirical section of a left-leaning Israeli newspaper making fun of Israel's anti-PLO flag policy.

Chadashot ("News") was an Israeli newspaper that first published on March 4, 1984 by the Haaretz Group. It had a satirical section using the pun Chashadot ("Suspicions").

On June 26, 1984, Chashadot published a story about an Arab watermelon seller "Mahmoud Al-Batikh" (which means watermelon in Arabic) who was sentenced to five years in prison for selling items in the colors of the Palestinian flag.

Moreover, the joke went on, his sign said that the watermelon slices would be sold freshly cut "on the knife" which was considered incitement to terror.

The earliest known association between watermelons and Palestinian Arabs comes from...Jews.

There is one earlier association, though - but with Palestinian Jews.

David Ben Gurion did not want Zionists to be a colonial-type power that exploits the local population for low-paying jobs. He developed the concept of "Hebrew Labor" where Jews would be the ones doing all the blue collar work. In fact, he said years later that the kibbutz movement was not motivated by any kind of socialist philosophy but to attract Jews to do the kind of farm work that they rarely had the opportunity to do, since they were proscribed from owning land in most of the world.

Later, in the 1930s, Jewish farmers found themselves in competition with not only Arab farmers but also from imports. Zionists were urged to support the local Jewish producers to allow them to stay in business, and this became especially important when Arasb started boycotting Jewish businesses. This poster, circa 1930, urges Zionists to buy "Hebrew watermelons" with a symbol certifying that they were grown by local Jews.

There were similar campaigns to buy Hebrew cheese, butter, bananas, chickens, and fish.

(h/t Adin Haykin)

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!

Hamas credited with Al Aqsa not being destroyed by Jews this week

As we've been reporting, Muslim media has been saying for weeks that Jews planned to slaughter the scary Red Cow this coming week on the Mount of Olives and then destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

According to the Muslim sites, the Jews were planning to do the slaughter and then the destruction on Eid al-Fitr itself, which is this coming Wednesday.

But this year, as with previous years, the Israeli police have said the Temple Mount is completely closed to Jews during the last ten days of Ramadan and for the three days of Eid al-Fitr.

Which would make destroying Al Aqsa a bit more difficult.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is already crediting Hamas with having instilled fear in the Jews and stopping them from this planned destruction.

This is a pattern that has gone on for a hundred years: Arab Muslims claim the Jews are about to destroy Al Aqsa, it doesn't get destroyed, and they then congratulate themselves for averting that destruction.

Since Hamas has made the Red Cow into one of its major reasons for going to war, this gives them the bragging rights to say that they are the ones who averted the catastrophe.

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!

04/06 Links: Pres. Herzog: 'We will heal, build, and rise again'; Howard Jacobson: Jews are starting to lose faith; After Damascus strike, Iran’s goal: Isolate Israel, deter the US

From Ian:

Pres. Herzog: 'We will heal, build, and rise again'

Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Saturday marked six months since the brutal Hamas attack on Israel, which sparked the war dubbed "Swords of Iron."

"Tomorrow at 6:29am, we mark six months since the cruel terror attack and the horrific massacre," he noted. "Half a year since this crime against our sisters and brothers, against our state, this crime against humanity. Six months of a bloody and difficult war."

"Today we received the bitter news of the discovery and retrieval from the Gaza Strip of the body of Elad Katzir from Kibbutz Nir Oz. We met his beloved mother, Chana - whose husband Rami was murdered on that fateful morning - at the hospital after she returned from Hamas captivity. A noble soul. I send my heartfelt condolences to her entire family and especially to his kindhearted and caring sister Carmit Palty Katzir."

Herzog continued, "Half a year our sisters and brothers have been held by a cruel enemy, our hearts falter, day after day, minute after minute – with them, there. Half a year we, the entire people, accompany, support, embrace the families of the hostages. We never forget them or their loved ones."

"The terrible suffering of the hostages and their families inconsolably rocks our souls. Michal and I see this almost every day, when we meet families of those held in captivity, and make every effort to assist them, to offer them strength in their all-encompassing struggle, to open doors for them and to introduce them to leaders of the family of nations and international organizations. For half a year we have been moved by the strength and unwavering faith of these heroic families. The most fundamental covenant between a state and its citizens obliges us to do everything – with creativity, perseverance, determination – to act in every way to bring them home.

"For half a year the IDF and our security forces, in regular and reserve duty, have been operating in every arena, on every front, with all their might – to bring back the hostages and to fight terrorism. Half a year into the war, and even in these tense days, we know we have an army that will stand against every enemy, near and far. We hope for the success and safe return of the soldiers, embrace the bereaved families, and pray for the recovery of the wounded in body and soul."

Noting that not all Israelis have returned home, Herzog said, "For half a year many Israeli citizens in the north and south have not yet returned to their homes. It is imperative not to forget that this is a supreme national priority - to return them to their homes, and to assist them in rehabilitation and in building a life of security, prosperity, and peace."

"Half a year, and despite the pain and turmoil, I am full of hope and faith in us. For half a year I have seen Israeli society in all its glory: The mutual responsibility on the front and at home - despite all the disagreements - the commitment to life, the closeness to others, the unique Israeli resilience. For half a year I have seen so many Israelis doing everything for the better of us all. Half a year, and every day, I feel anew immense pride in being part of this people."

He concluded, "Half a year has passed, and it is difficult to know what challenges still lie ahead of us. But despite the long and difficult journey, I look at you, citizens of Israel, and I know - we will rise again, we will heal and build, we will plant, we will reap with joy what we sowed in tears, and we will prove to the whole world: Am Yisrael Chai!"

Howard Jacobson: Is this the end of Israel? Six months on, Jews are starting to lose faith

In defence of last year’s massacre, it was argued that it could not be understood independently of the circumstances that led to it. Hamas’s attack, its apologists insisted, was the child of the Israeli occupation. I have always resisted the word “occupation” because it suggests a pre-planned policy, rather than — as I see it — the consequence of all the wars between the two people, most of them instigated by the Palestinians, after which Israel found itself with territory it needed to demilitarise for its own safety. But alright — an occupation it became. After which, what were Palestinians expected to do?

The elusive two-state solution was presented to them several times. Not equitable enough, they said, even when it was the United Nations that had done the divvying up. “Don’t accept,” the cosmopolitan Palestinian writer Edward Said urged from the comfort of his home in North America. “Demand more.” Was he right? Wouldn’t an inequitable divvying up have given Palestinians better if not perfect lives? Well, it’s not for one person to tell another what’s fair. But right or wrong, there was to be no deal. And so the bloody impasse — a tragedy, as Amos Oz saw it, of two rights. Later, a tragedy of two wrongs. For calling it a tragedy, Oz’s erstwhile Palestinian supporters deserted him. Tragedy meant there was no villain. And the Palestinians needed a villain.

Netanyahu fitted the bill. Netanyahu put his hand out and took. In retaliation for which — though nothing in the history of the two people would ever justify its extreme and twisted violence — the massacre of October 7. But if Israel must take some blame for the massacre, the Palestinians must, by the same token, take some blame for Netanyahu, the lumbering, unsubtle child of unrelenting war, a man hardened in suspicion and fear who does not know the difference between justice and revenge.

To hold out against the Palestinian narrative of dispossession, while allowing that not all of it is fantasy or self-pity, has necessitated, these last few years, more flexibility of mind than dedicated anti-Zionists are willing to try. That’s how we know they are wrong: they do not attempt to understand their enemy and do not cry for him. Did Gazans — educated in their schoolbooks to loathe Jews — dance in the streets on October 7? Whatever the truth, may Israelis never dance the dance of blood.

The heart breaks, seeing the destruction of Gaza. But seeing the destruction of Tel Aviv will hurt no less. Do I fear that? Yes. I sense a change of mood. The constant chanting on the streets of London and elsewhere has, to a degree, contributed to that change. One lie, endlessly retold, can weaken the cause of truth eventually. But, all on his own, Netanyahu is enough to try the patience of the West whose leaders have little appetite for sticking to a mission. There is a flaw in our natures that leads to our growing bored with even the noblest causes, let alone those grown stale in their own complacency. Oh, what the hell. Enough of them. So those are swastikas. So what? It’s all just a matter of context.

I fear they — papers and commentators and politicians — are losing interest and sympathy at the same rate. They’ve heard it all before. We Jews need to find other ways to make our harrowing history compelling. We’ve tried losing. We’ve tried winning. I’m not sure what’s left.

Nations Aren’t People

There’s no need to revisit the “genocide” canard, but I will note that these are not the procedures a country takes when it’s looking to wipe out a whole population.

More to the point, it just seems improbable that a military willing to forgo the element of surprise to spare Palestinian lives would suspend all of its safeguards for the express purpose of killing non-Palestinians (including one American).

I generally don’t like cui bono arguments, but how could it possibly benefit Israel to do so? Who in command would say, “I know the Americans and EU are going to come down on us like a ton of bricks if we kill these aid workers, but it’s worth it”?

How this could possibly benefit Israel is an utter mystery to me. The only attempt at an answer I’ve seen—other than Israelis are monsters—is that they want to “starve” Palestinians, and so this was an extension of that alleged policy. Among the problems with this theory is that according to the people offering it, WCK wasn’t making much of a difference, given the scope of the food crisis in Gaza. If that’s true, surely it makes little sense to kill these people given the foreseeable blowback.

Again, I think it’s obvious this was the kind of mistake that happens in war, especially urban war, and particularly an urban war when one side—that would be Hamas—rejects all laws of war and has an open and admitted policy of trying to maximize civilian deaths on their own side.

This is the amazing thing about this war and why it confuses so many people. Normally when two countries fight a war, each side takes responsibility for taking care of its own people. In this war, Israel is expected to protect its own civilians but also be responsible for protecting—and feeding—Palestinian civilians. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t protect Palestinian civilians as best they can, nor am I saying they shouldn’t feed them as best they can. But a little recognition of the fact that this is a burden the “international community” imposes on exactly one country.

From the Biden administration and much of the media, there’s this amazing, twisted, morally deformed assumption that Hamas should not be blamed for anything that happens in Gaza. In the fringier corners of academia and activism, this belief extends so far as to make October 7 Israel’s fault, because raping and mass murder are inevitable acts of resistance to “occupation.” (Never mind that Gaza was not “occupied” on October 7.)

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a Hamas leader, explained that because the tunnels and shelters underneath Gaza were built for Hamas fighters, the civilians on the surface are somebody else’s problem. More specifically, Hamas considers Palestinian civilian deaths to be a necessary sacrifice in the effort to bring international condemnation down on Israel and its allies. After six months of war, Hamas has not budged from its original negotiating position. But, yeah, Israel is being unreasonable.

I want to get off this subject, but it’s worth noting that despite getting its ass handed to it militarily, its territory pulverized, and watching thousands of civilians get killed, Hamas looks at the international climate, and the political climate in America, and thinks time is on its side. In other words, they think their strategy is working. They could only think this if they held the lives of Palestinians cheap, far cheaper than Israelis do.

Given how the Biden administration is wavering in its supposed “unwavering support,” Hamas may be right about its strategy working.

04/05 Links Pt2: The American Left’s Milošević Moment; Hamas Concessions Are Distorting Our Mideast Policy; Prince of Truth

From Ian:

The American Left’s Milošević Moment

As Eastern bloc communism began to crumble, Serb nationalists turned to this history to fill the ideological and narrative void and employed rhetorical tactics that are entirely familiar to today’s woke American landscape, including:

No. 1: Glorifying the year of enslavement as the beginning of a national narrative. There has been much scrutiny regarding the historical accuracy of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, but little regarding the sheer strangeness of it celebrating, from its own advocates’ perspective, a calendar year of enslavement and degradation initiating centuries of persecution that have de facto never ended. (This latter characteristic makes 1619 very different from conventional American commemorations of Pearl Harbor or the Alamo, military setbacks which were quickly dealt with.) However, this logic wouldn’t seem strange at all to Serb nationalists, who celebrated Yugoslavia’s own 1619 with 1389, the year Milošević said Serbs “fell into slavery” and Muslim rule for 489 years by, depending on your interpretation, either losing or forcing a Pyrrhic draw at the Battle of Kosovo against the advancing Ottoman Empire. The glorification of the Serb-specific defeat of 1389, most famously in Milošević’s Gazimestan Speech on the Battle of Kosovo’s 600th anniversary, directly attacked Yugoslavia’s motto of multiethnic Bratstvo i jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity) and summoned the ancient hatreds motivating the mass rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Bosnian Muslims. Milošević died in 2006 while on trial for genocide and other war crimes.

No. 2: Attributing sinister ethnically based motivations and ideologies to political opponents. Members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush regularly leave political opponents flummoxed with accusations of “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “anti-blackness.” In Bosnia, a squad of highly educated Serb politicians, propped up by Milošević and led by Karadžić—who had studied at Columbia—leveled parallel charges against Muslims. Though U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith called the largely secular Muslims Bosnia’s “most Western” ethnicity, Karadžić and crew harangued them as Islamic fundamentalists scheming to create an “anti-Serb” neo-Ottoman caliphate. Meanwhile, national media outlets “deliberately fanned the flames of national hatred,” in the words of British journalist Christopher Bennett, by amplifying, embellishing, and inventing incidents of interethnic violence. Moderate Serbian politicians and honest journalists who refrained from joining the frenzy were expelled from public life.

No. 3: Calling opposition and criticism “violence,” in order to legitimize future actual violence. In October 1991, after Slovenia had won its independence in the Ten-Day War and Croatia’s declaration of independence had initiated a Serb-Croat war that would last until 1995, multiethnic Bosnia faced the decision of whether to declare independence from Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia. Enter the charismatic Karadžić, who delivered a petrifying speech to Bosnia’s legislature taunting Muslims with “extinction” should they declare independence, continuing with a sneer, “If there is a war, the Muslim people will not be able to defend themselves.” (The line recalls President Biden repeatedly saying that the U.S. government can employ F-15s against American gun-rights supporters.) In that same speech, Karadžić pointed to the gallery and yelled that independence for Bosnia would be “violence on the Serbian people, constitutional violence” and that “constitutional violence breeds all other kinds of violence.” Calling words and beliefs “violence,” suggesting they breed and justify further violence, is a hallmark of wokeness. Karadžić was convicted of genocide in 2016.

In March 1992, Bosnia’s Muslims, joined by the province’s Croat minority, voted for Bosnian independence, rejecting Karadžić’s threats and making themselves the largest ethnicity in a new country. A month later, Yugoslavia’s politically corrupted army teamed up with extremist Serbian paramilitary gangs led by psychopathic career criminals like Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović in a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and mass rape against the largely unarmed Bosnian Muslim population. It peaked in July 1995 with General Mladić’s Srebrenica genocide, which Mladić openly called “revenge on the Turks in this region,” i.e., payback for Ottoman rule.

An ideologically pure decolonization of the Ottoman imperial presence, perhaps? The core belief of “wokeness” or “anti-racism” is that concessions are owed by the “privileged,” especially those affiliated with groups that centuries earlier engaged in conquest and enslavement. In fact, Hoare, the historian, has documented many influential “anti-imperialist” leftists who duly defended Milošević’s ethnonationalist regime in the 1990s.

Other contemporary woke believers would almost certainly oppose Serb violence against Muslims, though, and Hoare himself was raked over the Twitter coals for suggesting similarities between the destruction of statues in summer 2020 with the destruction of Ottoman monuments and mosques in 1990s Bosnia. (Hoare, impressively, never backed down.) The motivation in these cases is not concern over human rights or the golden rule, of course, but an instinct that Muslims are “good” while groups like Serbs, Christians, whites, and—as large-scale celebrations following the Hamas massacre on Oct. 7 made clear—Jews are “bad.”

Although wokeness is sometimes called “critical race theory,” the use of an academic, clinical term like that to describe this latter, instinctive version of wokeness is to miss the point entirely. The reality of “wokeness” is the promotion of tribal hatreds. It is tribal hatred even when—as in the case of many urbane white Westerners—it involves hating one’s own ostensible tribe, a circumstance that similarly applies to Bosnian Muslims, whose European heritage complicates whether they qualify as good Muslims or as bad white people. As bizarre as it might seem, it is in fact fairly common to see social media posts where Bosnian Muslim genocide refugees get harangued for their white privilege, sometimes by woke Bosnian Muslims, just like Jewish genocide survivors and their children are regularly denounced in the U.S. for their own “privilege.” Apparently the rule of instinctive wokeness is that vilifying Bosnian Muslims regarding 600-year-old events in the Balkans is evil, but vilifying them for their “responsibility” for 400-year-old events in America is righteous, providing that they fled to Utica or St. Louis to avoid mass slaughter.

Bosnia, then, serves as an important window as to whether wokeness is fundamentally an ideological or tribal phenomenon. More importantly, it shows wokeness’s endgame. America’s establishment once reviled the ethos that killed 140,000 and displaced 4 million in the Yugoslav wars and Joe Biden bragged about calling Milošević a “damn war criminal” to his face. Now, terms like “anti-racism” and “social justice” are covering for a worldview whose routine incitements to tribal hatred and social fracturing based on fanning the embers of historical grievances directly echo the ideological formations of the most bigoted and notorious villains of the late 20th century.

Not satisfied with Balkanizing the United States, the American political and media establishment is injecting the Milošević model into the rest of the world as well. The U.S. State Department is pushing aggressive “equity”-based policies on the world at large and, as the Croatian Canadian who goes by the pseudonym Niccolo Soldo has pointed out, is also training activists in Europe in the arts of wokeness and anti-racism. As politicians in New York and Chicago are discovering, the present-day, large-scale migration into the United States and Europe is quite stressful for polities to manage. Matters become far more grave when you realize that elements of the United States government are using their country’s cultural and political hegemony to convince masses of incoming migrants to think of local Americans and Europeans the same way rampaging Serbian Chetnik death squads thought of the Muslims they spent large chunks of the 1990s brutalizing and killing.

Bosnia became a cauldron of tribal hatred in the 1990s because of its combination of real-world ethnic diversity and age-old animosities and historical wounds that were deliberately inflamed by politicians and media figures. The entire Western world may soon discover what it means to live in such a society.

Prince of Truth

As a staunch defender of the West and its values, Murray is compelled to support Israel because, as he said, it’s on the front line of the civilized world, defending the West. “Israel has recognizable ethics and culture,” he said. “It’s different, as all countries are, but it’s part of us.” What baffles him – and many others – is the fact that Westerners in America and Britain are supporting every country in the Middle East except for Israel.

“Israel is the one country in which Americans could live in the Middle East,” he said. “I’ve spent enough time in other countries to know this difference. A lot of people don’t. Israel is a core part of the West. When people ask me, ‘Why do you support Israel?’ I say, ‘Why would you support every other country but Israel?’”

If Israel is a front line of the West, then why is Western media so anti-Israel? Murray believes that, in part, “it’s a numbers game,” he said. “There are 1.6 billion Muslims and under 20 million Jews, so advertising revenues play a part. There is also the fact that Israel has this disadvantage of being a relatively comfortable war zone to report from, so it’s a deep paradox. It’s not like reporting from Syria or Yemen; there are very few brave journalists who have made it into these war zones. There is also this ridiculous thing where, ‘If it’s Jews, it’s news.’”

Murray has seen the large-scale demonstrations against Israel and Jews, with tens of thousands marching in the street in his native England, as well as hostage posters ripped down and extremists spewing antisemitic, anti-West rhetoric. In February, protesters projected their genocidal slogan, “From the river to the sea” on Big Ben, and the U.K. reported that 2023 was the worst year for antisemitism since 1984, when it initially started recording the data.

Even though it seems bleak in Britain, with many Jews there wondering if they should leave, Murray is optimistic that his country can be saved from antisemitism and progressivism because the majority of people don’t buy into it. “I’ve done everything I can and will continue to do so,” he said. “Most people do not go along with those extremists. I have great trust in the British people, whom I believe have been pushed down more and more, but have not disappeared.”

Murray also empathizes with British Jews, who have felt unsafe living there, especially post-Oct. 7. “I believe my Jewish friends when they say they can’t come into London on a Saturday [because of the protests],” he said. “We should listen to Jews when they say, ‘I am not safe.’ It’s a remarkable thing how few people seem to have sympathy for that. If any other minority said that, I think we’d speak up and say something, and I don’t think we’d doubt their testimony.”

While much of the world is gaslighting the Jewish people, Murray is validating them. Since Oct. 7, he’s been invited to speak at Jewish events and dealing with cancelations and mobs for supporting Israel. He was set to speak at a fundraiser at the Apollo Theatre in London for IDF-drafted students, but the event was canceled by the venue and relocated to a synagogue. Afterwards, he posted on X, “Wonderful event to a capacity audience in London. Shame on the Apollo Theatre for bowing to the mob. But London’s Jews will not be intimidated and neither will I.”

Protesters recently tried to disrupt a speaking event Murray held in Sydney, Australia, chanting, “Douglas Murray, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.” When Murray went on Sky News to comment on what happened, he said, “First of all, I don’t feel like I’m hiding … I think that’s kind of a waste of a day, not least because I could not hear them … It’s really pathetic.”

Murray’s courage to stand up against the mob, to call out their lies, is a breath of fresh air that empowers the Jewish people and makes them feel like they have a friend in this fight. The fact that he is being embraced by Jews is “wonderful and deeply touching,” he said. “It saddens me that Jews feel alone and without allies. I think that’s a terrible thing. I spoke to one person in Tel Aviv who said they were there for the #MeToo and BLM movement, but none of those people were there for them since Oct. 7. Maybe it’ll never be reciprocated. That isolation is terrible, for the Jewish people and so many who care about Israel and see there is this lack of empathy.”

However, by using his voice, Murray knows he is strengthening the Jewish people. And he is proud of it. He said, “If I can, in any way, give people comfort or solace, that pleases me more than anything.”

This year, Palestinians bitterly complained at the supposedly severe restrictions Israel put on traveling to the Al Aqsa complex on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Today as the last Friday of Ramadan, when the crowds are typically the largest. About 120,000 people were there, a large amount but about half that of last year.

Israel didn't allow young male Palestinians from the territories to visit, although young men from Jerusalem could and did. Others required permits.

And this year, for the first time in several years, there were no riots or clashes between the worshipers and the police.

No rock throwing towards Jews at the Kotel. No fireworks stockpiled in A Aqsa Mosque. No staying all night to be ready to attack Jewish visitors.

Only this morning was there a relatively minor incident, where young men chanted antisemitic slogans and police came in to arrest them before things got out of hand. They threw stones at the police and tried to barricade themselves in the mosque and the police responded with tear gas. But it wasn't a major event, notwithstanding Al Jazeera trying to turn it into a bloodbath.

Israel's security measures paid off. Palestinians had planned to create a major event that would make Israel look bad and Israel managed to stop it.

It is a success story that no one is mentioning.

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!

04/05 Links Pt1: Israel is being subjected to obscene double standards; Biden’s Slow Motion Betrayal of Israel; Outrage over aid-worker deaths is about saving Hamas, not civilians

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel is being subjected to obscene double standards

In 2021, during the catastrophic allied withdrawal from Afghanistan, an errant US drone strike slaughtered an aid worker and nine members of his family in Kabul, including seven children.

Footage of the attack was later obtained by the New York Times. According to the paper, the footage showed how ‘the military made a life-or-death decision based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias’. There were other mitigating circumstances, readers were told. ‘The military had been working that day under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal.’

Contrast this with how America’s newspaper of record reported the tragic Israeli airstrikes that claimed the lives of seven aid workers in Gaza on Monday. This, it alleged, was ‘the predictable result of a shoot-first style of engagement Israeli troops have used in their military campaign since the Hamas attacks of 7 October’. The report made no such allowances for ‘extreme pressure’ or ‘fuzzy, hard-to-interpret’ imagery.

The Gray Lady even contrasted the two incidents in a way that painted the American atrocity favourably while casting Israeli intentions in doubt. The Kabul attack, it said, ‘came after a suicide bombing killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops, during the frantic American withdrawal from the country. Under acute pressure to avert another attack, the US military believed it was tracking a terrorist who might imminently detonate another bomb. Instead, it killed an Afghan aid worker and nine members of his family.’

The Gaza strike, however, ‘adds fuel to accusations that Israel has bombed indiscriminately’, the New York Times said, pre-empting the results of the independent investigation with breathless speculation and a healthy dose of ‘confirmation bias’ of its own. The assumption could not be clearer: whereas the Americans were acting out of panic and confusion, the Israelis were either acting out of disregard for human life or straightforward bloodlust.

Civilian deaths, including those of aid workers, are a tragic reality of modern warfare. Sixty-two humanitarian workers lost their lives in combat zones last year. Although they were mostly killed at the hands of autocratic regimes and militias, during wartime they are also the casualties of democracies, including Britain.

During the Libyan civil war in 2011, when David Cameron had his hands on the joystick, 13 people were killed by a NATO airstrike, including an ambulance driver, three nurses and some friendly troops. (He did not, surprisingly, subject his own government to the type of rhetoric that he has recently been levelling at the Israelis over the mistaken Gaza strike.) That same week, NATO wiped out a family near Ajdabiya in the north of the country. This year, even the Danish military was forced to admit that its aerial assault had claimed the lives of 14 Libyan civilians.

The difference between attitudes towards most Western armed forces and the Israelis could not be sharper. According to the UN, the average combatant-to-civilian death ratio in war around the world is one to nine. When Britain, America and our allies battled Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, we achieved a much more respectable rate of about one to 2.5. In Gaza, Israel has done better still, reaching about one to 1.5, and possibly even less.

Yet, while there is a willingness to believe that the Americans, British, Danes and others carry out tragic errors while doing their best to avoid harm to innocents, there is an instant suspicion when Jewish hands are on the bomb toggles.

Biden Loses the Plot on Israel

For six months, huge swaths of the press have painted Israel in the worst possible light. Netanyahu could say the sky is blue and a thousand fact-checkers would scrub his claim for signs of misinformation. Pro-Hamas falsehoods, meanwhile, are recycled without second thought. The casualty numbers from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, the bogus tale of the Israeli rocket "fired" at al-Shifa hospital, the blood libel that Israelis separated Palestinian babies from their mothers, the lie that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was free of Hamas infiltration—these stories were peddled in bad faith before Israel had a chance to rebut them.

Which is why a sense of moral clarity in this conflict is so important. Hamas is evil. Hamas could end the war it started by surrendering its cadres and releasing its prisoners. Hamas refuses. Hamas would rather sacrifice the civilian population of Gaza on the altar of its genocidal ambition and suicidal desires. Hamas brutalizes children, abuses captives, steals food, fires its rockets indiscriminately, wears no uniforms, and hides behind schools, hospitals, and mosques. Hamas does not just commit war crimes. It is a war crime.

A global movement sympathetic to Hamas is fighting an information war with the objective of isolating Israel diplomatically and undermining its right to exist. We have learned that the United States, our universities, and our social media platforms are fronts in this campaign. And we have learned that anti-Semitism has returned with shocking power to demonize, harass, intimidate, and assault Jews throughout the diaspora. What Jewish immigrants to America in the beginning of the 20th century called the "Golden Land" is no exception.

The political heroes of this moment are the men and women who have retained the ability to make clear distinctions between Israel and Hamas, between freedom, equality, and the rule of law and violence, terror, and fear. Few have put the matter as plainly as Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who recently has been making more sense than most of his colleagues. "Hamas is confident we’re going to capitulate—but it's never going to be me," he posted Wednesday on X. "Hamas only deserves elimination."

Alluding to the World Central Kitchen deaths, Fetterman continued, "This war is the sum total of daily, raw tragedies. The vast majority of the harshest criticism & all responsibility for this war belongs to Hamas. Stand with Israel."

Fetterman's message deserves a million retweets. And his story contains a lesson. Last December, Fetterman dropped his identification as a "Progressive" because he understood that the label has become entangled with the poisonous vines of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. And he, unlike Biden, refuses to play the anti-Israel lobby's game. He, unlike Biden, has drawn the correct lessons from the war in Gaza. John Fetterman knows that good friends come from unlikely places. That the truth is the most effective weapon in the war of ideas. And that the fate of our society, our nation, and our civilization depends on Israeli victory.

Jonathan Tobin: Outrage over aid-worker deaths is about saving Hamas, not civilians

His willingness to heed these calls to halt the Israeli effort to defeat Hamas goes beyond a desire for domestic peace in the White House. The entire left wing of the Democratic Party, including many so-called “progressives” in Congress, has been clamoring that he use the threat of aid cutoffs to end the war prior to the release of the more than 100 hostages still being held by Hamas, including five Americans. Isolated in the White House, Biden and his advisers truly believe that the reason he’s currently trailing former President Donald Trump in his battle for re-election is because he’s considered insufficiently hostile to Israel by the intersectional activist wing of his party that is ever more hostile to Zionism and the Jewish state.

When measured against the yawns and shrugged shoulders from the White House under Obama and Biden when civilians died as a result of their orders, it’s easy to see that the outrage about the aid workers has little to do with humanitarian concerns. Instead, it is about hatred for Israel that has taken root in left-wingers who have come to believe that Israel must not be allowed to defeat Hamas and that any civilian casualties that occur as a result of the terrorists’ actions are too many.

If Biden really wants to end the fighting in Gaza, then he should be directing all of his anger and threats against Hamas and its backers, not the Israelis. If Hamas surrendered and released the hostages—ranging from a baby to an 86-year-old man—the war would be over immediately. Instead, by threatening to trash the alliance with Israel and the mandate that it must live with Hamas terrorism, including the threat of more Oct. 7 massacres in the future, he has only strengthened the resolve of the Islamist murderers to stand their ground, secure in the belief that the United States will save them from the justice they so richly deserve for their crimes.

As much as we may all mourn what happened to the aid workers, the willingness of Israel’s foes and false friends like Biden to use this incident to end the war against Hamas should not be considered a manifestation of humanitarian sentiment. If their tragic fate provides the leverage that Washington uses to end the war, then the blood of the Israelis—and those in other nations who will fall victim to a revitalized international terror movement funded by Iran—will be on the heads of those who cynically exploited their deaths.

Has There Ever Been More Successful Settler-Colonial Power Than Islam? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

When talking about Israel, one of the most popular pigeonholes is settler-colonialism:

Why do Europeans invade other countries and then whine like cowards when people fight back?

Travelling from the US or UK to Iraq and Afghanistan, armed to the teeth, makes you the terrorist. Leaving your house in Poland to steal one in Palestine makes you the terrorist.
— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) March 27, 2024

But these are not Europeans invading a foreign country.
These are Jews returning to and re-establishing their land.

Also, Europe, and the US, do not have a monopoly on colonializing, invading, and occupying other countries.

More to the point, a case can be made for saying that Muslims themselves are the most successful colonizers in history. Bernard Lewis wrote in his book, The Crisis of Islam:

The then Christian provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were absorbed and in due course Islamized and Arabized, and they served as bases for the further invasion of Europe and the conquest of Spain and Portugal and much of southern Italy. By the early eighth century the conquering Arab armies were even advancing beyond the Pyrenees into France. [p. 34; emphasis added]

The Islamic empire was very busy.

Map from Bernard Lewis's The Crisis of Islam

And like other colonizing powers throughout history, the Muslims, too, had to deal with the resistance from the indigenous people they had conquered. In Spain, that was called the Reconquista, the Reconquest, which was ultimately successful.

Meanwhile, the attempt to re-establish control over the Christian areas of the Middle East was known as the Crusades. Those were not successful.

Muslim expansionism goes even further.

Lewis writes about the next phase of Islamic colonialism, not by the Arabs but by "later recruits to Islam" -- the Turks, who conquered Anatolia and Constantinople (which became the capital of the Ottoman Empire), and the Tatars, who went into Russia.

He writes that the time came when the Muslims were put on the defensive:

By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive--resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. This phase has come to be known as imperialism. [p. 35-36; emphasis added]

Today we have a skewed version of this era in history. We suffer from an ironic distortion of terminology, where the resistance and search for self-liberation from Muslim colonialism and occupation is labeled as imperialism.

On the flip side, we have equally misleading labels applied to Jews and Israel accusing them of settler-colonialism and imperialism. The labels simply don't fit. Writing for JNS, James Sinkinson, president of Facts and Logic About the Middle East points out:

Israel doesn’t fit ordinary definitions: Imperialism is a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through diplomacy or military force. Colonialism is the policy or practice of one country acquiring full or partial political control over another, occupying it with settlers and exploiting it economically...

If Israel is an imperial or colonizing power, it would be the first case in history of an indigenous people colonizing its own country.

The Jewish homeland has only ever been colonized by others: Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, British and many other imperialist forces have subjugated the Land of Israel and its indigenous Jews. No other people in human history—except the Jews—sought to give this land independence.

Also, unlike the Roman, Arab, Crusader, and Ottoman invaders -- Jews have an over 3,000-year-old bond with the land based on history, language, culture, and religion. In his book The Seeds of Abraham, Rafael Patai writes about Arabs who also pride themselves on the rich history of their countries. For example, the Syrian capital of Damascus was the center of the Umayyad Caliphate. The Iraqi capital of Baghdad was the center of the Abbasid Empire. And even though Egypt's greatest history dates back to before the founding of Islam, Arab Egyptians today view the era of the Pharaohs as part of their glorious past.

But what do Palestinian Arabs have?

In Palestine, such attempts at establishing a great Arab national past ran into a vexing problem. Since Palestine had never been an independent Arab country, its period of pride had to be sought in the biblical Israelite age.

And their claims of a rival connection to the land are periodically contradicted by archaeological discoveries.

The Palestinian propaganda war and the claims they manufacture against Israel serve not only to compensate for their military inferiority but also help them to fabricate their claims for indigenous connection to the land.

The fact that someone will attempt to reduce the return of Jews to their land to some kind of European invasion only shows how successful this part of the Palestinian propaganda war has been.

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!

+972 magazine has written a sensationalist article by Yuval Abraham about how Israel uses artificial intelligence in this war, claiming that it is killing thousands of civilians for no reason because an unfeeling machine is making the decisions and humans are merely rubber stamps approving airstrikes against those people identified or misidentified - and their families.

It conflates several different issues and topics in order to build an anti-IDF narrative.

First, it describes an database called "Lavender" that uses AI to generate large target lists much faster than humans could. It takes information from many disparate sources to figure out where to attack.

That is not a secret - the IDF published an article about this targeting database in early November, saying it had generated 12,000 potential targets at that time.

Then Abraham describes a different tracking system to identify where specific terrorists are, based on cell phone and other sources, that they said was called "Where's Daddy?" Intelligence officers would input names generated by Lavender into systems like Where's Daddy to track the human targets. Then, when the target was identified, approval would be given to hit the target. The article describes how the Hamas members were often hit in their homes.

According to IDF procedures, the intelligence officers are supposed to vet the information generated by Lavender before inputting them into Where's Daddy. One of the intelligence officers interviewed claimed that this wasn't done: "'You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can kill,' said one source with knowledge of the system. 'It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.'"

Another source reveals that he himself made decisions to kill people with no vetting: “One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased, That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems like a serious decision I made. And such decisions were not made at high levels.”

The article describes an army where previous standards of calculating targets and proportionality in attacks have been thrown out the window and a vengeful IDF is just trying to cause as much pain as possible.

Finally, the people interviewed claim that the IDF would use "dumb bombs" to then kill the targets in their homes with little regard to the number of civilians who would be there. But the intelligence officers interviewed wouldn't make the decision of what weapon to use - that is a completely different department. As we've seen, "dumb bombs" are deployed in a smart way, so this part of the article is mostly sensationalism and supposition.

So what is the truth?

This is a different war than any previous war in Gaza. While the goals of the previous wars were to deter Hamas from wanting to attack Israel, in this war the goal is to destroy Hamas and Islamic Jihad. With different goals come different policies: the killing of a low-ranking Hamas member would not be a priority if the goal is deterrence but it becomes more important when the goal is to ensure Hamas cannot stage another October 7.

This would prompt the IDF to loosen Israel's proportionality calculations since October 7. Today a low-level fighter's family would be considered to be acceptable "collateral damage" while in the past it wouldn't have been.

Moreover, people who participated in October 7 itself - and there were thousands - would be a higher priority even if they are low-level members of Hamas, or "civilians" who enthusiastically took part in the pogrom.

And all of this is legal and still proportional under the laws of armed conflict.

As I noted previously, a German court decision gave as an example of what is clearly disproportionate to destroy an entire village of hundreds of people to kill a single fighter.

[An] infringement [of the law] is only to be assumed in cases of obvious excess where the commander ignored any considerations of proportionality and refrained from acting “honestly”, “reasonably” and “competently” … This would apply to the destruction of an entire village with hundreds of civilian inhabitants in order to hit a single enemy fighter, but not if the objective was to destroy artillery positions in the village

This is the equivalent of destroying a high rise apartment building to kill a single low level fighter. The IDF doesn't do that - even this article says it would level a private residence but only hit larger targets for much higher level Hamas targets.

Killing a family that a fighter is hiding with is a tragedy but it is legal. The rules changed because the circumstances changed and military goals are different, but international law is still being followed.

The article says:

The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.

The article also says that there was a requirement to vet the targets from Lavender, even though it claims it was cursory, where the officers would check to make sure that the person is an adult male, for example.* This contradicts the claim that there was "approval to automatically adopt" these "kill lists." But the important question, which of course Abraham never asks, is what is the accuracy of human-only intelligence? 90% may be far better than humans can do on their own based on lower amounts of data. The 90% number in a vacuum doesn't mean anything.

An army makes decisions based on the best information it has at the moment. These systems help commanders make these decisions with far more information than was available before. I agree that blindly following the recommendations of AI should never happen: a human must check how the target was identified, and as I've reported before, Israel's AI systems can be queried to understand the process behind their decisions.

I would not be surprised if mistakes were made in the weeks after October 7. No one should be surprised. It was a new kind of war, with new rules, and new procedures being made on the fly. There is also no doubt that the shock and anger from October 7 could and would affect human decision making.

Abraham writes:

“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. ... I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

Even this article shows that as the IDF learned more, it adjusted its procedures to minimize unnecessary damage. The statistics bear this out - the number of casualties and the amount of damage has gone down significantly since the first chaotic weeks of the war.

The IDF adjusts and changes its procedures in real time in a war it did not plan, perhaps faster than any army in history.

The IDF responded to this article and the Guardian's similar article:

The process of identifying military targets in the IDF consists of various types of tools and methods, including information management tools, which are used in order to help the intelligence analysts to gather and optimally analyze the intelligence, obtained from a variety of sources. Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist. Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process. According to IDF directives, analysts must conduct independent examinations, in which they verify that the identified targets meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law and additional restrictions stipulated in the IDF directives.

The “system” your questions refer to is not a system, but simply a database whose purpose is to cross-reference intelligence sources, in order to produce up-to-date layers of information on the military operatives of terrorist organizations. This is not a list of confirmed military operatives eligible to attack.

According to international humanitarian law, a person who is identified as a member of an organized armed group (like the Hamas’ military wing), or a person who directly participates in hostilities, is considered a lawful target. This legal rule is reflected in the policy of all law-abiding countries, including the IDF’s legal practice and policy, which did not change during the course of the war.

For each target, IDF procedures require conducting an individual assessment of the anticipated military advantage and collateral damage expected. Such assessments are not made categorically in relation to the approval of individual strikes. The assessment of the collateral damage expected from a strike is based on a variety of assessment methods and intelligence-gathering measures, in order to achieve the most accurate assessment possible, considering the relevant operational circumstances. The IDF does not carry out strikes when the expected collateral damage from the strike is excessive in relation to the military advantage. In accordance with the rules of international law, the assessment of the proportionality of a strike is conducted by the commanders on the basis of all the information available to them before the strike, and naturally not on the basis of its results in hindsight.

As for the manner of carrying out the strikes – the IDF makes various efforts to reduce harm to civilians to the extent feasible in the operational circumstances ruling at the time of the strike.

In this regard, the IDF reviews targets before strikes and chooses the proper munition in accordance with operational and humanitarian considerations, taking into account an assessment of the relevant structural and geographical features of the target, the target’s environment, possible effects on nearby civilians, critical infrastructure in the vicinity, and more. Aerial munitions without an integrated precision-guide kit are standard weaponry in developed militaries worldwide. The IDF uses such munitions while employing onboard aircraft systems to calculate a specific release point to ensure a high level of precision, used by trained pilots. In any event, the clear majority of munitions used in strikes are precision-guided munitions.

The IDF outright rejects the claim regarding any policy to kill tens of thousands of people in their homes.

There is a tendency to sensationalize anything about AI and treat is like science fiction autonomous robots going amok. Reality is quite different, and facts matter.

____________________________________

* I wrote this post with the assumption that the +972 article is slanted but honest. But this part of the article makes no sense:

However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.

Are they saying that the AI system looks at hundreds of disparate pieces of information but cannot tell whether someone is a male or female?

This makes me wonder whether the author didn't understand what the interviewees were saying to begin with, or whether his understanding of technology is so poor that he wrote without knowing a thing about what he is writing about.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Gary Michael Tartakov is an academic who specializes in a specific kind of Indian art. He wrote an essay in the Daily Hampshire Gazette that starts off with several paragraphs establishing his Jewishness.

I have been a Jew for 83 years. Though I’ve only known it for around 78. My parents explained it to me at Christmas in 1945, as the reason that I was not going to get a Christmas tree, like my playmates, in Los Angeles. It was at the end of the Second World War and Jews in the United States were coming out of the antisemitic closet that mainstream 20th-century America had constructed for them, and widespread news about the Shoah (Holocaust) had shaken them out of.

So you know where this is going.

Growing up in west L.A. and the San Fernando Valley in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, I had a reform bar mitzvah and went to college, without ever experiencing the sort of fist-fight-in-the-schoolyard antisemitism my son-in-law faced in the 1960s growing up in Alexandria, Virginia.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s, on returning to Amherst from a job I had in Iowa, that I learned from my friend Bob that we were both listed on a website as “Self Hating, Israel Threatening Jews.” You can still find references to it as the Masaada2000 S.H.I.T. List on the internet.

What was my crime? As far as I can tell, it was my criticizing of Israel as an “apartheid state.” And this is the point of my note here. There are a good many people, Jews and non-Jews, who think that criticism of the state of Israel is antisemitic, as so many white nationalists consider any criticism of the United States to be anti-American.

As with all the modern antisemites, Jewish or other, he moves the goalposts and claims that he is merely a "critic of Israel."

But if he accused Israel of "apartheid" - especially in the mid-1990s, during the Oslo process, when Israel was heading towards giving autonomy and a state to Palestinian Arabs - then he wasn't merely "criticizing Israel." He was engaged in a blood libel, of expecting standards of Israel not given to any other nation on the planet.

The straw man argument that every critic of Israel is accused of antisemitism is a lie. Criticism of Israel similar to criticism of any country is not antisemitic. But singling out Israel for acts that other countries do and reserving all the vitriol for Israel is indeed antisemitism.

There have been more column inches denouncing Israel's accidental killing of aid workers in three days than there have been in all the accidental killings of civilians by US and British forces over twenty years. And no mainstream media outlet accused the Western armies of doing this deliberately.

When the US attacked a hospital in Kunduz in 2015, killing 42 medical personnel and patients, not one newspaper accused the US of a systematic campaign to destroy Afghan healthcare. But when Israel goes into hospitals and only kills terrorists, it is accused of that.

Those double standards are antisemitism, whether intended or not. Just as racism can be subconscious, so can Jew-hatred.

Tartakov is an expert on Dalit art. He spent decades studying and teaching about it. Dalits are members of the lowest caste in India and they suffer unimaginable abuse as this 2007 HRW report describes:

Dalits endure segregation in housing, schools, and access to public services. They are denied access to land, forced to work in degrading conditions, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and upper-caste community members who enjoy the state’s protection. Entrenched discrimination violates Dalits’ rights to education, health, housing, property, freedom of religion, free choice of employment, and equal treatment before the law. Dalits also suffer routine violations of their right to life and security of person through state-sponsored or -sanctioned acts of violence, including torture.

Caste-motivated killings, rapes, and other abuses are a daily occurrence in India. Between 2001 and 2002 close to 58,000 cases were registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act – legislation that criminalizes particularly egregious abuses against Dalits and tribal community members. A 2005 government report states that a crime is committed against a Dalit every 20 minutes. Though staggering, these figures represent only a fraction of actual incidents since many Dalits do not register cases for fear of retaliation by the police and upper-caste individuals.

Ten Dalit women are raped every day.

Tartakov is quite aware of the systematic discrimination Dalits suffer. He's written about it. But he didn't call it apartheid.

If you describe Israel's treatment of its Arab minority as apartheid but don't use the same term for India's treatment of Dalits, when by every possible metric the Dalits are treated worse, yes, you are an antisemite.

Even if you had a Reform bar mitzvah.

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!

04/04 Links Pt2: The ICJ is waging lawfare on Israel; How Much Is a Dead Jew Worth?; The Appalling Tactics of the "Free Palestine" Movement

From Ian:

WSJ: The International Court of Justice is waging lawfare on Israel

The party with clear genocidal intent here is Hamas, which, because it’s not a state, is conveniently not subject to the jurisdiction of the ICJ. Just take a look at the Hamas founding charter, which outlines “our struggle against the Jews.” After the, yes, genocidal Oct. 7 attack, a senior Hamas official declared the terrorist group’s intention to repeat the murderous feat and announced that “Israel is a country that has no place on our land.”

As to Israel, yes, there are painful and difficult questions about the civilian casualties and suffering it has inflicted in Gaza — casualties that are the result of not only the Hamas attack but also the organization’s cruel and cynical decision to reap benefit from embedding its operations deep in the civilian population and using the ensuing civilian casualties in its war for public support.

But the matter of Israel’s complicity in the suffering is an issue of international humanitarian law entirely separate from the unfounded allegations of genocide. “Israel, its officials and/or agents, have acted with the intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza,” South Africa claimed.

No. Israel’s intent — its legitimate intent, under international law — is to defend itself and destroy Hamas. The Genocide Convention requires proof of intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” A country with genocidal intent does not warn the civilian population it is supposedly seeking to destroy to leave an area it plans to bomb. It does not deliver incubators and baby formula to their hospitals.

None of this stopped the International Court of Justice. Responding to another prod from South Africa, it said Israel had to do more to ensure humanitarian aid to civilians — and, alarmingly, seven judges on the 15-member court said they would order Israel to stop the fighting.

To be clear: Israel has erred, badly, on the issue of humanitarian relief, which is a moral and strategic imperative as well as a legal one. The tragic killing of seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen only adds to the understandable pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian crisis — and to its potential legal exposure on that score. But, and here I need to make a maddeningly legalistic point, the ICJ has jurisdiction to decide only the genocide question. It doesn’t have the authority to determine whether Israel has violated the broader requirements of international humanitarian law.

Add to that the structural imbalance because of the ICJ having no power over Hamas. As Judge Aharon Barak, Israel’s representative on the ICJ, wrote, “The Court has accepted South Africa’s invitation to become the micromanager of an armed conflict,” a “dangerous endeavor” when only one party, Israel, is bound by its decisions.

What’s going on here isn’t law; it’s lawfare, an effort to hijack what should be the somber mechanisms of international justice to the political ends of tarring Israel with the calumny of genocide. South Africa, with close ties to Hamas and its sponsor, Iran, is deploying the Genocide Convention to dirty Israel in the public eye.

Years from now, when the genocide claim is ultimately resolved, it’s not likely Israel will be found to have committed this most terrible of crimes. But that’s not the goal. The goal is in the here and now, to turn public opinion even further against the Jewish state.

The ICJ is enabling it. As Barak put it, the ICJ’s “approach to this case is steadily leaving the land of law and entering the land of politics. The ideas of a judge as a human being should not determine the opinions of a human being when he or she acts as a judge.” The court’s new president, or chief justice, Nawaf Salam, is a former ambassador to the United Nations from Lebanon, where another front could erupt into war at any moment. In 2015, he wrote, “Unhappy birthday to you, 48 years of occupation.” Doesn’t exactly sound impartial.

Melanie Phillips: Lawyers for blood libels

The 600 British lawyers who have signed a letter to the Prime Minister denouncing Israel for breaking international law and potentially committing genocide deserve nothing but contempt.

Not only have they parroted the falsehoods and distortions with which Israel is being demonised and delegitimised across the world. They have also shockingly misrepresented January’s ruling by the International Court of Justice in the case brought against Israel by South Africa.

The letter, which is signed by 60 KCs and three former Supreme Court judges, says that the ICJ “concluded that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza”.

This is a wicked lie. The court said nothing of the kind. Here’s what the legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg (in whom I declare an interest) has written on his Substack:
In its third paragraph, the letter says that on 26 January 2024 the International Court of Justice “concluded that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza”. This error is repeated by the Guardian in its report of the letter. There are several further references in the lawyers’ letter to “the ICJ’s finding of plausible risk”.

The words “plausible risk” appear nowhere in the court’s order. They are a misrepresentation of what the court concluded in paragraph 54 of its judgment:

“In the court’s view, the facts and circumstances mentioned above are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible. This is the case with respect to the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts identified in article III [of the Genocide Convention], and the right of South Africa to seek Israel’s compliance with the latter’s obligations under the convention.”

Gadi Taub: How Much Is a Dead Jew Worth?

The Palestinian Authority compensates the families of terrorists in proportion to the amount of harm they inflict on Jews. Killing Jews is not just a religious calling that can grant you the status of "martyr" and guarantee you a place in heaven with 72 virgins. It is also a way to make a living. If you're sentenced to 10 years, you make four times the minimum wage and twice the average wage in the PA. The PA spends 7% of its budget on the pay-for-slay scheme.

This program is just one thread in the whole fabric of Palestinian national culture that has woven the idea of jihad against the Jews into all aspects of life. Terrorists dominate the gallery of national heroes. They are essentially the only role model for Palestinian youth. Regardless of how much well-meaning Israelis tried desperately to imagine otherwise over the years, the Palestinian national ethos is built around a genocidal war to ethnically cleanse Palestine, from the river to the sea, of Jewish presence.

Itamar Marcus, founder of Palestinian Media Watch, said Oct. 7 was not the result of Hamas indoctrination, but the product of PA indoctrination, which has been around for three decades. Both in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinian children are still being instructed in books produced by the PA that ceaselessly pump into young minds the poison of the death cult - of suicide and genocide.

Lt.-Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs concurs that PA indoctrination is a greater source than Hamas of this genocidal hate. The idea that the way forward in Gaza is for Hamas to be replaced by the PA is therefore a risible exercise in wishful thinking, since the PA, in reality, glorifies and incentivizes terrorism.

By now, we know that PA security forces personnel are directly involved in terror attacks. The police forces Israel armed and the U.S. military trains are active participants in the terror they were supposed to stop. Using the guns we gave them to stop terror, they instead kill Jews - in the process securing the livelihoods of their families.

Bret Stephens: The Appalling Tactics of the "Free Palestine" Movement

Protest movements have an honorable place in American history. But not all of them. Not the neo-Nazis who marched in Chicago in 1978. Not the white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. And not too much of what passes for a pro-Palestinian movement but is really pro-Hamas, with its open celebration of the murder of Israel's people and its efforts to mock, minimize or deny the suffering of Israelis, which so quickly descend into antisemitism.

It wasn't a response to the human suffering in Gaza. Pro-Hamas demonstrations broke out worldwide on Oct. 8, before any Israeli response. Nor is it a matter of seeking a Palestinian state. Among the popular chants at many protests is "We don't want no two states! We want all of '48!" - all of what had been Mandatory Palestine. In other words, the central, animating sentiment behind much of the protest movement is neither humanitarian nor liberationist. It's eliminationist.

Tactics like the routine removal or defacement of posters of Israelis kidnapped to Gaza; or holding a loud and aggressive demonstration outside of New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer hospital; or shouting down Rep. Jamie Raskin at the University of Maryland for being "complicit in genocide" reveals the bullying mentality at the heart of the pro-Hamas movement.

It isn't enough for them to speak out; they must shut other voices down. They aim to instill a palpable sense of fear in their opponents. American civil libertarians once understood that inherent in the right to protest was the obligation to respect the right of people with differing views to protest as well.

Friday is "Quds Day." Will Iran start a war?

Iran has vowed to retaliate against the assassination of major Revolutionary Guards generals in Damascus, and they will be buried on Friday.

Which is "Quds Day," the holiday to "liberate Jerusalem" that the late Ayatollah Khomeini declared for the last Friday of every Ramadan.

The current Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, isn't shy about his penchant for promoting violence. As Tehran Times reports in English,

Central to the Leader’s vision for Quds Day is the promotion of Jihad and self-reliance in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. He has called for a referendum in Palestine to determine its future, emphasizing the restoration of Palestinian rights and the rejection of Zionism.

He's not referring to any "personal jihad." As Iran's president Raisi said Thursday night, "the Islamic Republic of Iran considers defense as the legitimate right of all resistance groups and loudly supports the movement of resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen and all Islamic countries."

Funny how he classifies what these groups are doing as "defense."

But he also makes it clear that this is a war between all of Iran's satellites and Israel, not just Israel and Hamas. eave it to the Iranians to frame things properly while most of the Western media still gets it so wrong.

Iranian news site articles are nearly all about Israel.

But they are not beating the drumbeats of preparing their people for war, from what I can tell.

I don't think Iran will start shooting rockets at Israel tomorrow or anytime soon. They still prefer proxy wars to direct wars, and the bigger question is whether Hezbollah would risk escalating. My guess is that we will see an increase of rockets and drones from Yemen, Syria and Iraq, though. And Islamic Jihad will try to dig up some hidden short range rockets to shoot towards nearby Jewish communities to make it appear that Israel has not finished the job.

We'll see.

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