This article in the Tehran Times has really mixed messages.
The lines highlighted in yellow are warnings about how hurting Iran's oil exports will harm the entire world. The ones highlighted in green assert that the sanctions will have no effect on Iran's oil sales whatsoever.
Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a former Foreign Ministry spokesman, has said that if Iran’s oil sale is stopped more than one country will be harmed. “From an economic point of view, any fluctuation in oil market will cause harm to a group of countries and not just one,” he told ISNA in an interview published on Saturday.
The U.S. announced on Monday that Washington has decided not to extend waivers allowing major importers to continue buying oil from Iran when they expire in early May.
Hosseini predicted that the U.S. will be harmed by “evil” strategies that is has adopted against Iran. “No country welcomed this decision of the White House except the Zionist regime of Israel and one or two reactionary countries in the region,” Hosseini stated.
He said Iran has a “strategic status” and will not act passively in the face of the “cruel” and “illegal” sanctions. Over the past years Iran has learned how to circumvent sanctions, he added.
He also said that it will not be easy to find an alternate for Iran’s oil.
Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said on Thursday that Trump will not succeed in forcing Iran to capitulate to U.S. economic pressure because Tehran has a “Ph.D. in sanctions busting”.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in a statement on Thursday that Iran will not allow any country to replace its oil sales in the global market and warned the U.S. and its regional allies of the ramifications of their decision to halt Iranian oil exports.
In remarks on Wednesday, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tehran will be exporting any amount of crude it wants, asserting that U.S. attempts to zero out the export of Iranian oil will be fruitless.
The Leader also warned that the enemies’ hostile policies will not go unanswered because the Iranian nation would not stand idle in the face of plots.
When Iran is trying to pretend it is not nervous, it means it is very nervous!
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
The Palestinians could learn a lesson from the Jewish Zionists who created Israel. In seeking a state in Palestine, the Zionists used shrewd diplomacy and went about painstaking work over decades to reach their goal. They were visionaries grounded in hard-nosed realism who not only made moral, emotional, and historical arguments for their case, but also appealed to the brain, showing those leaders with the power to help them why supporting the Zionist cause was in their interests. Take the Soviet Union, which, contrary to popular belief, was as important as the United States in passing the partition resolution. Zionist diplomats, such as Eliahu Sasson, observed that the Soviets sought to counter the British in the Middle East, and therefore could view the establishment of a Jewish state as a means by which to eject Britain from the region. Moreover, as Martin Kramer notes, Zionist leaders, recognizing the importance of Soviet support for their cause, labored extensively to convince Moscow that, despite not being communist, they were kindred spirits that valued progressivism and collectivism.
And then, when the United Nations proposed its plan, thus endorsing the Zionist goal, the Jews took what they could get. Sure, the proposal gave them less land than they wanted—much of which was desert—and Jerusalem was to be an international zone surrounded by Arab territory. But national independence movements do not reject offers of statehood—except the Palestinians.
The point is that the Zionists did not have maximalist goals and were very practical. Moreover, they adapted to changing circumstances and deftly navigated the waters of high diplomacy with the world's great powers. Simply put, the Zionists put in the legitimate work to make their dream become reality. The Palestinians have not, seeking grand declarations of statehood at the U.N. without the prerequisite efforts to give them true legitimacy, which include negotiating with the Israelis. Meanwhile, the Palestinians, unlike the Zionists, make only crude, emotional pitches for statehood, motivated at their core by hate rather than aspiration. They do not show foreign leaders why a Palestinian state would help them, or the world more broadly. Even the Jews, who have much stronger legal, historical, and religious ties to the land of Israel, did not focus on the treatment they received during 2,000 years of exile while pushing for a Jewish state in the 1930s and 1940s. And then of course there is the Palestinian corruption, incitement, and terrorism, none of which makes for a promising state. If the Zionist approach to achieving statehood was a graceful ballet, the Palestinian one is a bomb hidden inside a teddy bear: a brute approach masquerading as a heartfelt plea for justice.
The Palestinians could take a few notes. So too could the media and anti-Israel politicians, who only perpetuate the conflict by giving the Palestinians a pass on accepting responsibility for their own stateless plight.
The New York Times International Edition ran a cartoon of an apparently blind US President Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke being led by a dog with a Star of David for a collar and with a face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 25.
The cartoon was part of its Opinion section and appeared next to a column by Thomas Friedman about immigration.
The cartoon was condemned by numerous people over the weekend. It appeared on the April 25 edition but in Israel was available with the end of the Passover holiday, coinciding with the holiday and Shabbat, two days when many observant Jews were not active online.
“Another disgusting display of vile anti-Semitic trope celebrated in the NY Times World. The NY Times is signaling to the world that antisemitism is real, here and welcome,” wrote philanthropist Adam Milstein.
Imam Mohamad Tawhidi condemned it on social media, saying it was reminiscent of anti-Semitic Islamist texts comparing Jews and dogs. Others noted that while it had appeared online, it had been removed by Saturday afternoon. The New York Times Opinion twitter account included an editor’s note that said the cartoon “included anti-semitic tropes.”
The Times admitted that the image was “offensive, and it was an error of judgement to publish it.” They said they had since deleted it online.
At a time of rising antisemitism, when we have become increasingly exposed to the notion of dog whistles and tropes that are antisemitic, when there is a lively and active debate about this issue in the US, The New York Times International Edition did the equivalent of saying “hold my beer.”
You thought that Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s comments about foreign loyalty or “Benjamins” were problematic. The International Edition of the Times just said: “Let me show you what we can do,” with a cartoon of a yarmulke-wearing, blind US President Donald Trump being led by a dog with a Star of David collar and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face for a head.
I didn’t believe the cartoon was real when I first saw it. Many of my colleagues didn’t believe it either. I spent all day Saturday trying to track down a hard copy. I phoned friends, I got a PDF of the edition, and even then I didn’t believe it.
I had to see for myself. So I drove to a 24-hour supermarket. There on the newsstand was the April 25 edition. I flipped gingerly through, fearing to see Page 16.
And then I found it. It stared back at me: That horrid image of a blind US President Donald Trump with a yarmulke being led by a dog with the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Worse, the dog was wearing a Star of David as a collar.
This is what The New York Times thinks of us Israelis. Even if they subsequently said it was an error, they thought it was okay to print a cartoon showing the US president being blindly led by the “Jewish dog”?
And not only that, those who watched as it went to print thought it was fine to put a Jewish skullcap on the US president. Dual loyalty? No need to even wrestle with that question.
An awful lot of people at the NYT had to sign off on that cartoon for it to be published. Who are they, and how are they being held accountable?
The second part of Passover is upon us. I won't be blogging until Saturday night.
Have a chag sameach!
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Geopolitical concerns must never overshadow history. The short term gain, in relation to the memory of genocide and mass murder, is not worth momentary strategic advantages or military agreements. The relationships between Turkey alongside both Israel and the U.S. will continue, even when both countries eventually honor history and formally recognize the Armenian genocide.
On the 104th anniversary of a genocide that paved the way for the Nazi’s to implement the destruction of European Jews, it’s time the U.S. and Israel accept their responsibility to simply recognize historical fact. The longer both countries ignore reality, the longer nations around the world question the moral stature of both Israel and the U.S. For a nation forged from Holocaust survivors, and a country who defeated the Nazis alongside the Allies of World War Two, it’s imperative moral clarity take precedent over whatever benefits are derived from appeasing Turkey on this grandiose issue.
The U.S. and Israel, especially the generations of Israelis and Jews around the world who remember the murder of 6 million souls by the Nazis, must never allow short-term political considerations to overshadow historical record. Had the world recognized the reality of 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children murdered in the Armenian Genocide, Hitler might not have been able to murder 1.5 million children, of which 1 million were Jewish, during the Holocaust.
Six million Jews might have lived, had the world protected the memory of 1.5 million Armenians who’s lives were stolen by the Ottoman Empire.
In addition, Raphael Lemkin stated categorically that genocide, the word he created, originated from his study of what the Armenians experienced 104 years ago. For revisionist historians, Lemkin’s own words provide all the evidence needed to prove categorically what happened to the Armenians is the same planned and orchestrated barbarism committed against the Jews and other peoples across history. As Lemkin states in a 1949 CBS interview, “I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times, it happened to the Armenians and after the Armenians, Hitler took action…”
In 2002, Shmuel Waldman, an American from New Jersey, was shot while boarding a bus in Israel. The terrorist attack killed 2 people and left 40 injured. Among that 40 was Shmuel whose leg was blown apart, forcing him to undergo multiple surgical procedures, and leaving him suffering from PTSD.
The terrorist who shot him was Said Ramadan, a “police officer” working for the terrorists who run the Palestinian Authority. The attack had been planned by senior Palestinian Authority officials and the Palestinian Authority viewed Ramadan as a hero. Waldman joined other victims of terrorism in a lawsuit against the terrorist group, which is funded by American taxpayers, under the Antiterrorism Act.
Waldman v. PLO resulted in a record award of $655 million in damages against the Palestinian Authority terror network. But the verdict was thrown out because an American court lacked jurisdiction over the terrorist group even though the United States provides much of the cash flow that its terrorists rely on.
The Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act was introduced and approved to make it clear that accepting security assistance for its "police force" would place the Palestinian Authority under judicial jurisdiction for lawsuits such as these. The PA could stop funding terrorism or face lawsuits from its victims.
A ruthless battle was waged against ATCA by a variety of groups which understood that the Palestinian Authority would not stop funding and promoting terrorism under any circumstances. These groups falsely claimed that ATCA would undermine American and Israeli security. That was a blatant lie.
The only thing that ATCA would undermine was the flow of tax dollars to Islamic terrorists.
Last year, the Palestinian Authority informed the United States that the terror group would no longer accept any aid from the United States that would expose it to ATCA lawsuits. The terror group’s letter suggested that it might revisit its refusal if the law were changed. That’s just what 6 Democrat senators, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein have set out to do, using the false claim of a humanitarian disaster.
“President Trump’s refusal to provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people is a strategic mistake,” Senator Feinstein claimed, accusing him of "denying funding for clean water, health care and schools in the West Bank and Gaza."
(h/t Failexa)
So how do you “win?” And why engage in these discussions at all? Because the Israel-haters are not your target audience!
In society, whether you are interacting with folks face to face or in cyberspace, you will encounter three kinds of people:
1. Those who completely oppose the existence of Israel as the state of the Jewish people;
2. A much larger number who actively support Israel;
3. And, far bigger than both groups, the majority who don’t have strong opinions about this issue and usually aren’t paying much attention to it at all, except when it is brought to their attention by a flare-up of violence in the region, an action on the local university campus, or a demonstration in their community.
This last group, not your interlocutor, is the audience that you are trying to reach.
Even if you can’t earn a decisive victory, you don’t want to be afraid to engage and challenge anti-Israel activism. Perhaps you’ll get the haters to think twice, but even if you don’t, you have an opportunity to reach the same audience that they’re trying to recruit.
What you might accomplish is getting a fair-minded person, who is listening to the exchange or following it online, to think more about what you have to say. You might get them to realize that the steady drumbeat of misinformation from the other side might not reflect the reality of a complex ethno-religious conflict that is over a century old. You might even get them to engage in conversation with you, to ask you some genuine questions, and to reconsider some of what they have heard.
The Five Commandments of Successful Advocacy
To best accomplish this, we need to avoid arguing down at the level of some of our opponents. To that end, I offer you The Five Commandments of Successful Advocacy. They are just as relevant online as face-to-face. (Perhaps you were expecting a different, more biblically connected, commandment number? Sorry, I don’t want to suggest that these small kernels of advice were the result of any type of divine revelation.)
Kasim Hafeez is a fascinating person. He was a radical Muslim in his late teens and early twenties and then took a second look at everything he had been taught when he came across The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz.
I had a nice (and fun) discussion with him in a Tel Aviv bar when I was in Israel last month. Unfortunately, the first part of the video is lost due to me, um, not remembering to turn on the camera. (You can find other interviews of him where he describes his life story with less background noise.)
In this part, he talks a bit about how radical Islam works, how Muslims tend to take the Quran literally, his reading of the Dershowitz book and his first eye-opening visit to Israel.
In upcoming parts we will discuss Islam in more depth.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
The suicide bombers in Sri Lanka were affluent and well educated. That should tell us something about the war on terror.
In 2015, then-State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf suggested that potential terrorists would not join the Islamic State if they had better job opportunities. "We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium- to longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs," Harf said on MSNBC. "We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people."
Harf is actually right—well, in the narrow sense that combatting Islamist terrorist groups is about more than military strikes. She is woefully—and dangerously—wrong, however, about more jobs being a solution. Yet the view she articulated is not hers alone. Her former boss, Barack Obama, similarly claimed that "extremely poor societies … provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism, and conflict." Indeed, the Department of Homeland Security's program on "countering violent extremism," or CVE, which the Obama administration established to counter radicalization within vulnerable communities, adheres to the same belief. How? CVE treats jihadists like members of street gangs or the mafia—as disgruntled, perhaps defenseless individuals who traveled down a dark path but can return to the light. And creating a better quality of life—a decent job, a reliable income, more responsibilities—is key to that return. In many cases, this framework would, for example, help gangsters who grew up poor with few opportunities. Not so much for the people who join ISIS.
Recent events show why this approach is misguided for Islamist terrorists. On Wednesday, Sri Lankan authorities revealed that most of the suicide bombers who murdered more than 350 people in coordinated attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday were affluent and well educated. "They're quite well educated people," Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka's state minister of defense, said of the attackers, adding that many came from "middle class" backgrounds. "We believe that one of the suicide bombers studied in the U.K. and then later on did his post-graduate in Australia before coming back to settle in Sri Lanka."
Two of the brothers who carried out the bombings came from one of the wealthiest Muslim families in the capital, a family that, according to a neighbor, was "very well connected, very rich, politically connected as well." The Daily Mail reports they are "the sons of millionaire spice trader Yoonus Ibrahim and were privately educated in Colombo." Another terrorist had a law degree, and two others were married—not the hopeless loners that one often imagines as suicide bombers.
In 2003, Asif Hanif – Britain’s first jihadist suicide bomber – murdered three people at Mike’s Bar in Tel Aviv. He had attended Kingston University. This week, a second alumnus of Kingston University, Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, committed a horrifyingly bloody massacre in Sri Lanka.
A significant number of takfiri jihadist terrorists have passed through British universities over the past couple of decades. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been a member of UCL’s student Islamic Society and its president in 2006-7 before graduating in 2008, joined al-Qaeda under the guidance of Anwar al-Awlaki and tried to bring down an American airliner in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his underpants. Kafeel Ahmed, a former president of Queen’s University Belfast’s Islamic society, tried to blow up a nightclub in London and then set fire to himself, fatally, in Glasgow Airport in 2007. Yassin Nassari, a former president of the University of Westminster’s student Islamic society, was convicted of smuggling missile blueprints into the UK in 2007. Waheed Zaman, the former president of the London Metropolitan University Islamic society, was convicted of conspiracy to murder in 2010 in a plot to place bombs on several airliners travelling from the UK to North America.
More recently, in April 2019 the BBC reported that no fewer than seven students from the University of Westminster alone had allegedly joined ISIS.
Whenever an atrocity is committed, it is natural to ask: why? What could drive a human being to slaughter his neighbours?
Ideology clearly plays an important part. Humans are, at least in part, rational. We do things for reasons which appear good to us. The beliefs which we hold, guide our actions.
In the case of Asif Hanif, evidence emerged which indicated that he had a connection to Al Mujhajiroun: the splinter group of Hizb ut Tahrir which has emerged as a nexus in many terrorist attacks. With Abdul Mohamed, the picture is not yet clear. We don’t know what meetings he attended, with which preachers, and during which period. Therefore, at present, it is proper to make only the most general of points about ideology and radicalisation.
Ali al-Bukhaiti, a Yemeni politician who used to be part of the Houthi party but quit and became a major critic of it, has written a scathing indictment of Islam in the Yemeni news site Cratersky. Under the title "Islam and terrorism - between truth and deception," he writes:
Islam, which is in the curricula of our schools and government universities, is the problem, not the Muslims. - ISIS works using the approach of Islamic conquests. - Within every Muslim believer in our heritage literature is a potential terrorist waiting for empowerment. - All the Islamic schools of preaching are, to varying degrees, waiting for empowerment. And if we speak openly as Muslims, much of what is done by Al-Qaeda and even the Muslim Brotherhood, the Houthis and the other extremist groups when it governs a region is the real Islam, which is found in the books of fiqh and the prophetic biography of the different sects without exception and some extreme interpretations of verses in the Holy Quran. ..I talk about the correct and frequent conversations and compiled between all the doctrines of Islamic Sunnis and Shiites without exception, including the story of the invasion of Bani Qurayza, led by the Messenger of Allah in the fifth year of migration, the Jews of Bani Quraizah in Madinah, and ended with the surrender of Bani Qurayza on the condition of arbitration, and the sentence was to kill men and and take wives and children captive and divide their wealth and land to Muslims. The execution was carried out in the Jews of Beni Qurayza. The men who had reached the age of fighting were executed, whether they participated in the crime of treachery - which was the cause of war against them - or did not participate. Then the women and children were taken away and converted as Muslims in the battle. Those were the practices in many "Islamic conquests".
...The children were taken captive and enslaved, the women were sexually abused.
Imagine this scene with me of a Jewish family from Bani Qurayza, consisting of six people, for example, husband and wife, 18-year-old boy, 13-year-old girl and children 8 and 9 years old, The husband and the eldest son are killed, their house, property, homes and lands were divided, the rest of the family was taken away and distributed to the Muslim Mujahideen. The mother raped by a Mujahid of the Quraish and the older girl raped by another Mujahid.
Is the scene of terror and terrorism the mercy of Islam, which they told us repeatedly? Isn't this the Islam of ISIS? Convert to Islam or give us a tribute, and if you refused we kill you, we loot you, and your wife and daughters were abused.
We are always pretending to ourselves that some Muslims are bad but not Islam. The truth is that the problems is in Islam and not in Muslims. I'm talking about the Islam found in the books of the Sahih and mothers of the books of the doctrines, which contain a lot of fatwas and da'is, And talk about the "Islamic conquests" of how to deal with Christians and followers of other religions, we must recognize, without flinching, that the correct Islam is found in those books....All these doctrines and imams recognize the legitimacy of the execution of the prisoners of Bani Qurayza and the captivity of their women, which contradicts several verses of the Koran. How to execute even those who did not participate in treason, women and children who are blameless, and recognize the legitimacy of forcing people to Islam or tributes or taking the captives and money contrary to many verses.
... We must admit that within every Muslim who believes in these narratives is a latent terrorist. ...That is why we must review our religious heritage, criticize it and correct it. Otherwise, terrorism will remain on our necks, waiting for favorable circumstances or intrigues or conspiracies to spread its fangs within our societies.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
After years of operating a woefully inadequate and inefficient pedestrian checkpoint in Qalandiya that often left Palestinian laborers from the central West Bank waiting in extremely long lines, Israel finally inaugurated a new checkpoint in the area in late February.
Inside the checkpoint, groups of laborers formed orderly lines and patiently waited their turn to pass through metal detectors and automatic gates that verify their entry permits (all Palestinian workers in Israel have biometric permits) as IDF soldiers and private security guards observed them from a distance.
Within five to ten minutes, they exited the checkpoint and started to search for the vans and buses waiting to transport them to their workplaces.
The checkpoint is located at the southern end of Kafr Aqab, Jerusalem’s northernmost neighborhood, which abuts the West Bank security barrier and has suffered from years of poor municipal services. The estimated 60,000 Kafr Aqab residents, many of whom are permanent residents of Israel, and other Palestinians in the central West Bank must cross through Qalandiya or another checkpoint to reach the center of Jerusalem.
The laborers, who have various jobs throughout Israel, overwhelmingly said the new checkpoint has made their morning commute to work significantly more manageable compared to the old one.
“It is substantially better,” said 43-year-old Yousef Jabareen, who works as a butcher in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market, while standing at Qalandiya’s exit. “It used to take about an hour to pass through the old one. Now it only takes a few minutes, which means that I get about an extra hour of sleep.”
So everyone should be happy that an overcrowded checkpoint has been replaced with something that takes less time to pass through than a trip through New York's Port Authority terminal?
Ha!
Azzam al-Ahmad, a senior Fatah and Palestine Liberation Organization official, said that Israel “should not be working to beautify checkpoints, but rather to remove them and end its occupation.”
“We are a people that wants its dignity and they only way we can achieve that is ending the occupation and establishing an independent state along 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as it capital,” Ahmad said in a phone call.
If the PLO wants a two state solution, then wouldn't there be checkpoints between the states anyway?
Machsom Watch, the NGO that monitors the checkpoints, grudgingly admits that the new checkpoint is much, much better - which, to them, makes it worse. They used to bring reporters to the chaotic, overcrowded and dirty checkpoint there, and now it looks better than most airports:
The new terminal is well lit, there is no crowding such as we used to see, people one on top of another, and it really does move quickly and efficiently . But I think of the times that we have brought people to see the horror of the situation there and also the photographers. When such people now come to Qalandiya how many of them will be aware what is going on behind this civilized scene. The West Bank, Hebron, The violence of the settlers, the soldiers who support them and give them a free hand, the nightly invasion of houses, children even under the age of 12 who arrested, the trees that are cut down, the schools which are destroyed, the demolition of houses. And I ask myself ….. Will Qalandiya be the whitewashing of the occupation.
As usual, Israel is going to be blamed. As usual, Israel is going to do the best it can, knowing that people will criticize it no matter what.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
At Al Watan Voice, Khaled Ahmed Waked has come up with a new reason for Arabs to hate Jews.
He starts the article off by talking about how widespread eye diseases are in the Arab world, and in the world in general, especially astigmatism.
He says that "the enemies of the (Arab/Islamic) Nation" succeeded in getting Arab youth hooked on staring at screens all day with apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, after they already got them hooked on all kinds of other drugs.
Why do so many Arab youths suffer from eye diseases? Why didn't Arab doctors and scientists discover that these smartphones and tablets contain radioactive materials that are extremely harmful to the eyes?
Don't they know that it's just another scheme by the West and the Zionists? Jews especially know that at the end of days, the stones will speak and show where the Jews are so they can be properly killed, and the West and the Zionists know that Arabs have historically had good vision which enables them to aim their weapons very well. Getting Arabs hooked on apps helps save Jewish lives more than the Gharqad tree does!
The reason that all these apps that Arab youths are addicted to are free is in order to destroy Arab youths, physically and mentally.
We are helpfully told that Facebook was invented by a Jew named Marc Edward Rosenberg, and Jews are also behind Viber and Twitter.
(h/t Ibn Boutros)
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
It’s become a truism that the hatred and harassment of individual Jews and Jewish communities that once was prevalent in the lands of the diaspora before the rebirth of a Jewish state has since morphed into loathing and persecution of that state.
There are other parallels. Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East had a precarious existence, depending on the good will of the local prince or emir. If the ruler liked the Jews – or, probably more correctly – found them more useful than despicable, they could live their lives relatively undisturbed. If, on the other hand – well, you know the story.
Today the position of the Jewish state is also dependent on powerful people and entities far beyond Israel’s control. In particular, the State of Israel is strongly affected by the policies and actions of the US. In America, foreign policy, and especially practical actions and reactions to events in the international arena, are primarily in the hands of the president and his appointees. These days, the President of the United States is the “prince” whose attitude most affects whether Israel thrives or withers.
Israel could have tried harder to reduce her dependence on the US and her susceptibility to pressure from the American government. She should have. I would like to believe that the desirability of this is becoming evident to Israeli officials, but the pull of “free” military hardware is hard to ignore. And there is some truth in the idea that Israelis simply admire the US and value a close relationship with her.
In recent times, Khamenei has been playing Haman to the American president’s Ahasuerus. The Iranian playbook calls for Israel to be battered by simultaneous attacks from Hezbollah’s and Hamas’ rocket forces, and invaded by proxies from both the North and South. The regime is working on increasing the number, payloads, defensibility, and accuracy of the rockets in the hands of her proxies as well as in Iran herself. At the same time she is developing new proxies by establishing Iraqi Shiite militias in Syria, modeled on the Lebanese Hezbollah. All this is intended to be shielded under a nuclear umbrella, whose development is proceeding.
Taken by itself, it seems that war between Israel and Iran is guaranteed. But there is one other possibility – the only alternative that I can imagine, given the objectives of the Iranian regime. And that is that the regime can be toppled by internal opposition encouraged by economic pressure from the US.
It’s a longshot, because a regime that is demonstrably willing to shoot down anti-government protesters in the street, that is buttressed by paramilitary militias, and that terrorizes and murders opposition figures, is hard to overthrow. The regime is quite prepared to control the allocation of resources in such a way that the general population suffers bitterly as long it remains in power, so economic pressure needs to be tough and protracted.
The alternative is a very destructive war for both Israel and Iran. If it comes to this, then I would hope that Israel will strike preemptively and hard. But that’s another discussion.
So now we can see the immediate effect of the attitude by the American president, the good or bad “prince” that holds the destiny of the Jewish community – in this case the State of Israel – in his hands. Barack Obama, following a nakedly anti-Israel script originally laid down in the 2006 Iraq Study Report (written in part by his close advisor Ben Rhodes), facilitated the Iranian plan. His administration negotiated a deal with the Iranians that removed economic sanctions, shielded the Iranian nuclear project, and even provided pallets of cash which went to support Iranian terrorist initiatives in Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, he punished Israeli PM Netanyahu whenever possible, kept up the pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians that would weaken Israel’s ability to defend herself, and – along with officials like Secretary of State Kerry – directly contributed to the public demonization of the Jewish state.
President Trump, on the other hand, has been the Good Prince. He recognized Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, reduced subsidies to the Palestinians, and – it seems – will not try to force the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state as a dagger next to Israel’s heart. Most important, he has taken the US out of the Iran deal and re-imposed sanctions – the only possible road to a peaceful end to Iranian aggression.
I know I am not exaggerating when I say that President Trump is a controversial figure in the US. But he is not controversial in Israel, where almost everyone agrees that he has been the most pro-Israel president – in terms of actual actions, not just words – since Truman. And most Israelis would be happy to see him re-elected in 2020.
But that’s up to American voters to decide. And unfortunately, perhaps in part because Trump has been so pro-Israel, many of his opponents have moved in the opposite direction. Six of the most likely candidates to oppose Trump have said that if elected they would restore US participation in the nuclear deal – that is, they would remove the sanctions re-imposed by President Trump. The Democratic National Committee also passed a resolution calling for the US to return to the deal. The phony “pro-Israel” organization J Street has been lobbying candidates to speak out in favor of the deal and even more ominously, Obama’s shadowy National Security Action group, co-chaired by the ever-present Ben Rhodes, is pushing to restore the Obama Administration’s dangerous Iran policy.
This may be effective as anti-Trump or anti-Israel policy, but it is not in the American interest. The Iranian regime has threatened over and over to attack American assets or even to conduct terrorist attacks in the US herself. “Death to America” is not just a slogan, and the US is not referred to as “The Great Satan” out of desire for friendship. The policy of rapprochement pursued by the Obama Administration was pocketed and exploited by the regime, which did not waver from its objectives of total control of the Middle East and its resources, the establishment of a Shiite caliphate, and – its ultimate goal – replacing the US as the dominant world superpower.
If the Iran deal becomes an issue in the 2020 election, it will be bad for Israel, which does not want to be seen as “taking sides” in an American election. But Trump will likely cite Israel’s security as part of his reason for re-imposing sanctions, while his opponents will accuse “the Israel lobby” of undue influence on US policy. Anything that Israel does or says relating to Iran will be interpreted as improper intervention in the election.
And just like the unfortunate Jews in the Pale of Settlement and the Jewish neighborhoods of Alexandria or Baghdad, the Jewish state will find herself yet again unwillingly involved in and battered by the conflicts of princes.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
It was once said that every Jewish holiday could be summed up with the same nine words: ‘They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat’. Now it only takes eight: ‘A Labour spokesperson apologised for any offence caused’. On Friday, the Labour party tweeted warm wishes to Jews celebrating Passover. At this stage, most Jews are glad to receive any communication from Corbyn supporters that doesn’t ask where the Rothschilds were on 9/11, but the well-meaning post contained a blunder: the accompanying graphic showed the Star of David, a cup of wine and… a loaf of bread.
Under halakha — Jewish religious law — bread is the ultimate forbidden food during Pesach. It is chametz (leavened) and Jews must abstain in memory of the slaves who fled Egyptian bondage so quickly their bread didn’t have time to rise. No doubt Labour moderates think the Israelites should have ‘stayed to fight’ until the yeast kicked in and Tom Watson triggered a leadership contest against Pharaoh. Whoever is in charge of tweeting Labour’s Yom Kippur message would be advised to delete any pictures of bacon rolls from their phone.
Why is this facepalm different from other facepalms? It’s a relatively minor one compared to most of Labour’s behaviour towards Jews. Unfortunately for Labour, it comes after a ComRes poll showing 51 per cent of Britons believe Labour has a ‘serious’ anti-Semitism problem and 55 per cent say it makes Jeremy Corbyn ‘unfit’ to be prime minister. Unfortunately for Jews, the same pollster puts Labour 10 points clear of the Tories. The British people are on the brink of knowingly electing an anti-Semitic government and our radio phone-ins are chocked on the ethics of policemen skateboarding with anarchists.
Do the Jews have a future in the UK? The confluence of Corbynism, an alt-right that has moved from the tweets onto the streets, the forgotten threat of Islamist terrorism and a simmering hostility to kosher slaughter methods will make the coming years the most trying British Jews have faced since the war. For some gathered around seder tables over the weekend, the words ‘next year in Jerusalem’ will have prompted thoughts practical as well as spiritual. Moving to Israel involves many sacrifices but at least once there existential angst comes with an air force.
In the 1970 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered at Yale, the literary critic George Steiner offered a compelling explanation for the persistence of anti-Semitism: The Jews suffered for millennia as retribution for introducing the “Ideal” into Western culture. With its idealism and ethical imperatives, the revelation at Sinai “tore up the human psyche by its ancient roots,” depriving its inheritors of not just the material God and the image, but also “natural consciousness,” and “instinctual polytheistic needs.” Jews, the original Puritans, rejected the satisfaction of both the body and the image, for the purity and ascetic life dictated by the divine Word. From this perspective, Judaism represents the earliest celebration of the absolute, the West’s punishing superego, demanding idealism and self-denial, which was later incarnated in primitive Christianity and Messianic socialism, also founded by Jews, Jesus, and Karl Marx, in whose visions the Ideal persists “with terrible tactless force.” By Steiner’s lights, Hitler’s “jibe” that the Jews “invented consciousness” explains the tenacity of Western hatred of the Jews.
Western hatred of the Jews thus begins with anxiety about Jewish claims to exceptionalism. There can only be one bearer of the ideal: The city on the Hill is not Jerusalem, but Rome, later London, and even later still, Boston. In this form of anti-Semitism, which Steiner both described and in some ways endorsed, Jews are loathed because they represent a reminder of their antecedent claim to the Ideal—a claim that causes such anxiety that it must be extirpated. Non-Jewish messianic movements reject the notion of Jewish exceptionalism, because they are the exceptional ones. The continued existence of the Jews, and the resurgence of Israel, are troubling reminders that that the Jews were first to be singled out as God’s “chosen people.”
Steiner’s writings on the State of Israel provide an early primer on the dynamics of the specific form of secular anti-Semitism that has captivated so many progressives in academia and among the rank and file of the British Labour Party, as well as, increasingly, among American progressives. For Steiner, nationalism is a “madness,” as is the “vulgar mystique of flag and anthem.” But it is Israel’s “barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma” that represent a “rhetoric of self-deception as desperate as any contrived in the history of nationalism.” For Steiner, and in this, contemporary progressives follow him, Israel must bear all the sins of the nation-state. The Greek dramatist Aeschylus in his celebration of Athens—the Oresteia—avows that the city-state is founded on blood: For contemporary progressives, as for Steiner, only Israel, the nation-state ne plus ultra, has blood on its hands. (h/t Yerushalimey)
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley called her veto vote that paved the way for the United States Embassy in Israel to move to Jerusalem “one of my proudest moments.”
“What I saw at the Security Council reminded me of what it felt like to be bullied when I was a kid. I have no patience for bullies. They were kicking Israel just because — without facts,” she said during the session with Hillel Neuer, the executive director of United Nations Watch.
Haley spoke during an on-stage interview in Montreal at the Shaar Hashamayim synagogue April 10.
She told the 1,200-person audience she doesn’t think U.N. resolutions are effective.
“I don’t think they matter,” she said, speaking of one of the main tools the U.N. General Assembly or Security Council uses to give an opinion.
Member states are not actually required to abide by U.N. resolutions, according to the U.N.
When she vetoed a resolution that would have condemned the United States for moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Haley told the crowd, “I felt like I was fighting for the truth and for what was right. And I was mad. Every country has the sovereign right to put their embassy wherever they choose. The U.S. always chooses to have its embassy in the capital. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The rest of the world can’t hide what we know as fact. The president had great courage to do it.”
“The Arab countries have a lot of oil and a lot of money, and they started picking up all these other countries to vote with them. If you actually go into the quiet corners of the U.N., most countries don’t hate Israel, most envy Israel,” she said.
The IDF wished its Christian,
Druze, and Jewish soldiers a happy holiday this week. Which is fine. Israel is,
after all, a democracy, and we have soldiers of various religions serving side
by side. But I did wonder why the graphic showing the Jewish symbol associated with
Passover, a matzoh, was situated at the lowest point of the three symbols
depicted. After all, the IDF is an army that represents the Jewish State.
Why is the matzoh situated at the lowest point of the graphic? Misplaced humility.
I’m sure no harm was meant.
Quite the opposite. That holiday greeting was an exercise in democracy, showing
Israel’s tolerance for people of different faiths. The point of juxtaposing the
symbols in that manner was perhaps to show that Israel is humble—that we don’t
need to see Judaism as superior to other religions. Only different.
Whether or not we agree with
this idea, it is important for Jews to remember and absorb the lessons of Jewish
history. In Ottoman times, it was prohibited
for Jews to build homes higher than those of Muslims. Four important Jerusalem Old
City synagogues, in fact, were built
below street level as a result of this prohibition. Officials had to be bribed before the
Hurva synagogue could be renovated during the early 1700s, because it was to be
built higher than before.
The issue of height was not
exclusive to the Turks, to buildings, or even to Jews. It was the practice wherever
there was Islamic rule that those who were not Muslim be subject to
humiliation. Often, humiliation was expressed through lowering the height of
Infidels as compared to Muslims. This meant that, for instance, Jews and
Christians could not ride horses.
It was regarded as a grave offense for a dhimmi to ride upon a noble animal, such as a camel or a horse. . .
In 1697, a Frenchman visiting Cairo noticed that Christians could ride only
donkeys and had to dismount when passing distinguished Muslims, “for a
Christian must only appear before a Muslim in a humiliating position.” Till the
beginning of the twentieth century, in Yemen and in the rural areas of Morocco,
Libya, Iraq, and Persia, a Jew had to dismount from his donkey when passing a
Muslim. An oversight authorized a Muslim to throw him to the ground. A
Spaniard, Domingo Badia y Leblich, who traveled in North Africa and the Orient
between 1803 and 1807, and who wrote under the name of Ali Bey, related that no
Jew or Christian in Damascus was even allowed to ride a mule inside the town. In
Yemen, the prohibition on riding horses remained in force till 1948, as well as
a rule obliging the Jewish dhimmis to
ride donkeys sidesaddle. (Bat Ye’or. The
Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Farleigh
Dickinson University Press, 1996)
The lowering of the Infidel in
Muslim lands was a pervasive practice enshrined by law. Humiliation, as a
precept, was extended to walking as well as to speech. Eyes had to be lowered,
doorways, too.
In some legal opinions (fatwas), jurists required dhimmis to walk with lowered eyes when
passing to the left—the impure side—of Muslims, who were encouraged to push
them aside. In the presence of a Muslim, the dhimmi had to remain standing in a humble and respectful attitude,
only speaking in a low voice when given permission. Jews and Christians were
humiliated and maltreated in the streets of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and
Safed till the middle of the nineteenth century. Travelers to the Maghreb and
Yemen mention similar customs even later; in the early twentieth century Nahum
Slousch observed at Bu Zein, in the Jabal Gharian (Libya), that it was
customary for Arab children to throw stones at Jewish passersby.
In Persia and Yemen, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, foreigners noticed the low doors that forced the dhimmis—as an additional humiliation—either to stoop or knock their
heads when entering their own homes . . . At certain periods, the Jews of
Bukhara . . . had to crouch in their shops so that only their heads and not
their bodies were visible to their Muslim clients, a practice reminiscent of
the obligation for Jews and Christians in fourteenth-century Damascus to keep
the threshold of their shops below street level so that they would always
appear in an inferior position before a Muslim. (Bat Ye’or, Ibid.)
In the book Miriam's Song: The Story of Miriam Peretz,
Miriam Peretz tells how, as a little girl in Casablanca, she was running an
errand for her mother, and as she came up to the counter, several Muslim
children entered the store and the storekeeper waited on all of them before
her. It was just the way things were in Muslim countries, even in the mid-twentieth
century. Their money may have been as green as anyone else’s, but Jews were
always secondary to Muslims in Muslim countries. It appears it was not, in
fact, “all about the Benjamins, Baby.”
Jews and Christians had to be
lower than Muslims, both figuratively and literally. Muslims were always first,
higher, and ahead of anyone else: ahead of people with differing beliefs. And
of course, the Jews were the lowest of the low and had to walk in the gutter to
be lower than Muslims, identify themselves with different clothing, and wear
bells and/or silly hats to announce their offensive presence to Muslims.
This history of humiliation is a
part of who we Jews are today as a people. The historic practice of Muslims humiliating
Jews is, in fact, one of the reasons it is so important we have our own state:
a place where we can live life with basic human dignity, as people with the same
rights as any other people in any other place.
But in Israel, the Jewish part
is supposed to come first.
Hence, in Israel, we are not
bombarded with television specials designed for children with a Christmas
theme. Our holiday is Chanuka.
It is not that we are saying
that Christmas doesn’t exist, or that Chanuka is better. It is that Israel is
the Jewish State, where Jewish practice is primary.
Other people are welcome to live
alongside us, rather than below us in humiliating fashion, but we must insist
on the central Jewish character of the State of Israel, or we imperil what it
means to us as Jews who for so long had to live subservient to other cultures, marked
inferior due to our religious beliefs.
This being the case, where
should the IDF graphic artist have rightfully placed that matzoh symbol? On
top, showing that in the Jewish State, Judaism reigns supreme? At the same
level, implying equality? Or at bottom, because after all, humility is also a
trait of decency and tolerance.
It’s a toughie, all right. And I
don’t envy that graphic artist’s dilemma: how to depict all the symbols so no
one gets upset. As such, the artist chose to put the Jewish symbol at the
bottom, thinking: the Jew won’t mind. It isn’t the locus of the symbol that
matters, but the holiday itself.
There is no doubt the graphic
artist serving the IDF meant to show Israel as a democracy, a place where all
people have complete freedom of religion, and can live in equality and harmony.
What that holiday greeting suggested,
however, is that our stateless wanderings of the past have affected our current
collective psyche. We are used to being humbled, used to letting others go
ahead of us, used to letting others climb on top. But now that we have our own
state, things are supposed to be different.
Menachem Begin knew this, felt
it when, in 1982, he said to then Senator Joe Biden, who had threatened to cut
off U.S. aid to Israel, “I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew
with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were
dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were
striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for
it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary,
we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
That is the spirit that is
missing from that graphic. The spirit that rebels at the idea of being Jews
with trembling knees. But it’s better that we find out now. It’s better that we
know the nature of the work that lies ahead. That IDF holiday tweet tells us
that our IDF soldiers (including those who serve as graphic artists) need to
have a much better grounding in Jewish history. That is if they are to be the
first line of defense for the Jewish character of the Jewish people in the
Jewish State of Israel.
UPDATE: As reader Dovid Levine noted, I originally said the IDF holiday greeting mentions Jewish soldiers, last. I have updated to correct the error.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Washington, April 24 - Waves of empathy and condolences for the hundreds of Sri Lanka church bombing victims and their families have left prominent figures in the Democratic Party bewildered, aides report, as those victims of violence do not belong to the Islamic faith.
Staff members of Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and other legislators and political leaders noted this week that in the aftermath of the attacks that left more than 360 dead and many more wounded, Democratic politicians continue to voice confusion at widespread outpourings of sympathy, goodwill, offers of assistance, and similar manifestations of care that those politicians had assumed only appropriate when Muslim suffering appears on the news.
"Some of them are really shaken up," observed an aide to Congresswoman Omar, speaking on condition of anonymity. "My boss, for example, spent much of last night on the phone with fellow Democrats discussing this phenomenon, which she described with words such as 'disturbing,' 'weird,' and frustrating.' There seems to be a general sense of the unfamiliar in party circles at the moment, because compared to when Muslim attacks on non-Muslims happen in the West, it's much harder in this case to fall back on the comfortable tropes of grievance, resistance, colonial baggage, or whatever. Those easy sound bites don't fit Sri Lanka. The whole thing feels very awkward."
"It's freaky," admitted presidential hopeful Kamala Harris. "We live under the assumption that the people who automatically get sympathy are Muslims, and then boom, so to speak, large numbers of people direct sympathy toward those who are not only non-Muslim, but victims of violence by Muslims. It's going to take some time to digest this."
Observers note that this is not the first time many on the political left have admitted confusion in the face of non-Muslim victims. "The Palestinian suicide bombing campaigns of the late 1990's and early 2000's prompted a good bit of perplexity on the left, as I recall," noted New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. "There was this groundswell of sympathy for Jewish Israelis, especially among Americans, and for those whose leftist leanings translated into reflexive sympathy only for Palestinians, that was a difficult and confounding time. Why would anyone feel sympathy, let alone empathy or solidarity, with non-Muslims, and with Jews, of all people? It was a real challenge."
"Fortunately," he recalled, "9-11 happened and eventually we were able to put that chapter behind us. Maybe something similar can happen now."
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
President Trump appears set to expose more than forty years of deceptive and misleading information disseminated by the United Nations (UN) in relation to the boundaries of former Palestine.
This welcome development comes with President Trump’s Special U.S Envoy Jason D. Greenblatt telling Sky News in Arabic on 19 April: “there is no reason to use the term ‘two-state solution,” the reason being that, “every side sees it differently.”
The UN must take responsibility for creating such confusion by perpetuating intellectual and political fraud originating with its 1978 publication: "The Origins and Evolution of the Palestinian Problem" (referred to below as the Study).
Part 1 of the Study covering 1917-1947 was trashed by Israel’s Ambassador to the UN – Yehuda Blum – on 16 November:
“Even the most cursory reading of this document can leave no doubt that the means and machinery of the United Nations have been misused once again to disseminate highly selective and tendentious information under the guise, in this instance, of what purports to be a scholarly study.
The history of international conflicts, and particularly those with complex historical origins, can only be properly written by objective historians who enjoy complete academic freedom. The practice of writing and rewriting history according to the transient interests of a political body is, of course, characteristic of certain regimes. It is regrettable that the United Nations has now been drawn into that pattern.”
Blum then told the UN General Assembly on 30 November 1978:
“At the end of the first part of the publication, ostensibly dealing with the period of the Palestine Mandate, there appear a number of maps. The one map that is conspicuously absent is the official map of the Palestine Mandate which, until 1946, included Transjordan on the east bank of the Jordan River. This map was omitted because it does not fit into the PLO’s own scheme, as it would show too clearly that a Palestinian Arab state has already been in existence for 32 years on more than three quarters of the territory of mandated Palestine – that is, the state now called Jordan. That embarrassment is eliminated in this purportedly scholarly and impartial publication by the simple expedient of eliminating the map.”
In the years since the second intifada ended, no small number of retired high-ranking IDF officers and intelligence officials have argued that complete separation from the Palestinians is a strategic necessity for Israel. Gershon Hacohen, analyzing the geography, the changes in warfare—and Middle Eastern warfare in particular—since the 1990s, and recent history, argues that they are wrong:
The withdrawal of IDF forces from the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state in these territories will constitute an existential threat to Israel. The absence of an Israeli military presence in the West Bank, especially along the Jordan River, will enable the creation of a terrorist entity, à la the Gaza Strip, a stone’s throw from the Israeli hinterland. This withdrawal will box Israel into indefensible borders, especially in light of the major changes in the nature of war in recent decades that have made the astounding achievements of 1967 impossible to replicate, not to mention the stark international response [that would follow Israel’s] takeover of a sovereign state.
The deployment of international forces in the West Bank will not, [contrary to what some have argued], ensure the demilitarization of the prospective Palestinian state, let alone prevent the entry of Arab forces into its territory (with or without its consent) and/or its transformation into a springboard for terrorist attacks against Israel. . . .
Israel [now] maintains control of some 60 percent of the West Bank’s territory, . . . which is mostly empty of Palestinian population but includes all of the West Bank’s Jewish communities and IDF bases, as well as main highways, vital topographic areas, and open spaces descending eastward to the Jordan Valley. The retention of this territory constitutes the absolute minimum required for the preservation of defensible borders and meets two conditions necessary for Israel’s security: the Jordan Valley buffer zone, without which it will be impossible to prevent the rapid arming of Palestinian terrorist groups throughout the West Bank; and control of intersecting transportation arteries, which, together with control of strategic topographical sites, enables rapid deployment of IDF forces deep inside Palestinian areas.
The Trump foreign policy team scored a big victory in The Hague that will protect American soldiers from illegitimate and unaccountable foreign prosecutions. The International Criminal Court dropped a more than decade-long inquiry into alleged crimes by U.S. personnel in Afghanistan after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the U.S. would deny a visa to the court's prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda.
If the ICC were to indict U.S. servicemen, no American president would turn them over, but it would have a real effect on their lives. They would face peril in traveling to countries that have joined the ICC, including all of Western Europe. They would be international fugitives.
The court's officials are unaccountable to nationals of non-member states like the U.S. Yet they might sit in judgment of decisions made by U.S. personnel in life-or-death situations, and second-guess the judgments of professional prosecutors in democratic countries that have chosen not to join the court.
The court is currently considering whether to open an investigation into whether Israel is committing war crimes by allowing Jews to live in the West Bank. Thus the ICC would be investigating a non-member state at the behest of a non-state member, for a supposed crime that no one in the history of international criminal law has been charged with.
The Swiss government has been directly funding legal activity targeting Israel over the past year. The funding, estimated at $2 million at least, was transferred by the Swiss Foreign Ministry through its diplomatic mission in Ramallah to a series of Israeli and Palestinian organizations one year ago.
The transfer of the funds took place shortly after the Swiss government ended its support for the Ramallah-based Human Rights and International Law Secretariat over its support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Ultimately, though, the funds went toward financing similar projects.
Israel Hayom has seen the contracts, signed by both the Swiss diplomatic mission in Ramallah and six pro-Palestinian organizations in 2018. In addition, funding was allocated toward three Israeli organizations: Hamoked human rights organization, Physicians for Human Rights and Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.
Among the activities financed in accordance with the contract: “building cases for the International Criminal Court” and “collecting testimonies, field inspections, holding interviews and [providing] legal assistance to victims of war crimes.”
It should be noted that according to the security doctrine formulated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the ICC is one of the greatest threats to Israel.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
Christmas Eve
-
[image: Dry Bones cartoon, Christmas, Bethlehem, Israel, antisemitism,]
And to all a Good Night!.
* * * Please support DRY BONES (through PayPal or your Cr...
Ireland is Committing Genocide Against Itself
-
The obsession of the Irish government with falsely accusing Israel of
genocide is only equaled by its determination to commit an actual genocide
against...
This Week’s Sanity Report from Israel Dec. 22, 2024
-
[image: This Week’s Sanity Report from Israel Dec. 22, 2024] This Week’s
Sanity Report from Israel Dec. 22, 2024 IsraelSeen.com
This Week’s Sanity Report f...
Israel’s Anti-UNRWA Campaign is Working
-
The IDF has gathered evidence that proves that dozens of UNRWA staff
members took part in the atrocities — rapes, tortures, mutilations, murders
— carried ...
An Observation on Israelis and Archaeology
-
Ariel David of Haaretz reported on a new find, one that appears here and
deals with An Israelite Residency at Mahanaim in Transjordan?
It deals with "th...
Hamas/Gaza War Musings #36- Dangerous Surrender!
-
As a student of the Bible/Tanach, most recently Prophets/Navi, that's the
message. Gd will save us if we do the right thing. That's how we won the
1967...
One Choice: Fight to Win
-
Yesterday Israel preempted a potentially disastrous attack by Hezbollah on
the center of the country. Thirty minutes before launch time, our aircraft
destr...
Closing Jews Down Under Website
-
With a heavyish heart I am closing down the website after ten years.
It is and it isn’t an easy decision after 10 years of constant work. The
past...
‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
-
Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Sunday, April 28, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
.jpg)
