Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, March 21, 2021

03/21 Links: Will the Exodus story be the next victim of cancel culture?; What has anyone ever done for the Palestinians?; Failure to stop Iran's terror support might lead to Israel-Hezbollah war

From Ian:

Will the Exodus story be the next victim of cancel culture?

With Pesach (Holiday of Passover) literally just around the corner, should we be concerned that the story of Exodus may very well be the next victim of “cancel culture”.

The story of Exodus tells of the Jewish nation’s departure from Egypt, the revelations at Mount Sinai, and their wanderings in the desert wilderness for 40 years prior to entering the Land of Israel. The central message of Exodus was that the Jewish nation was delivered from slavery to freedom by God, and therefore became the “Chosen People” by the covenant given to the Jewish nation at Mount Sinai.

Early Christians saw the Exodus as a typological prefiguration of resurrection and salvation. The story has also resonated with other non-Jewish groups, such as the early American settlers fleeing persecution in Europe, and African Americans striving for freedom and civil rights. However, this message of liberation from slavery to redemption may very well be nothing more than a hollow manifestation of wishful thinking and a remnant of what was once accepted as progressive thinking.

Today’s progressive movers and shakers, such as Black Lives Matters and their supporters among America’s intelligentsia, academia, and media celebrities, have rendered this interpretation of Exodus no longer valid. With the proliferation of fake news alongside the unparalleled political polarization that has swept America, its makes it nearly impossible to establish an agreed-upon set of historical facts from which to draw conclusions, let alone accept the story of Exodus as a beacon of hope and freedom from slavery.

Current progressive thinking has a wholly different approach and asserts that not only are Jews to be seen as privileged whites, but that being Jewish can be invoked and used to benefit Jews as a way of intensifying someone’s status as being white. This being the case, their argument goes further and claims that essentially Jews have no right to be identified as oppressed and thus cannot claim sympathy for being slaves under Egyptian bondage. Inferred in this interpretation is that Jews should not be viewed in the same way as other minorities who have been freed from slavery. In other words, the Jewish nation's past persecution has been canceled by their present day status as white privileged.

National Review Editorial: Against California’s Ethnic-Studies Curriculum

The proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world. Even after all of the many revisions made to the document, it remains at bottom a political catechism, clearly formulated for the purpose of indoctrinating children into the intersectional electoral priorities of the far Left.

The first draft of the curriculum was so far outside the boundaries of the Overton window in California that it was rejected out of hand by the Board of Education, the governor, and even by the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, who ridiculed it as an “impenetrable mélange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements.” One of its lesson plans included a list of 154 influential people of color but omitted to mention Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, or even the late congressman John Lewis. Pol Pot, however, the architect of the Cambodian genocide, did make an appearance, alongside other violent revolutionaries.

Antisemitism has also plagued the development of the model curriculum from the start. An early draft listed the anti-Semitic BDS campaign alongside Black Lives Matter and #MeToo as an example of an historic American social movement and also referred to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence only as the “Nakba,” an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe.” Even in the final version of the curriculum, Jews have been relegated to an appendix. Their outsized contribution to American life does not warrant a place in the core content of the course in the eyes of the curriculum’s authors.

Jonathan S. Tobin: The Problem With Ethnic Studies Isn’t Just How It Treats Jews

The trouble with ethnic studies is that even with the more overt symptoms of anti-Jewish prejudice removed, the curriculum is still a political catechism rooted in intersectional ideology about Third World nations and people of color locked in a never-ending struggle against white oppression. The subtext is therefore still one that puts Jews in the unfortunate position of either denying their own “privilege” or being enlisted in a political struggle that has little to do with a celebration of diversity, let alone the manifold blessings of American liberty.

The disturbing aspects of this teaching go beyond the trouble it makes for Jews. After all, in California, students are only required to take three semesters of English and two of math to graduate high school. But while subjects like biology, chemistry, physics, geography, civics, history, and foreign languages are merely optional, this ideologically tainted ethnic studies curriculum will be mandatory. Think about what this means for the future of a country in which important disciplines, including those that were once correctly viewed as essential for an informed citizenry in a democracy, are ditched in favor of lessons about prioritizing race and tearing down the country.

Those who are trying to remind Californians of the struggles and achievements of Jews in America have a good story to tell that is deserving of attention. The same is true of Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, and a host of other groups. But Jewish success in the United States is rooted in the core truths about that so-called “dominant” narrative about the country in which immigrants from a variety of backgrounds joined together to embrace the values and the ideas of the Founding Fathers about political and economic freedom. The same is true for the successes of every other group, including those who were subjected to far worse discrimination than the antisemitism Jews had to face.

By enshrining an ethnic-studies course into law in this manner, California has set up a destructive competition along racial, religious, and ethnic lines that makes race the primary way we all define ourselves rather than as individuals and Americans. It glorifies a struggle for “equity” in which some Americans will get privilege and power based on their group identity, rather than demanding that all are given an equal chance and judged on their own merits.

We should know the stories of all groups that make up the mosaic of American life. But the critical race theory animating this curriculum and other versions of it infiltrating into American society is a poison that undermines national identity and patriotism. Instead of Jews demanding their piece of the ethnic pie and begging that the core ideology of intersectionalism that dismisses them as privileged whites be watered down, we should be rejecting the entire edifice of this deplorable curriculum as something that will hurt all Americans.

From Time, March 29, 1954:

At dawn one day last week, a bus pulled out of the stockade at Elath, Israel's southernmost outpost and single Red Sea port. It headed north into the Negeb desert, toward Beersheba and civilization, wheezing and jogging for hours through the cratered wasteland that comprises half of Israel. The 15 passengers chatted and compared souvenirs. Outside, vultures wheeled in the pale sky.

The bus reached treacherous Scorpion's Pass, 60 miles south of Beersheba, and started up the grade like a clumsy beetle. As it neared a stone monument, erected to honor the Jews who fell in 1948 to win the Negeb, it was struck by a volley of gunfire. Ephraim Fuerstenberg, the driver, slumped dead; the bus rolled to a stop. Four passengers raced wildly through the door; a second burst spat from a hillock, and they fell lifeless onto the bleached clay. A bottle of cologne broke in the pocket of Hanna Kirshenbaum, 29, mother of three, and mingled the scent of flowers with her blood.

Two khaki-clad Arabs raced for the bus, leaped inside and sprayed it with Tommy guns. A soldier saved Ephraim's five-year-old daughter by throwing himself across her body, but he was riddled. Then the Arabs grabbed revolvers and fired into anything that twitched. "I played dead," said Miriam Lesser, a waitress. "One of the Arabs dragged me up by my hair to see if I was alive, then shot at my head but missed." A moment later, the assassins were gone.

Behind them they left eleven dead and a woman and a child critically wounded. Three shammed death. For a long time they dared not move because they heard noises. Later they learned that the sounds had been made by a dying man's feet drumming the bus floor in his last agony. Ephraim's daughter whimpered a few times; her father and mother were dead. The vultures were swooping lower and lower when an army truck twisted up the road and onto the terrible scene.

Once again—as it does almost every day—blood flowed in mockery of the state of affairs that diplomats call the Palestine truce.

Trackers traced the footsteps of approximately five people to Jordan, and the Jordanians then saw that the team split up, but they were never found. One of the IDs of a victim was found later in Gaza.

This was before 1967, before "occupation." Today, "occupation" is an excuse for Palestinian terror, but there was no such excuse before "occupation" and there was plenty of terror.

I've mentioned before that Palestinians have been protesting UNRWA's decision to a implement a "unified food basket program" where it would give all families the same food benefits and take away free food for families with a steady income.

Cash-strapped UNRWA isn't backing down, so the Palestinian protesters have been escalating their activities.

Today, the Joint Committee for Refugees closed all UNRWA service centers in the Gaza Strip for two consecutive days in protest, ensuring that no one gets food at all.

If they keep it up, UNRWA can save lots of money on food rations. Soon all recipients of food aid in Gaza can starve thanks to the people who pretend to defend them.

This is the sort of story that gets roundly ignored in the Western media, because Palestinians having reckless disregard for their own people isn't worth reporting on.

Captain Triumph was one of the many mostly forgotten superhero comics of the 1940s.

In one episode Triumph confronts a thinly disguised composite of Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini named "Mussler:"

Triumph's friend pretends to be the dictator's guard, and when the Hitler character demands to know what happened to his regular assistant, he is told that his grandfather was found to be a ....unnamed type of person. Therefore he was shipped off to a concentration camp.

There has been research in how comic books in the post-war years addressed the Holocaust, but I couldn't find any mention of how the comics - which ridiculed the Axis countries often - ever hinted at the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany.

03/20 Links: The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy; Israel climbs to 12th spot in pandemic-focused World Happiness Report

From Ian:

The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy

Since the Biden administration’s decision to reverse the designation of Yemen’s Houthi militia as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) on February 12, drones and ballistic missiles have targeted Saudi Arabia 48 times.

The latest attack, on Saudi oil facilities in Ras Tanura, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, on Sunday, did not come from the direction of Yemen, a royal court adviser told the Wall Street Journal; declining to comment on whether the projectile was launched from Iran or from Iraq.

The removal of the Houthis from the US government’s FTO list was meant to reduce tensions, but it achieved the opposite result. At the heart of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy is a fallacy: that the region’s politics should be understood as a contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict between two states that is also a sectarian struggle.

Seen from Tehran, the central contest in the region is between the American alliance system and Iran’s self-styled “resistance alliance”.

Biden’s misconception leads to a number of erroneous ideas: that the United States can play a neutral, mediating role between Riyadh and Tehran; that by distancing itself from Saudi Arabia, it creates opportunities for regional stability and understanding; and that it is the Saudi role in Yemen – and not the Iranian role – that has perpetuated the conflict in that country.

While escalating by attacking Saudi Arabia via its proxies is a core part of Iran’s regional policies, we must not forget that Iran has waged a forty-year war to spread its control across the region — not to compete with Saudi Arabia, but to undermine the American alliance system. The Biden administration’s resurrection of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East has breathed life into one of its most inaccurate and damaging myths: the centrality of a Saudi-Iran rivalry to regional politics.

Iran’s imperial project in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon does not exist to reclaim influence from Saudi Arabia, but to upend the American security order in the Middle East. And, like Iran’s Foreign Minister, Iran’s network of terrorist groups in the region chant, “death to America,” not, “death to Saudi Arabia”.

Team Biden sees these attacks as cries for help from partners for peace. Trump-style deterrence “did not work,” b/c bad people continued to exist and do bad things. Only a new approach that calls the bad good can make the bad disappear, not unlike choosing your pronouns properly. https://t.co/MGslyaU8LY
— Mike (@Doranimated) March 19, 2021

Don't cut or condition US military aid to Israel

One of us is a member of Congress from Florida who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and used to work as a national security specialist at the Department of Defense. The other is also a former Pentagon official who now leads an organization that promotes strong U.S. defense policies, including close cooperation between the United States and Israel.

One of us is a refugee from Vietnam whose family fled a communist regime that seized power after the Vietnam War. The other is an American Jew whose ancestors fled virulent anti-Semitism in Europe. Just as the United States was a safe haven for our families, we recognize — on both an emotional and intellectual level — that the state of Israel, which reestablished ancient Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land, has been a sanctuary for millions of Jewish families enduring persecution in their native lands.

Informed by our personal and professional backgrounds, both of us believe that U.S. military assistance to Israel — beyond helping our ally to deter conflict with aggressive state and non-state actors, to prevail if conflict occurs, and to protect its civilian population from persistent rocket and missile threats — directly advances America’s national security interests. It also promotes our shared democratic values in a region of the world where autocracy predominates.

We appreciate the fact that U.S. military aid to Israel — which currently amounts to $3.8 billion a year and is used to enhance Israel’s offensive and defensive capabilities — has long enjoyed broad support from the American public, from their Democratic and Republican representatives in Congress, and from presidential administrations of both political persuasions.

It is precisely because support in this country for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship has been bipartisan that it has also been enduring.

That’s why we’ve been troubled by recent calls from U.S. political leaders in some quarters to cut security assistance to Israel, or to condition that assistance on Israel making changes to policies toward the Palestinians that these U.S. leaders find objectionable. We believe this approach is counter-productive and dangerous. (h/t jzaik)

India Israel Relations – An Overview

India-Israel relations have always been an ongoing topic for academic research and journalistic reporting, as well as a fascinating experience for practitioners. Many generations of diplomats, scholars and reporters have witnessed the unique story of the Indo Israeli journey. As a young diplomat, during the early 1970s, I was attracted by what promised to be a special partnership but lacked, at the time, political feasibility. I thus felt privileged, years later, as Ambassador to India, to contribute to the long chain of dedicated diplomats from both the countries, who brought our relations to where they stand today.

Trade between the Jews and the Indians dating hundreds of years ago, the fact that Jews were always welcome in India, never suffering from racism or discrimination were the first threads in the fabric of today’s special relations between the governments and peoples of India and Israel. Both the nations also have much in common, with shared democratic values and interests, as two relatively young societies, proud of their respective historical, cultural roots, eager to embrace the future, innovation and technology.

While India officially recognized Israel in 1950, it took four more decades until a suitable political atmosphere and political will, allowed the recognition to be translated into diplomatic relations. A ‘wind of change’ reshaping global, regional and national paradigms, also led to a new global approach to Diplomacy. The stage was thus set for 1992 to be a turning point in the emerging relations between both the nations.

Looking back at the past 29 years, two notable trends come to mind in the Indo Israeli relations: Visibility and Scope. When full diplomatic relations were established, they were kept low-key, with a conveniently, discrete emphasis on Defence. The “zero sum game” perception prevailing at the time in many Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) capitals, including New Delhi, avoided admitting publicly good relations with Israel and the Arab world at the same time. As a leader of NAM, Delhi opted to stick with the Arab countries (NAM members by themselves). This “arrangement” did not last beyond the Cold War era, as the rationale behind the low-key approach was no longer acceptable, relevant, or needed. The low-volume relations paradigm slowly shifted by the end of the 1990s. It was dramatically replaced in 2014, when the Indian Government adopted a landmark “De Hyphenation” (or “No Zero Sum Game”) policy toward West Asia: Shortly after coming to power, on July 21, 2014, the Government of India’s External Affairs Minister (EAM), the late Sushma Swaraj, stated in the Parliament, that while continuing to support the Palestinian cause (which was the overriding policy element until then), India maintains good relations with Israel. This dramatic public departure from previous policy has since been reiterated numerous times by various Indian officials, in words and deeds. Dramatic as it was then, this new approach has since become part and parcel of our relations, as acknowledged recently by EAM, Dr. Jaishankar, speaking at the opening session of Israel’s Ambassadors to Asia-Pacific Annual Conference, “the (India Israel) relationship finally enjoys the stature and visibility it deserves”.

03/19 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War; Guardian op-ed promotes the end of the Jewish state; The Quincy Institute vs. John Quincy Adams

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War

Two weeks ago, a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals from the Bithonistim, a grassroots national security organization, slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.

They came to draw the public's attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.

The site was excavated between 1980 and 1989 by the late Professor Adam Zertal, who identified it as Joshua's Altar as described in the Books of Deuteronomy, (27; 1-9) and Joshua (8; 30-35). The animal remains at the site contained thousands of burnt bones of year-old male, exclusively kosher, animals. They were burned in an open flame 3,250 years ago—the time generally identified as the period of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel under Joshua. Other remains found at the site included earrings and scarabs made in Egypt at the time of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh often associated with the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

As Zertal explained in a lecture in 2013, the altar was buried under a layer of rocks, in keeping with Jewish prescriptions for preventing the desecration of abandoned holy sites. In keeping with the biblical narrative, the altar is made of unhewn stones; instead of steps, there are two ramps for the priests to alight to the platform—blocks of plaster were found nearby. The altar at Mt. Ebal also matches a Talmudic description of an altar from the Second Temple period, around 900 years later, indicating a continuity of Jewish practices throughout the biblical period.

Although initially controversial, Zertal's general finding that the site is around 3,300 years old and is a Jewish historical site, where sacrifices were carried out in keeping with biblical guidelines, has become widely accepted—although many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua.

In late January, the Palestinian Authority (PA) posted a video on its website of 60 meters of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road connecting the Palestinian village of Asira ash-Shamaliya to Nablus. Nablus, built on the ruins of the biblical city of Shechem, is located in northern Samaria between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim.

Zertal was a fiercely secular son of hardcore socialists. Yet, he explained in a 2013 lecture, his scientific work compelled him to accept that the biblical narrative "from Deuteronomy through the Books of Kings was historically accurate."

"There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the damage done here was deliberate," Major General Gershon Hacohen explained to Newsweek. "That since it was the surrounding wall—rather than the altar itself—that was destroyed, the altar wasn't harmed. That's like saying that if someone destroys the steps to the Acropolis, they aren't harming the Acropolis. It's the same complex."

"They also say the Palestinians weren't trying to damage the site—they just needed stones for their road. But look at this place," he said and waved his hand across the landscape.

The slopes of Mt. Ebal are strewn with loose rocks.

"If they needed rocks for the road, all the Palestinians had to do was bring up a truck and take as many as they needed. Instead, they brought a bulldozer all the way up here and deliberately destroyed 60 meters of a 3,250-year-old wall."

As if to prove Hacohen's point, this week, a group of Palestinians was filmed barbecuing on the altar itself.

The Palestinian effort to destroy the site is of a piece with the PA's long-standing efforts to destroy the physical record of millennia-old Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. That effort is now focused on destroying and appropriating the artifacts of Jewish history in Samaria.

Guardian op-ed promotes the end of the Jewish state

For the second time in as many months, the Guardian has published an op-ed calling for an end to the Jewish state. The latest piece, (“The Israeli and Palestinian elections offend democracy – each in their own way”, March 18) by Salem Barahmeh, director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, parrots the narrative of B’tselem in claiming that Israel isn’t truly democratic.

In January, Btselem’s director Hagai El-Ad penned a Guardian op-ed (based on his group’s report) which included the lie that Israel is a non-democratic “Jewish supremacist” state which “rules everyone and everything between the river and the sea” – propaganda we refuted at the time.

Similarly, Barahmeh’s op-ed includes the following:
Israel’s famed “democracy”, like its expansionist policies, doesn’t stop at or recognise the green line – if anything it has bulldozed them into oblivion. In practice, Israel effectively exercises total control over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

He’s arguing, much like El-Ad before him, that Israel has “total control” not only over Palestinians in PA-controlled Area A of the West Bank, but, even more absurdly, that Jerusalem has “total control” over the two million Gazans who live under Hamas’s authoritarian rule.

Barahmeh then peddles more untruths:
5 million Palestinians vote for the PA, an administrative body that today has only partial control over 40% of the West Bank and is dependent on Israel for its survival. The PA was supposed to exist for five years while Palestinians transitioned to statehood, but that state never came. Successive Israeli governments made sure of that, using settlements and annexation to turn the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem into an archipelago of disconnected Palestinian population centres.

In fact, the PA has both military and administrative control of Area A, where the overwhelming majority of West Bank Palestinians live. Further, contrary to Barahmeh’s claim, there was no such promise that, five years into Oslo, a Palestinian state would be born – a myth about the Accords that we’ve gotten corrected at other publications.

Finally, his suggestion that “Israeli settlements and annexation” have turned the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem into “an archipelago of disconnected population centres” is ahistorical. Since as far back as 1949, when Jordan controlled the West Bank and Egypt controlled Gaza, the two Palestinian population centres were “disconnected”. Contrary to myths spread by pro-Palestinian activists, there never was, at any time in history, a sovereign, unified, uniquely Palestinian polity between the river and the sea.

The Quincy Institute vs. John Quincy Adams

n the fall of 2019, a group of historians and foreign-policy scholars founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Featuring thinkers such as Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Wertheim and funded by the unlikely duo of Charles Koch and George Soros, the organization named after John Quincy Adams calls for a restrained, noninterventionist U.S. foreign policy. Its stated mission is to “set U.S. foreign policy on a sensible and humane footing” based on “diplomatic engagement and military restraint.” Its mantra is Adams’s pithy quotation that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” which Bacevich contends “has discomfited proponents of militarized liberation or benign hegemony or empire gussied up as social uplift ever since.”

According to documents published on its website, the Quincy Institute wants to “reduce U.S. military operations in the Taiwan Strait,” concede Chinese military dominance in the South China Sea, “significantly withdraw troops” from the Middle East, offer Iran billions of dollars of IMF loans “to fight the coronavirus pandemic,” slash American commitments to NATO, and reduce the military budget.

The recommendations on the Middle East and Iran are of particular note. For among the Quincy Institute’s coterie of experts are numerous figures who have been publicly antagonistic toward Israel and America’s close relations with the Jewish state. These include Lawrence Wilkerson, a bitter critic of “the Jewish lobby in America”; the indefatigable investigators of American Jews’ dual loyalties, Paul Pillar and Chas Freeman; and leading “Israel Lobby” conspiracy authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Bear in mind, the institute is named after a man who in 1825 endorsed “the rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation.” That the anti-Zionist scholars of the Quincy Institute are at odds here with their organization’s namesake is not surprising. In fact, they misunderstand John Quincy Adams’s foreign-policy thinking in general. Bacevich laments, “During the 20th century, particularly its latter half, Americans abandoned the precepts that had guided policy makers back in Adams’s day…. Meddling—always in a worthy cause, of course—became fashionable.” To him, “Adams’s singular achievement, articulated in the Monroe Doctrine, was to position the United States for hemispheric hegemony, while still heeding Washington’s dictum to avoid ‘interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe.’” He has also praised Adams for “avoiding unnecessary trouble” and continuing an American grand strategy that “emphasized opportunistically ruthless expansionism on this continent, avid commercial engagement, and the avoidance of great-power rivalries abroad.” Wertheim adds that Adams “came to strongly oppose U.S. expansionism in the 1840s and 50s.”

03/19 Links Pt1: Caroline Glick: Abdullah the Irrelevant of Jordan; Former Ambassador Friedman sifts through ‘transformative’ accords and their future success; Schrödinger's War: The Palestinian Redux

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Abdullah the Irrelevant of Jordan

This then brings us back to King Abdullah and his decision to prevent Netanyahu's trip to Abu Dhabi last week. If the raging success of Netanyahu's regional diplomacy causes ideological and political distress to Israel's rabidly political and ideological media, it presents a strategic challenge to Jordan and is a source of existential angst for the Hashemite regime.

The Hashemite royal house in Jordan is an artifact of Britain's colonial regime in the region a century ago. The Hashemites are a small minority of Jordan's population. And the country they control is poor, and resource-strapped. The principal source of the longevity of the Hashemite regime is Israel. Jordan is located between Israel and Iraq and shares a border with Israel and Syria. Its position has long made it a buffer state. And its (relative) moderation has served as a deterrent to Iraqi and Syrian aggression against Israel. As a consequence, Israelis – particularly Israeli military leaders – long viewed the Hashemite Kingdom as indispensable.

As things stand today, the threat of war between Iraq or Syria (or both) and Israel has never been lower. Both Iraq and Syria are failed states at advanced levels of decomposition. And as a result, today, Jordan's importance as a buffer state has never been lower.

So too, for many years, Jordan, which has long owed its financial survival to support from and the remittances of Jordanian workers in the Gulf states, served as a bridge between Israel and those states. It's been almost a decade since Jordan has been asked to serve in that capacity.

The Obama administration's decision to realign the US Middle East alliance structure towards Iran and away from Israel and America's traditional Arab allies spooked the Emiratis, Egyptians, and the Saudis sufficiently to convince them to develop defense ties with Israel. Once that happened, Jordan, which was close to the Obama administration, became more of a nuisance than a bridge.

Jordan's transformation into an irrelevancy was on display last Thursday. By blocking Netanyahu's flight to the UAE, Abdullah showed that far from a bridge, he is an obstacle to the Gulf States' ties with Israel. So too, Netanyahu's announcement – subsequently repeated by the UAE – that the Emirates intend to invest $10 billion in Israel showed that Abdullah's ability to serve either as a bridge or an obstacle to relations is a mirage.

No one cares what Jordan does.

This then brings us to the Palestinians. Aside from the PLO and its Palestinian Authority, the greatest Arab champion of the Palestinian veto over Arab-Israeli peace has been King Abdullah. Whereas Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi welcomed the Abraham Accords, Abdullah joined Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in condemning them. So too, whereas the UAE and Bahrain sent their ambassadors to the White House to celebrate when then-President Donald Trump presented his peace plan, which included Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria, Abdullah condemned the plan.

As Israel moved forward with its plan to apply its sovereignty to those areas of Judea and Samaria in accordance with the Trump plan, Abdullah let it be known that such an Israeli-US move would cause him to abrogate Jordan's peace treaty with Israel.

One of the regional developments that keep Abdullah up at night is the still-unofficial alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Abdullah lives in fear that in exchange for Saudi Arabia's official normalization of ties, Israel will provide the Saudis with an official position in managing the mosques on the Temple Mount at Jordan's expense. For its part, as the current custodian of the mosques on the Temple Mount, Jordan has torpedoed every Israeli effort to stabilize the situation at the holy site.

Former Ambassador Friedman sifts through ‘transformative’ accords and their future success

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman came to his position as an attorney without a background in politics or diplomacy. Not being allegiant to a particular point of view, he said, “gave us an open field to chart our own course which we are very proud of.”

Friedman served for four years under the Trump administration, which delivered a number of remarkable achievements for Israel, including recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; recognizing Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights; and launching an ambitious and game-changing peace plan known as the Abraham Accords.

The “us”—meaning Friedman and his team, including Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt and Avi Berkowitz among others—thought the way that the United States and the rest of the world were looking at the Palestinians was that “they were giving them a pass on egregious human-rights violations, a pass on the inability of Hamas and P.A. [Palestinian Authority] to ever coalesce on anything, a pass on terrorism, a pass on pay-for-slay, a pass on not creating any of the institutions necessary for an economy … and yet people were talking about a Palestinian state.”

“This was putting the cart before the horse,” he said.

Sitting down in conversation with Martin Kramer, founding president of Jerusalem’s Shalem College, as part of this week’s Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference, Friedman said that when he came to office, “the Middle East was due for some unconventional thinking.”

The primary advantage of coming in without a diplomatic background, he said, was “not being wed to the past” and harnessing “problem-solving skills taken from past experience”as part of his career in the legal field.

Asked which conventional wisdom needed deflation, Friedman said “the most wrong was the indulgence of the Palestinian cause to the point where it negated the notion of accountability.”

“There would be this equivalence between building settlements and acts of terrorism. You can be pro or against settlements, but you cannot possibly equate the two,” he added.

Schrödinger's War: The Palestinian Redux

When discussing the Israel-Palestinian conflict, President of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes is fond of using the remarkable story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Imperial Japanese Army as an analogy. Lt. Onada had been living on an island in the Philippines engaging in acts of a war that had, to the rest of the world, ended decades previously.

At the state level, Jonathan Schwarz in a 2006 Mother Jones piece aptly titled Schrödinger's War compared the schizophrenic nature of the Bush administration’s approach to the Iraq war to a well known physics conundrum:

“The famous “Schrödinger’s Cat” thought experiment posits a situation in which, according to quantum theory, a cat could be both alive and dead. Today, America is in much the same situation. We’re not at war, since the attorney general insists Congress has not declared it. Yet at the same time, we are at war, because the entire Bush administration says so as often as possible.”

Most people in the State of Israel and around the world believe the Israel-Palestinian conflict has ended and has been since 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords, but the conflict is very much alive at the same time. While there is no negotiated solution, and acts of murder and bloodshed occur sparingly, these are frequently seen as disconnected from the reality of war as Onada was from the end of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, for us, the Palestinian leadership still very much believes they are in a war that will end in Israel’s destruction.

This might be obvious for Hamas, but it also remains true for Fatah and other groups which rule or are active in Judea and Samaria.

According to Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub has announced that Fatah urges “all the national activity factions” to run together on a joint list in the upcoming elections.

“[PFLP] emphasized its firm opposition to recognizing the racist Zionist entity, and its determination to continue with all forms of the struggle, and foremost among them armed resistance, in order to liberate every grain of the soil of Palestine,” PMW quoted Ma’an, a Palestinian Arab news agency, a day earlier.

In other words, Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is happily embracing and officially calling to partner an organization dedicated to the end of the Jewish State through violence and terror.

It might be useful to try and bring a comparison to Israeli or U.S. politics, but no party exists which calls for the violent destruction of a whole nation.

In a response to the events at Middlebury College I mentioned earlier, Max Shulman-Litwin, a member of Middlebury's Hillel, wrote an op-ed for the college newspaper explaining why Jews are uncomfortable with Students for Justice in Palestine.

Shulman-Litwin falls into a trap that many Jews do when talking about the Middle East - his arguments are wishy-washy and he agrees that Israel's critics are correct up to a point. Then he expects the readers to follow his nuanced approach of drawing a tortuous line between what they say that he(falsely) thinks is true and where they go too far.

Max's intro to the article points to how poor the entire op-ed is:

The Middlebury chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has created a website that helps us understand the extent of the suffering of the Palestinian people currently and in the past. In this op-ed, I do not deny the merit of their arguments for the rights of the Palestinian people, but I do draw attention to a harmful blind spot in their activism.

He links to the SJP website that calls Israel an apartheid state! Before he even gets to defending Israel or Jews, he essentially concedes the entire argument to those who want to destroy Israel!

Max's whole article follows the same apologetics:

This, naturally, does not mean that we may not criticize the government of the State of Israel (in which I find appalling flaws)....The state of Israel was meant to provide a safe space in which Jews could flourish free of ethnic cleansing. However, I struggle to find the words to express my lamentation for the manner in which this was carried out; rather than creating a land of emancipation and equal opportunities, those who wished to protect Jews fought fire with fire, protecting the well-being of Jews at the cost of that of Palestinian Arabs who had largely inhabited the region beforehand. The rights of those Palestinian Arabs who did not flee in many manners were infringed upon, and these people have suffered unspeakable inequality and maltreatment for decades under various Israeli administrations.

Palestinian terrorism, rejectionism, antisemitism - they aren't to be mentioned in an article showing the Jewish viewpoint of the conflict. Only supposed Jewish crimes.

Gee, thanks for your even-handedness.

And even his criticism of SJP is tempered by the idea that, sure, they don't really intend to be antisemitic when they want Israel to be Judenrein:

SJP claims that Zionism is nothing more than a colonialist ideology, going as far as entertaining the proposal that Jewish nationals return to the lands of Eastern Europe, whose peoples had so horrifically slaughtered their Jewish populations. As a result of this complacency and lack of consideration for the implications of their own demands, even if it is not their intention, SJP harmfully aligns itself with those who hope to cause the further oppression of Jews.

His watering down of SJP's desire to destroy Israel is mind-boggling:

If Palestinians Arabs inhabited the land of Israel/Palestine before 1948, and all Palestinian Arabs and their descendents are to return to their original homes, where are Jews to go as the cycle of anti-Jewish violence and antisemitism persists?...SJP does not even attempt to address this question; while their intention is righteous and ethical, the result of the policies it promotes is tolerant (or, dare I say, encouraging) of the hate that has universally plagued the Jewish people.

No, Max, their intention is not righteous and ethical. The entire point of "return" is to destroy Israel, not advocate for Palestinian rights. Read this book or watch this interview before you decide to defend a hate group like SJP.

Many of the best defenders of Israel - like Einat Wilf or the late Petra Marquardt-Bigman - are decidedly liberal. Many of them oppose settlements. But they know that those attacking Israel do not add caveats and excuses and discomfort to their arguments - they are full throated in their attacks. When Jews and Zionists do not respond in kind, the bystanders - in this case on Middlebury's campus - will naturally conclude that the antisemites are correct, because the "pro-Israel" side is agreeing with half of their premises.

This article does far more harm than good.

The Middlebury Campus should find someone who truly understands the issues to write a response showing that SJP is a hate group and that Israel is a modern, liberal, amazing Jewish state that eagerly seeks peace.

Israel is not merely a "safe space" for Jews. It is the eternal Jewish homeland. And if you don't understand that, don't act as a spokesperson who can defend Israel and Jews.

Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, has a feature in its online network where students can add what are called "go-links", shortcuts that take them to information pages. They are used to give students a quick way to get to important information, like course materials for classes or webpages for student groups.

The anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine group abused the system, creating a link called "go/apartheid" that linked to lies about Israel and creating posters and sidewalk chalk messages all over campus to encourage students to go to that link.

In response, a student named Benjamin Lesch created three links in response: go/sjp, go/palestine and go/palestinian - that linked to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs webpage “Palestinian terror and incitement.”

And then the president of Middlebury SJP, Matt Martignoni, a self-described queer Jew, created another go-link in response to Lesch, go/antisemitism, which linked to a Google Docs page (since removed) criticizing Zionism with no mention of antisemitism.

A further response, go-jewish, was made by Jews pointing to a letter explaining how Jews on campus felt attacked by the SJP go-links.

Three students and groups abused the go-link system by pointing students to pages that were not appropriate for the titles of the links. But only one of them was punished.

Lesch has been placed on indefinite leave from his positions at the campus Middlebury Consulting Group the Student Investment Committee because of what he did.

SJP and its president? Nothing. The ones who started this entire abusive use of the go-links system aren't punished at all - in fact, they are claiming to be the victims here.

Just another case of where Jewish sensitivities are ignored.

There is one other piece of hypocrisy here. The go-apartheid webpage made by SJP was created with the Wix website builder - and Wix is an Israeli company.

(h/t Andrew P)

This 16th century rabbi wrote a work on cryptography

The Seforim Blog has an article on R. Abraham Menahem ben Jacob ha-Kohen Rapa mi-Porto, a true Renaissance man and scholar.

He is best known for his work Minchah Belulah, an accessible commentary on the Torah written in response to the 1553 burning of every edition of the Talmud in Italy - an event Rabbi Menachem witnessed first hand.

But his work on cryptography is also fascinating. He wrote about it in his booklet "Zafenat Pane’ah," named after Joseph's royal Egyptian name.

According to the article, Abraham Menahem spent two years preparing Zafenat Pane’ah, and it was published in 1555. It appears that he took the method of encryption published in 1553 by Giovan Battista Bellaso and applied it to Hebrew.

Here is the page of Zafenat Pane'ah to help one encrypt (and decrypt) text:

Note the similarity with Bellaso's 1553 table, including the shifting of the alphabets.

Here's how it works. The sender and receiver of the message both know a password or passphrase that is the key. Find the row with the first letter of the key and choose the corresponding letter for the first letter of the message, and the cipher letter is the one that corresponds to it (above or below.) Then for the second letter of the message, do the same with the second letter of the key, and so forth. When you run out of letters of the key, just start at the beginning again.

Just like today, a stronger password makes it much harder to decrypt.

The receiver of the message does this in reverse, taking the first letter of the key, and choosing the corresponding plaintext on the row that has that letter.

One other very interesting thing about Rabbi Abraham Menachem is his escutcheon, his seal. It includes two topless women!

Although later versions changed the image, I verified this with the edition of Minchah Belulah that is at HebrewBooks.org:

Nudity of that type was obviously not too scandalous for 1th century Italian Jews!

Rabbi Abraham Menachem was definitely an erudite, interesting and well-read person.

(h/t YMedad)

03/18 Links Pt2: ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ is a grotesque insult; Israel Tops Resilience Index Among ME Countries; Arab Israeli Life Has Gotten Better

From Ian:

‘Israel Apartheid Week’ is a grotesque insult

Look around the Middle East. Syria still trapped in a brutal civil war. Libya in carnage, and Yemen in the grip of a fierce proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. How can anyone look at the Middle East and think the biggest problem is the region’s only democracy?

If the only country you campaign against, want to boycott or believe should be abolished is the only Jewish one, don’t tell me you’re not an anti-Semite. But the anti-Israel campaigners know what they are doing. They hope that demonising Israel with this grotesque insult will isolate the country and boost campaigns for boycotts and sanctions.

These campaigns are a barrier to a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because they drive people apart and make the prospects of negotiation and compromise more difficult. Worse still, they have a terrible impact in the Palestinian territories because boycotts and sanctions reduce economic opportunities for the very people they claim they are trying to help. This is why Britain’s role must be to promote trade, investment and economic development and to encourage dialogue, negotiation and compromise between Israelis and Palestinians.

The reality is that the pernicious boycott campaign is failing. Trade between Israel and the UK was worth a record £8 billion before the pandemic. Some 500 Israeli companies have invested in Britain, creating thousands of jobs across the UK. The country also makes a huge contribution to the NHS. One in seven of all prescription drugs is made by an Israeli pharmaceutical company, and UK and Israeli scientists are collaborating on research to develop treatments that will save lives in the UK and across the world.

Let’s celebrate and strengthen this partnership, tell the truth about this so-called Israel Apartheid Week and campaign to make sure its lies are no longer able to defile our universities and intimidate our students.

Meet the group behind Jew hate week in UK
(PSC )here they are meeting their Terrorists friends in Hamas ...Enough said . pic.twitter.com/Y6KZzGlI4d
— Jewish Human Rights Watch (@jhrwatch) March 18, 2021

Israel Tops Resilience Index Among Middle East Countries, New Study Finds

Israel is the most resilient country in the Middle East, according to a study published on Wednesday by the Institute of Economics, Society and Peace in the Middle East Studies at the Western Galilee Academic College.

The study ranked Middle East countries based on six main criteria—economic, social, gender equality, the degree of openness to globalization, ethnic variance and religious variance—using quantifiable figures from sources such as the World Bank.

Based on these criteria, researchers from a wide range of fields found that Israel is the strongest country in the region, followed by Greece, Cyprus, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The countries at the bottom of the list are Jordan, Syria, Sudan and Yemen. The strength index does not account for military might, rather which reflects the degree of overall welfare among the people of each country.

In terms of economics, Israel ranked fifth, behind Qatar, Turkey, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, in descending order. Israel also ranked fifth in the degree of openness to globalization, behind Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and Iran. Economics might take into account factors such as total Gross Domestic Product, GDP per capita, population size, the ratio of children and elderly relative to the size of the civilian workforce and other measures.

As for social strength, Israel, as one of the only democracies in the Middle East, ranked first by a wide margin over the other countries, the vast majority of which are ruled by totalitarian regimes or monarchies.

Another variable examined by the researchers was the degree of religious variance in the respective populations. In this category, Israel ranked sixth out of 33 countries, showing religious variance to a considerable degree.

Arab Israeli Life Has Gotten Better

There have been dramatic improvements in the lives of Israel's Arab citizens over the last 15 years.

Beginning in 2006, the government funded training programs, improved educational support, subsidized employment, expanded transportation networks and built industrial parks near Arab towns.

Funding to rectify imbalances between Jewish and Arab communities has meant that 85% of homes in Arab towns are now connected to modern sewer networks, up from less than 40% in 2015.

The employment rate among Arab Israeli women ages 25-54 rose from 21% in the early 2000s to 35% in 2016.

In the 2017-2018 academic year, Arab Israelis made up 16% of college students in Israel compared to 8.3% in 1999-2000. The Technion - Israel's MIT - reports that its proportion of Arab students increased by 200% since 2004.

Arab Israelis now comprise 17% of the country's doctors, 24% of nurses and 47% of pharmacists.

Newest "Apartheid?" poster starring Ayman Odeh

The series continues....

Sir, We Cannot Figure Out In Which End Of The Anti-Zionist To Insert The Anal Probe (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Sir, We Cannot Figure Out In Which End Of The Anti-Zionist To Insert The Anal Probe

by Lieutenant Zorb-8, Watch Commander, Galaga-X Scout Vessel 22R, Squadron Blue, Intergalactic Fleet Task Force M

alien Intergalactic Standard Date 14.5.99.008, in orbit around Earth - Captain, our surface team has returned from the planet with several specimens upon which to conduct our experiments, including at least three of the fascinating "Anti-Zionist" subspecies of human, but our laboratory crew are reporting some trouble determining which is the anterior and which is the posterior, and those specimens have yet to undergo the anal probing as a result.

As you no doubt realize, sir, the procedures mandate a two-hour turnaround time for all specimens, and we must decide within the net fifteen minutes how to proceed, or this batch will prove abortive, and we will fall behind schedule. At the same time, as you also know, sir, inserting the probe in the wrong end will corrupt the data it provides and our research will suffer as a result,

In consultations with the mission planners and our existing protocols, my preliminary conclusions point to an unforeseen gap in those protocols and procedures, and not to any incompetence or negligence on the part of any crew members. The lack of distinction among this subspecies between the oral and anal apertures and their respective anatomical neighborhoods, if you will, is unlike any other we have encountered to date, and yes, sir, that does include even the flat-Earther specimens and those who insist Marvel is superior to DC except perhaps for specific outliers such as the Punisher. But I digress, sir.

I think maybe this diagram will help illustrate the problem, sir. As you can see, unadulterated fecal matters spews from either end in similar quantities, a factor that deprives us of our primary method for making the determination. In addition, given the limited intelligence of the subspecies, we cannot confidently hold to the assumption that they walk upright, which deprives us of another key indicator.

Yes, sir, the trend toward, well, just plain ugliness among this subgroup has also given us problems, of course. An astute observation. Humans of all kinds have also adopted an ever-shifting array of sensibilities as to which parts of the body should have hair and which should be shorn, so we cannot put very much stock in that either, sir.

We will need a command decision on this very soon, sir. I will instruct the surface team to remain on alert, and the launch crew to prep the vessel for another sortie, just in case, so that we can at least attempt to find Anti-Zionists with a less ambiguous anatomy.

03/18 Links Pt1: Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines; ICC contacted Israel to notify of war crimes probe; US plans $15M in coronavirus aid for Palestinians

From Ian:

'The National' obtains US official document for Palestinian ‘reset’

The US administration is looking to 'reset' relations with the Palestinians with a plan that includes $15 million in Covid-19 assistance and a rollback of several Trump administration positions that favoured Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and did not prioritise the two-state solution, an internal memo reveals.

The official document, obtained exclusively by The National on Wednesday, was raised to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on March 1, by acting assistant secretary of state for near eastern Affairs Joey Hood.

It was drafted by deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs Hady Amr and his team.

The memo, The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward, is the most detailed proposal so far by the Biden team to rebalance relations with the Palestinians after four years of Donald Trump, who cut ties with Ramallah.

The US memo acknowledges new challenges in approaching the Palestinian situation.

“As we reset US relations with the Palestinians, the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection point as it moves towards its first elections in 15 years,” it says.

“At the same time, we [the US] suffer from a lack of connective tissue following the 2018 closure of the PLO office in Washington and refusal of Palestinian Authority leadership to directly engage with our embassy to Israel,” the memo says.

It mentions growing disparities between Israelis and Palestinians and outlines a “reset under way and the path ahead”.

The memo defines the US vision on the issue as one “to advance freedom, security, and prosperity for both Israelis and Palestinians in the immediate term which is important in its own right, but also as means to advance the prospects of a negotiated two-state solution”.

Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines

The Biden administration will reportedly push for a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines, with mutually agreed upon land swaps, reinstating US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to more traditionally held positions than those of former president Donald Trump.

A memo titled “The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,” which was revealed Wednesday to the Abu Dhabi-based The National, also showed that the Biden administration is planning on announcing a $15 million aid package in coronavirus-related humanitarian assistance for the Palestinians as early as this month.

Drafted by Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr, the memo also details plans to roll back various Trump policies that Washington believes made reaching a two-state solution more difficult, such as US legitimization of the settlement enterprise.

Amr recommends in the memo that the White House back a two-state framework “based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps and agreements on security and refugees.”

While behind closed doors, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has participated in peace negotiations based on the 1967 lines, publicly the formula is not very popular in Israel, particularly among the right wing, which is expected to further expand in the Knesset after next week’s election.

The memo discusses “rolling back certain steps by the prior administration that bring into question our commitment or pose real barriers to a two-state solution, such as country of origin labeling.”

The memo was referring to a last-minute policy change announced by Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, which requires all US exports from the settlements to be labeled as having been “made in Israel.”

Since 1995, US policy had required products made in the West Bank and Gaza to be labeled as such. That directive was republished in 2016 by the Obama administration, which warned that labeling goods as “made in Israel” could lead to fines. Prior to the Oslo Accords, however, all products manufactured in these areas were required to mention Israel in their label when exporting to the United States.

The Pompeo order went into effect in December, but manufacturers were given a 90-day grace period, until March 23, to implement the change.

“As we reset US relations with the Palestinians, the Palestinian body politic is at an inflection point as it moves towards its first elections in 15 years,” the new memo reads. “At the same time, we [the US] suffer from a lack of connective tissue following the 2018 closure of the PLO office in Washington and refusal of Palestinian Authority leadership to directly engage with our embassy to Israel.”

Ouch: Member of the Trump MidEast peace team tells me re: Biden plans to roll back pro-Israel reset in the region: "The reporting reeks of the current Admin returning to the failed policies of the past that only served to prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
— Adam Kredo (@Kredo0) March 17, 2021

Last week, the Czech Republic opened its diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, under the lead of its embassy in Tel Aviv.

Earlier this week, Kosovo opened its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, making some history along the way:

And now Netanyahu is claiming that there are four more countries that will soon be signing peace deals with Israel. While it is not known which countries Netanyahu is referring to, Niger, Mauritania, Indonesia are considered to be possibilities.

Syria is not considered to be one of those countries.

And yet...

Back in May 2018, The Wall Street Journal ran an article claiming that Iran’s Push for Influence Meets Resistance in Iraq and Syria:

Syrians in the largely secular capital, Damascus, have meanwhile accused Iran of stoking religious tensions. And Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s other main foreign partner, Russia, has showed impatience with Iran’s growing military presence in Syria, which Israel has moved to contain with airstrikes.

The existence of friction between Syria and Iran is not the same as a rapprochement between Syria and Israel.

But that was back in 2018. A lot has changed since then.

Russia has presented itself as a broker between Israel and Syria, arranging the deal that saw an Israeli woman who wandered into Syria returned home in exchange for 2 Syrian shepherds (with Israel funding Russian Covid vaccine for Syria) and searching for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in Syria, missing since 1982.

Along these lines, Foreign Policy reported last month that analysts suggested that "Assad’s strong relationship with Russia and growing ties with the UAE, both of which want Syria to come to terms with Israel, has impacted the regime’s thinking." The article goes on to quote a former human rights activist in Syria:

We have seen several deals recently, such as when Russia dug graves in Yarmouk to find to Israeli soldiers. Now we have heard that Israel is buying Russia’s coronavirus vaccine for Syrians. This comes in parallel with the normalization wave between Israel and the Arab countries. It’s not impossible we will see a formal normalization between the regime and Israel very soon. [emphasis added]

Normalization sounds overly optimistic.

But he is not alone in seeing forces moving Syria in that direction.

Jim Dunnigan, a military-political analyst and editor-in-chief of the website StrategyPage, posted analysis this month that also claims there is an effort towards a peace deal between Israel and Syria:

Israel is quietly working on a peace deal with the Assads by first consulting Russia, Turkey and the Arab nations Israel has diplomatic relations with. If Israel can achieve a consensus on how to offer and deliver the Assads a workable peace deal, Iran could be driven out of Syria.

The idea is that on the on hand, the Iranian people are not pleased with Iran's involvement in Syria because of the financial cost, and on the other, Russia sees Iran's ongoing involvement as destabilizing.

Now we know how Russia, Iranians, Turkey and the Arab countries feel about this.

What do Syrians think?

The article continues:

There has been a shift in Syrian public attitudes towards Iran as Iran moved in more of its Lebanese (Hezbollah), Afghan and local mercenaries to Syrian army bases around the capital and other areas where a lot of Assad supporters live. That is followed by truckloads of missiles and other weapons from Iran to be stockpiled for use against Israel. Several hundred times over the last few years Israeli airstrikes have destroyed these Iranian stockpiles, usually with few casualties on the ground and those tend to be Iranians or their mercenaries. Now the Iranians, or at least their Hezbollah veterans, are talking of the need to store these weapons in residential areas to use Syrian civilians as human shields to discourage Israeli air strikes. Syrian civilians know how this works. [emphasis added]

This is where things become problematic for Syria. It is one thing for Russia and Israel to discuss moving Syria out of Iran's orbit -- there is nothing Iran can do about that. But Iran will not take kindly to Syrian public opinion that opposes Iran. According to StrategyPage, if Iran believes that this public opinion extends into the Assad government itself, it will take action.

And where does the Syrian government itself stand?

In January, Mordechai Kedar wrote for the Besa Center about re ports of secret talks between the Assad regime and Israel. He quotes from an article appearing in the online Arabic newspaper Elaph, last December, featuring an interview Israeli journalist Majdi Halabi die with an officer of the IDF General Staff. The officer said that Syria was in touch with Israel, both through Russia and through other means. Those 'other means' would include a reported meeting of Israeli and Syrian representatives in Cyprus.

Then, on January 14, 2021, the newspaper al-Shira reported that Israeli representatives met with Assad's representatives at a Russian base in northern Syria. Four days later, the London-based newspaper Asharq Al-awsat, picked up on the report and indicated that Lieut. Gen. (res.) Gadi Eizenkot and Ari Ben-Menashe, a former top Mossad official, met with the head of the Syrian National Security Bureau, Gen. Ali Mamlouk, and Assad’s security affairs adviser Bassam Hassan. The meeting was hosted by Russia’s Gen. Aleksandr Tchaikov.

Kedar admits:

While the details might not be entirely accurate or complete, it appears that intensive Israeli-Syrian contacts are being held behind the scenes.

What exactly would Syria want from Israel?

When Halabi asked this question during his interview, the IDF officer responded:

They want to go back to the Arab League and they want economic aid, fuel for example. They need money to pay the Iranians to get out of Syria, and they want to solidify their regime. Assad sees the reality, and he wants to forge ties with the Sunni axis so that he can pay his debts to Iran and get them out of Syria. He sees that Israel can help him with the US on the one hand and with the Gulf axis and the Sunni axis on the other...But he is now prepared to talk with us so as to shore up his rule, defray the financial debt to Iran, and create a situation of non-belligerency with Israel, and after that negotiations on the Golan and other things. [emphasis added]

Since December, Biden has taken office and it is likely that the degree to which "Israel can help him with the US" has diminished, while its ability to help with the Gulf and Sunni axes has improved.

How realistic is Syrian normalization with Israel?

According to that IDF officer:

Certainly, I’m prepared to reach an agreement with [Assad] tomorrow morning, but to tell the truth, we haven’t spoken about this with the Chief of Staff or with the political echelon because it’s still at the starting point, with improvised mediators…The important thing is that there’s a possibility of breaking up the radical axis, the Iranian axis. [emphasis added]

In the Middle East, Israel is developing into a force -- not just a force to be reckoned with vis-a-vis Iran, but also a force to be relied upon by less than friendly Arab/Muslim states. And while Biden has undermined this by delaying the delivery of F-35's to the UAE and undercutting Saudi Arabia with a leaked CIA report, the wheels have already been set in motion by Trump in this changing region.

Just ask Syria.

There is precious little greenery in Jerusalem's Old City. Most of it is on the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest spot where Arab families picnic and play soccer.

The Jerusalem municipality wants to change that.

Kol Hair reports:

Ronen Harari, a Jewish businessman from Canada, recently approached the Jerusalem Municipality with a proposal to finance a large-scale renovation of Galicia Yard, a huge complex that dominates the market roofs in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old Quarter, for NIS 15 million. This is an area that has become a popular promenade for tourists and a particularly convenient vantage point overlooking the Old City and the surrounding neighborhoods.

In addition, Harari proposed renovating the Pardusi Garden complex, which is also located in the Old City, with an investment of about NIS 2 million, according to one of the proposed programs for the complex, an ornamental pool, seating areas, seating stairs for tourists and groups, and a playground.

Today, Monday, the Jerusalem Municipality's donations committee is expected to approve the donation, with the agreement between Mayor Moshe Lion and Harari's representatives in Israel, the donations will be transferred directly to the Jerusalem Municipality, and the municipality will carry out the projects through the Moriah Municipalities and East Jerusalem Development Company.

As the illustration shows, the new rooftop promenades and gardens would be for all residents of the Old City to enjoy, Arab and Jew alike.

Right now the roofs are used by Arab parkour artists and skateboarders. This would open them up for all to enjoy - and it would reduce the excuse that Arab youth must play games on the Temple Mount because there is nowhere else in the Old City for them to relax.

So, of course, the Palestinian Authority is incensed.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates condemned the announcement of the occupation municipality in Jerusalem yesterday about a colonial, Jewish project that aims to establish a biblical garden for settlers on the roofs of the historic markets in Jerusalem, including planting trees and placing recreational games for settlers to change the appearance of the roofs of those markets.

The ministry stated in a statement today, Thursday, that this comes within the framework of a policy aimed at falsifying the landmarks of the heart of Jerusalem and its old town and besieging Al-Aqsa, in a clear disregard for the Islamic Endowments Department and an open confiscation of its role and powers.

And it considered that changing the features of the roofs of the ancient historical markets in Jerusalem is not only a crime to be held accountable by international law, and disregarding the decisions of the United Nations and its relevant specialized organizations, but rather an intended Israeli mockery of the international community and its legitimacy and decisions regarding the situation in Palestine.