Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Arabic memes mocking Hezbollah after pager attack

Here are some of the memes I'm seeing in Arabic social media.

This is very important, since Arab culture is so frightened of shame, Hezbollah losing respect is a big deal.

Text autotranslated.

An entire music video:

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Human Rights Watch again beclowns itself in its claim that Israel violated the prohibition of booby-traps

Here is Human Rights Watch's response to the incredible attack on Hezbollah's pagers:

Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.

HRW clearly employs teams of corrupt international law experts to twist the law in such a way.

Communications devices used by an armed group are valid military targets.

This is not in dispute. This is international law. Israel accepts the definition of a military objective from Article 52(2) Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, "Insofar as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage."

Beyond the clear success of directly attacking the devices, Israel also accomplished the destruction of two entire military communications networks - the pager network and the "walkie talkie" network. Hezbollah is no longer using those networks. This is as clear a military target as one can imagine.

HRW doesn't mention these facts because HRW is not interested in international law - it is only interested in twisting international law as a weapon to attack Israel.

What about their main point that booby traps are themselves prohibited?

HRW's own language proves how absurd their interpretation of the law is. In 2024 in Lebanon, pagers and bulky radio transceivers are not "associated with normal civilian daily use" - almost no civilians use them and none of those used by civilians were targeted.

The actual Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices paragraph 7(2), when you squint a certain way, makes it appear that booby-trapping pagers is illegal: "It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material."

However, the AR-924 pager device was not specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material. It existed for years before this attack and was sold worldwide. Explosive materials were added to the device after its original design and manufacture, from all accounts so far. Hezbollah obviously chose to purchase them before anyone tampered with them.

But beyond that, the previous paragraph 7(1) of the convention gives a clue as to what the authors intended with this rule. It lists civilian objects that must never be booby-trapped, like human bodies, animals, medical equipment and food. But this one entry in the list makes the intention of the law clear: "kitchen utensils or appliances except in military establishments, military locations or military supply depots."

Innocuous objects that are used for even indirect military purposes, like kitchen utensils, may be booby trapped under this convention.

If that is true, then certainly pagers whose entire purpose is directly for military communications are allowed to be booby-trapped. The only people carrying the pagers are themselves part of Hezbollah.

What about the claim that Hezbollah has non-military members who would be considered civilians and exploding their pagers would be prohibited?

Hezbollah itself emphatically refuses to distinguish between its military and civilian functions. "We don't have a military wing and a political one; we don't have Hezbollah on one hand and the resistance party on the other...Every element of Hezbollah, from commanders to members as well as our various capabilities, are in the service of the resistance, and we have nothing but the resistance as a priority," its Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem said.

In Hezbollah's own self-definition, every member is considered support personnel for their "resistance," meaning that they are just as much targets as any support personnel for any army would be, such as cooks, drivers, maintenance workers, supply quartermasters and clerks.

Even though Israel haters are scrambling to find reasons to declare the attacks to be illegal, they do not have a leg to stand on.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted this on Wednesday:

Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon detonated thousands of handheld devices across of a slew of public spaces, seriously injuring and killing innocent civilians.

This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict.

Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.

I had already anticipated that anti-Israel morons would take that avenue of attack on Tuesday, as I tweeted then. Here is a slight expansion of that mini-essay.

Since there are already armchair "international law experts" pretending that the pager attack is a violation of international humanitarian law, it is perhaps the most legal large scale attack in history against people hiding amongst civilians.

The principle of distinction says that belligerents must distinguish between combatants and protected civilians. Only Hezbollah operatives would have the pagers, no one else. Having one proves you are a militant. They are the cyber equivalents of uniforms.

The principle of proportionality says that any harm to civilians must be proportional to the military advantage gained from the attack. The explosives were tiny - the vast majority didn't kill even the people carrying them.

From all appearances, the pagers themselves were purposefully chosen by Hezbollah to be battle ready. They were especially hardened (assuming they were the Apollo AR-924.) Their entire purpose was military communication for a terror army. The pagers themselves were not civilian objects - they were military objectives on their own.

The question for the fake "experts" and "human rights professionals" like AOC is the same as always: what could Israel have done to achieve a valid, legal military objective better than it did? With fewer injuries to civilians?

As always, they can never answer that question except for insisting that Israel should just surrender and let the terrorists have the right to murder Jews.

Hezbollah has shot hundreds of rockets at Israel, killed many, and tens of thousands of Israelis had to evacuate their homes. This is a war. Israel just managed to sideline hundreds of fighters in an instant with close to zero collateral damage.

Nobody could adhere to the laws of armed conflict better than Israel (apparently) did this week. Saying it is a violation of IHL is the exact opposite of the truth - no one has ever mounted an attack that neutralized so many of the enemy in the middle of civilian areas, with almost no civilian casualties, in the history of warfare.

AOC is following the antisemitic playbook. Declare everything Israel does as illegal, and then make everyone think it must be true by calling for an investigation into the nonexistent crime.

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

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09/18 Links Pt2: An Executive Order that Targets Jews; International donors are complicit in Hamas’ presence in Gaza – and key to its demise

From Ian:

An Executive Order that Targets Jews

The sanctions are being imposed on people who are neither settlers nor violent. The list of sanctioned entities includes Tsav 9, an organization that engages in nonviolent protest to prevent humanitarian aid from being captured by Hamas. You’d think that this administration, or any U.S. government, would have exactly the same goal: It can’t be a good idea to let Hamas capture humanitarian aid, because we know—as reported by Israeli TV again recently—that Hamas sells the aid, at exorbitant prices, to the Gazans to whom it’s directed, and then uses that money to fund Hamas terror operations.

The Israelis who are trying to right this obvious wrong are engaging in exactly the kind of protests we see all the time. When such tactics were used to protest judicial reforms, President Biden praised the riots as an “enduring protest movement that is demonstrating the vibrancy of Israel’s democracy.”

But the same tactics deployed by Israeli Jews against Hamas get a different response, and this administration is committed to stopping them even if they take place entirely in Israel, entirely among Israelis and are entirely nonviolent. What does this mean in practice? It means that the organization Tsav 9 and one of its organizers, a mother of eight living in a development town in Southern Israel, have been debanked.

As shocking as it is, this Executive Order didn’t come out of nowhere: Within weeks of President Obama’s first inauguration, IRS and State Department officials began considering whether they could deny or revoke tax-exempt status for organizations that provide material support to Jews living across the Green Line—the nonborder that delineates pre-1967 Israel from the territories Israel acquired in the Six-Day War. The theory was that a Jewish presence in those areas is inconsistent with U.S. policy. The IRS drew up lists of such organizations based on information from anti-Israel websites such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss. A case successfully challenged that policy, with a federal appellate court opinion holding that the IRS couldn’t discriminate on the basis of viewpoint when processing applications for charitable status.

One of the most troubling things about this Executive Order is how it’s targeting Jews. There are plenty of Islamist terrorists operating in Judea and Samaria, and in fact the Palestinian Authority itself officially pays monthly stipends to the families of terrorists who have been convicted of killing Jews. (Those payments are an explicit violation of the U.S. law known as the Taylor Force Act, but the Biden administration doesn’t care and allows such payments.) Not one Arab individual has been sanctioned under this Executive Order.

The only sanctions “imposed” on any non-Jewish person or entity was the Lion’s Den terrorist cell in Nablus. But the terrorist cell is just that—a cell. It has no bank accounts or credit cards in its own name, and nobody else was sanctioned along with it—no individual people or leaders, no banks that service those people. And aside from this “sanction,” the Biden administration has done nothing under this Executive Order to sanction any non-Jew for any action, including the actual or attempted murder of Jews, which you can read about every few days in the newspaper.

As a matter of Constitutional law, the president has the authority to treat allies and enemies largely as he wishes, and it’s not illegal for the President to discriminate among different groups of people when none of them is a U.S. citizen. But it’s disappointing that Israel, which for the Biden administration is formally categorized as an ally, has its citizens subject to financial sanction while the people who are trying to kill them not only get virtual immunity, but also get paid with money provided as U.S. aid.

Seth Mandel: Hamas’s Fitting Embrace of a Nazi Symbol

Ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder. That seems to be the lesson of the quadrennial fight over political symbols in U.S. presidential elections. Four years ago, an inverted red triangle in some of the Trump campaign’s Facebook ads caused a scandal, and the ads were eventually taken down and replaced with triangle-free versions.

The Nazis had used the inverted red triangle—and triangles of other colors—on prisoners’ uniforms to sort them into categories. Since the Trump ads took aim at the pretend anti-fascist rioters who called themselves Antifa, and the red triangle in German camps represented Communist political prisoners, we were told the symbol was proof of Trump’s Nazi role-playing games.

“If your reaction is, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,’” wrote a contributor to Psychology Today, “consider also that the first sentence of the ads contained 14 words, and a total of 88 ads were purchased by the campaign to be run on Facebook.” Fourteen is the number of words in an alt-right slogan, she pointed out, and 88 is shorthand for “Heil Hitler,” since H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. (Remind me never to watch Sesame Street with this person.)

It was doubtful Trump or Facebook’s moderators understood the full implications of this—the campaign had seen the triangles in Antifa material and assumed the group had adopted it, which some actual anti-fascists did after World War II—but both were scolded for it and the ads were changed.

Contrast that with the chin-stroking over the inverted red triangle used by Hamas to indicate its battlefield targets.

Because its origins (in this context) lie in Hamas’s use of the triangle for one specific purpose, its meaning contains no ambiguity. But in the grand tradition of Western play-radicals who want to have their cake and eat it too, Hamas’s supporters have begun to reverse-engineer the symbol into vague respectability.

To understand the truly demented nature of this, you’d have to be in the unlucky position of having watched some of Hamas’s battlefield propaganda videos. At their tamest, they show the triangle hovering over an Israeli tank in the distance before the tank is shelled. Often these videos are a cross between a snuff video and a horror film, and glorify the execution of people.

The adoption of the red triangle by pro-Palestinian activists is a badge of derangement. This is not the watermelon, which is used as a stand-in for the Palestinian flag because of its similar color scheme. The triangle is a specific marker of vicarious violence.

Seth Frantzman: International donors are complicit in Hamas’ presence in Gaza – and key to its demise

It’s important to understand here how deeply Hamas has infiltrated all facets of life in Gaza. It infiltrates media and also healthcare workers. It exploits schools, universities, shelters and hospitals. For Hamas, all these NGOs and UN organisations are targets to be exploited, and each large civilian building is a potential hideout. Hamas conducts itself both as a terrorist group and a kind of mafia in this respect. The armed men that it sends to hijack aid convoys, for example, pretend to be there for “protection”. This is the kind of protection that the mafia also offers in other settings. It’s how cartels operate. Separating the civilians from the mafia-cartel aspect of Hamas is key to uprooting Hamas.

Gaza’s misfortune is to have an international community that has worked in Gaza for decades and been unwilling to confront Hamas. The NGOs and other groups that work there want to get their aid to local people. They see working with Hamas as a lesser evil than the aid not being delivered. They aren’t willing to condemn Hamas or monitor their aid convoys for the presence of gunmen, because it’s easier to look the other way and just let a system that is in place continue. As long as they can say aid came across the border, they can say it was delivered, even if it never reaches the people in Gaza and even if Hamas and armed gangs take the aid and sell it, fuelling the Hamas war machine. To separate Hamas from local people in Gaza, donor countries should mandate that any NGO or UN organisation working in Gaza must monitor and report on Hamas and other groups’ presence in institutions that receive funding. It’s not enough to call on “armed groups” not to enter schools. Monitoring Hamas, as the ruling power, is needed.

This can be done. Schools can set up CCTV cameras and they can provide transparent lists of who enters and exits the school. Convoys can track where aid goes and make sure it is not stolen. UN institutions are strong enough to have a special rapporteur tasked specifically with reporting on Hamas’s presence. Hospitals can monitor each floor and each room in their facility.

This can also be done by shifting the way organisations operate in Gaza. Rather than pretending Hamas doesn’t exist and calling it an “armed group” it should be named and monitored. NGOs and UN organisations know how to do this in other conflicts. They know how to keep armed men out of their facilities or report the presence of armed men in places such as eastern Congo. If the UN and NGOs can report armed men entering schools or hospitals or taking over aid in other places in the world, they can do it in Gaza.

Separating Hamas from civilians in Gaza and ending the exploitation and use of civilians as human shields is key to defeating Hamas. This starts at the level of donor countries who back the UN and NGO efforts in Gaza. They can mandate reporting on Hamas presence. After October 7 it is imperative that a paradigm shift takes place in how the international community relates to Gaza. The international community can also work toward a day without Hamas, and a day when Gazan children can attend school without Hamas men illegally occupying their classrooms.

09/18 Links Pt1: The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe; Day 2: Hez-noballah Walkie Talkies Explode; UNGA res. calling for Jerusalem Old City to be Jew-free

From Ian:

Eli Lake: Hezbollah’s Exploding Pagers

All of these operations demonstrated an operational cunning and competence that are the stuff of spy novels. And yet Iran today is closer than ever to obtaining a nuclear weapon, according to the U.S. government’s own recent estimates.

“I think it’s fair to say the Israelis have tended to look at strategy as an accumulation of tactical victories,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operations officer who is now a distinguished fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Free Press. “That obviously has been tested to the max with the Islamic Republic of Iran. I think the Israelis are aware it hasn’t worked.”

This failure of Israeli covert action to improve its strategic standing in the Middle East is perhaps best demonstrated by its recent killing of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. At the end of July, Haniyeh lost his life in an explosion at the guest house where he was staying during the inauguration of Iran’s new president.

Not only did Israel’s agents reportedly manage to sneak a bomb inside a guest house in the capital city of their mortal enemy, but after Iran vowed revenge, to this day it has yet to follow through on its threat. That sounds like an unbelievable success. But there’s a catch. Because of Iran’s mere threat of retaliation, most commercial airlines have stopped their flights to Israel, further isolating a country maligned for fighting a war in Gaza started by Iran’s proxy, Hamas. Indeed, after the pager explosions, Air France and Lufthansa have canceled flights to Tel Aviv, fearing Hezbollah’s retaliation.

In this respect, the real story is not that covert action for Israel is worthless. Gerecht stressed that the tactical success of these operations have value. The prospect of every encrypted Hezbollah pager exploding at the same time may be a psychological deterrent for the organization’s middle managers and others.

But they will not deter Hezbollah from launching the missiles and rockets into Israel that make it impossible for 100,000 citizens to return home. As Gerecht said, “Israel’s tactical brilliance is no substitute for serious hard power and military interventions.”

Put another way, Israel cannot defeat its enemies by waging war only in the shadows.

Seth Mandel: The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe

There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.

Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.

You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.

But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.

In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.

What’s the upper limit here? How many terrorists can Israel target before it violates the international humanitarian law known as It’s Enough Already?

The pager operation reportedly required a year of planning and meticulous execution, because Israel is not in fact a nation of Bionic Jews. But in the minds of Israel’s critics, the more powerful the Jews become, the more evil they automatically become. Therefore you don’t actually have to make a case against what Israel does on the merits, you merely have to assert Israel’s power and success. Which hopefully will continue to outpace that of its enemies by leaps and bounds.

Brendan O'Neill: This wasn’t a war crime – it was an audacious assault on anti-Semites

Yet beneath the double standards, which are painfully predictable, there is something else, too. Something even worse. It’s the flagrantly bigoted belief that everything Israel does is a war crime. This nation can’t do right for doing wrong. If it fights its Islamist foe from the air, as it is doing in Gaza, it is committing a crime. Yet if it plants deadly weapons directly in the pockets of the Islamists who want to destroy it, that is also a crime. If it bombs neighbourhoods in Gaza where Hamas lurks, that is ‘indiscriminate slaughter’. Yet if it behaves in a highly discriminating fashion and puts mini-bombs in the trousers of terrorists, that is ‘barbarism’.

The list of things that become ‘crimes’ when Israel does them grows longer every day. Following the butchery of 7 October, when Hamas’s pogromists raped, kidnapped and murdered Jews in southern Israel, Western leftists described Israel’s bombing of Hamas positions in Gaza as criminal. Yet when Israel went to extraordinary lengths to warn Gazans to leave the places it planned to bomb, dropping tens of thousands of Arabic-language leaflets from the sky, that was called criminal, too – it was the crime of ‘forced displacement’, apparently. Kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal; try not to kill Palestinian civilians and you’re a criminal. Likewise, when Israel bombed Aleppo in Syria earlier this year to take out the Hezbollah militants based there, it was noisily damned as the vilest of military aggressors. Yet now its meticulous planting of mini-bombs in Hezbollah pagers is branded wicked aggression, too.

That many in the West view Israel’s every action as criminal is depressing, but not surprising. Fundamentally, they think it is a crime for Israel to defend itself. They think it is a crime for Israel to take any action that might limit the threat posed by the apocalyptic anti-Semitism of Hezbollah and Hamas. And they think this because they think Israel’s very existence is a crime. They view the Jewish State as a criminal enterprise, a vile, law-defying blot not only on the Middle East but also on the reputation of humankind itself. When you harbour such intense, irrational hatred for one nation, it is a short step to telling that nation to down its weapons, lower its defences and let itself be attacked.

Make no mistake, this is what the radical accusers of Israel are saying when they tell it to stop bombing Hamas, stop attacking Hezbollah militants, stop arming itself, stop everything. They are saying leave your enemy be, and let your people be murdered. They can call this ‘anti-Zionism’ as much as they like, but to many of us their bizarre and cruel singling out of the world’s only Jewish nation as the only nation that is forbidden from fighting its enemies smacks of anti-Semitism. If you are stony-faced when Jews are murdered, but furious when their murderers have 20 grams of explosives put in the batteries of their pagers, then please remove the word ‘anti-fascist’ from your social-media bio, please refrain from calling yourself ‘anti-racist’, and please cease all future use of the word ‘progressive’.

Through those weaponised pagers, Israel sent an important message not only to Hezbollah but also to the world. It let the world know that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Those days are gone. Kill Jews now – as Hamas and Hezbollah have both done, as part of their fascistic war on the Jewish State – and there will be consequences. You might lose a bollock, you might lose your life. That the racist militants of Iranian-sponsored Islamism are peeved that Jew-killing is no longer acceptable makes sense. That so many ‘progressives’ in the West also seem put out by the fact that killing Jews is a riskier business today than it was in earlier centuries is more disturbing. Paging the Western left: racist terrorism must always be resisted.

Miriam Kresh was 17 when she learned to make rice by her mother’s side, in the style of Latin America. Producing the perfect bowl of rice, each grain separate and with the right amount of bite, was for Miriam a revelatory process. The cook needs only to follow the age-old steps, step by step, for flawless results. Miriam did just that, following the steps as she stood alongside her mother, cooking rice. It was in those moments that Venezuelan-born Miriam Kresh, a food writer, cook, and cooking teacher, first encountered kitchen magic.

In the years following that first pot of rice, Miriam, now 70, moved from place to place, living in the United States, Venezuela, and Brazil before making Aliyah in 1976. Today, Miriam Kresh makes her home in Petach Tikvah, Israel. The food she cooks, the recipes she develops and teaches, all reflect her journey, and all of it is delicious.

You don’t have to imagine it—tucked into the following Q&A is a mouthwatering recipe from Miriam’s Kitchen. Miriam Kresh is gracious like that.

Varda Epstein: What can you tell us about your background? You come from an intriguing mix of cultures.

I was born in Venezuela, of an American dad and Nicaraguan mom. I lived in the States for ten formative years, during which English became my most important language. My parents were cultured, cosmopolitan people who enjoyed cooking and eating foods from many different cuisines. Mom had a fine palate and a fine hand in the kitchen. While cholent and chicken soup were Shabbat standards, she would occasionally produce a sumptuous dish like duck a l’orange. She set a high standard in home cooking, and I’ve done my best to keep it.

Varda Epstein: Who taught you how to cook? How do those early cooking adventures impact on your cuisine and your methods, today? I remember you once telling me that you always have to have a tomato in there, somewhere!

Miriam Kresh: Yes, I love a juicy tomato, but I was probably talking about garlic. I love garlic, to the point where my family and friends make fun of it.

My mother taught me the first dish I ever cooked, when I was age 17. It was rice, Latin American style. Mom taught me to first toast the rinsed, drained rice in a little oil, then add salt and crushed garlic. Next, to stir in boiling water, and cover the pot tightly. Cook at very low heat for 20 minutes until all the water has been absorbed and each grain is separate and tender. Rice made this way goes through frying, seasoning, and steaming. This taught me multiple lessons, not only about flavor, texture, and timing, but also about focus. The essential lesson was to pay attention. Cooking has taught me a lot about mindfulness.

Once I understood that cooking involves a flow of successive stages, learning other dishes was natural. As I became more confident and discovered a certain culinary talent, I made a point of learning from other cooks whose food I admired. Having kept kosher now for 50 years, I’ve learned to adapt certain well-loved dishes from treif to kosher. One example is Brazilian feijoada, a stew of beans and about four kinds of pork. I found substitutes and developed a kosher feijoada that’s pretty darn good, if I say so myself. The recipe was published on the Forward and picked up by the NY Times, who linked to it.

I’ll talk to anyone about food and cooking, and shamelessly solicit recipes. As a food writer and reporter, I’ve had great opportunities to learn from professional chefs.

Eggplant Stuffed with Bulgur and Herbs (photo: Miriam Kresh)

Varda Epstein: I remember you won the contest for the cooking column at “Green Prophet.” Do you still write there? Where else have your cooking columns appeared?

Miriam Kresh: I still write for Green Prophet. At the moment, I’m working on a review of The Eucalyptus Cookbook, by Moshe Basson, chef of the famous Jerusalem restaurant bearing that name. The review should appear in Green Prophet by the end of this month (September 2024). My first food writing was self-published: a blog I used to run named Israeli Kitchen. An online magazine called “From The Grapevine” bought the blog – domain, content, and all. I was ready to move on anyway and welcomed the opportunity to sell it. Subsequently, they sold their content to a different online magazine, Jewish Unpacked. My recipes are still online there, and I still get fan mail
from there. I understand that some individual now runs a blog under the name Israeli Kitchen; they never asked permission to use the name.

I’ve had recipes and articles published across the English-language Jewish spectrum, from left-leaning the Forward to the Haredi HaModia. I wrote a chef interview column at the Jerusalem Post for several years, besides features on non-cooking-related issues. Many of my freelance articles appear across the Net. Sometimes I Google my own name and am surprised to find my work copied onto sites I had no idea existed. That’s the way it is.

Roasted Butternut Squash with Shallots and Parmesan (photo and recipe: Miriam Kresh)

RECIPE: Roasted Butternut Squash with Shallots and Parmesan
You can easily make this recipe vegan by omitting the cheese and adding 1 tablespoon Balsamic vinegar to the olive oil indicated in the recipe.
Some prefer to eat butternut squash with the peel on. It’s perfectly edible, with a crisp/tender texture.
Serves 4-6
Ingredients:
·        4 cups butternut squash, peeled and chopped into 1″ cubes
·        3 medium shallots or 1 large red onion, peeled and cut into medium-sized chunks
·        3/4 cup white flour
·        1/2 teaspoon baking powder
·        1 teaspoon finely chopped dried rosemary, or dried thyme, or za'atar
·        1/2 teaspoon salt
·        1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
·        1/3 cup grated Parmesan, Kashkeval or other aged cheese
·        2 large garlic cloves
·        1/3 cup olive oil
Directions:
1.      Preheat oven to 400° F (200° C).
2.      Put the flour and dry seasonings, except the cheese, in a large bowl.
3.      Dredge the vegetables in the flour/seasoning mixture. Place the pieces on a parchment- lined baking sheet, leaving a little space in between the pieces.
4.      Sprinkle the cheese over the vegetables.
5.      Crush the garlic. Scrape it into a bowl with the oil (and the Balsamic vinegar, if doing this vegan). Drizzle the garlicky oil over the vegetables.
6.      Bake for 30-40 minutes. The butternut squash should be soft and caramelizing slightly.

Varda Epstein: You’re also a dab hand at descriptive writing, with an ongoing series on Substack. Tell us about that, if you would.

Miriam Kresh: I write fantasy fiction, something I’ve always wanted to do, and now have time for. The stack is named Fantastical Fiction. I do my conscientious best to write quirky stories about strange people and strange events…but can’t seem to keep food out of them. Recently I published a short story where a woman goes out to buy butter and meets the Mad Hatter from "Alice in Wonderland."

Varda Epstein: Why did you make Aliyah? What is your general philosophy about Aliyah? Is it something you feel every Jew should do?

Miriam Kresh: My family are Zionists from way back. My Dad, as a youth, did fundraising among American Jewry to buy weapons for the Hagana. My family weren’t 100% religiously observant, but there was always Shabbat, chagim, Hebrew lessons, shul: we were part of the Jewish milieu, wherever we lived.

I made Aliyah from the conviction that Israel is the place where a Jew should live. I was living in Caracas, Venezuela again, in my early twenties. It was a peaceful and prosperous country then. No noticeable antisemitism. The Jewish school had functioned for decades and was still going. Chabad had established a kindergarten and a Kollel. One building in a middle class part of Caracas housed the various youth groups, the Jewish Agency and the Israel National Fund. There was a Jewish social center, a handsome building in a good part of town. A Jewish bookstore, two kosher butchers, at least three shuls that I can remember.

All that’s gone now, under a communist dictatorship. But I couldn’t know that would happen. Nobody could.

What I did know was that I was out of place. The Jewish kids my age were away at university, often abroad, or were getting married. I was a footloose single, feeling empty. I became religiously observant in a search for meaning; became close to other religious families. But I wasn’t fitting in, either too old to be with the cool kids or too young to be comfortable among the marrieds. The more I looked around, the clearer it became that I needed to live not just with Jews, but in Jewish society. To prepare for Aliyah, I read up on Jewish and Israeli history and closely followed current events in Eretz Israel.

Then Entebbe happened. I made a bargain with God: get those Jews home safe, and I’ll make Aliyah. As we know, Yonatan Netanyahu tragically lost his life in that rescue mission; somehow it hardened my determination to get to where being Jewish matters most.

So here I am, all those years later. Now, should every Jew make Aliyah? Historically, Diaspora Jewry has supported Jews in Israel since ancient times and until today. We still need that support. What I say is, yes, send us all kinds of support, we need it – and send your children.

I hope the time comes when every Jew will live here. But doubt it’ll happen in my lifetime. On the third hand - who knows?

Swiss Chard Stuffed with Potatoes (photo: Miriam Kresh)

Varda Epstein: What made you choose Petach Tikvah as your home? What do you like about this city?

Miriam Kresh: I lived for years in Jerusalem, then in Safed. I moved to Petach Tikvah with my late husband and youngest daughter because my aging parents lived here and needed me. My tsadik late husband promised we’d move to be near them when the time came, and it came. Now my folks are gone, and I comfort myself knowing that we were there for them till the end.

Petach Tikvah is a butt for jokes around the country, regarded as an industrial town with no night life, sort of a drab suburb of Tel Aviv. But there are important schools and hospitals here, and between my parents’, my husband’s, and my children’s needs, not to mention my own, I’ve been well served here.

There’s city development with a new eco-consciousness going on all the time. There’s a big movement of hi-tech businesses to Petach Tikvah. The shuk (open-air market) is open every day. The mayor, Rami Greenberg, is accessible and menschlicht. And transportation is good. Don’t mean to sound like a promotional brochure, here… But Petach Tikvah has been good to me.

Varda Epstein: Aside from writing about food and cooking, you’ve also taught classes. I remember you teaching virtual cooking classes during the pandemic. It was so chill and pleasant. A really lovely break from the fear and isolation. Can you describe how that worked for our readers? What are some of the menus you cooked in tandem with your students?

Miriam Kresh: I began the Israel Cookalong with a clutch of international participants - friends, and friends of theirs. We were all so lonely and bored, being stuck at home. We cooked together in real time, via Zoom, every Sunday. It was safe and fun, like having a party in the kitchen every week. And each had a delicious fresh dish by the end of the session. That version of the Cookalong had a good run of three years. Some people came and went, but a core group formed. We’re all still good friends and stay in touch.

My focus is on Israeli/Mediterranean/North African dishes like humus and majadra (spiced lentils and rice), expanding to fancier foods like artichoke bottoms stuffed with meat and pine nuts, and baklava. I teach a lot about Israeli foodways. My students enjoyed learning about typical culinary herbs and spices - like za’atar, the fresh herb, and za’atar the spice blend, which is based on it.

There was one month when I taught classic Ashkenazi cooking. Blintzes, knishes, kugel, cholent. The week we cooked cholent, my Japanese-American student in Ohio served it to guests. She said they loved it! You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy cholent.

I’m proud of having taught the group a different world of food. But I’m happiest that one nervous participant who thought she’d never master cooking gained the confidence to cook, and cook well. I love knowing that she gained an important life skill through the Cookalong.

Varda Epstein: Tell us about your latest foray into the world of cooking and sharing about food. What are you cooking these days, and with whom?

Miriam Kresh: My new project is a Cookalong for English-speakers in Israel. It’ll be via Zoom, twice a month, on Thursdays. The sessions will be one hour long, sometimes an hour and a half if we’re cooking more than one recipe, or if the recipe is more elaborate than usual.

By popular request, this Israeli Cookalong will be vegetarian, at least in the beginning. That might change, according to the wishes of the group.

The sessions are for pay, but you don’t subscribe to X number of sessions. You just choose which Thursday’s menu appeals to you, and register ahead of time. I send out the monthly menus the first week of the month, and email the recipes by Sunday to give participants time to shop.

I also give private cooking classes, via Zoom. These one-on-one sessions are great, because you get 100% of my attention, and cook the recipes in your own kitchen with me coaching.

Tajine of Sweet Potatoes and Prunes (photo: Miriam Kresh)

Varda Epstein: What’s your favorite food/dish?

Miriam Kresh: Now that is a question. There are foods I’ll gladly eat every day, like black beans and rice as my Mom used to cook them. Then I have a weakness for lamb. I’d say my favorite is a festive tajine of lamb cooked in the Moroccan way, with dried fruit, and funky spices like saffron and cumin. But I couldn’t eat it every day! Or even every month. That’s a dish for birthdays and holidays.

Miriam Kresh

Varda Epstein: What’s next for Miriam Kresh?

Miriam Kresh: The new Israeli Cookalong! Can’t wait to begin. Spoiler alert: the first class of the year will be salmon baked in coconut sauce. While the fish is in the oven, we’ll cook turmeric rice.

I also teach a floating class where participants make homemade condiments, relishes, dips and spreads. That’s available on demand either privately or as an extra session for a group.

Betayavon (bon appetit)!

Contact Miriam Kresh at miriamkresh1@gmail.com for full details about the Israeli Cookalong, or to book a private class. Or WhatsApp Miriam at 050-786-7211. Outside of Israel, it’s +972 507-867-211.

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The media in Lebanon and Iran are filled with chaotic reports as people don't know what is going on. Today, they are reporting, not only Hezbollah walkie talkies exploding but also car batteries, fingerprint machines, smartphones, intercoms and solar panels, attributed to Israel Moreover, there are rumors advising people to remove their smart watches.

It seems unlikely that any of these besides the walkie talkies are true, and they are mostly just either coincidental or secondary explosions from the exploding walkie talkies today.

There were also reports of explosions at an Iranian-backed Shiite paramilitary group in Iraq.

One rumor is more interesting than most.

Iranian website Raja News, which is close to the hardline camp, claimed that a company named Iran Cell, a leading telecom company in Iran, was involved in the deal to purchase pagers for Hezbollah.

According to the report, Iran Cell recommended the specific pagers to be used by Hezbollah, and they checked them out before distribution to check for any potential problems.

As soon this report was published, Iran Cell issued a vehement denial, saying "Following the publication of an article about the advisory role of Iran Cell managers in the process of providing pagers for Lebanon's Hezbollah, this issue is fundamentally false and the mentioned article is denied."

That denial leaves some wiggle room. They might be denying only one detail. I have no idea if they were involved, but Iran Cell is definitely close to the Iranian regime.

Seeing paranoia among terrorists and their supporters is quite satisfying.

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The EU issued this press release today:

Today, the European Union (EU), Germany, and the Palestinian Authority signed a €6 million grant agreement to build 12 new social and public infrastructure projects in Area C of the West Bank. This initiative is part of the European Union's ongoing Area C Development Programme, which aims to improve essential infrastructure and services for Palestinian communities.

This latest funding package marks the seventh phase of the EU’s Area C Development Programme and will benefit over 33,000 Palestinians living in 12 localities across the West Bank. The projects to be implemented include the construction of a school, roads, sewage and water distribution networks, a water reservoir, and the rehabilitation of electricity networks. With this new contribution, the total investment in the programme rises to €23.2 million, covering 73 infrastructure projects in 59 localities. The European Union Area C Programme is funded by the European Union and its Member States.

The statement then includes this interesting phrase: "All EU activity in the West Bank is fully in line with international humanitarian law."

If the EU decided that illegal immigrants to America have the right to live in Yosemite National Park and would fund building houses and schools for them there, it would not violate international humanitarian law. But it would certainly be illegal.

Even if you consider Area C to be under occupation, the laws Israel must implement there - under international law - would be the laws that existed in that area under Jordanian, British and Ottoman rule. Israel does this - and even anti-Israel activists admit this, arguing that those laws are "outdated" but unable to say that there is anything wrong with enforcing those laws.

When the EU builds structures on Area C lands against the laws in place under the British Mandate, they are violating international law. They know this quite well, which is why they use that curious expression that they are not violating humanitarian law.

Here's the game: The EU builds illegal buildings, Israel properly dismantles them under the laws that it must follow, the EU then condemns Israel for following the international law of belligerent occupation. Areas that were empty since time immemorial are now being populated, with Palestinians encouraged to move to Area C to pressure Israel.

And they have.

When Area C was first defined, there were less than 100,000 Arabs living on that land. By In 2008, that went up by 50% to 150,000. In 2014, that doubled to 300,000. It is probably higher now. That is a much more dramatic jump in population than the much derided Jewish "settlements" in Area C.

EU policy is clear - Jews must not live on their ancestral lands of Judea and Samaria. But when they invoke IHL to justify their manifestly illegal activities, the only conclusion is that their insistence that Israel follow international law is pure hypocrisy.

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The New York Times can't resist:

Israel’s attack on pagers belonging to Hezbollah on Tuesday was a tactical success that had no clear strategic impact, analysts say.

While it embarrassed Hezbollah and appeared to incapacitate many of its members, the attack has not so far altered the military balance along the Israel-Lebanon border, where more than 100,000 civilians on either side have been displaced by a low-intensity battle. Hezbollah and the Israeli military remained locked in the same pattern, exchanging missiles and artillery fire on Wednesday at a tempo in keeping with the daily skirmishes fought between the sides since October.

We've seen this in the past - the media makes up a goal and then say Israel didn't achieve it.

We of course don't know the details of the attack. Reports that Israel decided to explode the devices now because they were about to be discovered sound plausible, because the timing does not seem to be optimal.

But whatever Israel's plans were, the attack accomplished a great deal.

Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran spend a lot of time on psychological warfare. They have correctly identified public opinion as no less important than physical strength, and in many ways it is more important. Hamas' October 7 strategy was based in great part on expected world pressure to stop any Israeli retaliation. Similarly, its release of hostage videos and use of social media bots also points to a strategic goal of dividing up and weakening Israeli society.

This operation, if nothing else, had a profound psychological effect on Israel's enemies and others.

It increases paranoia. Israel must have infiltrated multiple layers of Hezbollah in order to pull this off, as well as its other assassination operations. Every Hezbollah member must spend more time looking over his shoulders and wondering whether the person they work with is a spy - and less time planning attacks on Israel.

More importantly, it destroys an important part of Hezbollah's C3 (command, control, and communications) network. If Hezbollah cannot use electronic means to communicate, it is a major blow to their operations.

It sends a message to all of Israel's enemies. They like to claim that they are planning "surprises" against Israel, but this was a real surprise no one could see coming.

It sends a message to the Arab world as a whole. While Iran and Hezbollah make daily threats of massive imminent attacks, Israel quietly and without taking responsibility actually does them. It causes fear among Israel enemies, but respect among the larger Arab world.

Do not underestimate the psychological effect in the Arab world of Israel effectively castrating hundreds or thousands of its enemies.

And on the flip side, Hezbollah and Iran look weak, disorganized, and to be liars, something that the larger Arab community notes and remembers.

People like to say that "Hamas is an idea, you cannot kill an idea." Besides being false to begin with, do you think that an attack like this will encourage more recruits to Hezbollah and Hamas or scare more of them away? Do they want to risk their testicles?

Hezbollah's vows of revenge do not have much of a bite now.

On a larger scale, this attack increases Israel's prestige in the larger Arab world. You can be sure that Gulf nations are more likely to want to be allies with Israel after this, and less likely to want to be enemies.

Moreover, the attack proves that Israel only targets terrorists, not civilians. Hezbollah is trying to release propaganda to claim otherwise, but everyone sees through that.

Perhaps Israel intended to time this attack in an initial invasion of Lebanon. But even without perfect timing, this was an unqualified success whose benefits will be seen in the months and years to come.

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Hamas losing popularity, especially in Gaza, but is still by far the most popular political party for Palestinians

The latest PCPSR poll has been released. It finds that although Hamas is losing popularity, especially in Gaza, it is still far more popular than any other political party. Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah has very little support among Palestinians.

For the first time, most Gazans now say that Hamas' decision to attack on October 7 was a mistake, although it still receives overwhelming support in the West bank.

When asked which political party or movement they support, a plurality (36%) said they prefer Hamas, followed by Fatah (21%), 6% selected third parties, and 29% said they do not support any of them or do not know.

Similarly, in a head to head election between Mahmoud Abbas and Yahya Sinwar, for voters actually participating in the elections, Sinwar receives 74% and Abbas 24%.

The entire world and all the "experts" say that the only possible solution is two states where the Palestinian side is controlled by Fatah. The Palestinians don't want Fatah to rule them and even today still prefer Hamas. The supposed experts simply ignore that inconvenient fact, and blame Israel for no peace. As they always have.

The PCPSR poll is the one that a Hamas memo found by Israel was said to be manipulated. PCPSR says it mounted an investigation and their conclusion is that it is highly unlikely that their Gaza polling is incorrect, and it is possible that the Hamas member who wrote the memo was just trying to get money from his commander (which he explicitly asked for) and made up the whole claim.

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