Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

01/28 Links Pt1: Netanyahu is first foreign leader invited by Trump to White House; Hostages spent eight straight months in tunnels; Senate Democrats block ICC sanctions bill

From Ian:

Hamas May Be Cheering, But It Is Writhing in Pain

All the stories about how Hamas has swiftly recovered, replenished its depleted ranks with new recruits, and resumed governing contradict the realities on the ground. Hamas has not renewed any of its military capabilities and has not yet reestablished its battalions. Nor has it resumed rocket production or tunneling work. The new recruits in the displaced persons camps have not been given any real training. Its civilian apparatuses are operating on a very limited scale.

Countless tweets and videos show that the local population has learned that it can both hate Israel and despise Hamas. Several clans in southern Gaza have formed armed gangs that are prepared to clash with Hamas operatives. Hamas may have a large amount of money, but it has gotten that money by scalping goods at the civilian population's expense. Everyone knows this.

It is clear to Hamas officials that no serious sum of money is going to be given to rebuild devastated Gaza as long as they remain in control. They have been practically begging PA President Mahmoud Abbas to assume responsibility for administering Gaza, but the PA won't enter unless Hamas first disarms. Neither the Emiratis nor the Saudis will open their wallets, and Israel isn't about to let Qatar sneak its way in.

For those who have already begun to weep bitterly because Hamas survived and supposedly emerged with the upper hand, they should think again.

Seth Mandel: Qatar’s Bid to Destabilize Israeli Politics

We know, and have known for some time, that the live return of all the hostages was not on the table in December 2023. We also know that the positioning of Israeli troops was so different in December 2023 that in terms of the reality on the ground, the deal would not have looked anything like the deal that was signed earlier this month.

As a reminder, here is what then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few weeks ago regarding the barriers to a deal:

“The two biggest impediments to getting that over the finish line — and we’ve been so close on several occasions and as we speak today, we’re also very close — there have been two major impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas. One has been whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a cease-fire and the release of hostages. And so there are times when what we say in private to Israel where we have a disagreement is one thing, and what we’re doing or saying in public may be another. But that’s in no small measure because with this daylight, the prospects of getting the hostage and cease-fire deal over the finish line become more distant.”

Scapegoating Israel for the lack of a deal is nothing more and nothing less than a form of diplomatic sabotage. It is what Hamas was doing then, and it is what Qatar is doing now.

But to what end? What’s the purpose of Qatari misbehavior at a time like this? The answer is that Qatar is playing games with Israel’s domestic politics. Emotions are, of course, raw. And that is especially so around the hostage deals, in which Hamas and its Western chorus line have succeeded in portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the roadblock.

We know now that this wasn’t the case all along—we know now definitively that it was Hamas acting as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown each time. But we’ve known this for quite some time. Nonetheless, Israelis had one government they could petition: their own. That petitioning morphed over time, for many in the Israeli public, into an article of faith that Netanyahu was negotiating against himself. Hamas took advantage of this and poked and prodded at Israel’s internal divisions, tormenting families and constantly reopening wounds.

That is what Qatar is doing now. The Qataris want what Hamas wanted: the destabilization of Israeli politics. And so they portray Israel as the only party to the conflict with agency. And they are willing to continue doing so, even if it maximizes the suffering of grieving Israelis.

End America’s unwise alliance with Qatar

An alliance with the U.S. — specifically, a Major Non-NATO alliance — was once the most highly coveted relationship a nation could earn, a sacrosanct pact of mutual importance. But one such alliance is now a liability for both the U.S. and its long-time allies.

Qatar, our oil-wealthy “ally” in the Persian Gulf, is funding and harboring terrorists that not only threaten American forces but are attacking long-standing American allies. Worse yet, Doha believes this terrorist/ally balance is protected because the country hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East.

A U.S. base should give America leverage with the country hosting it — it should not give leverage to Iran, in the case of Iraq; and it should not give leverage to Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in the case of Qatar.

Qatar is counting on the proposition that hosting a strategically significant U.S. base insulates Doha from the repercussions of funding and supporting Hamas attacks against Israel and helping the terrorist organization survive to carry out more such attacks in the future —attacks promised by Hamas leaders from luxury hotels in Doha.

How did the Hamas political office end up in the capital of a U.S. ally? Qatar’s ambassador to the U.S. says the nation was asked by the Obama administration in 2012 to set up “indirect lines of communication” with Hamas. Doha gravely mistook the request. Qatar was certainly not asked to give Hamas billions of dollars, give its leaders a platform on Al Jazeera to call for jihad, and embed its reporters to film terrorist attacks.

There should be a cost: targeted sanctions and designations like those established by the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force, which was set up to seize and reallocate assets to support the victims of Vladimir Putin’s aggression. The U.S. should seize assets tied to individuals and entities in Qatar for supporting terrorist groups, especially those tied to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism. The U.S. should use those funds to replenish the U.S. Victims Of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund.

It’s time to put Doha on notice that they are jeopardizing their relationship with the U.S. by providing material support to designated terrorist groups. Qatar is clearly acting like a state sponsor of terror and should not be allowed to use the U.S. banking system to bypass existing, though not enforced, sanctions on funding Iran and its terrorist proxies.

The Real Humanitarians

Curiously, those in the West who most loudly claim to be champions of Palestinian human rights, international law, and a voice for the downtrodden have a bizarre double standard. The very people who are ordinarily the loudest advocates for the rights of refugees and asylees, are adamant that the right to leave a warzone doesn’t apply to Gazans.

Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Ukrainians and others are welcomed with open arms but Gazans? Well, hang on a minute, that’s much more complicated. For Gazans their advocacy is limited to outrage at both the conditions in Gaza and at the suggestion that Palestinians might choose to leave.

The absurd position these so-called humanitarians take is that survivors of what they claim is a genocide, must be prevented from leaving the place of their tragedy. What kind of monster demands that survivors of genocide live in tent cities for decades, and under the iron grip of the same oppressive regime which brought about this disastrous war in the first place?

Yet this is the position these sanctimonious hypocrites take. Instead of supporting Gazans right to rebuild their lives on their own terms, western activists fetishize Gazan suffering so they can display their professed moral virtue.

What then of the “brotherly” Arab nations? Where is their solidarity? Unless you count words, it’s just not there. Egypt, which ruled Gaza before Israel or Hamas and sits on vast tracts of empty land keeps its border slammed shut- refusing to accept any refugees. Gazans speak the same language, have the same religion and many have family ties in Egypt, but even the sick and wounded in Gaza are not permitted to leave for medical treatment unless it is to be treated in a third country. What about Yemen, which boasts of its solidarity with Gaza. Well, it turns out that the Houthi’s solidarity extends only so far as their effort to murder Israelis. They do nothing to save Gazans or reduce their suffering.

Others in the Arab world issue routine condemnations of Israel, but concrete help to Gazans other than dropping aid on their heads, or sending food which they know will be stolen by Hamas and sold for extortionate prices? Forget about it. With the exception of Bahrain and the UAE, the nations which make up the Arab League continue their decades long policy of using the Palestinians as a weapon against Israel, even though everyone knows they couldn’t care less.

Trump’s suggestion that Gazan be allowed to leave and rebuild their lives is a welcome break from the usual hot air, slander of Israel and slavish adherence to policies that have failed Arabs and Jews for decades.

Human rights advocates insist that Gazans leaving Gaza would be “ethnic cleansing”, ignoring the fact that no-one calls it this when refugees voluntarily leave other war zones, or that forcibly expelling Jews from Judea and Samaria is the preferred policy option of most govts. They aren’t humanitarians they are hypocrites.

True compassion for Gazans would be to genuinely free them. Not from Israel which left Gaza in 2005 and only went back to retrieve the hostages stolen by Hamas, but from those who claim to represent them. Hamas and Fatah do not care for Gazans, we saw in this war, and the negotiations to end it, that there is literally no-one on earth who cares less for them.

Certainly no-one serious is talking about forcing Arabs to leave Gaza, but let them leave if they wish. Let them start over in places where their children can grow up without fearing the next airstrike. Let them escape the grip of Hamas and the indifference of their “allies.”

Denying Gazans who wish to leave the chance to rebuild their lives elsewhere is not humanitarianism. It’s cruelty masquerading as solidarity.

Did the US provide Hamas with condoms that they turned into IEDs? Probably not, but UNRWA did.

In 2020, the Jerusalem Post reported:

Two years after Palestinians first started launching flaming kites and other improvised explosive devices (IEDs) like condoms and balloons into the South, the phenomenon has yet to abate.
It started with kites with burning rags or embers attached to them. Three months later, booby-trapped balloons and condoms began to be carried east toward the South, carried by winds coming off the Mediterranean Sea.
While the use of kites – a popular Middle Eastern pastime – seems to have disappeared, scores of balloons and condoms with explosive devices attached to them continue to land in schoolyards, agricultural fields and highways.
Though condoms or balloons bearing messages of “Happy Birthday” or “I ❤️ You” flying through the air may sound silly, the hard truth is that these primitive devices have wreaked havoc, burning thousands of hectares of land and causing millions of shekels of damage.

Could these condoms have come from the US taxpayer? The White House just said that they blocked a planned shipment of $50 million in condoms to Gaza.

That figure seems quite high. Condoms are not the most popular method of birth control in Gaza -

The UN has reported that the condoms that NGOs (including UNRWA) did ship to Gaza were often not used for their intended purpose:

It was noted that the amount of methods dispensed to NGOs doesn’t correspond to the number of beneficiaries they serve. During a focus group discussion (FGD) with the members of the FP steering committee in Gaza, a key informant at one NGO said, “We receive condoms from MOH but we use them for something else other than family planning. We use them to cover the head of the ultrasound probe during doing vaginal ultrasound”.

The report says, "UNRWA is the second biggest provider (27%) after the private sector (for birth control) and is the main provider in the GS (61%), much more than in the WB (11.4%)"

UNRWA almost certainly provided condoms to Hamas that were used as delivery systems for IEDs.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Last year, someone offered an online series of seminars called "Hospicing Zionism: Cognitive, somatic & ritual practice toward Jewish recovery."

Our premise is all survivors and perpetrators of Zionism will need healing and recovery...This course asks, what does healing look like for Jewish survivors of Zionism? Akin to dismantling internalized white supremacy, the invitation is to dismantle the intersecting, internalized supremacist constructs of of Zionism, whiteness, Ashkenazi normativity, ableism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism; and to examine the internalized and external structures of nation states, imperialism and settler colonialism. We aim to do so not just cognitively and intellectually, but also in a sturdy container of somatic practices, ritual, and deep empathic witnessing.

Wait, it gets better:

Recognizing that the soul wound of relational separation and disconnection underlies Zionism, as it does all forms of settler-colonialism, together we’ll practice deactivating the affective, cognitive and relational patterns that reinforce that separation and fuel dehumanization and violence done in our names. We are clear that through the colonial process of assimilation into whiteness, combined with intergenerational trauma, many Ashkenazi Jews have lost connection with body and earth based ways of being and relating to self, other humans, the more than human world (trees, waters, land, animals, plants, elements, the whole earth, etc), our earth and body honoring ancestors, and the Divine. As such, this course intends to support participants in not just developing cognitive understanding of Zionism and its alternatives, but also recovering and regenerating the capacity for sacred and honorable connection, reciprocity, presence, and intimacy with all of our relations. In this way, we will collectively cultivate secure attachment in relationship to all these layers of relationality.

How much does it cost to learn how to babble like this?

INVESTMENT / EXCHANGE

The exchange for this course is $3,000 ($250 month ‐ actual cost), $2400 ($200/month) or $1800 ($150/month).

Who is it meant for?

This course is an affinity space for Jewish folx, and is best suited for white, Ashkenazi Jews who feel ready to do the work of unpacking Zionism and all its related siblings of supremacy with both rigor and support. If you are Jewish and have Mizrahi or Sephardic lineage and/or are BIPOC, you may feel that this is not the right container for you as you have different lineages, lived experiences and relationships with Zionism/white supremacy/settler-colonialism. However, if you are a Sephardic, Mizrahi and/or BIPOC Jew who identifies as white adjacent, white presumed, or who simply feels that this container speaks to you, you are welcome to apply! We are also happy to discuss this further if you have questions.

Who created this absurdity?

Stacey Prince, PhD, SEP Stacey (she/her) is a psychologist and somatics practitioner living on the stolen lands of the Duwamish and Coast Salish peoples in what is colonially known as Seattle, WA. She is queer, an anti-occupation Ashkenazi Jew and a visitor on these lands with a lifelong commitment to examining and dismantling her complicitness with whiteness, settler-colonialism and modernity. She founded and stewards The Living Room, a collective of politicized healers. In addition to psychotherapy she offers supervision, consultation, group workshops and healing spaces, and is an adjunct professor in the department of psychology at the University of Washington.

Simon Wolff, SEP Simon (they/them) is a politicized healer, ritualist, and artist weaving one-to-one and small group somatic, ancestral, and cultural healing vessels in service to collective liberation. They support Jewish people to cultivate embodied and animist resilience and relationality amidst lived and intergenerational trauma. Simon identifies as a white antiracist, antizionist, queer, trans, disabled person of the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora living on Anishinaabe land called Waawiiyaatanog / Detroit, MI. Starting in June 2024, they will be living on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land known as Northampton, MA. To learn more about their work, visit www.simon-wolff.com.

The course - sorry, vessel - started last summer and is supposed to occur once a month for a year.

I would be very surprised if they attracted a single paying attendee.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Trump says Palestinians who want to start new lives elsewhere should have that chance. The media, NGOs and Arab leaders say they shouldn't. Who cares more about human rights?

Haaretz reports that Donald Trump "doubled down" on the idea that some Gazans should be allowed to leave if they want to.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday doubled down on his desire for Egypt and Jordan to take in displaced Palestinians from Gaza, 48 hours after his suggestion to "clean the whole place out" caused significant uproar across the world and rejection from the parties involved.

Shortly after speaking with Egypt President Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, Trump said "I'd like to get them living in an area where they can live without disruption, revolution." He further told the press pool that "when you look at the Gaza Strip, it's been hell for so many years."

"I think you could get people living in areas that are a lot safer and maybe a lot better and maybe a lot more comfortable."

Under the Biden administration, the idea of "voluntary migration," a plan promoted by far-right Israeli ministers eyeing the Jewish resettlement of Gaza, was considered highly controversial, with most Palestinians and their supporters rejecting the idea of relocating, even temporarily.

Much outrage has come from Trump's initial comment to "clean the whole place out," as usual taking his words literally when he has made it clear that he is not demanding ethnic cleansing or forced migration. Rather, he wants to give Gazans the option of living elsewhere, short or long term, while the situation in Gaza remains unresolved.

That is not a violation of human rights. It is an embrace of human rights - and one that no major NGOs or media have even allowed themselves to take seriously.

Is it any wonder ordinary people voted for Trump? He cares more about the day to day lives of Gazans than all of the supposedly "pro-Palestinian" and "pro-human rights" community combined.

How many Gazans would rush to take advantage of Trump's suggestion that they move to other countries?

A survey of Gazans taken immediately before October 7 2023 found that 31% considered emigration. That is equivalent to 650,000 Gazans who said they would like to leave before the war started. That number could only have increased since then, although there are no recent polls I am aware of asking that question.

It is not out of the question to believe that over a million Gazans would relocate to Egypt or Jordan or elsewhere if given the chance.

It is the "human rights community" and the "pro-Palestinian advocates" who are insisting they stay, not the Gazans themselves.

The media refusing to mention these easily verified facts is unconscionable.

More evidence comes from sites like GoFundMe, where thousands of Gazans are begging for money so they can escape Gaza. The page only allows a limit of 1,000 appeals per query, but as of today, over 1,000 GoFundMes use the specific phrase "escape Gaza," another 1,000 use the phrase "evacuate Gaza," 360 more ask to "flee Gaza" and over 1,000 ask to "leave Gaza."

There is reality, and there is a funhouse mirror version of reality that the media covers. This story is a prime example of how the news media and NGOs pursue an agenda that is the polar opposite of human rights and the desire of Gazans themselves, instead they go out of their way to hide the truth from their readers and viewers.

Moreover, since 1948 we have seen self-declared Palestinian "leaders" claim that most Palestinians reject becoming citizens of other countries. No one has ever done a survey asking that specific question, it is just an assertion that is often made by UNRWA and pseudo-academics. (See this 2010 paper: "Naturalization is also strongly rejected by the Palestinians, who insist on their right to return to Palestine " Even though they surveyed Lebanese Palestinians they did not ask that question.)

Yet when Egypt, Lebanon or Jordan offered up the possibility of citizenship for a subset of Palestinians, there is no resistance. During Mohamed Morsi's reign in Egypt, thousands of Gazans with one Egyptian parent - including prominent Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar - applied for citizenship. In the 1950s, some 50,000 Palestinian Christians were offered and accepted citizenship in Lebanon, and some 60,000 other Palestinians - Sunni, Shi'a and Christian - were given citizenship in 1994. When Jordan offered citizenship to Palestinians under its control in the 1950s, no one rejected it by claiming that it would compromise their principles.

This is a question of human rights. Palestinians who want to start new lives elsewhere should have the same opportunity to do so as everyone else in the world. The coverage of the Palestinian issue is so imbued with latent antisemitism ("this is what the racist apartheid-loving illegal Jewish settlers want them to do!") that this simple and quite obvious fact gets buried under falsehoods and misdirection. This blatant hypocrisy proves that the obsession of opposing Israel is prioritized by much of the Western world over Palestinian human rights.

In this case, Donald Trump is showing more compassion for Palestinians than Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the Arab League, the EU, the entire mainstream media, and all of the student protesters combined.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

How many people would have died if Israel dropped bricks randomly on Gaza cities?

Last month, Islamic Jihad published this graphic saying that Israel had dropped 87,000 tons of explosives on Gaza.

If Gaza's health ministry is telling the truth about fatalities, that is about 1.8 tons of explosives for every fatality.

If Israel intended to kill people, that is a remarkably inefficient use of explosives.

It is like dropping three grand pianos filled with explosives for every death.

So I wondered, if Israel would have dropped bricks instead of bombs, and if it was done randomly in urban areas where most of the explosives were dropped, how many people would we expect to be killed?

I put together a scenario where 70% of the Gaza population live in urban areas, and assuming that about one-third of Gaza land is urban. That comes out to a population density of over 16,000 per square kilometer, which is pretty close to the density of Gaza City.

If the people are randomly distributed in those areas, and if a falling brick has a 50% chance of being fatal if dropped within a half meter radius of a person (a falling brick would hit the ground from a plane at about 150 km/hour), and Israel dropped 87,000 tons of bricks which is about 35 million bricks, 450,000 bricks would land on or right next to people and about 225,000 people would be killed by falling bricks - five times the official Gaza numbers for the same mass of high explosives!

Israel could have killed a lot more people and saved a lot of money if they chose bricks instead of bombs.

Now, of course most people would be indoors and the bricks would likely only penetrate the top floor or two of a building. On the other hand, Israeli pilots have computer guidance systems that could clearly aim bricks to enter through windows or walls on any floor of a building if they intended to kill people. My numbers are for random distribution of bricks; intentional aiming of bricks at people would result in far more casualties!

The silliness of the exercise does not detract from the serious point: if 47,000 people were killed in Gaza with huge bombs and precise munitions, this disproves the slander of genocide - because clearly Israel did not intend to kill innocent people. This brick exercise shows that takes a great deal of effort not to kill hundreds of thousands of people in an urban area with 87,000 tons of bombs.

This is one more proof that anyone who claims Israel intentionally kills innocent people is not a serious person. Which is a nice way of pointing out that they are just Jew-haters.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/27 Links Pt2: Howard Jacobson: We have still not been fully liberated from Auschwitz; Pres. Higgins’s hatred for Israel is bringing shame on Ireland

From Ian:

Howard Jacobson: We have still not been fully liberated from Auschwitz

It has been said often enough that Holocaust denial takes many forms, from the brute mathematics of those who jotted down the dimensions of Auschwitz to prove that it was no bigger than Butlin’s, and probably more fun, to historians who claim to have found evidence that Jews had done it to themselves to justify invading Palestine. Of all forms of denialism, the worst minimises the slaughter by arguing that Jews were always just Nazis in waiting anyway, thereby forfeiting in advance the world’s pity, first by showing none themselves, and then by claiming what we might call “Shoah exemption”.

I have yet to meet a Jew in real life – as opposed to on a panel or at a literary festival – who believes that what was done to his grandparents in Bergen-Belsen gives him the right to murder children in Gaza, but this passes as psychology in some quarters, especially where Jews of a certain over-educated sort get together and squirm whenever Jews without degrees and from the wrong side of the tracks make a dog’s dinner of defending Israel.

There has always been a reluctance to embrace Zionism among professorial Jews, as much for social reasons as political ones. It is part of the parochialism you are eager to put behind you when you leave Hendon for Oxford, and one of the reasons you march alongside people who don’t know where Hendon is.

I am not a marcher myself. I don’t care for their mood-music. But I have occasionally forgotten to be cautious – or tactful, if you prefer – and allowed myself to stray too close to what’s left of a march late on a Shabbes afternoon. “How dare you?” I have muttered under my breath at the straggling churchy people wrapped in Palestinian scarves who don’t want to go home. “How dare you, as members of a society or practitioners of a faith that made Jews pariahs for two thousand years, sit in judgment yet again in a matter of which, frankly, given what you chant, you know nothing?”

Towards those who have an unborrowed grievance I feel differently. It wasn’t centuries of Arab contempt for Jews that led ineluctably to the camps. But I would like them to know more of what it is they accuse Jews of exploiting, if only to understand the nature of Jewish apprehension. It appears at times as though Israel’s neighbours view the Holocaust as just another of the ways Jews have stolen a march on them, one more Jewish advantage, akin to controlling the media and running Hollywood. Call it Holocaust Covetousness.

My brothers, I want to say to them, believe me, you wouldn’t want it. Go and see A Real Pain if you doubt my words. Played in a low key, it is not a film about the horrors of the Holocaust or any advantage Jews have tried to wrest from it. Without fanfare or self-pity, it tells of the slow-burn of depletion and depression that endures all these years later.

One way or another, the lesson of the last 15 months is that the greatest calamity to have befallen a people – to have befallen the Jews, anyway – remains unknown or disbelieved, no matter how often we recount it or how many schlock Holocaust novels people read. The Chartered Accountant of Auschwitz might while away a tedious hour, but it hasn’t brought knowledge or enlightenment.

The true story cannot be told often enough – not only as history of terrible events we are duty bound to commemorate, but as an honest reckoning with the aftermath. And we Jews have to stop being apologetic about repeating it.

Aviva Klompas: When everything is genocide, nothing is: A call to preserve the term’s weight

In a bitter twist of irony, some of the most vocal anti-Israel protesters who invoke the Holocaust to condemn Israel often indulge in genocidal rhetoric themselves, chanting slogans like “From the river to the sea,” which calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.

The word genocide was coined by a Polish lawyer, Raphäel Lemkin, in 1944 and enshrined in international law in 1948. It refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This definition, the U.N.’s no less, emphasizes deliberate, systematic targeting — not unintended harm amid conflict.

When I first visited the Majdanek concentration camp as a teenager, I stood before a giant mound of ashes preserved as a testament to the industrialized murder of the Holocaust. I was struck by the meticulous intentionality of it all — the systematic effort to annihilate an entire people. That is genocide. Misapplying the term to describe the conflict in Gaza trivializes the 6 million Jews who were murdered and undermines the legal framework designed to prevent such atrocities.

Meanwhile, real genocides go largely ignored. In early January, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined that the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces were committing genocide in their struggle with the Sudanese Armed Forces. This conflict has killed 150,000 — more than three times the number of deaths in the Israel-Hamas war — and displaced 11 million. Yet there is scant media coverage, no International Criminal Court arrest warrants, no campus protests and no celebrity speeches at award shows.

The same neglect applies to the Burmese military’s atrocities against the Rohingya and the Chinese government’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims, both of which the State Department recognized as genocides in recent years. Where is the outrage?

Instead, the global focus is on Israel, where the accusations of genocide require a distortion of international law. Amnesty International, for instance, dismisses what it calls “an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence.” This amounts to moving the goalposts, turning genocide into a catch-all accusation, and making a mockery of international law.

Sadly, international legal bodies are complicit in this confusion. Last year, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against political leaders from both Israel and Hamas, charging both sides with “extermination…as a crime against humanity.” This false equivalency — drawing parallels between a democracy defending itself and a terrorist organization deliberately targeting civilians — is a moral and legal outrage.

As legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich has noted, “If Israel’s defense against Hamas constitutes genocide, then American wars from World War II to Obama’s campaign against ISIS do as well.” And this is precisely the problem: If anything is genocide, nothing is genocide.

In 1945, Allied general and future American President Dwight D. Eisenhower liberated a concentration camp at Ohrdruf in Germany. He later documented what he saw and heard, “in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Today I see a new battle unfolding — not just against Holocaust denial but against Holocaust dilution.

If we are silent as genocide is recklessly redefined, we dishonor its victims and weaken our collective ability to prevent future atrocities. In memory of those who perished and in defense of those still at risk, we must stop the politicization of genocide. Instead, we must preserve the term’s integrity, uphold its legal weight, and direct our outrage where it truly belongs — toward those who commit the most heinous crimes.

The debasement of the Holocaust

The Holocaust has been ripped out of its historical context. So much so that its historical meaning has now been thoroughly inverted by assorted anti-Israel activists. After Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023, ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters quickly characterised Israel’s self-defence as Nazi-like aggression. On their marches, they waved placards featuring a Star of David inside a swastika. They compared Israel’s siege of Gaza to Nazi concentration camps. They cast Israeli soldiers fighting to defend their nation as Nazi stormtroopers. In the most grotesque inversion of all, they cast the Hamas terrorists responsible for the atrocities of 7 October in the role of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims.

It now seems that Gaza is equated with Auschwitz itself. In May 2024, pro-Palestine demonstrators went so far as to disrupt an Auschwitz remembrance march with a ‘Stop Genocide’ protest. According to Maung Zarni, a supposed genocide expert, Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is a ‘repeat of Auschwitz’, and a ‘collective white imperialist man’s genocide’.

This wilful warping of the historical record is breathtaking. If Gaza is the new Auschwitz, then where are the packed trains transporting their ‘passengers’ to their death? Where are the deadly gas chambers? Where is the routine violation of the corpses of the dead? Anti-Israel zealots are not merely robbing the Holocaust of its horrific reality, they are also hollowing out its moral significance.

Holocaust inversion is rife among the anti-Israel crowd. As Lesley Klaff explains, it involves both ‘an inversion of reality’, casting Israelis ‘as the “new” Nazis and the Palestinians as the “new” Jews’, and an ‘inversion of morality’, in which the ‘Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of, “the Jews”’.

Anti-Israel propaganda is infused with Holocaust inversion. The UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has even called for the boycott of today’s Holocaust Memorial Day on the grounds it is ‘morally unacceptable’ that Gaza is not considered as a genocide alongside the Holocaust. It wrote to 460 town halls and educational centres asking them to boycott the event.

The words ‘Never Again’ have become thoroughly corrupted. Decontextualised and Disneyfied, the Holocaust has become a weapon to be wielded against the very people who were its historical victims. The ease with which Hamas and its Western supporters have turned the memory of the Holocaust against its historical victims is an indictment of Western culture.

We must start reasserting an uncompromising commitment to ‘Never Again’. Eighty years after its liberation, the memory of Auschwitz must be freed from the powerful forces committed to distorting its meaning.

01/27 Links Pt1: Hamas’s crimes against women must not be erased; Eight dead in Hamas list of 33 hostages to be freed; Released Hostage: ‘2 million terrorists’ in Gaza

From Ian:

Hamas’s crimes against women must not be erased

International non-governmental organisations, normally at the forefront of campaigning to end violence against women and girls, were slow to issue any kind of response. Human Rights Watch issued 51 press releases about Gaza in the eight weeks following 7 October, including accusations about ‘Israeli war crimes’. But when it finally addressed the 7 October rapes in December 2023, it merely called for an investigation, rather than addressing the already extensive evidence.

The United Nations finally got round to sending a special representative on sexual violence to Israel several months after the Hamas attack. Its report acknowledged that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence – including rape and gang-rape – occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October’.

Yet even this, it seems, was not enough to spur global networks of feminist campaigners into action. The names Naama Levy and Emily Damari have never been uttered by those feminists who, only a few years ago, were getting worked up about knee-touching, bad dates and rudeness on social media.

That the hostages released so far have been able to walk out of Gaza with their heads held high is testament to their incredible strength of character and phenomenal bravery. Reports suggest that Emily Damari asked her Hamas captors to free fellow hostage Keith Siegel in her place because she believed he was in worse shape than her. Her request was denied. On making it safely back out of Gaza, Damari ditched the Palestinian lanyard all the hostages had been forced to wear and draped herself in the Israeli flag. Her body may have been abused but her spirit remained undefeated. Damari, a living embodiment of resilience and fortitude, should be a celebrated feminist icon, a role model for an entire generation of girls. Instead, newly released hostages are still having to fight to have their plight acknowledged.

This weekend’s release of women soldiers raises questions about the hostages left behind, including Shiri Silberman Bibas, who was taken captive alongside her husband and two young sons, Ariel and Kfir. Sadly, these young boys and their mother may now be dead, although this has not yet been confirmed. If Bibas and other female hostages are released in the coming days it will be no thanks to global organisations that campaign for an end to violence against women and girls. Tragically, we must even ask who will believe the captives’ story when they are ready to talk about their experiences.

We should celebrate the release of Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag. But we must not forget how few professional feminists agitated for their release.

Israel: Eight dead in Hamas list of 33 hostages to be freed

Eight of the 33 hostages intended for release during the first phase of the ceasefire-hostage deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip are dead, according to a list provided by Hamas.

Israeli government spokesman David Mencer confirmed that the terrorist group stated the remaining 25 hostages are alive. The list was delivered to Israel overnight on Sunday.

After repeatedly violating the truce deal with Israel, Hamas is to release three additional captives on Thursday, the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem announced on Sunday night.

The hostages to be released are civilian Arbel Yehud, Israel Defense Forces soldier Agam Berger and an unidentified man. Three more abductees are to be freed on Saturday, per the terms of the ceasefire.

So far, seven hostages have been freed. Yet 87 of the 251 individuals taken by Hamas during the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, are still in Gaza. This includes the remains of at least 34 hostages, confirmed dead by the IDF. Hamas is also holding two Israeli civilians who entered Gaza in 2014 and 2015, as well as the body of an IDF soldier killed in 2014. Another soldier’s remains were recovered earlier this month.

Hamas failed to provide the list on Saturday, as required by the terms of the ceasefire, prompting Jerusalem to postpone the return of displaced Palestinians to northern Gaza.

On Monday, Palestinians began crossing on foot via a coastal road through the Netzarim Corridor south of Gaza City. Vehicle crossings via a parallel highway inland followed, leading to heavy traffic. While vehicles are subject to inspection under the ceasefire agreement, the details of the inspection process remain unclear.

Bibas family ‘nightmare’ as children and mother left off hostage list for another week

The relatives of the only children still held hostage in Gaza have said that their “world came crashing down” when they were left off the list of those slated for release yet again.

The family of Shiri, 33, Kfir, 2, and Ariel, 5, were named for release in the first phase of the deal which requires Hamas to prioritise the release of civilian women and children.

The Bibas father, Yarden, is slated to be released later in the deal’s first phase.

But the mother and children have not been released in the first two exchanges of the deal.

Relatives of the family have condemned Israeli media for failing to convey “our pain, our struggle, and, most importantly, the crucial discussion about the complexity and tragedy of them not being on the list,” after Hamas violated the deal by releasing captive female soldiers before civilian women.

When the four Israeli women soldiers were freed on Saturday, fears over the Bibas’s fate soured. If alive, they should have been released before any soldiers, according to the terms of the deal.

In a statement on Saturday, the Bibas’s relatives described how their “world came crashing down” when they discovered that Shiri, Kfir and Ariel, were left off the list of captives to be released later in the day.

IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari said the terror group had violated the terms of the deal by not first freeing all female civilians.

He said Israel would make sure that civilian hostage Arbel Yehud, who is believed by Israel to be alive, is released soon, along with Shiri Bibas and her two small children, Ariel and baby Kfir.

Condemning Israeli media, the Bibas relatives’ statement went on, “Does the grave concern for their lives cancel out the fact that they are civilians in captivity who must be brought home?

“Does the grave concern for Shiri’s life mean that there is no longer a need to display her photo as a kidnapped civilian in Gaza whose fate remains unknown?

“The answer is — no.

“Liri, Daniela, Naama, and Karina — We are waiting to see you smiling, wrapped in love, at home with your incredible families,” the statement continued. “Shiri, Yarden, Ariel, and Kfir — We will continue to hope and demand your return. It’s not over until it’s over.”

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong

TheJC wrote in August:

There are certain jokes that only make sense to Jews, a sort of coded language that only members of the Tribe understand.

And that trademark Jewish humour was on full display this week after a screenshot of a very Jewish team name on the BBC game show Only Connect.

The Four Opinions team - made up of three Jews named Jacob Epstein, Rafi Dover and Aron Carr.

One fan of the show wrote on X/Twitter: “What a name,” while another said “I cannot express how much I love this.”

The team went through to the next round having beat opponents the Bean Farmers.

Only Connect is a British television quiz show presented by Victoria Coren Mitchell, in which teams compete in a tournament to find connections between seemingly unrelated clues.

The Four Opinions team members each wear a kippah. So I spent way too much time this weekend trying to watch the three episodes they have appeared in so far, all of which they have won. They are now going to the semifinals.

Here is their first appearance, against the Bean Farmers.

And their most recent show, against the Al Frescans, shown last week:

I could not find a (legal) copy of their second match against the Cat Cows, but here is a screenshot of one of the clues that they solved (the goal is to figure out the fourth in the sequence.)

Answer on the bottom of the post.

This is without a doubt the most challenging game show I have ever seen. I am stunned at how good these contestants are. The show requires not only an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia but also the ability to think way outside the box to find very non-obvious connections between the trivia answers. The three "Four Opinions" have studied Talmud together (they considered the name "The Talmudics") so that was good training for them. But it doesn't hurt that they also know Minesweeper.

I would be happy to blame my inability to answer nearly every question on the subjects being heavily British, but I watched an episode that had half of the questions about the United States and I did just as poorly.

In other words, The Four Opinions are wicked smart, as are their opponents.

I don't know when the semi-finals will air, but I'm looking forward to watching them and rooting for the Jews.

----

Answer: -4: BOA. Each word is the result of removing successive letters from the word BOAT.

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Video of Netanyahu speech from 1988. Things haven't changed much (Real Jerusalem Streets)

The more things change - the more they stay the same.

Between 1984 and 1988, Benjamin Netanyahu served as the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1988, he spoke to a full house at the Hebrew Academy of Greater Washington during the height of the first intifada.

Sarah Stern, who in 2005 founded and is president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), a pro-American and pro-Israel think and policy institute in Washington, D.C. was key in arranging the event.

Recently digitized, the recording reflects discussions about Israel at 40 years—remarkably similar to the challenges Israel faces today at 76.

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From Al Mayadeen:

The Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip has documented 4,500 cases of amputations, involving both upper and lower limbs, since the outset of the Israeli genocidal war on the besieged Palestinian enclave, Anadolu Agency reported, citing a senior health official in Gaza.

"We have recorded 4,500 amputation cases by the end of 2024, as a result of the continuous Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks on Gaza," Zaher al-Wahidi, the head of the Health Information Unit at the ministry, confirmed in a statement on Friday.

Al-Wahidi highlighted that approximately 800 of the amputees were children, representing 18% of the cases, while 540 were women, accounting for 12%.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics citing the health ministry, some 64% of those killed in Gaza are women and children.

How is it possible that 64% of those killed in Gaza are women and children, but 70% of the amputees are adult males? Those losing limbs would certainly be a representative sample of those who lost their lives and have similar demographics - bombs cannot be calibrated to kill mostly women and children but to maim mostly adult men, which is what the health ministry is claiming.

Roughly half of the population of Gaza is under 18, and roughly half of the remainder are women. If Israel's bombings were indiscriminate, we would see over 70% of the amputees to be women and children and less than 30% to be adult males, not the other way around.

Statistically speaking, the chances that a similar population would have such different results for fatalities and amputations (p-value) is less than 0.01%.

Unless Gaza doctors deliberately choose not to perform amputations on women and children, preferring that they die instead, those two statistics cannot be reconciled. Even I don't think the doctors are that monstrous.

This is yet additional proof that the Gaza health ministry lies about fatalities.

(h/t Irene)

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How will the new Trump administration affect the Middle East?

Based on the first Trump administration and what we are seeing so far, this is my initial impression of the major factors that will affect US relations with the Arab world.

1. A transactional approach

It seems very clear that Trump is not interested in exporting US values or human rights in the Arab world. He sees every relationship as an opportunity to help the US financially. He will not condition arms sales to Saudi Arabia on anything but getting top dollar.

I am not so clear whether he prioritizes Israel's military superiority in the region when considering what weapons to sell to Israel's rivals. On the other hand, Trump's tendency to make decisions based on broad strokes and not sweating the details seems well aligned to Arab mentality. A Bidenesque approach where support for Israel is conditional makes the US look inconsistent and strengthens the hands of Israel's enemies.

2. The Strong Horse

This transactional approach supports the theory that (at least the leaders of) the Arab world are attracted towards the "strong horse" and will tend to naturally align with that perceived leader for their own interests. Trump is interested in a United States that projects strength and this will naturally keep the Arab world in the US camp.

3. Honor and Shame

Israel's existence remains the biggest source of shame for the Arab world. But Israel is highly aligned with the US and Trump supports Israel, so Arab leaders are not going to make it into an issue. They will continue to use anti-Israel rhetoric in public, to maintain the appearance of honor to their people, but their pragmatism outweighs their sense of shame at tacitly aligning with Israel.

Remember, there was a huge outcry at Trump moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, but in the end, there was no change at all in the Arab diplomatic posture towards the United States. One could argue that the US under Trump being strongly and unapologetically pro-Israel prompted the Abraham Accords. Only when they see daylight between the US and Israel do they return to their fantasies of destroying Israel.

4. Abraham Accords part 2

Trump will certainly try to extend the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, which is the big prize, and other Arab countries (like Oman) would fall into line along the way. The Saudis will try to gain symbolic concessions from Israel about Palestinians but in the end they want the same thing Trump does. Being on his side is more important than honor in this case. And ultimately, Israel and the Saudis are on the same side in most matters.

5. The Palestinian issue

It has been obvious for well over a decade that the larger Arab world is no longer interested in the Palestinian issue except as a rhetorical device. They poured billions into the Palestinian Authority and it remains as corrupt and as little interested in statehood as ever. Arab leaders, like Trump, no longer want to spend money on the Palestinians when there is no return on the dollar. Either the Palestinians realize this and accept compromise to achieve a state or they remain in stateless limbo forever. There is little indication that they even begin to understand how little the rest of the Arab world respects them, as they take the empty rhetoric at face value and wishful thinking.

In the end, the PA has a choice between becoming like the UAE or like Hamas, and they consistently choose Hamas.

6. A single bullet away from chaos

The biggest worry in all of these is the possibility of pro-US regimes falling and being replaced with Islamists who, for honor/shame reasons, cannot allow themselves to appear to accept Israel in any way.

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01/26 Links: Ghosts of a Holy War : Peace Was Never the Goal; Trump: send Gazans to Egypt and Jordan; Qatar: Hamas will hand over Arbel Yehud and two other hostages before Friday

From Ian:

Peace Was Never the Goal

Ghosts of a Holy War stands out as one of last year’s most under-reviewed and yet most read-worthy books on the Middle East. It spans the Hundred Years' War between Arabs and Jews over a piece of real estate the size of New Jersey and was praised by Israel’s major papers. Apart from the Wall Street Journal, it was basically overlooked in the United States. It deserves better.

Even Mideast mavens will keep turning the pages after the first of 30 chapters complete with 20 pages of tiny-print footnotes. They will be rewarded with a first-rate blend of scholarship and boots-on-the-ground reportage—a far cry from the breathless fare served up by the daily media.

Yardena Schwartz does not present a one-sided view of the War for the Unholy Land. Her heart is with Israel, where she had lived and worked for 10 years as a prize-winning journalist, but her head is that of a scholar who knows how to dissect interests and ideologies.

This book is not yet another regurgitation of the world’s most intractable conflict, but a refreshingly original take. The centerpiece is Hebron, the West Bank’s largest town—hardly a headline-fetching hotspot. Hebron’s main claim to fame is its biblical stature. Arabs call it "Khalil" ("friend"), shorthand for Abraham as "Friend of God." According to Scripture, this is where the Patriarch bought a grave for himself, his wife Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob. It is a holy site revered by both Muslims and Jews.

Why focus on Hebron? Ghosts of a Holy War owes its birth to a sheer fluke, a box of letters, photos, telegrams, and a diary from the 1920s gathering dust in a Memphis attic—a bequest from an American named David Shainberg to his family, which it passed on to Schwartz. Young David had gone to study at the Hebron Yeshiva, the largest within the British Mandate. He was no Zionist—he just wanted to be nearer to God, to coin a phrase. The Tomb of the Patriarchs was close enough.

In Hebron, Shainberg studied Talmud and Torah in a world more hospitable than the Pale where the tsar’s Cossacks had routinely slaughtered Jews. Hebron was a place where Jews and Arabs had peaceably lived side-by-side for ages, sharing comity and coffee. Schwartz relates how the city’s "Arab leaders danced into the night alongside rabbis" during holidays and weddings.

On August 24, 1929, the old dispensation descended into a paroxysm of mass murder. Some 3,000 Arabs armed with daggers and axes invaded the Jewish Quarter, butchering 67 men, women, and children, including Shainberg. Fast-forward from Hebron to Hamas on October 7 in southern Israel, a far more deadly orgy exterminating 1,200 with unspeakable cruelty.

At that point, Schwartz’s project—retracing the Hebron Massacre with the help of Shainberg’s treasure trove—cried out for redesign. The author draws a "direct line" from Hebron 1929 to Hamas 2023. "The forces that drove Arabs to slaughter their Jewish neighbors in 1929 were identical to [those] behind October 7." She explains: "The parallels … were so overwhelming, haunting, and chilling" that she had to lay out the whole blood-curdling story in 432 pages.

Israel Declares Victory in Region-Shaping Conflict

On its first day, Hamas's motorcycles, pickup trucks, and hang gliders successfully crossed the border, and their 6,000 riders did a lot of killing and pillaging, but it took hardly 48 hours to kill, wound, capture, and chase away the entire invading force, to the last man. The Gazan fighter, once in combat, proved militarily undertrained and logistically naked. To accomplish the deeper invasion Hamas had in mind, it had to supply its troops with food, gas, and ammunition.

Hamas's assumption that Hizbullah would invade the Galilee was dashed, and Hamas failed to predict that Hizbullah would be floored: its leadership annihilated, its troops decimated, its hardware incinerated, and its outposts razed.

Moreover, Hamas's overarching assumptions, that the IDF would not dare enter Gaza's dense urbanity, and that Israelis had lost the will to fight, proved unfounded. Gaza was invaded big time; Israel's soldiers fought tooth and nail; Hamas's troops were killed by the thousands; and Gaza's houses, roads, plazas, and pavements became piles of rubble, cement, and dust.

Yes, Hamas's offensive will be counted among military history's most successful surprise attacks. However, its planners will be counted alongside Hitler's when he stormed Stalingrad and Japan's when it bombarded Pearl Harbor. They had no idea what they were provoking.

In addition, Hamas's attack triggered Iran's attacks on Israel, which resulted in Israel's counterattacks, which exposed Iran's military weakness. Lastly, Hizbullah's defeat made the Syrian rebels decide that the time for their assault on Damascus had arrived, leading to the downfall of the Syrian regime and its army's demolition by the IDF. The chain reaction now leaves Hamas all alone.

The war since October '23 has ended in Israeli victory, because Hamas lost its Iranian roof, its Lebanese backyard, its Syrian flank, and its geopolitical umbrella, after Russia's loss of its Syrian fort.

WSJ: This Israel-Hamas Deal Sets a Dangerous Precedent

In 2012, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a report from a former president of the Supreme Court aimed at preventing Israel from paying exorbitant ransoms in exchange for its captives and hostages abducted by terrorists. The recommendations weren't enacted into law.

Over the years, 48 Israelis have been killed in military operations to free hostages. Netanyahu sustained a bullet wound while freeing a hijacked Sabena airplane in 1972. His brother Yonatan was killed four years later in an operation which successfully freed more than 100 hostages from Palestinian hijackers at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda.

In recent years, Israel has begun to pay increasingly exorbitant prices for its hostages. Once it refused to negotiate with terrorists; today it does. In the hostage deal of January 2025, for the first time in history, a state is paying a strategic price on the battlefield for the return of its citizens.

Not only are murderers who killed hundreds of men, women and children about to be released, but now the IDF is also withdrawing from northern Gaza, which it conquered at the expense of more than 100 lives. How did this happen?

A combination of factors contributed to the lopsided hostage deal: President Biden was determined to bring an end to the war at any price - war that had cost the Democratic Party during an election year. Netanyahu, in the face of crushing public pressure, needed to bring the hostages home. Trump was eager to prove that he could succeed where his predecessor failed.

Seeing the hostages at home fills the heart with joy. No words can capture the profound relief at seeing men, women, children and the elderly brought home from Hamas's terror tunnels. Yet we must not forget the devastating price extracted.

Israel's Strategic Security Objective in Gaza Is Demilitarization

The ceasefire agreement has breathed new fighting spirit into Hamas's leadership and members. Khalil al-Hayya, head of Hamas's political bureau who led its negotiating team, promised the struggle would continue until complete victory. Hamas in Gaza will exploit the ceasefire to revitalize their personnel, smuggle and manufacture weapons, reassert control over the population, and maximize political gains from the release of operatives in Gaza, the West Bank, and regionally.

Israel cannot allow the existence of combat forces, means, and military capabilities that threaten its citizens' security. Complete demilitarization of Gaza means denying Hamas and other organizations their military operational capabilities. Alternatives to Hamas rule won't be acceptable to Israel until demilitarization is achieved.

The Palestinian Authority recently concluded a six-week operation in Jenin. The operation ended with reconciliation between the PA and the "Jenin Battalion," providing another proof of the PA's limited capabilities.

Hamas is riding the wave of joy and elation following the release of its operatives from Israeli prison and calling for "escalation of resistance" from the West Bank.

"By Any Means Necessary:' Palestinian leftists historically used Westerners as terrorists, and campuses today are recruitment centers for the next generation

Last year, Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote about how Palestinian Leftist groups like the PFLP recruited young women from the West to be terrorists attacking Israel.

The article highlights a French woman, a teacher, named Evelyne B. who was recruited by an Algerian theatre director to the PFLP in 1970. She smuggled weapons from Beirut to Paris that were used in an airplane hijacking, she drove Palestinian terrorists to blow up an oil depot in Rotterdam and then she was set to be a ringleader of a series of attacks in Tel Aviv on Easter Monday 1971, but she was caught at the airport with explosives meant to attack hotels.

Another young European woman, Anne-Marie B., a pharmacy student who was recruited by the same Algerian to help a planned attack on a camp in Vienna with Soviet Jews en route to Israel.

People don't remember that the actual hijackers of the plane to Entebbe in 1976 included two Germans, Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfried Böse. Members of Germany’s Revolutionary Cells, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Japanese Red Army cooperated with the PFLP in several terror attacks including the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre.

More recently, in 2006, International Solidarity Movement volunteers posed happily holding weapons with the Palestinian terrorists they were helping.

When we see slogans like "Globalize the Intifada" and "By Any Means Necessary" being shown prominently in anti-Israel demonstrations organized by communist and socialist organizations like Within Our Lifetime and International ANSWER, it seems highly likely that they are brainwashing the next generation of violent radicals and setting the agenda for a larger group to justify the upcoming terror attacks.

Today's "progressives" claim to eschew violence, but on their more radical websites they justify all violence against Jews. It is not difficult to draw a direct line from the students recruited in the name of Palestinian solidarity in the 1970s and those who support Hamas today.

Only a tiny percentage of the leftists of the 1970s actually engaged in terror, but a larger pro-Palestinian, anti-Western movement created the conditions for those people to emerge. The playbook today sure feels a lot like that of fifty years ago.

(h/t Daniel)

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The media is aghast at President Trump floating an idea for Gazans to temporarily relocate to other Arab countries. Articles are filled with Palestinian fears of ethnic cleansing, of another "nakba." The broad implication is that Trump is trampling on the human rights of Palestinians by suggesting they be allowed to go elsewhere.

There is one word that the media is avoiding mentioning as much as possible: "voluntarily."

Nobody is proposing that Gazans be forced to leave Gaza if they don't want to. The idea is that they should be treated like any other people worldwide who can leave a war zone if they so desire.

As far as I see, none of the articles are mentioning this. AP notes that Egypt and Jordan already host many refugees from other conflicts, but instead of advocating that Palestinians be treated exactly the same way, it gives excuses as to why they should not.

The New York Times has to make up facts to justify the anti-Palestinian policies of other countries:

Millions of Palestinian refugees are living in camps in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and a few other countries in the Middle East. Since the start of the war, Egypt has said that it will not take in any more Palestinian refugees, and that any attempt to force Palestinians into their territory risks agreements that it has with Israel.

There is not one camp for Palestinians outside the UNRWA camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Egypt has no camps, and neither does Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Qatar or Libya or anywhere else descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 have moved to. The people living there are not refugees according to the definition in the Refugee Convention. and UNRWA uses doubletalk to paper over this fact.

The media avoids mentioning that hundreds of thousands of people desperately tried to flee Gaza for safety during the war. Tens of thousands of those with the financial means paid huge bribes to Egyptian officials to become "VIPs" who were allowed to get temporary visitor visas.

Not once does the media or NGOs mention the basic fact: Palestinians have the human right to voluntarily seek better lives elsewhere, and this right that is being denied by every Arab country. Outrageously, this right is emphasized by human rights organizations for every war zone except Gaza.

If the media would mention the voluntary nature of the plan, it would damn the Arab countries who have different policies for Palestinians than for every group of refugees from places like Syria, Iraq and Sudan.

One could even say that these different policies for Palestinians and for everyone else is in some ways the very definition of apartheid.

People who pretend to care about Palestinians love to say how many times Gazans were forced to leave areas where Hamas used them as human shields. Their cynical pretense to care about human rights never extends to allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza to seek safety and asylum elsewhere - on the contrary, they frame this refusal by Egypt and Jordan as if they are protecting Palestinian human rights.

If the news articles would include the simple word "voluntarily," everyone would see that this is a human rights issue. That is the last thing the media wants its readers to know.

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