Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 13, 2024

05/13 Links Pt2: On Memorial Day, Israeli leaders promise brighter future; The UN and Eurovision: A tale of two votes on Israel; While we mourn, others celebrate murders of Jews and Americans

From Ian:

Richard Landes: The Paradoxical “Proof” that Jews are the Chosen People

The deeper motives of anti-Semitism have their roots in times long past; they come from the unconscious, and I am quite prepared to hear that what I am going to say will at first appear incredible. I venture to assert that the jealousy that the Jews evoked in other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, the favorite child of God the Father, has not yet been overcome by those others, just as if the latter had given credence to the assumption.” (Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism)

It’s well known that the thing about the Jews that most grates on gentiles – especially derivative monotheists and post-monotheists – is the notion that Jews are the chosen people. And yet, the claim is specifically enunciated in Jewish scripture that God chose the Jews to be mankind’s moral leadership.

Observe these laws carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what nation… is there so great, that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day? (Deuteronomy 4: 7-8).

The pretension to be “the chosen people” has inspired both hatred and emulation. Both Islam and Christianity, the two religions most likely to generate Jew-hatred, are also claimants to the status of God’s chosen people, replacing, erasing the Jewish claim.

Recently, modern progressives have expressed if not anger, then exasperation at so primitive and pretentious a notion. Nobel-prize author Jose Saramago deplored “the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God…” Science writer Jostein Gaarder declared (in the royal “we”):
“We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.”

Among those attitudes most associated with antisemitism is a hostility to, a resentment of the Jewish claim to be a chosen people. Indeed, a good progressive Jew views that problematic claim with great wariness if not scorn: ‘we are the same as everyone else.’

Of course, even if one rejects any divine claims, biblical or otherwise, about the Jews being chosen, there is historical evidence for the claim. Studies of the resilience of Jewish communities over time, of Jewish success in societies based on merit, certainly indicate that there is something special about Jews, whether God chose them, or they imagined that God chose them, or they chose a God they invented. The very survival – and vigor – of Jews to this day suggests that something unusual is at work.

But I think the most striking proof that the Jews are the chosen people comes from what social scientists call “non-reactive” evidence, that is from a pattern of evidence produced by agents who do not behave in reaction to being seen, but whose behavior nevertheless unconsciously reveals evidence they might deny, even vigorously, were they aware. And the proof, in our day, for the chosenness of the Jews, comes from the dual phenomenon of the extraordinary obsession gentiles display over Jewish behavior, on the one hand, and the extraordinary inversion of reality – both moral and empirical – that obsession takes, on the other.

The obsession is not hard to document. If one were to weight the international news coverage of countries by their population, then the coverage of the only Jewish state by international news organizations is skewed by several orders of magnitude. One study published in 2013, found that, aside from the US (“the uncontested world news hegemon”), articles about Israel and Palestine rank the highest, literally pushing out China, Russia, and Europe. If one factors in size and population, this means over a hundred-fold greater attention to this particular Middle East state and its behavior with its hostile neighbors, than any other global story including the entire US. Similarly, if one factors in casualty figures, then Israel/Palestine media footprint is the exact inverse of the Democratic Republic of Congo: about ten thousand dead in twenty years (1989-2009) has filled global media, whereas about four to six million dead in the same period in the Congo, remains nearly invisible to the world―one of many stealth conflicts.

Phyllis Chesler: The prophet unhonored

Is Joe Biden on Hamas’s payroll? If not, why is his administration withholding promised military equipment to America’s most reliable and stable ally in the Middle East? Does Biden fail to understand what Israel is up against?

Clearly, his administration is acting as if Iran and its proxy armies, beginning with Hamas, are “good” people, no different from the rest of us. He thinks they are “reasonable” people with whom he can negotiate or even outwit.

I strongly beg to differ.

Long ago, I was held captive in Kabul as a young bride. When I managed to get out, I understood in my bones that the West and the East are very different places. Other Americans do not understand this.

Although I loved many things about the Muslim world—the awe-inspiring mountains, the ancient bazaars, the ceremonial aspects of dining, rose petals in the pudding, the biblical barefoot nomads tinkling as they walked together with their sheep and camels—I saw that the East was very wild. It was rife with unending blood feuds, vigilante (in)justice, illiteracy, poverty, disease, cruelty and above all hatred.

Hatred of infidels, especially Jews, Christians and Hazaras who are Shiite, not Sunni Muslims. Hatred of women. Hatred of servants. Hatred of daughters-in-law. Hatred of their own political dissidents and free-thinkers. Hatred of Americans. But respect for Nazi Germany and German products.

One cannot blame any of this on imperialism or colonialism. These customs were all indigenous. It is crucial to understand this.

Why? Because this is the neighborhood in which Israel lives. The Jewish state has weathered every storm. We are an eternal people and will always survive. But the cost in blood has been high. The IDF is now fighting brilliantly. The Israelis are miraculously resilient.

Seth Mandel: Lifting Hamas’s ‘Fog of War’ Reveals a Very Different Conflict

The fog of war is no excuse to use unethical counting methods. And it is no excuse to lie.

Does anyone feel guilty for what they’ve done here? We’re left with a circus-like cycle of duplicity: Hamas puts out fake numbers, the White House promotes those fabrications, which fuels street protests, which the president uses as an excuse to shift policy against Israel, which incentivizes Hamas to publish more fake numbers, etc. Around and around the blood-libel Ferris Wheel we go.

Something in the machinery of the White House has come loose. The whole edifice most closely resembles the Boeing planes with faulty bolts that just started falling apart mid-flight. Instead of bringing calm, the Biden team increasingly brings chaos—and seems unwilling or unable to act responsibly. The media that report the Hamas numbers are complicit in transforming America into an erratic actor on the world stage.

All of this is now undeniable. The only question left is what Joe Biden is going to do about it.

The NYT notices that Gaza citizens cannot talk without fear from Hamas. It won't affect its coverage at all.

From the New York Times:

The Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has for years overseen a secret police force in Gaza that conducted surveillance on everyday Palestinians and built files on young people, journalists and those who questioned the government, according to intelligence officials and a trove of internal documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The unit, known as the General Security Service, relied on a network of Gaza informants, some of whom reported their own neighbors to the police. People landed in security files for attending protests or publicly criticizing Hamas. In some cases, the records suggest that the authorities followed people to determine if they were carrying on romantic relationships outside marriage.

Hamas has long run an oppressive system of governance in Gaza, and many Palestinians there know that security officials watch them closely. But a 62-slide presentation on the activities of the General Security Service, delivered only weeks before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, reveals the degree to which the largely unknown unit penetrated the lives of Palestinians.

The documents show that Hamas leaders, despite claiming to represent the people of Gaza, would not tolerate even a whiff of dissent. Security officials trailed journalists and people they suspected of immoral behavior. Agents got criticism removed from social media and discussed ways to defame political adversaries. Political protests were viewed as threats to be undermined.

This story only gives a little bit of information that was not known before - the extent of Hamas' oppression and limiting of freedoms.

But from the beginning of Hamas' takeover of Gaza, it was obvious that the people were expected to tell Western reporters and NGOs only what Hamas would allow them to say.

For years, whenever Human Rights Watch or Amnesty reported on "witnesses" to events in Gaza, the anti-Israel witnesses were named, and the ones who confirmed Israel's side of the story were anonymous. Amnesty even once wrote a report about how unreliable eyewitnesses could be when they are in a heavily politicized environment.

The reporters who aren't completely incompetent know all of this quite well. They are looking for an anti-Israel angle and will not bother reporting anything that adds complexity to the "evil Israel, good Palestinians" narrative. They know their stringers will bring them the right people to interview that will tell them what Hamas wants them to hear.

So now we know a bit more about how extensive Hamas' control has been over Gaza and over what people could say to Westerners. Will any newspaper or NGO go back over their last 15 years of Gaza coverage and re-examine their interviews in this light? Will they issue corrections saying that the Gazans happen to be deathly afraid of Hamas and their words need to be viewed from that viewpoint?

Come on.

Only two weeks ago, CNN reported on a demonstration in Gaza of children thanking US university students for their support. Does anyone seriously think that this rally was organized by the kids who are holding professionally created signs in English but don't even know which side is right side up?

CNN showed no curiosity as to who organized the demonstration, or who printed the signs.

The Palestinian Authority is just as repressive as Hamas, although I don' t know if their spying abilities are quite as extensive. Every Christmas, the wire services dutifully interview Palestinians in Gaza and Bethlehem about how Israel oppresses them. At the same time, some courageous Christian news outlets dig a little deeper and find anonymous Palestinian Christians who describe how they are being oppressed by their own leaders and by the larger Muslim population. But nothing will change in media coverage in the West Bank, either.

Not even from the New York Times which belatedly mentions what every reporter knows.

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!

05/13 Links Pt1: UN seemingly halves estimate of Gazan women, children killed; The Betrayal of Israel by the US Administration Is Almost Complete

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: After 76 years of Israeli independence, Jews must still be Zionists

A new debate about Zionism
The antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the reality of the Nazi Holocaust destroyed the illusions of the Socialists (or at least should have), as well as convinced Western Jews that there was no alternative to a Jewish state. And once Israel came into existence, those who feared it for secular or religious reasons generally made their peace with it.

Today, there is a new anti-Zionist movement among the Jews that gets disproportionate coverage in the corporate press, yet represents only a minority of non-Israeli Jews. Unlike past opponents of Zionism, it doesn’t oppose Israel’s existence because they have a better idea to protect Jews. Rather, these Jews who belong to groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace exalt Jewish powerlessness and twist Jewish beliefs into a creed that believes Jews alone of the peoples of the world ought not to have the right of self-determination or the power to defend themselves.

It is no accident that they also traffic in antisemitic blood libels, such as the claim that Israel trains American police to murder African-Americans. As the reaction to Oct. 7 has shown, these Jewish anti-Zionists may be loud and have strong support from the mainstream media, but they have nothing to do with normative Jewish values and represent only themselves.

Yet the battle over Zionism isn’t merely this faint echo of past Jewish squabbles. Today, anti-Zionism is a main plank of leftist activists, whether they are environmental extremists like Thunberg (who want the world to give up air travel, the right to own cars, as well as to eat meat or cheese); Black Lives Matter activists in the United States who smear America as an irredeemably racist nation; or the LGBT+ community that sees Palestinians as fellow victims, even though unlike Israel but in most Arab countries, they would be in danger because of their lifestyle. Ze'ev JabotinskyRevisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky (bottom right) meeting with Beitar leaders in Warsaw, circa 1939. Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin is on the left in the first row. Source: National Photo Collection of Israel

Another variant of antisemitism
They claim to speak for human rights but have little interest in any conflict or alleged humanitarian crisis unless it can be blamed on the Jews. Like intellectuals of the early 20th century who blazed the trail for the acceptance of Nazism, they claim to be moved by the suffering of victims of war but have a curious blind spot when those victims are Jews. The plight of the hostages or those who were slaughtered in the orgy of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction committed by Hamas and Palestinians on Oct. 7 move them not at all.

Their nurturing of Palestinian fantasies of Israel’s destruction is helping to doom the supposed objects of their sympathy to a future of more war, terrorism and destruction. The fact that their reaction to Hamas barbarism was not merely to oppose Israel’s justified war to eliminate a genocidal terrorist group, but to vow to “crush Zionism” and erase it from “the river to the sea,” remains proof that it is not so much an intersectional human-rights cause as it is just a new variant on the same old tropes of antisemitism. They aren’t merely criticizing an Israeli government’s policies or actions. Their problem is with the fact that there is one Jewish state on the planet.

They seem to believe the Jews are the only people on the planet whose right to self-determination deserves no respect. While they reject accusations of antisemitism, what else can you call those who discriminate against Jews and judge them by a standard they would never apply to any other people?

Jew-haters are now recirculating tropes that Soviet propagandists first issued a half-century ago to label Zionism as racism. The only rational reaction to this is for Israelis and Jews wherever they live to embrace not just the label of Zionist but the ideas behind it. Zionism recognizes age-old ties between a people and their land, and at its core is a fundamental expression of Jewish rights.

Zionism has created a nation that for all of its flaws and frailties is a unique experiment in the ingathering of a people in a democratic state. In the last 76 years, Zionist Jews have worked miracles not just in surviving wars waged by enemies bent on their elimination but also in a society capable of enormous economic, technological and cultural achievements. It should be celebrated—not reviled—and people of good will, whether Jewish or not, should know that by embracing it, they are identifying themselves with among the most just causes and most amazing stories in modern history.

Israelis are still mourning their dead since Oct. 7 while they battle Hamas and work for the safe return of the remaining hostages held captive in Gaza. But they are also celebrating a nation that needs no permission from any foreign power to exist and, false accusations of antisemites about “genocide” notwithstanding, whose conduct under excruciating circumstances has been exemplary by any standard.

Zionism isn’t dead. Nor will it be defeated by Hamas and its leftist enablers in the streets of Malmö or on North American college campuses. It is very much alive, and on Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israel’s 76th Independence Day—every Jew with a conscience and sense of self-respect should be proudly calling themselves Zionists.

The Jewish Oyster Problem

The one who best answered Steiner was Isaiah Berlin, who, in a witty article called “The Cost of Curing an Oyster,” compared the exile of the Jews to a disease. “A people condemned to be a minority everywhere, dependent on the goodwill, toleration or sheer unawareness of the majority, but made aware of its insecure condition, of its constant need to please, or at least not to displease … cannot achieve a fully normal development either individually or collectively.” Exile created distortions of personality: self-insulation, anxiety, aggressive defensiveness. True, the peculiar position of the Jews as a minority on the margins of society resulted in works of genius, like Kafka, Freud, or Heine. When your life depends on understanding the whims of the majority, you develop a clear and critical view of that majority, an outsider’s perspective. But that deeper insight possessed by gifted individuals was “purchased by untold suffering of entire communities” and “could not be accepted as natural or unavoidable.” Exile, in this sense, subjected Jews to mental illness and, as mental illness sometimes does, produced works of genius. But at what cost?

“Hundreds of thousands of oysters,” wrote Berlin, “suffer from the disease that occasionally generates a pearl. But supposing an oyster says to you, ‘I wish to live an ordinary, decent, contented, healthy, oysterish life; even though I may not produce a pearl. I’m prepared to sacrifice this possibility for a life free of social disease; a life in which I need not look over my shoulder to see how I appear to others.’”

Maybe Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesized better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.

The exercise of power is messy. Always. Not a single national liberation movement in the world was neat and blameless. Thinkers like Steiner don’t deny that. In fact, they admit to the dirty nature of statehood and consider that the only way for Jews to stay “pure” is to forego political power and submit to the rule of others. This is different than universalist utopians. Anti-Zionists who long for powerlessness don’t necessarily harbor a Lennonesque dream of “no countries and no religion.” Pointedly, they see nothing wrong in Palestinians exercising political power in the context of a Palestinian national state and even oppressing Jews—or killing them. It’s Jewish power that bothers them; it’s Jewish sovereignty that they disdain and rage against for exposing their own pretensions to moral superiority as fallacious.

That their supposed moral excellence is acquired by trading on the bodies of dead Jews doesn’t bother them, since they’ve established that playing the victim is by definition a morally superior posture. Jews need to be oppressed to produce their best.

Under the layers of intellectual distortion and self-righteousness, this pretension of moral superiority is, paradoxically, morally rotten. The carefully crafted self-image of privileged Jewish academicians, who observe the world from the heights of their tenured positions, seems ruined by Jews who refuse to be at the mercy of others. “How dare those plebeian oysters deny me the right to be a pearl? Don’t they know that they must die so that I can be an ethical beacon to the world?”

Those who criticize Israel for pushing “Jewish supremacy” are, in fact, advocating for another type of Jewish supremacy, probably more racist and self-righteous than the former. But more important than the question of whether being a Jewish oyster with or without a pearl is better, the argument that powerlessness is necessary for “the Jewish genius” to develop is factually false.

Yes, the diasporic persecution produced Freud and Kafka, but Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel produced the Bible and the Mishnah. Israeli Jews win more Nobel Prizes and gain more patents than French Jews or Russian Jews. The truth is that a people, any people, can develop its greatness only by being the master of its own destiny. True, you mess up bigger and more noticeably if you run an economy, an army, and a police force than if you run a corner store or a physician’s office. But avoiding power to avoid the problems of power is like starving to death to avoid obesity.

The anti-Zionism of powerlessness is deeply cowardly. It avoids the real challenges of power, its messiness, its insolvable moral dilemmas, and its endless shades of gray. Diasporism is a facile escape, for which someone else is expected to pay the tab. Easier to sit in judgment in an air-conditioned room at Columbia University writing about the virtues of powerlessness than to work hard to make prophetic visions a reality.

Zionism’s Israel presents a historical opportunity for Jews to deploy the values we developed in the Diaspora and move them from the abstract realm of books to the arena of real life. It may not be so pristine and pure as Steiner wanted, but that’s okay. Our values were never meant to be theoretical. They were meant as a practical guide to life in the here and now, not in the hereafter.

Refusing the opportunity and rejecting the challenge is craven. Doing so while putting other Jews at risk so that our unearned sense of our own superiority can remain intact is a morally criminal act.

The Betrayal of Israel by the US Administration Is Almost Complete

The Biden administration does not appear ever to have issued the slightest threat, warning or ultimatum to the authors of the war: Hamas, Iran or Qatar.

US Senator Chuck Schumer, after declaring himself a friend and defender of Israel, suggested overthrowing Israel's democratically elected prime minister, and -- as if Israel, and not America, were within his jurisdiction -- called for new elections.

Meanwhile in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where anti-government demonstrations began again, one of their leaders, Ami Dror, revealed on social media that the demonstrations and riots are part of a plan by the Biden administration to bring down the Netanyahu government.... The US State Department has, for more than a year, been providing financial support for protests hostile to the Netanyahu government.

Biden, it seems, is frustrated that Netanyahu is objecting to humanitarian aid -- which basically resupplies Hamas. Hamas, Israel's argument goes, released hostages only after unremitting pressure. Relieving that pressure by backing Hamas makes the probability of seeing any more hostages released less likely. Biden is also reportedly frustrated that Netanyahu, for some inexplicable reason, objects to the creation of a terrorist Palestinian state next door.

One cannot leave aside that the Biden administration, through ignoring sanctions on Iranian oil, has allowed the Iran's regime to earn up to an estimated $100 billion... Without those funds, the massacre of October 7 would not have been possible, Hezbollah would not have been able to fire so many missiles into Israel from Lebanon, and Iran itself would not have been able to launch more than 300 drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in April, and to attack US troops more than 150 times on, just since October 7, 2023 -- evidently in an attempt to drive the US out of the Middle East.

The Biden administration, it seems, does not want a definitive end of the conflict -- as with Ukraine as well -- especially if the end would entail the defeat of Hamas or Russia. Hamas is a protégé of Qatar and Iran, the world's two leading state sponsors of terrorism. The Biden administration has been rewarding them -- Iran with money and Qatar with renewing its protection by Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of America's CENTCOM, as well as controlling the new terror pier the US has built in Gaza At the same time, the Biden administration is falsely accusing Israel of violating human rights.

The Biden administration may even be complicit in the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that might be issued by the International Criminal Court – possibly as a way to dispense with him.

The mullahs are, in effect, using their proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and so on -- as their "human shields".

The Biden administration has placed the existence of Israel in danger to protect Biden from the dangerous voters of Michigan.

Greta Berlin, the anti-Israel activist who co-founded the "Free Gaza" movement in 2006, was interviewed by the Tehran Times in December where shared some antisemitic tropes like this one:

The West has three major reasons for supporting Israel’s genocide against the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinians. [The first is ] Zionist money, blackmail and bribery that influences much of the West.

She also highlighted her idea of Israel's goals in the war:

The Israelis want all of Palestine with no Palestinians in it, and their current leaders are blatantly saying that Palestinians in Gaza should be shoved into Egypt and live in tent cities. That is their intent.

So naturally she, like all anti-Israel activists, want Palestinians to stay "steadfast" in Gaza to frustrate Israel's nefarious plans of grabbing Gaza beachfront and gas fields and to build an alternative to the Suez Canal* (yes, she really says this is why Israel is fighting in Gaza.)

But when it comes to her own friends in Gaza, she is raising money to get them out!

My name is Greta Berlin, and I'm the co-founder of the Free Gaza movement, the boats to Gaza. I'm here to raise money for a family, Allam, Rania, and their 2-year-old daughter, because I've worked with Allam for years since I was his mentor with We Are Not Numbers. I've watched him grow into an amazing young man, marry the woman he deeply loves, and was thrilled when their daughter was born. Now, as another war rages on, Mais and her family desperately need your help to escape the devastation and build a future.

She is the only "pro-Palestinian" activist I've seen actively raising money for Gazans to escape. But not just any Gazan - only the ones she knows should have the chance to save their lives by going to Egypt. The rest of them, presumably, are traitors to the cause if they want to leave.

Berlin is the exception that proves the rule: "pro-Palestinian activists" don't give a damn about actual Gazans' lives.

-----

* It turns out that anti-Israel propagandists have been spreading the rumor that Israel's invasion is to help facilitate the "Ben Gurion Canal," a fanciful and prhibitively expensive idea from the 1960s for an alternative to the Suez Canal, going from Eilat through the Negev to north of Gaza. There isn't a shred of evidence that Israel still wants to do this - there is always discussion of smaller plans to bring water from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea,. and of a pipeline to pump crude oil from Eilat to the Mediterranean and save time for oil tankers too large for the Suez Canal to go around Africa. But anything about a canal is simply fantasy to support antisemitic conspiracy theories.

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!

There are some differences between UNRWA and COGAT statistics of aid into Gaza, but not too much

Here's another case where the media doesn't check the claims of anti-Israel organizations.

A month ago:

While Israel says the number of trucks entering Gaza has risen sharply in recent days, the UN has provided much lower figures, and says it is still far less than the amount required to meet humanitarian needs.

Israel said that 419 trucks entered the Gaza Strip on Monday, but the main UN agency there, UNRWA, said only 223 trucks came in on that day.

Both COGAT, the Defense Ministry body responsible for aid transfers, and UN agencies have said that the discrepancy in numbers results from different ways of counting.

But when you look at the total amount of aid counted in truckfuls, the numbers from IDF COGAT and UNRWA are not all that different.

UNRWA, today, says 25,189 trucks entered Gaza, of which 17,574 are food.

COGAT, today, says the numbers are 27,775 and 18,112, respectively.

The discrepancy for medical supplies is a bit larger: UNRWA says 1,304 trucks while COGAT says 1,993.

Part of the discrepancy is because UNRWA does not count trucks that enter from Erez or Netzarim, nor the aid that started coming in from sea. Israel opened a third crossing for aid into northern Gaza this past weekend, Western Erez, and sent about 18 trucks through there that UNRWA does not count.

In the end, they are pointing fingers at each other, but the totals are not all that different. Yet the media accepts UNRWA's claims and dismisses COGAT's.

Par for the course.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

From Times of Israel:

The Israeli military and Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) announce that they have coordinated the establishment of a new field hospital in the central Gaza Strip, run by the International Medical Corps aid organization.

The hospital was built in the Deir al-Balah area, and began operations in recent days, according to the IDF.

Israeli authorities say they coordinated the entry of 150 international medical staff and equipment, including medication, beds, food, water, tents and other materials for the field hospital.

Seven other field hospitals were established in Gaza amid the war.

Eight field hospitals built in seven months. It is very strange behavior for a genocidal entity hellbent on wiping out all Palestinians.

Israel is sending more aid into Gaza than Egypt. Bizarre behavior for the Zionists who want to destroy all Palestinians.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics issued a report saying that there are 14.63 million Palestinians in the world - an increase of 1000% since 1948. Most peoples would be thrilled to be subjected to that kind of "genocide."

Believe it or not, there are more Gazans alive today than on October 7. According to Palestinian Red Crescent, 180 Gaza women give birth every day, which means that over 39,000 children have been born since October 7 - higher than even the exaggerated death count claims of Hamas. Apparently, Israel cannot even do a genocide in Gaza.

That same report considers the casualties in Gaza today as part of the "Al Aqsa Intifada" - the second intifada that started in 2000. Which means that the official Palestinian Authority opinion is that this is all the same war that they launched when Arafat rejected statehood.

October 7 is, according to the "moderates," a continuation of the war Arafat started 24 years ago. Which means the only attempted genocide going on now is the one that Palestinians have never stopped waging against Jews.

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!

Latest Palestinian poll: Gazans expect Egypt to shoot them, Palestinians still overwhelmingly support October 7, they all love Hamas

The latest PCPSR poll came out in mid-April. In most way it is similar to their previous poll from three months earlier, but some Palestinian attitudes that are quite important to understand are still barely mentioned in Western media.

71% of Palestinians still believe that Hamas was correct to launch the war in October, a consistent finding both in Gaza and the West Bank.

In Gaza, 70% of those in shelters run by UNRWA say that the organizers distribute aid unfairly based on political considerations.

Only 7% of Palestinians say Hamas is responsible for the suffering in Gaza.

The ability of Palestinians to delude themselves is apparently unlimited. While 78% agreed in December that murdering civilians in their homes is a war crime, only 5% think Hamas committed those war crimes. Most have not seen the videos of the atrocities on October 7, but even among the people who did see the videos, only 17% believe that Hamas committed the murders that they themselves saw on the videos. That's down from 31% in December.

When Gazans were asked how they expect Egypt to react if masses of people break through the barrier to Egypt, 68% expect Egyptian soldiers to shoot them dead.

When asked who should control Gaza after the war, 59% say Hamas should remain in charge. And 49% say that Hamas should be the ruler over all Palestinians.

70% of all Palestinians are satisfied with how Hamas is waging this war. 83% are satisfied with the Houthis intercepting ships and shooting missiles at Israel.

Twice as many Palestinians would vote for Hamas compared to Fatah if elections would be held today, 30% to 14%.

The answer to this next question shows that the scenario that the West insists must be the solution for Palestinian leadership is one that Palestinians would never accept:

Finally, we asked the public about if it is for or against an idea of a long-term vision for the day after in which the US and an Arab coalition comprising Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan would develop a plan that would strengthen the PA, restore negotiations based on the two-state solution, and bring about an Arab-Israeli peace and normalization. Almost three quarters (73%) said it stands against the idea

Similarly, this question showed a side of Palestinians that close observers know to be true but that Western media refuses to report:

We asked the public about its willingness to compromise for the sake of peace: “if during negotiations, Israel agrees to make painful concessions to the Palestinian side, would you be willing in this case to support a similar Palestinian position in offering similar concessions to Israel?” A majority of 63% (70% in the West Bank and 52% in the Gaza Strip) said “no,” while only one third (33%; 46% in the Gaza Strip and 24% in the West Bank) said “yes.”

The Palestinian attitude for years has been that they want the world to give the a state on a silver platter without any compromising for peace, and even without a peace agreement. As the UN General Assembly vote last week showed, they are being rewarded for their intransigence.

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!

Today's explicit antisemitism in Arab media.And there is plenty, just from today.

Not this week ot this month. Today.

Akhbar El Yom (Egypt):

The tyranny of the Jews has not been stopped by calls for wisdom and mercy, and despite the negotiations, the machine of Israeli treachery continues on its path and humanity is evaded.Jewish arrogance is reinforced by the hidden support of great powers that pamper their allies and croak like an owl.

Al Madinah (Saudi Arabia):

Selfish and treacherous Zionist genes were born in the distant past, since the era of the Prophet Moses - peace be upon him - and they are still breeding and multiplying, and oh how safe the world is from Jewish genes!

Jafra News (Jordan) :

President Biden celebrates with the oppressive racist Jews of America who do not pay attention to the practices of their colony in Palestine against its people.

Al-Binaa (Syria):

It has become clear that the term anti-Semitism is an invention proposed by international Zionism after the so-called “Holocaust” carried out by the Germans against the Jews.

Al Anwer (pan-Islamic):

Revealing a malicious conspiracy of the Jews
In this context, the Arab thinker Ali Al-Sharafa Al-Hammadi says: I do not rule out at all that behind the dispersion of the Islamic call and the creation of intellectual confusion for Muslims are hidden hands, which created different and fabricated narratives in the words of the Companions, creating a state of contradictions, tensions, and intellectual polarization, and each sect now has its own reference. Private, which led to an intellectual and dialectical conflict that then turned into a physical conflict, resulting in Muslims fighting each other.

These evil hands were preparing their malicious plan, whether they were Jews who could not imagine that God would choose a messenger from other than their people, because they believed that the choice of prophets and messengers was limited to the children of Israel, because they are God’s chosen people, as they believe and claim. This aroused in their souls envy and jealousy for the appearance of a sent prophet. He carries a divine book for all people, including the so-called illiterate people who are not People of the Book, such as the Christians and the Jews. They did not give them any weight or respect and treated them in an inferior manner. This created in them grief and revenge when a prophet appeared among them.

...
The Jews achieved what they wanted, isolating the Qur’an from the lives of Muslims and following the divine approach, and the evidence today that we live in confirms the condemnation of the Qur’anic verses against the Jews and the children of Israel. It is the divine warning that anticipates the future with divine wisdom.

Thinker Ali Al-Sharafa Al-Hammadi says: Today we see that the Israelis rule the world, control its economies and its media, and provoke wars in order to maximize their financial capabilities, which is the weapon with which they were able to control the capabilities of peoples, create revolutions, and corrupt morals.

The hatred of Jews is explicit, but their denials of antisemitism get far more media attention than their actual antisemitism.

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05/12 Links: US withholding ‘sensitive intelligence’ on Hamas from Israel; Europe's public vote shines for Eden Golan at Eurovision; Israel marks first post-Oct. 7 Memorial Day

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Liberal media is still in denial about post-Oct. 7 antisemitism

Seven months of an unprecedented surge in antisemitism that has turned American college campuses and even K-12 schools into hostile environments for Jews has changed a lot of minds about the issue. The willingness of much of the political left to downplay or even justify the atrocities of Oct. 7—and then to flip the narrative about the war that Hamas started to one in which the victims of terrorism are somehow the real villains of the story—has shocked even many political liberals into rethinking their assumptions about where the real danger for Jews lies.

But not The New York Times.

As two lengthy news features published in the paper this week confirmed, the flagship of liberal journalism in the United States hasn’t let events or the reality of a post-Oct. 7 world interfere with their ideological or political agendas.

In one story, the newspaper devoted the time of four reporters to take a deep dive into contemporary antisemitism. But the result of what is described as their extensive research is that they have come to the conclusion that the real culprits are not the people who seek the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet, legitimize a genocidal terrorist movement as justified “resistance” or attempt to allow those responsible for the mass murder of 1,200 people to get away with it. Instead, the Times believes that the problem rests with (surprise!) Republicans who are rallying in support of a beleaguered State of Israel and who are opposed to the deluge of Jew-hatred on display in the American public square since the current war began.

In another article, the paper reported a congressional hearing about the growing problem of antisemitism in K-12 schools throughout the country as primarily one about how those in charge of these institutions scored points against members of Congress who care about the issue.

These are just two prominent examples out of many that could be pointed to that show how the Times and other liberal media outlets manipulate coverage of this issue to promote their own partisan agendas. They are worth noting precisely because they illustrate how ideological agendas work to present a distorted picture of an antisemitism crisis that serves primarily to deflect attention from the real cause.

In this case, that means denying or downplaying the fact that the principal engines of antisemitism in 2024 America are left-wing ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality, which grant a permission slip to Jew-hatred. The pervasive influence of these toxic ideas in American education has helped to indoctrinate largely ignorant students to parrot what earlier generations might have easily understood to be Soviet-era Marxist propaganda about Zionism being racism and Israel being an “apartheid state” against which all “resistance”—even the orgy of rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that Palestinians carried on Oct. 7—can be justified.

Israel’s PR-War Pandemonium

The job of international spokesperson for Israel, in a state of war, is fit for a patriot, a masochist, or a diva, or better yet all three. For most of the past six months, it was occupied by Eylon Levy, a 32-year-old British Israeli with an affinity for television cameras and seemingly infinite ability to absorb the abuse that comes from publicly defending Israel, at its least defensible and at its most. When Israel was still picking through the corpses in the kibbutzim near Gaza, he reminded viewers of the carnage—both the dead concertgoers and elderly (who were real victims) and “beheaded babies” (who turned out not to be). When Israel began hunting Hamas in Gaza, he defended his country’s actions without reservation, even when the civilian toll became unbearable. His tenure ended on the last day of March, reportedly after British Foreign Minister David Cameron took exception to Levy’s rhetoric. The story goes that Cameron’s office sent a curt message to Levy’s bosses, who suspended him and encouraged his resignation.

Levy says that these reports are inaccurate, and that he was forced out because he is not, and never was, a Netanyahu loyalist. He told me he has “no reason to doubt” a conflicting report that Sara Netanyahu, the child psychologist and former El Al flight attendant married to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, orchestrated his overthrow. Cameron was a pretext, he says. Levy’s version of events is one of many data points suggesting that the Netanyahu government is obsessed with the slavish loyalty of its staff. And Levy is not alone in wondering whether such a government is fit to lead a country as divided as Israel, during this time of maximum stress. (Netanyahu’s office did not reply to a request for comment on Levy and the circumstances of his hiring and departure.)

When I met him last month in Tel Aviv, Levy still seemed dazed by the speed of his rise and fall. He said he’d never met Sara Netanyahu or her husband, but if they thought he was less than devoted to Bibi’s politics, they were onto something. Before the war, he said, he had been among the hundreds of thousands who had filled Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to protest the government and heap disgust on Netanyahu. “The protests became a social happening—just what people did on a Saturday night,” he said. His presence was sincere, but also, in that sense, “entirely unremarkable and quite expected for someone in my demographic.”

And his distaste for Netanyahu did not evaporate after October 7. Levy’s feed on X (formerly Twitter) confirms much of what he told me about his personal distaste for the prime minister, before the Hamas attack and indeed even in the days after it. He tweeted witheringly about Netanyahu’s failure to stop the attack (“This will be [his] legacy”), and about his “useless” ministers’ failure to address the public. But he went into spokesperson mode in record time—even before he was officially tapped for the job. Levy, who says he was “taking a professional break,” when the attack happened, had previously worked as a media adviser to Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Now he saw an opportunity. “The prime minister’s office had been caught with its pants down,” Levy told me. “It was simply not prepared to deal with the deluge of media attention.” He stacked his laptop on a pile of books on his dining-room table and positioned his lamp and webcam just so. “I thought: I know how to do media. So I put out the message that I was available to give media interviews.”

The media took him up on the offer, and he did nearly a dozen TV hits. Within days, he says, an envoy from the prime minister’s office asked him whether he’d like to “come on board in some official capacity.” The envoy, Rotem Sella, was the Hebrew publisher of Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir and had now joined the government to correct the pants problem. Sella, Levy says, knew that Levy had protested Bibi but didn’t care. “It was a completely insane proposition,” Levy said—a guy in his living room, openly contemptuous of the government, would now be paid to defend it. “But everyone was doing their bit, so I said, ‘Absolutely. Count me in.’”

“Within 24 hours, I found myself effectively being nationalized,” he told me. The contemporaneous record strikes a vainer tone. He tweeted a photograph of himself at a lectern, with the comment “Cometh the hour,” a Churchillian line (“... cometh the man”) that is, like most compliments, best bestowed by others rather than by oneself. But as long as Israel’s actual leaders were bunkered away from public scrutiny—when they did appear, ordinary Israelis screamed at them—this living-room Churchill could run unopposed as Israel’s man of the hour.

Lowy’s lament: ‘I know how insidious antisemitism can be’

Looking in from the outside, Sir Frank Lowy is shaken by what is happening in Australia. He’s been watching as antisemitism seeps into the country and weakens its famous sense of “a fair go”.

This is new, something he never experienced in his 66 years in Australia.

“When I arrived in Sydney in 1952 and got a job in a factory, I was seen as a ‘New Australian’ and I took it as a term of endearment, not exclusion.

“In the canteen, we ate our sandwiches together and no one remarked on my foreignness or questioned my religion.

“And in six decades of running Westfield, I never experienced antisemitism. Once, a newspaper referred to me as ‘a Jewish businessman’. I objected, and it never happened again.”

While many believe the current conflict in Gaza has not led to antisemitism in Australia, Lowy has seen it before, and he does.

“In Europe in the late ’30s and ’40s, I experienced it directly. I know what it feels like, and I know how insidious it can be.

“In Europe back then, it had become safe for people to express antisemitism, and now it’s becoming safe to do so in Australia. It may take a different form, but the feeling is the same, and it’s deeply disturbing.”

Latest EoZ cartoons

I'm a bit behind, but here are some....

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Professor of Jewish studies just cannot accept that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, even after encountering it herself

Flora Cassen, an associate professor of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern studies and associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, writes in Haaretz about a Reddit exchange she had with anti-Israel fanatics. Even after seeing how filled with hate they are, she still cannot call them antisemites.

The haters parroted Students for Justice in Palestine and claimed that every single Israeli has no civilian status - they are all illegal settlers and therefore fair game for being killed.

[She wrote] "What you're saying that any person (including babies, children, elderly, etc.) who lives in Israel within the green line is a colonizer who deserves to be massacred?" They responded, "I'm not saying they deserve to be massacred, just that Israelis are not simply civilians. Every single Israeli exists on land violently stolen from Palestinians within the lifetime of the average grandma. Simply just existing as an Israeli makes you a weapon of violence against Palestinians bc you are living on land that was stolen from them & their parents/grandparents, etc. If you don't want your baby killed in the process of people liberating their own land from their oppressors, maybe don't be one of their oppressors."

I could feel hate and anger in those postings, which scared me, even though I had no idea whom I was dialoguing with. But I decided to continue trying. "But what if you happened to be born there and your entire family lived there?" I wrote, "Would you all be fair play to be murdered? Israel needs to end the war, leave the illegal settlements, end apartheid, and stop oppressing Palestinians. I'm not defending what they're doing. But to mark them all as colonizers (including within the green line) who are fair play to be murdered just because of where they were born is a step too far."

Notice that saying that Jewish civilians who live across the Green Line are deserving of being murdered is not a step too far for this professor. But that's isn't enough for the bloodlust of the haters:

My persistence was in vain. They answered in bold letters, "They ARE all colonizers. So, to answer your question, yes. Nobody in Israel is unaware of what's happening; every person in that illegal apartheid state is 100% aware of what their living there means. There are no legal settlements bc Israel itself is not legal. These are mostly Europeans that colonized Palestine in the modern age. They don't just get to keep a little sliver for themselves. Palestine should be ruled by Palestinian ppl & if Israelis want to stay, they have to abide by Palestinian laws......Here's a tough one to digest for ppl raised under intense liberal propaganda. Sometimes justice is not peaceful. "

At that point she gave up, but she then defends the haters being called antisemitic:

This conversation brought home how inadequate our terminology has become at capturing the essence of the current debates.

Antisemitism is a term that emerged in the 19th century to refer to political and racial hatred of Jews. It reached its apogee under the Nazis, who believed Jews were a separate and evil human race that had to be exterminated. Since then, not only has racial science been debunked as pseudo-science, but Jews are far more likely to be described as a religious or ethnic group. Moreover, people who express antisemitic ideas often have Jewish friends.

For example, pastor John Hagee, a popular televangelist who once said that God "sent Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land," is a friend of the State of Israel and was invited to speak at the rally against antisemitism in Washington in November 2023.

Students in the pro-Palestine tent protests at Columbia University sang slogans that glorified Hamas and the killing of Israelis, yet welcomed Jewish students for a Passover seder. Nazis never would have joined a march against antisemitism or welcomed Jews in their tent to celebrate a Jewish holiday. These contradictions highlight why the term antisemitism generates so much confusion. How can a term that evokes the mass murder of all Jews without exception be used to label those who hate some Jews but not others?

How can someone who says "some of my best friends are Jewish" be antisemitic?

Instead, Cassen tries to come up with a new term for rabid anti-Zionists that cleanse them of the charge of hating Jews: "Eliminationists."

Eliminationists derive their worldview from post-colonial theory and see the State of Israel in this framework. ....Eliminationists also understand racism and inequalities as the outcomes of the colonial and white supremacist structures persisting in our societies. Their life's goal is to fight for justice and against all racism and inequality, and they always include antisemitism among the racisms they fight.

To the extent that eliminationists call for the "removal" of the State of Israel, but not for harm against Jews as a racial or even ethnic group, they are not antisemitic. However, an ideology does not need to be antisemitic to be cruel and built on flawed intellectual foundations.

Cassen makes two major mistakes.

Her first mistake is by defining antisemitism as nothing less than Nazi-style demands for the death of every Jews on the planet. The Spanish Inquisition wasn't antisemitic because it wasn't racial - the Jews could convert to Christianity. The libel of Jews poisoning the wells during the Black Death was not antisemitic because it had no racial component. It means that Iran's former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust, or Hamas leaders, whose charter still calls for the murder of all Jews, could not be antisemitic since they met with members of Neturei Karta.

That is a very strange mistake for a professor of history and Jewish studies.

Her other mistake is to believe what the modern antisemites are saying. They claim that they are against antisemitism, and are only against Israelis.

Yet she didn't bring up the obvious rejoinder to the haters she wasted time with on Reddit. When they say that "Israelis" are legitimate targets, they only mean the 80% of Israelis who are Jews. They don't want to eliminate 100% of Israelis - they want to eliminate 100% of Israeli Jews. They want a genocide of seven million Jews.

If that isn't antisemitism, what is?

Obviously, Cassen isn't defending the haters, but she believes their lies that they don't hate Jews. She could have asked the next obvious question: what should be done with the 95% of Jews worldwide who support Israel's existence? Are they also the enemy, that should be destroyed? That was the opinion of the many Muslims who have attacked synagogues in America and worldwide over the past couple of decades.

Yet Muslims are just as adamant that they are not antisemitic as the Reddit posters Cassen encountered.

I once coined a term for the irrational, rabid hate of Israel, "misoziony." The intent was not to say that haters of Israel are not antisemitic but to stop the term antisemitism from being a distraction when pointing out that rabid anti-Zionism is just as illogical, just as irrational, just as hateful and just as impossible to justify as antisemitism is. Maybe Dr. Cassen would prefer that term. But it doesn't mean that the misozionists aren't antisemitic - because when you dissect their beliefs, that is exactly what they are.

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More aid has gone to Gaza through Israel than through Egypt - even BEFORE Egypt stopped aid last week

During this past week, Egypt has blocked all aid into Gaza that came from Egypt.

Both through Rafah:

Egypt has refused to coordinate with Israel on the entry of aid into Gaza from the Rafah Crossing due to Israel’s “unacceptable escalation,” Egypt’s state-affiliated Alqahera News satellite TV reported on Saturday, citing a senior official.

The official also said that Egypt held Israel responsible for the deterioration of the situation in the Gaza Strip.

And via Kerem Shalom:

Although Israel has reopened Kerem Shalom and some fuel has gone into Gaza from there, humanitarian aid like food and medicines has not been allowed through the crossing since last Sunday, according to Scott Anderson, a senior official at UNRWA, the main U.N. agency that aids Gaza.

One reason is that Egypt, where most of the aid for Gaza is collected and loaded, is resisting sending trucks toward Kerem Shalom, according to two U.S. officials and another Western official who are involved in the aid operation, as well as two Israeli officials.

Where is the world demand for Egypt to release the aid, ready to be driven into Gaza? Where are the social media posts and the caplus protests and the op-eds condemning Egypt for deliberately withholding aid from Gaza?

Why does no one want to pressure Egypt?

From reading the media, one gets the impression that before last week, the lion's share of aid to Gaza came via Egypt through the Rafah crossing. But it turns out that this is wrong. Far more aid has been coming through Israel's Kerem Shalom crossing, as this UNRWA graphic shows. Here are the comparisons for every month:

Since January, Israel has sent more truckloads into Gaza than Egypt has. Moreover, the number of trucks from Egypt have gone down since the first months of the war. At the moment, more truckloads total have gone through Kerem Shalom than through Rafah to Gaza, 14,000 to 11,000.

What media has reported this? None I have seen.

Part of the reason the world keeps castigating Israel is because the media and politicians refuse to say anything negative about Egypt. Israel must be framed as malicious and genocidal, and the truth - even according to UNRWA, which has done all it can to demonize Israel's aid efforts - shows that between Egyptian refusal to allow tens of thousands of Gazans to flee there, Egypt extorting bribes for thousands more to come as "VIPs," Egypt's refusing half of the medical cases that need to exit Gaza, and now Egypt's refusal to send aid that Gazans need every day, it seems Egypt cares less about Gaza civilians than Israel does.

And what news source will risk reporting that?

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05/11 Links: Hamas’s hostages: Who are the five remaining Americans still held by the terror group?; Eden Golan gives a flawless performance in Eurovision final

From Ian:

Switzerland wins Eurovision, Israel lands in fifth place overall with second-highest televote

Switzerland wins the Eurovision song contest while Israel ends up in fifth place overall.

Israel got an impressive 323 points from the televotes — the second-highest amount — and 52 points from the jury.

Croatia got the most points from the televote, 337, but Switzerland’s Nemo ran away with the win with their song “The Code.”

Eurovision Song Contest 2024 results
Switzerland: 591
Croatia: 547
Ukraine: 453
France: 445
Israel: 375
Ireland: 278

Don’t let the Eurovision boycotters win

Thankfully, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organises Eurovision, has resisted calls to ban Israel. However, it did force Israel to change the words of its song on the grounds that it was ‘political’. The original song was entitled ‘October Rain’, and was a moving lament for those murdered by Hamas last year. It has since been renamed ‘Hurricane’ and the lyrics have been rewritten.

Complaints that ‘October Rain’ was too political might have held a bit more water if Eurovision didn’t have a history of including political songs. A Greek entry in 1976 criticised Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus. Switzerland entered an anti-war song in 2023 in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, the Dutch entry, ‘Europapa’, is a celebration of open borders within the European Union.

Some may be tempted to dismiss the efforts to banish Israel from Eurovision as trivial. It’s just a singing competition, they might say. But this boycott needs to be seen in the broader context of the BDS movement. Launched in 2005, its goal is to delegitimise and culturally isolate Israel. It targets academia, musical events, sport, theatre, visual arts and much more. In every case the goal is to purge all spheres of public life of Israeli involvement. So not only is BDS deeply intolerant of all things Israeli, it is also a movement against freedom of expression. Individual Israeli performers and competitors are targeted simply because of their national background.

The targets of the Israel boycotters range from big corporations and brands, such as Barclays and Zara, to iconic global events, such as the Olympics and of course Eurovision itself. The current anti-Israel student protests are part of the boycott-Israel movement, too. Their chief objective is to force universities to break all links with Israel.

For anyone with an understanding of anti-Semitism, this pervasive boycott campaign is driven by an all too familiar sentiment. Its main objective is to target, isolate and exclude Jews from wider society. They may not want to slaughter Jews, as Hamas explicitly says it wants to. But the boycotters would certainly like to erase all traces of the Jewish State from public life.

So while it might seem like a small thing, voting for Israel in Eurovision would be a great way of sticking two fingers up to those determined to turn Israel into a pariah state. We need to do all we can to resist this campaign to wipe Israel off the map.

Hysterics for Hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:
“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”
“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”
“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.

It was not too long ago when administrators started bringing in therapy dogs to campus libraries and dining halls to help a female-heavy student body cope with psychic distress, especially after the election of Donald Trump. “Trigger warnings” were implemented to protect female students from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and other great works of literature. Campus discourse and its media echo chamber rang with accounts of the mental-health crisis on campus, whose alleged sufferers were overwhelmingly female.

Hamas’s hostages: Who are the five remaining Americans still held by the terror group? Often overshadowed by the Israeli war in Gaza in response to last year’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, 133 surviving hostages are still held by Hamas. Five of them are Americans.

Here are their stories.

Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23
“I love you.” And then: “I’m sorry.” That is not a pair of text messages that a mother wants to receive from her son early on a Saturday morning. Rachel Goldberg-Polin looked at her phone and “knew something horrible was unfolding in my world,” as she would tell reporters at the United Nations later that month.

Rachel had moved to Israel with her husband, Jonathan Polin, when her son Hersh was 7 years old. He soon developed a love of soccer that his parents, who migrated to the Jewish state as adult Americans, couldn’t quite share — a fan especially of Hapoel Jerusalem, a century-old soccer team associated with the Israeli Left.

“He was always teased for being a lover of peace, a crunchy granola dreamer,” his mother told the Lever in December.

Hersh grew into a young man enthusiastic about travel and music. He left home on the evening of Oct. 6 to attend a music festival in southern Israel, just a few miles from the Gaza Strip. That festival would end in carnage as Hamas terrorists surrounded the remote site and murdered more than 250 attendees, according to first responders.

Hersh and one of his best friends, Aner Shapira, managed to reach a roadside bomb shelter where 27 others also sought refuge. Hamas terrorists surrounded the place and tossed 11 grenades through the door. Shapira, whose great-grandfather reportedly was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, “managed to pick up eight of them and throw them back out,” as Rachel Goldberg-Polin emphasized during that October press appearance, before succumbing to his wounds.

A video recorded by Hamas confirmed the account and showed Hersh being forced into the bed of a pickup truck, bleeding from the stump of his left arm. Rachel Goldberg-Polin has emerged as one of the most internationally prominent advocates for the release of the scores of hostages held by Hamas.

“There are many of the 133 [hostages] that the world never hears about because there is so very much noise,” she told the attendees of an April 7 rally in New York City. “I don’t hear a lot about the eight Muslim Arabs being held hostage or the eight Thai Buddhists or the two black African Christians. There are hostages from Mexico and Nepal who are Catholic and Hindu. We do an injustice when we erase these people when we are talking about who is still being held hostage.”

A few weeks later, her son appeared in a new proof-of-life video released by Hamas amid fraught negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage deal. “We’re here today with a plea to all of the leaders of the parties who have been negotiating to date,” Jonathan Polin said after seeing the video. “That includes Qatar, Egypt, the United States, Hamas, and Israel. Be brave, lean in, seize this moment, and get a deal done.”

Watch the full interview: https://t.co/CEbOnNZNCL

Or listen to the audio at https://t.co/DaUOzc1iYx. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more.
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) May 10, 2024

@taliaraab took to the streets of NYC to ask Americans if they know about the American hostages being held in Gaza. Their answers will surprise you! #hostages #gaza #hamas #bringthemhome 🎗️ pic.twitter.com/HOuj89qQhN
— Gabby Klein (@GabbyKlein1) May 7, 2024