Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

The world was wrong. Israel was right. Again.

Israel's Foreign Minister Israel Katz speaks to the Wall Street Journal about how Israel turned the tide in Rafah:

Something changed in Gaza. After months of rejecting Israeli cease-fire proposals and holding out for more concessions, Hamas has begun to offer concessions of its own. Israel is closer than ever to freeing many of its remaining hostages, and it has gained the leverage to demand terms that protect the strategic gains of the war.

If you believe the media drumbeat—that Israel’s war effort is futile, its strategy absent, and its political isolation growing—it’s impossible to account for the breakthrough. Why, after months of contemptuous stalling, did Hamas begin to bend?

“Two reasons,” says Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, in an interview at the Journal’s office. “One, they understand now that there will be no cease-fire without a hostage deal. Two, the IDF is acting aggressively against the terrorists in Gaza. Especially important was entering Rafah,” Hamas’s stronghold at the southern end of the strip.

Israel cut off Hamas’s supply routes and now holds Hamas “by the throat,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently put it. Senior terrorists are dropping at a faster clip as Israeli intelligence closes in; half of Hamas’s military leadership has been eliminated. Even after a large Israeli bombardment to kill Hamas’s military chief, Mohammed Deif, who is considered unlikely to have survived, Hamas barely attacked in response and rushed to clarify that it isn’t leaving negotiations. “Hamas is under much more pressure now,” Mr. Katz says. “That’s what made the difference.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that pressure on Hamas could yield gains in negotiations. Yet for months Western powers took the opposite approach, pressuring Israel to end the war and leave Hamas victorious. They called for an “immediate cease-fire,” increasingly delinked from a hostage deal. Humanitarian groups upbraided Israel and kept quiet about Hamas. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court menaced Israel with bogus prosecutions and tribunals.

The Rafah operation was delayed by months, during which Hamas seemed to be under less pressure than ever. The White House withheld weapons from Israel. Warnings of a humanitarian disaster poured in from all quarters. On May 6, Israel invaded Rafah anyway.

“And we were right,” says Mr. Katz. “Everyone knows it now, even the U.S., because everyone warned that it would be a catastrophe. It’s a war, yes. It’s not a picnic. But they said that it would take four months to evacuate the population. It took only days.” More than a million Gazans quickly evacuated Rafah to designated safe zones.

No critics recanted, but the pressure on Israel quietly diminished. As if embarrassed, the world suddenly took note that Hamas is the obstacle to a hostage deal. The White House made the point, especially after airing on May 31 an Israeli offer that Hamas went on to reject. The U.N. Security Council ratified that offer. Even the Palestinian Authority, which glorified the Oct. 7 massacre, now blames Hamas for the continuation of the fighting. Hamas, the odd man out, had to admit there is no cease-fire on the horizon unless it releases the hostages.

The media barely covers it, but Israel's strategy has been evolving quickly, and it is not fighting the war that the world thinks it is. Andrew Fox, former British Army officer and current lecturer, recognized this in May at the very moment Western "experts" were warning that the war was unwinnable:

In the case of the 2023-24 Gaza war, Western critics have almost comically misunderstood what the Israeli military is trying to do. The flaw in Western analysis is always the same: “We wouldn’t do it that way.” Yet the IDF has absolutely no intention of using the clear-hold-build COIN [counterinsurgency] tactics the West tried in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why would it? Those tactics were an unmitigated disaster in both campaigns, which ended in humiliating defeats at the hands of technologically inferior armies.

If you look at what is possible, what the best version of “success” looks like, and what Israel is doing, I contend that in Gaza we are seeing a masterpiece of operational design within severe politically imposed limitations. The IDF is not trying to clear Gaza. With no ability to impose a political arrangement in Gaza, and a Gazan desire for continued Hamas rule, the IDF answer is: Let them have Hamas. But the version of Hamas that Gazans will get is one heavily degraded militarily, and, most importantly, with vast swaths of their tunnels and civilian-embedded infrastructure destroyed. In other words, the IDF aims to replace Hamas 3.0—the version that fought three wars against Israel and then launched the brutal Oct. 7 surprise attacks—with Hamas 1.0, which took over the Gaza Strip from Fatah in June 2007.

To accomplish that end, the IDF has methodically razed what Hamas infrastructure they could find in Gaza City, Khan Yunis, and now Rafah. They have secured the Netzarim corridor to control freedom of movement from south to north. It looks like they are trying to do the same thing along the Philadelphi Corridor and Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, to cut off the inflow of weapons and supplies to Hamas.

Israel's takeover of the Rafah crossing was perhaps the single most important move in the war. Hamas was importing weapons with impunity while Egypt controlled the border. Now, they are running out of equipment. The Jerusalem Post's latest update notes:

Hamas's military wing no longer operates in large formations and has shifted to guerrilla warfare. The working assumption on the ground is that Hamas can plan attacks but currently prefers not to fight, thus retreating from any place the IDF reaches.

It is assessed that Hamas's retreat policy is due to the loss of experienced operatives and commanders and a shortage of weapons. Hamas's equipment shortage is so severe that they recently started using "reverse" cameras taken from vehicles as security cameras.

The other mostly unreported success for Israel has been its ability to retrieve and operationalize huge amounts of intelligence, quickly.

The IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) have uncovered a treasure trove of Hamas intelligence, consisting of stacks of documents, files, and computers,...

"The amount of intelligence accumulated so far in the hands of Shin Bet and Military Intelligence allows us to dismantle Hamas from within," said a senior security official exposed to the heaps of documents.

Cutting off Hamas supply routes, fantastic intelligence and especially perseverance in the face of international pressure is what is bringing Israel to victory. Too bad you won't read about this in the New York Times.

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Reuters reports:

The Israeli parliament gave preliminary approval on Monday to a bill that declares the main United Nations relief organization for Palestinians a terrorist organisation and proposes to sever relations with the body.

The vote against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) is the latest step in a Israeli push against the agency, which Israeli leaders have accused of collaborating with the Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza.

Western coverage of Israel's accusations against UNRWA all have the subtext of how Israel is going over the top, UNRWA might have a few bad apples but altogether it is doing good things.

UNRWA has embarked on a campaign to deflect the criticism, with op-eds written for at least 10 newspapers claiming that if UNRWA is declared to be a terrorist organization, Israel will shoot humanitarian workers with impunity. This is of course a slander.

But Israel knows things that the media doesn't.

A Jerusalem Post article this week on intelligence discoveries by the IDF in Gaza three separate discoveries about UNRWA:

Some documents also revealed the corruption within Hamas, showing how they not only accumulated assets but also used them. United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) apartments were registered in the name of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif's wife.

Apartments of Mohammed Sinwar, Hamas head Yahya Sinwar's brother, were found to be received from UNRWA and then rented to Palestinians, according to rental contracts in possession of Military Intelligence.

Documentation of Hamas operatives working for UNRWA was also found.

Is it even remotely plausible that UNRWA doesn't know that its apartments were being sublet by Hamas? That they didn't know the names of Deif's wife and Sinwar's brother?

That they don't know that UNRWA workers moonlight for Hamas?

The apartments are supposed to be free for "refugees." Yet the "refugees" are freely subletting them, profiting off UNRWA funds. Don't claim UNRWA isn't aware of this, if not profiting from it itself.

I am not sure that declaring all of UNRWA to be terrorist is a smart move politically, but Israel can and should make it illegal in Israel. It does nothing to promote peace; on the contrary, it is in UNRWA's interest that there never is peace because then it would be out of business.

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UNRWA says "We have no idea how many trucks enter Gaza but we'll issue statistics anyway to make it look like there are very few"

UNRWA's dashboard of trucks entering Gaza says that 1296 trucks entered Gaza in June, and 674 in July so far.

But there is some fine print:

Here's what that says:

Current Data (after Rafah operation): This page of the supply and tracking dashboard currently records trucks entering Gaza via Rafah and Kerem Shalom which are being handled and retrieved by UNRWA, and records of trucks via Western Erez are based on those received at the UNRWA Warehouse. Dashboard data includes partial cargo from INGOs, Red Cross and other UN agencies, and excludes Commercial actors. We are unable to provide comprehensive monitoring of cargo for the following reasons: i) safety and security concerns, which continue to prevent UN staff from maintaining constant presence at Kerem Shalom, therefore severely impacting our ability to record data from INGO, Red Cross and commercial trucks, and delays and/or denials in approvals for UN to retrieve, count and move UN humanitarian aid from Kerem Shalom to other parts of the Gaza Strip, which mean that we are unable to fully verify all trucks which have transited the land crossings. We will resume presentation of comprehensive data once the situation at the crossing allows.

In other words, they admit that they are not counting all the trucks and give reasons for their inability to count.

If that is the case, why are they showing such specific numbers of trucks entering?

Luckily, the IDF COGAT unit has finally created its own interactive dashboard counting every truck going into Gaza.

COGAT counts nearly four times as many trucks for June as UNRWA does, and over six times as many for July so far.

This isn't a difference of 10%. This is an order of magnitude difference between what UNRWA reports and reality. And UNRWA's accuracy is getting worse, not better, over time.

So one must ask again: why does UNRWA even publish these completely irrelevant numbers on their website that bear zero relationship with reality?

To make Israel look bad, of course. If Gaza needs hundreds of trucks a day, and it only gets a fraction of that, then UNRWA can accuse Israel of deliberately starving Gaza.

I'm sure it's unintentional. Sure.

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A previous meeting between Palestinian and Chinese officials

This week, all the major Palestinian political parties and terror groups met in China to try to come up with yet another reconciliation plan.

This happens every few years, with big announcements and no follow-up.

The participating parties were Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian People’s Party, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, the Palestinian National Initiative Movement, the PFLP-GC, Fida, the Palestine Liberation Front, the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestinian Arab Front, and the vanguards of the Popular Liberation War.

As with all the previous attempts, they issued a general statement of their plans for unity their goals and their tactics.

Every Palestinian party agrees that terrorism is legitimate.

The second principle that they all agreed upon in Beijing stipulates "the Palestinian people's right to resist and end the occupation in accordance with international law, the United Nations Charter, and the right of peoples to self-determination and their struggle to achieve it by all available means."

It is ambiguous enough for wishful thinking Westerners to think that this only means peaceful resistance, since it invokes the UN. However, Palestinians have consistently claimed (falsely) that the UN gives them the right to mount terror attacks. They base this on a 1990 UN General Assembly resolution that "Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle."

Both Hamas and Fatah use this resolution and similar ones to claim that their attacking Israeli civilians is legal under international law, and top Palestinian legal "experts" have written many articles making the same point.

And whenever Palestinians attack Israeli civilians, the same groups justify it because they consider all Israelis to be either "soldiers" or "illegal settlers."

"By all available means" is unambiguous to Palestinians. It includes major terror attacks that they still celebrate and pay families of the terrorists for. You will be hard pressed to find a single Palestinian official today who condemns the Munich Olympics massacre, or the Coastal Road massacre, the Sbarro pizza shop massacre, or any other specific terror attack. (Some pretended to condemn them under American pressure at the time. But the previous deadly attacks are treated as sacred in official Palestinian media and school textbooks.)

Hamas and Fatah agree on this. Fatah is more reluctant to say it explicitly to the West, but it is part of its party platform. And the western media does its part by pretending that most Palestinians seek peace, not the destruction of Israel "by all means possible. "

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

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07/22 Links Pt2: Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Post-Biden Democratic Party; Biden stands down, with Middle East in crisis; The future of Jewish students at elite universities

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the Post-Biden Democratic Party

In one of Joe Biden’s final interviews before he dropped out of the presidential race, Complex Networks’ Speedy Morman asked him: “Are you a Zionist?” It is not the first time Biden has been asked the question, though it’s not exactly a common question in national politics. Biden’s answer hadn’t changed: “Yes.”

The president then said that people who love to make trouble for Zionists don’t know what the word means. Do you, the president asked his interviewer with obvious relish, know what a Zionist is? Morman then vindicated Biden’s contempt for him on the spot by weaseling out a weak “I just ask questions, I don’t answer.”

Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he will be ending his political career after one term in the White House left me wondering: How would Kamala Harris answer that question if asked tomorrow? How would anybody else in the upper echelons of the president’s party, the keys to which he is now handing over, answer it?

The Democratic Party’s changing of the guard is almost certainly a milestone in American politics, a bold notch on the timeline marking a point of departure for the party’s approach to anti-Semitism and the Jewish state. The party’s standard bearer 24 hours ago considered himself a Zionist and routinely condemned—even if his administration took no appropriate action against—Jew-baiting mobs on campus. The party’s standard bearer today fears and admires those mobs for, in her preposterous words, “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”

Members of the Biden-Harris administration who resigned over the president’s support for Israel against Hamas see Harris’s succession in that light. Lily Call, a former Interior Department staffer and member of the virulently anti-Israel group IfNotNow, expressed hope that Harris might enact an arms embargo on Israel. “I’ve worked for Kamala, and I know she’ll do the right thing,” Call told Politico.

Josh Paul, who resigned as a State Department point man on weapons transfers because Biden insisted on arming our Mideast allies, told Politico that Harris will probably be better (i.e. more evenhanded in her treatment of Israel and Hamas) than Biden. As I explained in December, Paul displays a remarkably aggressive ignorance on all things Middle East, and seems to have been particularly radicalized by his misreading of a story about donkeys in Gaza. This is the other reason for concern: U.S. agencies are apparently littered with a combination of entitled but inexperienced activists and historically illiterate fame-chasers. Things can easily get out of hand without a president who knows how to say “no” to them.

Jonathan Tobin: Biden’s legacy is a world in flames

Now that President Joe Biden has finally bent to the will of his party’s leaders and donors, the praise for his presidency is nearly universal on the left. The paeans to his personal greatness and acclaim for his time in the White House accelerated once his infirmity became clear in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump.

Liberal corporate media spent years covering up the president’s cognitive decline, including accusing any journalists who brought up the subject of spreading “misinformation.”

But once the lies were exposed, those who were mostly likely to know the truth about Biden—like former President Barack Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, congressional leaders and Hollywood fundraisers such as actor George Clooney—turned on him, albeit while still improbably praising him as one of our greatest presidents. Like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, they “came to bury” Biden, but thought to praise him first.

Trump’s iconic defiance after a failed assassination attempt, a Covid diagnosis and the closed purses of big Democratic donors were the final blows that appear to have forced Biden to drop out, thus rendering the process by which he had gained the nomination a sham. That Biden announced his withdrawal via a social-media post—and on Elon Musk’s X, which liberals have denounced for its free-speech policies, at that—rather than bothering to record a message telling the country himself, was perhaps a fittingly feeble end to this dispiriting drama.

This will now be followed by the extravagant and equally disingenuous choruses of praise for Harris, as she now likely becomes the focus of the Democrats’ last-ditch efforts to prevent a Trump victory. But before we begin the task of separating truth from partisan hyperbole with respect to the vice president, it is appropriate to take a moment to unpack the notion that the Biden presidency was as great as those slipping the knife between his shoulders have been telling us.

Seth Frantzman: Biden stands down, with Middle East in crisis

US President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris will have ramifications in the Middle East, a region already in crisis. While many countries in the region have been watching the last several weeks of political chaos in America and have likely prepared for this scenario, there will be bad actors seeking to take advantage of the US domestic political chaos.

On the other hand, if Biden shifts focus solely to his politics amid the presidential race, he may try to nail down his legacy in the Middle East by pushing robust policies. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats – it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this,” Biden wrote late Sunday night.

This will set up a chaotic process within the Democratic Party. Change can be good, bringing new leadership to the spotlight, but an orderly transition of power is what makes democracies stable. Countries in this region are already wary of the United States because of the political chaos it has endured over the last decade. Many find the US less reliable than in the past, and key American partners and allies have been drifting into the arms of Russia, China, and others.

Enlrage imageThis drift began years ago. Countries such as Turkey, a NATO member, have leaders who are openly anti-West and authoritarian. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for instance, tried to block Sweden from joining NATO and has been working closely with Russia and Iran. Meanwhile, many Gulf states are also hedging and have been open to working more closely with China, as well as the countries in the BRICS and the SCO, two economic blocks closer to China and Russia than to the West.

Qatar, a major non-NATO ally of the US, continues to openly host Hamas and work directly with Iran. It has sought to benefit from the October 7 war triggered by Hamas by serving as a mediator, but it has its own interests; it is unclear if these coincide with those of the US and the West.

07/22 Links Pt1: J’accuse! How the International Court of Justice Has Condemned Itself; It's time to get rid of UNRWA and Guterres; Trump and the UN

From Ian:

Jacques Gauthier to Israel: ‘Never allow people to tell you you’re trespassers’

The United Nations has long referred to Judea and Samaria as “occupied” Palestinian land, and the global body’s principal judicial arm, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, issued a non-binding ruling last Friday declaring that “occupation” to be “unlawful.”

French-Canadian attorney and scholar Jacques Gauthier told JNS recently that the United Nations, countries, nonprofits and others that use the term “occupied territories” in this way misunderstand international law and legally recognized treaties.

“Never allow people to tell you that you’re trespassers. It’s your land,” Gauthier, who is not Jewish, told JNS. “It’s been given to you, in law.”

Gauthier, whose scholarly work focuses on the Jewish people’s legal rather than biblical claims to the modern State of Israel, thinks that the 1920 treaty that emerged from the conference in San Remo, Italy, ought to be as well known as the Balfour Declaration.

Great Britain didn’t control the region of Palestine at the time, and its Balfour Declaration was just that—a declaration, not an international legal document.

But the San Remo agreement, which incorporated the principles of the declaration from three years prior, had the legal imprimatur of international support.

The 1920 San Remo agreement “is the most momentous political event in the whole history of the Zionist movement,” Gauthier told JNS.

‘A good cause’

Montreal-born and educated in Paris until elementary school, Gauthier didn’t know much about Jews as a child. “My environment, my schooling, exposed me in a very limited way to the State of Israel or the issues that preoccupy me now,” he told JNS.

Under Trump, Soleimani was eliminated. Another 4 years will see Iran weak again

REGRETTABLY, DURING the Obama and Biden administrations, the Islamic Republic reinvigorated its cycle of fire and terror. It aligned with Russia in the conflict in Ukraine and played a crucial role in the terrorist attacks in Gaza against Israel, instigating actions from Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Popular Mobilization Forces. The Islamic Republic fears Trump’s possible return.

Trump knows that the Islamic Republic does not represent the people of Iran. They have only one popular, legitimate, and trustworthy representative and that is Prince Reza Pahlavi, who believes in friendship with Israel, the United States, and the West. Some of Trump’s advisers have met with the prince in Washington. Perhaps Trump and the CIA will support regime change in Tehran. Although the Islamic Republic has repeatedly called for Trump’s execution and death on television, this issue was not taken seriously during Biden’s tenure.

Rather, Biden paid attention to the mullahs’ superstitions. On May 2, 2022, during President Joe Biden’s speech at a reception celebrating eid al-fitr. he remarked, “I didn’t understand the concept of the ‘hidden imam’... so I sought guidance and enlisted the expertise of a distinguished Islamic studies professor to collaborate with me.” The hidden imam is a theological notion within Shia Islam and does not possess an external, tangible presence, being a construct tied to Shia religious history. [The hidden imam is believed to have been born but disappeared, and will remain hidden until he reappears to bring justice to the world at the end of time, a doctrine known as “the occultation.”] The Islamic caliphate regime claims to be sustaining the authority of the hidden imam until an alleged reappearance. Tragically, advocates of Khomeini, such as the terrorists of Fadā’iyān-e Islam, brutally targeted intellectuals like Ahmad Kasravi who dared to label this contemporary imam as counterfeit (March 11, 1946).

Trump might, with the help of the CIA, realize that the mullahs commit murder based on these superstitions – and not repeat Carter’s 1979 mistake in sanctifying a savage mullah as a divine representative on Earth.

The flawed cycle of Washington-Tehran relations after 1979 must change if the world in the 21st century seeks stability and peace.

Ruthie Blum: ‘If only we had known’

It’s the neighbors’ reactions that the network didn’t realize it was exposing as equally vile. What came across in the report was the mind frame of Gazans, even those not affiliated with Hamas. Take Abu Muhammad el Tahrawi, for instance.

El Tahrawi described Dr. Aljamal as “a pious man,” one who “leads the prayer, then goes back to his home. He didn’t mix with people, didn’t complain about other people, and no one complained about him. He was a man who minded his own business.”

Expressing surprise that Aljamal had been holding hostages in his home, el Tahrawi told CNN, “Had we known, had he told us, we would have taken safety precautions, hide or move [sic] to somewhere else.”

Wow. One might have expected him to say that if he and others in the community had been aware of hostages in their midst, they would have informed Israeli authorities or tried to help the innocent victims in some other way.

But, no. El Tahrawi was referring to the danger of being in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli heroes who swooped into Nuseirat and saved Kozlov, Jan, Ziv and Argamani.

Which brings us to Argamani’s jailers. According to CNN, “local people were reluctant to share many details about [the Abu Nar] family, but they did express surprise and concern that a hostage had been held in their midst.”

Calling Abu Nar “ordinary” and a “normal man,” Khalil al-Kahlot, a civil servant in Gaza, said, “He had young children at home. No one would expect him to hold a hostage like this, in homes and among people.”

Another neighbor, this one anonymous, added, “They are people in Hamas, but we did not know that. If we had known there was something there, no one would have stayed in the area.”

Again, not an ounce of sympathy for the hostages—only distress at not having been told in time to relocate. In this context, it’s worth reiterating what I wrote a mere four days before “Operation Arnon” in Nuseirat (renamed after National Counterterrorism Unit Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, who was killed while leading the mission):

“[I]t’s a fact that only terrorists captured and interrogated by the Israel Security Agency have provided information on the whereabouts of hostages. No Gazan ‘civilians’ have come forward to do so voluntarily. The argument that they fear Hamas repercussions simply doesn’t cut it anymore, however. Even in Nazi Germany there were citizens who risked their lives to do the conscionable thing. Yad Vashem created a special title for such gentiles—The Righteous Among the Nations—who protected Jews at great peril to themselves.”

One paragraph of the ICJ ruling says:

67. Following an increase in acts of violence from the West Bank, in the early 2000s Israel began building a “continuous fence” (hereinafter the “wall”) largely in the West Bank and East Jerusalem...

Why would the ICJ say a fence is a wall?

For the answer, we look at the original 2004 ICJ ruling against the separation barrier:

67. As explained in paragraph 82 below, the "wall" in question is a complex construction, so that that term cannot be understood in a limited physical sense. However, the other terms used, either by Israel ("fence") or by the Secretary-General ("barrier"), are no more accurate if understood in the physical sense. In this Opinion, the Court has therefore chosen to use the terminology employed by the General Assembly.

Paragraph 82 does not clear things up:

82. According to l.he description in the report and the Written Statement of the Secretai-y-General, the works planned or completed have resulted or will resuli: in a complex consisting essentially of:
(1) a fence with electronic sensors;
(2) a ditch (up to 4 :metres deep);
(3) a two-lane asphalt patrol road;
(4) a trace road (a strip of sand smoothed to detect footprints) running parallel to the fence;
(5) a stack of six coils of barbed wire marking the perimeter of the complex.
The complex has a width of 50 to 70 metres, increasing to as much as 100 metres in some places. "Depth barriers" may be added to these works.

So a small part was a wall, most of it was a fence along with other supporting features to make it more difficult to cross. (Over time, Israel has indeed replaced more of the fence with a wall as the fence was constantly breached.)

"Barrier" seems more accurate than either "wall" or "fence," but the ICJ adopted the UN's biased language as the way to refer to it, effectively enshrining anti-Israel bias in its decision. After all, a "wall" evokes draconian measures to limit human rights, like the Berlin Wall.

The ICJ did the same thing, as we've seen, with the term "Occupied Palestinian Territory" that is employs in last week's decision. Gaza was not occupied before Israel's response to October 7, but the UN has called it all "oPT" since the 1990s, so the ICJ - instead of correcting the nomenclature - adopted it and then justified it after the fact.

Even the very question the ICJ was tasked to advise on was loaded with anti-Israel bias baked in.

What are the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and from its adoption of related discriminatory legislation and measures?

The ICJ should be objective and reject this biased language across the board. Instead, it adopts it.

Which is yet another reason this is a kangaroo court.

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Friday's ICJ ruling claims that Israel is violating the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) because it treats Palestinians and Israelis who live in the territories differently:

They accurately quote Article 3 of CERD:

States Parties particularly condemn racial segregation and apartheid and undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of this nature in territories under their jurisdiction.

They rule that Israel is violating CERD:

The Court observes that Israel’s legislation and measures impose and serve to maintain a near-complete separation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem between the settler and Palestinian communities. For this reason, the Court considers that Israel’s legislation and measures constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD.

But they ignore the part of CERD that allows Israel to treat Palestinians and Israelis differently, in Article 1:

This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens.

Israel allowed to treat citizens differently from non-citizens. Every nation does the same, treating citizens and non-citizens differently under the law (voting, passports, army recruitment.) Citizens have rights and responsibilities that non-citizens do not have.

Furthermore, there are Israeli Arab citizens who live across the Green Line, even in "settlements" outside Jerusalem, and they are treated the same as Israeli Jews. In some ways, they have more legal rights than Israeli Jews do, since they may buy homes in Area A where Jews are forbidden to enter. They prove that there is no racial discrimination in the West Bank - the only discrimination is the type that CERD explicitly allows, that between citizens and non-citizens.

The ICJ, by deliberately ignoring the very first article of CERD, proves that it has no interest in the actual law.

It's bad enough when an NGO like Human Rights Watch selectively quotes international conventions to prove their predetermined point.

The ICJ is supposed to be above that.

This one section proves that it is just as biased, just as much of a propaganda organ, as every other anti-Israel organization. And it proves that any decision it renders about Israel is not worth the paper it is written on.

------

Much of the ICJ argument relies on mentioning that a small number of "settlers" are "non-Israeli Jews" who receive some of the same benefits as Israelis in Judea and Samaria. and it seems to try to use them as proof that Israel is engaged in racial discrimination. However, nations have much latitude in how they treat different classes of non-citizens, including prospective citizens, often giving them rights that other non-citizens like tourists do not get. On the other side, Palestinian Arabs who work in Israel receive some of the benefits of citizens, like minimum wage and other work benefits. Flatly calling these policies "discrimination" under CERD is false and intentionally misleading.

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A silver lining in the ICJ: "Uti possidetis juris" invoked in dissent saying Israel has legal rights to the territories

In 2016, legal scholars Abraham (Avi) Bell and Eugene Kontorovich published a paper in the Arizona Law Review arguing that Israel has the presumptive legal right to the West Bank and Gaza based on the well-known legal principle of uti possidetis juris.

Briefly, uti possidetis juris is a principle, accepted by everyone as part of customary international law, that maintains existing territorial boundaries when a state achieves independence. Bell and Kontorovich argued that since Israel was the only state to emerge in 1948, and the international community never accepted that any other nation (Jordan and Egypt) held legal title on the West Bank and Gaza, that Israel held the best legal claims to those territories under international law unless it voluntarily gave those claims up.

While the argument sounds convincing, I am not a legal expert. As with other legal arguments given by Zionists and Israel - such as the argument that the League of Nations gave legal rights to the Jews of the entire territory of Palestine - I always wonder whether they hold water in the larger community of international law scholars. How much of these arguments are sound and how much of them only appears that way to me as a Zionist myself? After all, no one seems to have even considered applying uti possidetis juris to the disputed territories before 2016 even though hundreds of articles had been written on the topic of Israel's legal borders in the 49 years before Bell and Kontorovich's article.

In her dissenting opinion of the ICJ ruling saying Israel's "occupation" was "illegal," ICJ Vice President Julia Sebutinde of Uganda writes that uti possidetis juris is most definitely a factor - and, arguably, the factor - in determining who has legal rights over the territories.

70. Under international law there are several principles upon which legally enforceable borders are established, including effective control, historical title, and treaties. Uti possidetis juris is one of the main principles of customary international law intended to ensure stability, certainty and continuity in the demarcation of territorial boundaries of States emerging from decolonization or mandates such as the British Mandatory Palestine. In effect, the principle of uti possidetis juris transforms the colonial and administrative lines existing at the moment of birth of the new State into national borders. The principle applies to the State, as it is “at the moment of independence”, i.e. to the “photograph” of the territorial situation existing then. As the Court explained in the Burkina Faso/Republic of Mali case, the doctrine ensures that:
“By becoming independent, [the] new State acquires sovereignty with the territorial base and boundaries left to it by the [administrative boundaries of the] colonial power . . . [The principle of uti possidetis juris] applies to the State as it is [at that moment of independence], i.e., to the ‘photograph’ of the territorial situation then existing. The principle of uti possidetis [juris] freezes the territorial title; it stops the clock."

...72. As stated above, when Britain terminated its stewardship over what was left of the Mandate for Palestine in 194777, according to the principle of uti possidetis juris, the administrative boundaries of the Mandate for Palestine on 14 May 1948 became the borders of the independent State of Israel (the only State to emerge from Mandatory Palestine at the time of Britain’s withdrawal).

...73. Israel’s independence would thus appear to fall squarely within the bounds of circumstances that trigger the principle of uti possidetis juris. Applying the rule would appear to dictate that Israel’s borders are those of the Palestine Mandate that preceded it, except where otherwise agreed upon by Israel and its relevant neighbours. Indeed, Israel’s peace treaties with neighbouring States to date — with Egypt and Jordan — appear to reinforce it. These treaties ratify borders between Israel and its neighbours explicitly based on the boundaries of the British Mandate of Palestine. Likewise, in demarcating the so-called “Blue Line” between Israel and Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations Secretary General relied upon the boundaries of the British Mandate of Palestine79. Given the location of the borders of the Mandate of Palestine, applying the doctrine of uti possidetis juris to Israel would mean that Israel has territorial sovereignty over all the disputed areas of Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, except to the degree that Israel has voluntarily yielded sovereignty since its independence. This conclusion stands in opposition to the widely espoused position that international law gives Israel little or no sovereign claim to these areas

By using the argument of uti possidetis juris in her dissent, Sebutinde has elevated it in respect to determining the legal borders of Israel. The argument has been largely ignored since the publication of the paper, but Sebutinde ensures that it is now part of the conversation. And there is nothing on the ICJ website that disagrees with it.

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I can only find one serious objection to this argument, written by Ariel Zemach in Fordham International Law Journal in 2019. where he argues that in this case (unlike every other of uti possidetis juris,) the Palestinian right to self-determination trumps the principle because they formed a majority of the population of British Mandate Palestine in 1948. I can see that this argument has emotional weight, but I do not see how it has legal weight; it is a sui generis situation so there is no other precedent for overriding uti possidetis juris with a different principle. (One can counter-argue that if it wasn't for British anti-Jewish policy, Jews could easily have been the majority of Palestine as they would have fled there from Europe during the Holocaust if they could have. Their rights to self-determination should not be limited by an arbitrary and antisemitic immigration policy that contradicted the League of Nations.)

And even Zemach concludes that the principle of self-determination has nothing to do with the legal determination of national borders. "The bulk of the international community recognizes a Palestinian entitlement to the whole of the West Bank, but because of the lack of Palestinian possession of this territory—a corollary of the status of the West Bank as an occupied territory—such international recognition carries no constitutive effect," he concludes. So while he might disagree with Sebutinde, he would also disagree with the majority ICJ claim that the entire West Bank is presumptively "Palestinian."

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From the New York Times:

The Israeli bombing of a vital Yemeni port controlled by the Houthi militia is not expected to deter the group from further attacks but is likely to deepen human suffering in Yemen, regional experts said.

Yemeni scholars and former American officials who study the country said that the Israeli strikes would do little harm to the Houthis. Instead, they said, the attack was likely to exacerbate suffering in Yemen, which is experiencing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises after a decade of war.

“The target of the strike does more to hurt the average Yemeni than the Houthis’ ability to launch attacks on the Red Sea or Israel,” said Adam Clements, a retired U.S. Army attaché for Yemen.

The article quotes other "experts" who describe how the airstrikes will hurt civilians and will not deter the Houthis.

It is an old journalistic trick, and one that news editors keep using - because it works.

First determine the editorial policy towards an event. Then find "experts" to support that position.

It gives the appearance of journalism, but it is the opposite. It is an editorial disguised as journalism.

I have yet to see a single article mention the last time Israel attacked the port of an enemy, and its effectiveness. Without knowledge of that earlier incident, all the analysis in the world is useless.

In 2020, Israel reportedly launched a devastating cyber-attack on Iran's Shahid Rajaee port in response to a failed Iranian cyber-attack to poison Israel's water infrastructure.

For days, the port was inactive. Hundreds of commercial trucks were stuck on the roads to the port scores of ships could not unload their goods and were forced to wait in line in the Persian Gulf to dock there.

It was a well-calibrated attack. It did not cripple Iran. which depends on sea traffic in order to survive, but it showed that Israel could easily have done that if it wanted to. It sent a strong message to the Iranian regime not to try to mount a similar cyberattack on Israel again.

At the time, the New York Times quoted an 'expert" as well: "[A]ccording to one intelligence assessment, the Revolutionary Guards will respond by attacking Israel again," the NYT wrote.

Four years later, we are not aware of any similar Iranian attempt since then. Israel's threat to Iran's economy worked.

The "experts" were wrong.

The Saturday attack on Hudayah was as at least as much a message to Iran as it was to the Houthis. Any self-proclaimed expert that doesn't realize this simple fact, and who doesn't reference the cyberattack on Shahid Rujaee, is not an expert at all.

The so-called experts are probably correct that the Houthis, who are insanely antisemitic to the point that cursing Jews is one of the four major tenets listed on their flag and one of the others is "death to Israel," would not be deterred by a strike on their combined military/commercial port at Hudaydah. They don't care if their own people suffer; on the contrary, like Hamas, the Houthis are basing their military strategy on the idea that their enemies care more about their own civilians than they do. But they will listen to Iran, and Iran heard the Israeli message that the next attack might not be towards Yemen but against their sponsors in Iran itself.

You know what hasn't deterred the Houthis? Six months of restrained US and Western activity in the Indian Ocean meant to protect shipping to the Persian Gulf. The allis deliberately avoided attacking Hudaydah because of its potential impact on civilians in Yemen. And as a result, the Houthis could continue to import weapons from Iran with impunity.

Israel's attack changed the equation. It is too early to know whether it will be successful or not, but clearly the Western response so far - while stopping scores of rockets and drones towards Israel and other targets - has not deterred the Houthis one bit.

One other important point about the New York Times pseudo-analysis: it supports human shielding as a tactic by Hamas and the Houthis. after all, the article is saying, anything that hurts civilians must be avoided at all costs. Every one of the analysts quoted emphasized the potential of the port attack hurting innocent Yemeni civilians. The media is saying that as long as terrorists use civilians to protect their own military assets, they should be untouchable.

This is an immoral position. And until the media understands and reports on the cynicism behind these decisions by Islamic terrorists to endanger their own people, and place the blame on their deaths squarely on the terrorists and not on those defending themselves from terrorists, the media is on the terrorists' side.

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Egyptians freaking out over a nursing student dancing at her graduation ceremony

Egypt's El Balad reports:

Indecent dancing at the Faculty of Nursing in Ismailia

An account on TikTok posted a video of a girl dancing in a provocative manner, which caused an uproar in Egypt, prompting it to be deleted later.

The girl, Farah Saeed, appeared in a video clip dancing at her graduation ceremony at the Faculty of Nursing at the Suez Canal Academy for Advanced Sciences in Ismailia, where she was criticized and accused of provocative and inappropriate dancing among her fellow young men, which caused a crisis for the girl that prompted her and her mother to respond to these accusations.

Farah Saeed said that she was overwhelmed with happiness for coming in first in her class, graduating, and achieving her dream that was the culmination of her mother’s hardship and fatigue in order to reach this moment. She did not imagine that the video clip would spread on various social media sites in this way, and she was shocked when she read the comments, some of which contained insults, slander, and attacks on her reputation and honor, contrary to her reality.

Videos of the dance show that she is dressed modestly and she is simply very happy. But now she and her mother are being subject to insults throughout Egypt.

If Saeed would threaten to inject Jewish patients with poison, she would be hailed as a hero.

But dancing?

Egyptians have to draw the line somewhere.

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07/21 Links: Biden out, endorses Kamala; Natasha Hausdorff: Anti-Israel lawfare has reached a dangerous new low; BBC deliberately deceives with dog attack story

From Ian:

David Collier: Unforgivable: BBC deliberately deceives with dog attack story

Last week the BBC ran a story about a young man with Down’s syndrome in Gaza who was they said was mauled and ‘left to die’ by the IDF.

How does the BBC know this story is true? Because the mother told them it was.

Digging into the story unravelled the truth – and it is as shocking, as it is extreme. The BBC not only provided cover for Hamas – whitewashing a terrorist family – putting a highly distorted and edited narrative online – and blaming the death of a Hamas human shield on Israel – the BBC journos then deliberately butchered an IDF statement to make sure the truth was never told.

The problematic journo
My first real suspicions about the article were raised by the involvement of BBC Journalist Haneen Abdeen. She was one of the three journalists involved in creating the article and the only native Arabic speaker. These situations create a massive agency problem for the BBC, and one that they apparently remain oblivious to. The other two journalists (Fergal Keane and Alice Doyard) become dependent on the integrity and motivations of a single Palestinian journalist – and this skews the output in favour of an anti-Israel position from the beginning. Abdeen has even run and promoted anti-Israel events – so she can hardly be considered an impartial journalist. Abdeen also has form, and in November she was the Arabic speaking BBC Journalist that helped put together an entirely fake story (100% junk) that platformed a terrorist supporter and promoted a bunch of lies about trapped young footballers.

Her involvement as the lead Arabic speaker suggests that the BBC never honestly sought evidence to rigorously challenge the story they promoted.

The witnesses and probable cause
Mohammed Bahr had Down’s syndrome. His family home was in a combat zone and was raided by the IDF on the 2/3 July.

The first mention of Mohammed online comes from his brother Mekael at 8pm on July 3. He was not a witness – but he tells the story of the IDF arresting his two brothers (Adam and Saif) at a family home in the east of Al-Shujaia neighbourhood near Gaza City. Only after letting us know about his arrested brothers, and telling us his mother, sisters, and other ‘women of the family’ were there – does he tell us that another brother, Mohammed, was injured by a dog. This post is accompanied by pictures of his brothers and another image of Mohammed sitting alone by a bed.

But here is the thing. The person who introduced Mohammed to the world – Mekael Bahr- works for Islamic Jihad. He is a journo at their TV station, ‘Palestine Today’. He is a paid terrorist-supporting propagandist. Here is Mekael given VIP press treatment at the 29th anniversary celebration of the Islamic Jihad. He posted the footage on his Instagram. alongside hashtags praising ‘Jihad’.

Then there is the face of the BBC article, the mother Nabeel Al Yazji. Nabeel was a witness to what happened. I tracked down her FB account. It turns out her husband was killed in 2002 and buried in Hamas colours:

The BBC article even ackowledges she is a widow (did they not bother to check)? Which means the BBC’s key witness was the wife of a Hamas terrorist. The third key voice was a sister, ‘Sarah’. She was also in the home and a witness to the event. Her timeline is FULL of glorification of violence, murderous terrorism and the adoration of Hamas officials.

We are told of two brothers who were arrested in the house by the IDF (Saif and Adam). The Facebook timeline of one of them, Adam, carries numerous images of weapons. And this is him on the right in this image:

All this immediately creates TWO massive problems with the BBC article
1. Context. There was ample information available online to show that this house, this family, would rightly be considered a family of terrorists. There was EVERY reason to treat this house as a military target – and the use of dogs as a way of mitigating risk – becomes a clear and obvious military strategy. The article implies (lying through omission) that the IDF randomly used dogs against a peaceful civilian family. This is a false image and in the circumstances it is a highly misleading and demonising one. 2. Nobody is denying Mohammed was bitten by a dog – but the details and the narrative of the event and what followed are dependent on the honesty of the witnesses. This is a family that literally works with Islamic Jihad propaganda channels and has a history of supporting Hamas and providing fighters for the ’cause’. How can the BBC rely at all on what they are being told?

Where did BBC 'special correspondent' Fergal Keane get his latest Gaza story?

Did Fergal Keane and his team get this story from the ‘Middle East Eye’ contributor Maha Husseini who, according to one of her colleagues was “the first journalist to break this horrible story” and whose own article is illustrated with the same main photograph as that appearing in the BBC’s report? Given the lack of transparency on the BBC’s part regarding the sources of stories it publishes about the Gaza Strip and its insistence on not identifying the ‘freelancers’ presumably paid with licence fee funding, it is of course impossible to say.

What we do know based on the BBC’s past record is that despite the fact that Hamas is a proscribed organisation in the UK, the corporation has in the past used contributions from employees of the clearly partial and politically motivated Hamas-linked NGO ‘Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’ which was founded and is headed by a person who publicly lauded Hamas’ October 7th atrocities.

An alternative explanation is of course that Keane and his team are simply of the opinion that content put out by a partisan, Muslim Brotherhood supporting media outlet with ties to the regime which hosts and has funded the Hamas terrorist organisation is worth copying – despite their inability to fact check and verify such content.

US President Joe Biden withdraws from presidential race, endorses Kamala Harris

US President Joe Biden announced in a post on X that he will be exiting the race for president.

This comes amid weeks of speculation about Biden's health and increasing pressure from the Democratic Party to withdraw.

In the statement to X, published on Sunday, he said, "I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."

"I will speak to the Nation later this week in more detail about my decision."

In his statement, Biden thanked Vice President Kamala Harris and expressed his "heartfelt appreciation for the American people for the faith and trust you have placed in me."

"We just have to remember we are the United States of America," his statement concluded.

It was unclear whether other senior Democrats would challenge Harris for the party's nomination, who was widely seen as the pick for many party officials - or whether the party itself would choose to open the field for nominations.

The president later posted "My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best decision I’ve made. Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year. Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this."

Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. What now?

How does this impact the Democratic Party?

This decision by Biden could significantly shift the already fraught dynamics in the Democratic Party, within which several prominent voices had already been calling for Biden to step down from the race before the announcement.

In the past, potential candidates within the party would begin positioning themselves for a presidential run, leading to a competitive primary season. However, we are already quite close to the elections, so that may not be true. A candidate will most likely be announced very soon.

Is Biden becoming a lame duck?
A president becomes a lame duck after a successor is elected, during which the outgoing president and the president-elect typically initiate the transition of power.

While no new president has been elected yet, Biden is no longer in the race, so he may very well take on that title sooner rather than later. It represents a significant waning in his influence. Has this happened before?

This is not the first time a US president has decided not to rerun for office. In 1849, President James K. Polk chose not to run for a second term.

President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election in 1968 amidst the Vietnam War and domestic turmoil.

Antisemitic tropes dominate Turkish dramas; they even claim Jews controlled the crusades

Last week I reported on two dramatic series from Turkey that both cast Theodor Herzl in a role of the head Jew that aims to destroy the Ottoman Empire.

Turkpress reports on other such series that include antisemitic tropes of Jews controlling the world's money - even as far back as the Crusades.

A Jewish character named Ephraim in a drama about Saladin,"Conqueror of Jerusalem," tries to establish a Jewish kingdom extending from the Nile to the Euphrates with Jerusalem as its capital. He uses the influence of money to control the Crusaders in Jerusalem, Ashkelon, and in Gaza, and clearly reveals the secret to his follower Simon by also showing him gold chests. He has great influence over the Crusader queen of Jerusalem and the Crusader leaders, who in real life murdered or tried to convert every Jews they came across.

In another series called "Barbaros Hayreddin," a woman named Luna is one of the Jewish merchants in Istanbul who has influence with Jewish families who form the backbone of the world’s financial world. She is one of the children of forty bankers in the world who control all the world's money, and are moved by the Jewish leaders or their supreme council to control the Christian West and end the Islamic Caliphate during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent.

The idea of Jews controlling the world's money by the Jews appeared in any other Turkish historical dramas. In "Ertugrul," they are Jewish merchants present throughout the Abbasid state, controlling some of the Caliphate palaces in the Levant, controlling the Muslim trade, and participating in schemes to overthrow major political leaders.

The article lists other series with the same theme.

Anyone who pretends that Turkey has no antisemitism is either ignorant or delusional.

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In this summer's Commentary magazine, Arthur Herman writes, "China and Artificial Intelligence: The Cold War We’re Not Fighting."

It describes how much China is investing in artificial intelligence - and for what purposes.

It is the most frightening article I have read in a long time. While it is not specifically about Israel, Israel is affected as well as the entire Western world - and Western civilization.

In short, China is planning to use AI to achieve global hegemony. And the West is not doing nearly enough to stop it.

Even as anti-AI activists in the U.S.—among them some of the technology’s original innovators—were calling for a moratorium on research a year ago, China was paving the way toward an AI-dominated future none of us wants. For the past seven years, China has been moving ahead with its plans to become the world’s AI superpower. This includes building the next high-tech industrial revolution for victory on the battlefield and creating a total surveillance multiverse.

China is ramping up AI investment, research, and entrepreneurship on a historic scale. Its generative AI spending is set to reach 33 percent of the world’s AI investment by 2027, up from 4.6 percent in 2022. Those investments will probably reach $13 billion by then, according to a new report from research firm IDC.

What would China do with AI?

Hudson Institute scholar Koichiro Takagi sees the Chinese military’s interest in AI research and applications centering on four main areas (bearing in mind that under Chinese law, anything that private companies develop in AI automatically belongs to the People’s Liberation Army).

One area is the autonomy of unmanned weapons, including the development of drone swarms, about which more later.

The second is processing large amounts of information through machine learning. For example, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is building a network of unmanned weapons and undersea sensors in the waters surrounding China to gather data it can analyze with AI/ML.

The third is using AI to speed up military decision-making, including what’s called “strategic reasoning.” AI can sift through multiple options for actions on multiple fronts and domains to arrive at an optimal solution—something that would take a human-led council of war hours, even days, to achieve.

Fourth is the military’s interest in cognitive warfare, or actively influencing the brain and neurological systems of their human opponents, to shape the enemy’s will to fight or subdue an opponent without a fight. (The most science-fictional of the four, it is the one about which we have reason to be skeptical, at least for the present.)

But probably the most striking and notorious developments within the Chinese AI monolith today are AI’s applications for the total surveillance state.

China is surging ahead on facial recognition, using it to monitor not only Uighurs but every Chinese citizen. Chinese made cameras and communications equipment are used worldwide; they use them to monitor Chinese dissidents but also, potentially, the entire world.

And it gets even worse:

In 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences He Fuchu insisted that biotechnology will become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense. Since then, Fuchu has become vice president of the Academy of Military Sciences, which leads China’s military science enterprise.

Zhang Shibo, a retired general and former president of the National Defense University, has named biology as one of seven “new domains of warfare.” In the wake of Covid and the possibility that the virus in the Wuhan lab was being developed for biowarfare purposes, these matters need to be taken very seriously.

In all these cases, AI applications can be useful for not only identifying but manipulating and attacking an entire category of persons or groups through targeted viruses and diseases. This is because, at the most basic biological level, DNA itself is nothing more than data—data that can be exploited using AI and machine learning.

In that sense, the combination of China’s earlier interest in biotech and its obsession with advancing artificial intelligence may allow China’s military and intelligence services to develop comprehensive digital profiles of specific individuals, nations, and races—a form of high-tech racial profiling that a Himmler or a Mengele might have only dreamed about. By targeting specific weaknesses within a population’s genomic makeup, it might be possible to develop weapons that could harm a specific subpopulation or race.

Even more frightening, scientists at the Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology are using mouse embryos to develop ways to provide key growth information to an AI caretaker, which can then rank the embryos in terms of overall health and genetic potential—enabling researchers to manipulate the growth of embryos to achieve optimal results. In short, the Chinese vision of AI includes a new paradigm for genetic engineering, conducting eugenics on a massive high-tech scale.

This is an unprecedented threat to the West.

What can we do to defend ourselves?

The article falls short on that count, only mentioning generalities, saying "the United States needs to develop an overall AI strategy that aims not just at countering China’s moves in AI but advancing American AI supremacy."

That's good as far as it goes, but it doesn't deal with the problem now.

I am not an AI expert, but it seems to me that there are some tactics that can - and indeed, must - be done today.

AI depends on the quality of the data that it is trained on. I use AI to create most of my cartoons, but the underlying data being out of date means that when I ask for a drawing of an editor speaking to a newsroom, invariably both the editor and the reporters are tie-wearing white males that one would see in 1940s movies about newspapers, and do not resemble newsrooms of today at all.

The AI algorithm works exactly as it should. But its input data is bad.

The old computer adage of "garbage in, garbage out" applies to AI as much as to every other program. To disrupt the Chinese surveillance state, for example, Western state hackers should be breaking into Chinese databases and modifying the oceans of data the AI is using. For example, changing the faces of people the Chinese consider enemies to include many faces of Chinese government officials. Poison the data so that the entire enterprise is unreliable.

Old-school hacking is also necessary to understand Chinese strategy. A trove of leaked documents earlier this year revealed a great deal of information about the extent and methodology of Chinese surveillance, and this sort of thing needs to happen more often. Here is where Israel can contribute a great deal, although it requires more expertise on Chinese thinking than Israel probably has now.

Similarly, injecting our own backdoors into Chinese software libraries and source code now can pay dividends later. Supply-chain attacks are effective in both the physical and cyber spaces.

Like it or not, AI is the future. We need to take advantage of current Western AI superiority to come up with better cyberdefenses and better cyber-offenses to not only stay ahead of the Chinese threat but also to hamper it.

The Chinese already invest a lot of resources into infiltrating Western technology companies and universities to steal the latest innovations. Not only does the West need to do a better job monitoring the spies, but it should be doing the same to Chinese military and commercial AI researchers, both for intelligence and potentially for sabotage. In retrospect, the US government actions against Israel's Pegasus spyware were shortsighted - because technology like that, which can turn phones into spy devices, are what is needed to stay ahead of the enemy.

Of course, major companies like Microsoft and Amazon must do a better job in defending themselves from not only today's attacks but from novel attacks coming that are created or improved by AI. World governments are depending on these companies to protect their own data, and as we've seen just this past week, even the most advanced software companies can screw up and cause massive outages. Here is another area Israel, as a cybersecurity leader, can be used effectively. There is a reason Google is about to pay a record amount for a relatively new Israeli cloud cybersecurity company.

The cognitive warfare component is not as science-fictional as the article implies. We already have years of data on how nation-states have manipulated - or failed to manipulate - public and political leaders' opinions. An AI crafted social media campaign is certainly possible, and we are not far from an AI-created campaigns of fomenting antisemitism or anti-American feelings in Europe and Africa, for example. Perhaps it is already happening. The West needs to do the same to increase discontent within China (and Iran, Russia and North Korea), and AI can brainstorm ways to do that.

Western AI needs to be ahead of Chinese AI even in doing evil things like DNA hacking (or building an undetectable suitcase nuclear bomb.) We will need AI to come up with ways to defend against these, but we will also need AI to even identify them before they happen. Laws that protect us from the negative repercussions of AI can also hamper our ability to combat it, and we need to carve out carefully created exceptions to not subvert human rights while being able to anticipate and if necessary attack the enemy in ways we cannot even imagine. It is scary, but not as scary as the alternative of unchecked Chinese dominance in the field.

The war is happening now. We need to treat it as such.

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