Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, May 23, 2021

The star soccer player who was also an Islamic Jihad terrorist

Last week, the president of the Asian Football Confederation, Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa, expressed his condolences on the death of Palestinian player Moaz Nabil Al-Za'anin, a player for the Beit Hanoun football team in Gaza.

There were many articles in Arabic about how tragic it was for a promising sports star to be martyred at such a young age, killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with an apparent relative, Muhammad Awni Abdullah Al-Za'anin, and a friend, Muhammad Yusef Mahmoud Abdullah.

Now, Islamic Jihad has released a list of 19 of its members who were "martyred" during the fighting, and guess who is there?

Both of the Za'anins were part of the "Mujahideen artillery in the North Gaza Brigade" of Islamic Jihad.

Many of the people listed here were named in the lists of PCHR and Al Mezan Center - but most of them were not identified as militants by those supposed human rights organizations.

05/23 Links: Ben Shapiro: If you side with Hamas, your antisemitism is showing; Israel's secret weapon: We have nowhere else to go; The BBC, child fatalities and shortfall Palestinian rockets

From Ian:

Ben Shapiro: If you side with Hamas, your antisemitism is showing

The media coverage of the conflict has been predictably morally absurd. The Associated Press, an outfit that has regularly covered up Hamas' atrocities, has condemned Israel for hitting a Hamas building in which the AP had offices. Trevor Noah suggested that Israel's military superiority means that Israel must absorb hundreds of rockets per day and allow its civilian population to live under the shadow of radical Islamic terrorism. "If you are in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, how hard should you retaliate when they try to hurt you?" he asked. HBO's John Oliver accused Israel of "killing civilians and children."

Members of the Democratic Party's radical, antisemitic fashion have been no less morally inverted. Rep. Rashida Tlaib has encouraged President Joe Biden to cut off Israel's defense supplies. Rep. Ilhan Omar has accused Israel of "terrorism." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel an "apartheid state," despite the fact that Arabs are full citizens of Israel while not a single Jew lives under the predations of Hamas. And this week, nearly 200 Democrats voted not to cut off funding to groups linked with Hamas.

The conflict between Hamas and Israel is not a dispute over borders: Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip a decade and a half ago. It is not a dispute over religion: Israel allows Muslims full freedom of worship throughout Israel, particularly on the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site, where Jewish worship remains essentially forbidden in favor of kowtowing to Islamist diktats. It is not a dispute over homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a suburb of Jerusalem that has been the subject of a decadeslong property dispute between private parties and in which Arabs who aren't subject to such disputes continue to live.

The conflict between Hamas and Israel is about a stubborn fact: Israel exists, and Hamas wishes it didn't exist. Hamas will target civilians in Israel, use Palestinian children to shield its rockets and lie to the press to achieve its goals. Israel, meanwhile, is seeking to minimize civilian casualties at great risk to its own citizens. Opposing Israel's actions doesn't make you an anti-Semite. But siding with Hamas in a conflict like this one certainly does.

Ben Shapiro: IDF Spokesman Explains How The Iron Dome Actually Works

I had the privilege of speaking with Jonathan Conricus — International Spokesperson for the IDF — about Israel’s life-saving Iron Dome Defense System. Conricus also provides a glimpse into other strategies Israel has implemented to defend itself against missile attacks being launched by the terrorist group Hamas.

The BBC, child fatalities and shortfall Palestinian rockets

The IDF also investigated an additional incident that took place around the same time in Jabaliya in which four children aged 18 and under and four adults died. That too was found to be the result of a rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists. The NGO ‘Defence for Children International’ described that incident as having been caused by “a homemade rocket fired by a Palestinian armed group”.

If the BBC’s previous record is anything to go by, it is highly unlikely that audiences will be relieved of the inaccurate impression that Ibrahim al-Masry and other members of his family were killed by an Israeli airstrike.

As has so often been the case in previous escalations, the BBC continues to uncritically amplify casualty figures which are part of Hamas’ framing of the story without any evidence of the type of independent verification that responsible, accurate and impartial journalism requires having taken place.

How do we know these are actually terrorists and we're not just saying so?

- Hamas & PIJ publish "shaheeds" on their websites
- Confirmed pictures of terrorists on social media
- All backed up & supported in the following @terrorisminfo report:https://t.co/kHOp4eG4Lc

??fin
— The Mossad: The Social Media Account (@TheMossadIL) May 23, 2021

Hamas spokesman confirms Hamas is committing war crimes. He tells @Stone_SkyNews that international law gives Hamas the right to ignore international law and wage war "by all feasible means." He confirms that Hamas fires rockets from civilian areas and targets Israeli civilians. pic.twitter.com/fnJ3wUf7qn
— Daniel Rubenstein (@paulrubens) May 22, 2021

Human Rights Watch @HRW leader says antisemitism is bad - because some anti-Israel Jews might be attacked accidentally

Just when you think Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch can't be any more against human rights, he proves you wrong.

He tweeted, "Antisemitic incidents have surged (e.g., fivefold in London) in light of the Israeli government's recent conduct. It is WRONG to equate the Jewish people with the apartheid and deadly bombardment of Prime Minister Netanyahu's government. "

That's Ken Roth's reason why attacking Jews is wrong?

He seems to be saying that antisemitism is wrong - because some Jews don't support Israel defending itself.

But, Roth implies, if the Jews you are attacking are supporters of Israel, then he cannot think of any objection to attacking them!

The Skokie synagogue that was vandalized has a big sign in front of it with Israeli and American flags. Ken Roth seems to be saying that this attack is therefore justified. He certainly did not say a word that would condemn that attack.

In 2014, Roth implied that antisemitic attacks were done because of Israel, and Jeffrey Goldberg slammed him for it. This is possibly worse, because now he's saying that antisemitic attacks are OK depending on the victim's beliefs.

Similarly disgusting is Linda Sarsour's reasoning to oppose antisemitic attacks - not because they are wrong, but because they make Palestinians look bad.

Antisemites attacking Jews reported as "clashes between groups"

There are two reasons the media has been soft-pedaling the many antisemitic attacks last week.

1) The victims are Jews.

2) The attackers are Arabs.

The media has internalized the lie that Jews are privileged whites and Arabs are disadvantaged people of color. To people with that mindset, the "whites" are presumed to be in the wrong and the POC are in the right, no matter what the actual circumstances.

Since the actual facts contradict the narrative that the media has been pushing for years, there is a reluctance to contradict all that previous coverage with those false assumptions. So the media (and politicians) duck and only say anything when they are FORCED to.

Finally, on Friday, some outlets were shamed into covering the story. But they didn't leave their biases aside.

The New York Times actually claimed that the attacks in New York City that they ignored all week were "clashes" between Zionists and pro-Palestinian protesters, not that 100% of the incidents reported were attacks on Jews. That 100% of the injured were Jews.

And other media outlets used the same script of "clashes."

When Hamas attacks Israel for no reason, or when Arabs attack Jews in broad daylight, suddenly the media that was screaming lies about Israel deliberately attacking civilians is "even-handed."

The antisemitic memes that Jews control the media and the government affect even those who know it is nonsense. In the back of their minds, they - including many Jewish reporters - don't want to be looked upon as puppets of the great Jewish/Zionist conspiracy. Hence, avoiding reporting as long as possible - and then "all-lives mattering" the reporting they are forced into doing.

One cannot stress enough how toxic these identity politics are. And after years of modern antisemites converting Jews from racially inferior to racially privileged, they've accomplished their goal of having ordinary people look at Jews as part of the despised group.

Which is something Jews have a few thousand years of experience in.

This isn't a story about resurgent antisemitism. This is a story about antisemitism that has stealthily become part of the fabric of Western society.

Without the years of positioning Jews as the rich, white successful, arrogant "chosen", and of positioning Palestinians as the brown, oppressed, helpless victims, the violence we've seen could never occur.

So this isn't a story about a few keffiyeh clad thugs, as the Israel haters take pains to try to paint it (when forced to.) It is a story of an entire mindset that the far Left has managed to create, where people are victims or victimizers, Jews are by definition victimizers, and victims are always right.

Anyone who truly cares about the future of America should be angry at what we see happening, the stealthy hate that has infected large swaths of society and that became explicit this week.

It didn't happen in a vacuum. These are the fruits of slanders that started behind the Iron Curtain and has become mainstream in the US.

Four US synagogues were vandalized in the past week

Last Sunday, a Chabad shul in Salt Lake City was defaced with a swastika etched into the front door.

Also on Sunday, a synagogue in Skokie, IL, saw its window smashed by a man wearing a Palestinian flag and who placed a Palestinian sign on the door.

In Tuscon, a synagogue door window was smashed overnight Tuesday.

In Brooklyn, police arrested Ali Alaheri for starting fires outside a synagogue and a yeshiva, as well as attacking a Chasidic Jew.

The attackers are not white supremacists. These are all done by anti-Israel protesters.

Just as three attacks on synagogues and Jewish memorials in Germany were done by "Arab looking men" burning Israeli flags. Or the vandal of a congregation in England that we've mentioned before.

People who deny antisemitism from the Left are condoning this.

05/22 Links: The New Furies of the Oldest Hatred; Fantasies of Israel’s Disappearance; Liberals can't be silent as the left incites anti-Semitism

From Ian:

Peter Savodnik: The New Furies of the Oldest Hatred

Take a good look at who is speaking out against Jew-hate. And who is staying silent.

Let us dispense with the fiction, once and for all, that hating the Jewish homeland, which contains the largest Jewish community on Earth, is different from hating Jews.

It has been exceedingly difficult in our blinkered, hyper-secularized present, so removed from the primal animosities of not so long ago, to conceive of a world in which tens or hundreds of millions of people who have never visited Israel or never met a Jew want Jews dead. We’ve been blinded by the oceanic success of life under the Pax Americana. We think this is how people are.

This is not how people are. This is a wondrous aberration. There were 2,000 years of ghettos, blood libels and pogroms, of dehumanization and second-class citizenship that culminated with the Shoah. For the past several decades — a sneeze in the span of Jewish history — we American Jews have been maundering through the happy, mournful echoes of the recent past.

That recent past meant that we weren’t shocked to see this violence from the Europeans, who have never stopped hating Jews, but who had been forced, by the camps, to camouflage their Jew hate in their criticism of Israel, their obsession with it.

But America?

We were not steeped in the Old World hatreds. We were deeply flawed — who wasn’t? — but our flaws were always in conflict with our identity. One of the many problems with antisemitism, like Jim Crow, was that it made a mockery of our ideals, which made it impossible to hold onto the old bigotries forever. One had to reject Jew-hate and support the Jewish right to self-determination for the same reason one had to dismantle literacy laws that limited voting rights: It was central to the American weltanschauung. It was part of our animating ethic. The progress was glacial and uneven but inexorable. It was America becoming more American.

We were supposed to have transcended the old blood-and-soil stupidities. But they can’t be transcended. That was a beautiful myth, a myth that was fundamental to our idea of ourselves. But we are losing ourselves.

BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY: Eyeless in Gaza

Hamas has no clear objective that might be the subject of a dialogue and eventual compromise.

More precisely—because “objective” can be translated in two ways in Carl von Clausewitz’s language—it has no Ziel (a concrete, rational aim about which the antagonists could negotiate during and after a ceasefire), but it does have a Zweck (that is, one strategic objective, which is the reaffirmation of its utter merciless hate and intended annihilation, spelled out in its charter, of the “Zionist entity.”

I ask myself another simple question, as should others, whenever thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in Paris, London, or Berlin “to defend Palestine.”

Is it the death of Palestinian civilians that bothers them? If so, it is hard to understand why they are silent when it is Palestinians who are pursuing, tormenting, gunning down, assassinating, or using artillery to attack other Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel or Fatah.

Are they concerned with human rights, everywhere and under all circumstances? Then one wonders why, without going all the way back to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda or the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia and Darfur, we hear nothing from the protesters in defense of the Uyghurs being “cleansed” by the Chinese dictatorship, the Rohingyas being “displaced” by the Burmese junta, or the Nigerian Christians being exterminated by Boko Haram and Islamist Fulanis. We hear nothing about the violations of human rights being committed on a grand scale in Afghanistan, Somalia, Burundi, and the Nuba Mountains, places I’ve visited and know well and where it’s not hundreds, but thousands, and even tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians who are dying from conflict, some at a simmer, some at a boil.

Are the demonstrators outraged by the indifference of a complicit West that allows a Muslim city to be bombed? If so, why didn’t they spill into the streets to show their solidarity with the Kurds of Kirkuk, assaulted in October 2017 by planes financed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards? Or with the Kurds of Rojava bombarded by Erdogan in 2018 and 2019? Where were they when Syrian cities were barraged by the planes of dictator Bashar Assad, supported by those of Vladimir Putin, with a savagery seldom seen.

No.

However you look at it, there are crowds of people in France, the United States, and Great Britain who are not truly interested in human rights, forgotten wars, or even the Palestinians. They simply seize the opportunity to demonstrate only when it enables them to kill two birds with one stone and chant “down with Israel” or “death to the Jews.”

Fantasies of Israel’s Disappearance

As Munayyer sees it, the Hamas-initiated Gaza war represents the Palestinian goal of “breaking free from the shackles of Israel’s system of oppression.” These “shackles” include “the impending expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.” The only problem (ignored by Munayyer) is that these homes are not theirs; in 2008 the Israel Supreme Court affirmed that the property is owned by the Sephardi Jewish community, which purchased it more than a century ago.

Grounded in this false claim, Munayyer writes: “Palestinians across the land who identified with the experience of being dispossessed by Israel rose up, together.” In translation, Palestinians were justified in pursuing their false claim of property ownership with waves of violence in Jerusalem and a cascade of rockets from Gaza. Palestinian defiance, especially in Gaza where Arabs are “caged and besieged,” exposed the “ugliness” of Israeli rule. The only problem is that Israel does not rule Gaza; Hamas does, and bears full responsibility for launching waves of rockets — against Israel.

Munayyer seems to favor the (preposterous) goal of “equal rights in a single state if the two-state solution fails.” But the two-state solution has failed because Palestinians have repeatedly rejected it, preferring the disappearance of Israel, by war if necessary. The alternative, for Munayyer, is another fantasy: “equal rights in a single state.” That would only require Israel to relinquish its identity as the Jewish state that it is, and always will be — a state, he fails to notice, where twenty per cent of its population are Arab citizens.

But even a two-state “paradigm,” Munayyer suggests, is “dead.” Why? Because, predictably, “Israel buried it under settlements long ago.” In the end Munayyer is the perfect New York Times advocate for the disappearance of the world’s only Jewish state. Not coincidentally, it located in the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

05/21 Links Pt2: Caroline Glick: Biden's skin-deep support for Israel; The Squad’s Noxious Anti-Semitism; Throwing Israel Under The Bus Will Not Save American Jews

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The last, overlooked but still active front of World War Two

In World War Two, the allies fought an attempt to conquer and destroy western civilisation and exterminate the Jews.

Today, the Palestinians of both Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah constantly churn out Nazi-style, murderous incitement against the Jewish people. And the Iranian regime, which funds and arms Hamas, has been at war against the west for four decades and regularly announces its genocidal intentions towards the Jews.

So today’s war against western civilisation and the Jews amounts to infernal unfinished business. But unlike the Second World War, when those in the free world on the side of the fascists were regarded as traitors, such people today march on the streets of London and elsewhere arm-in-arm with those pledged to Islamic holy war against the Jews and the rest of the “infidel” world.

In the United States, President Joe Biden told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that America expects an immediate and “significant de-escalation” on the path to a ceasefire. This while the rockets from Gaza were still flying against Israel. The demand was as unconscionable as it would have been to tell the British to de-escalate during the Blitz.

Worse yet, after Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) confronted Biden over the Gaza war and echoed an earlier speech in which she accused Israel of “racism” and running an “apartheid system,” Biden said of Tlaib: “God thank you for being a fighter.”

The heirs to the Nazis are still intent upon the same terrible aims. The difference now is that those fighting for civilisation are being undermined by an enormous fifth column — and even the leader of the free world itself has become a useful idiot for the other side.

Caroline Glick: Biden's skin-deep support for Israel

Until Wednesday, President Joe Biden had maintained a fairly supportive posture towards Israel in the face of the Hamas terror regime in Gaza’s launch of its newest round of war against the Jewish state.

In the first week of the new war, Biden’s administration blocked the United Nations Security Council from adopting anti-Israel statements and resolutions three times.

Until Wednesday afternoon Israel time, Biden avoided publicly calling on Israel to halt its counterstrikes against Hamas and expressed his support for Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Hamas’s missiles.

So it wouldn’t be surprising if some Israelis were flabbergasted when Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday afternoon that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire,” effectively ordering Israel to stand down by day’s end. But Biden’s week of professions of support for Israel was hardly the last word on his administration’s positions on Israel and the war. Indeed, they weren’t even its first word.

Biden’s actual policies regarding Israel are revealed in three different ways. First, there are the policies Biden had already adopted before Hamas opened its missile offensive from Gaza and its spate of organized anti-Jewish pogroms in mixed Arab-Jewish cities throughout Israel.

Biden’s courtship of Iran through the renewal of nuclear talks in Vienna, in which he has signalled his willingness to end U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, and his administration’s persuasion of Iraq and South Korea to unfreeze billions of dollars in Iranian oil revenue have signalled Iran and its terror proxies, including Hamas, that the Biden administration is abandoning the U.S. alliance with Israel and the moderate Sunni states in favour of Iran and its proxies.

Likewise, Biden’s announcement that he is restoring U.S. funding to UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority despite their funding of terrorism was a tailwind for Iran and Hamas plans to attack Israel. With U.S. funding and sanctions relief, not only did they realize that the United States had their back, Iran and Hamas gained the economic wherewithal to wage war. So too, Hamas was able to use America’s abandonment of Israel as a means to persuade Israeli Arabs that they could safely participate in pogroms against their Jewish neighbours and accept Hamas as their representative.

Here's the speech I gave to the Tikvah Fund Conference in March where I discussed whether American Jewry has a strategy for survival.https://t.co/fwSW3AJxYl
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) May 20, 2021

The Tikvah Podcast: Michael Doran on America’s Strategic Realignment in the Middle East

In wake of President Biden’s inauguration, experienced foreign-policy hands argued over what could be learned about his administration’s approach to Israel and the Middle East from his early statements and appointments. They faced an unresolved question: would President Biden’s longtime instincts, which tend to be sympathetic to Israel, hold sway over the louder and more progressive voices arrayed against Israel in the Democratic party? Would he continue to support Israel in the Oval Office as he did for so long in the Senate? Or would President Biden advance the strategy pursued by the Obama administration, strengthening Israel’s main adversary, Iran?

This week’s podcast guest believes that the answer has now been revealed. Michael Doran is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a long-time Mosaic writer, and the co-author of an important new essay about the Biden administration’s developing Middle East policy. In it, he argues that instead of working with Israel and the Sunni Arab states to contain Iran, President Biden and his team want to partner with Iran to bring a different kind of order to the Middle East. In conversation with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver, Doran discusses his argument and explains why Israel and America’s Sunni allies need to prepare for the final act of America’s strategic realignment.

Victor Davis Hanson's The Classicist Podcast: The Israelis, the Palestinians, and the Future of the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson analyzes the recent conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, how it reflects on the foreign policy of the Biden Administration, and what the consequences may be for the future of the Middle East.

Kuwaiti draft law: Prison for saying anything nice about Israel

From Albawaba:

Five MPs yesterday submitted a new draft law stipulating a jail sentence of between one and three years for people and authorities dealing with or traveling to the Zionist entity.

The bill, submitted by MPs Adnan Abdulsamad, Hisham Al-Saleh, Ali Al-Qattan, Ahmad Al-Hamad and Khalil Al-Saleh, bans any dealing or normalization with the Zionist entity. It also bans any direct or indirect contacts with the Zionist entity and also bans any Kuwaiti or expat residing in the country from visiting the Zionist entity with or without a travel document.

The bill also bans any expression of sympathy with the Zionist entity. It proposes a jail sentence of between one year and three years and a fine of up to KD 5,000 for violators.

This is the kind of freedom of expression that is coming soon to the West.

CNN started referring to "Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry" when citing casualties, Israel haters are livid

One of the small but important victories for truth during the Gaza fighting came from CNN, when it issued this internal memo on May 17:

Superdesk Guidance on Gaza Fatalities

We need to be transparent about the fact the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas. Consequently, when we cite latest casualty numbers in attribute to the Health Ministry in Gaza, we need to include the fact it is Hamas-run.

As an example: “Latest figures from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health put the number of fatalities at…”

From Andrew Carey and Calvin Sims

It is of course entirely accurate to say that Hamas runs the Health Ministry and that the casualty figures are subject to Hamas approval. For example, the Health Ministry seems not to have included most dead terrorists in its figures, making it appear that nearly all of the dead were civilians. Hamas has been censoring nearly all mentions of its dead fighters, which Israel estimates to be around 200. (If the cease fire holds, expect headlines next week that scores of "civilians" buried under the rubble were discovered.)

Someone at CNN was apparently so upset at a memo asking for transparency that they leaked this memo to Al Jazeera, where Senior Presenter and Producer Dena Takruti tweeted the incredible lie that this makes the Health Ministry a target for Israel:

This @CNN internal memo directs staff to say “Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health” when reporting casualty numbers. It was sent by the Jerusalem bureau chief.

This is a page straight out of Israel’s playbook. It serves to justify the attack on civilians & medical facilities

Other stupid takes followed:

It needs to be repeated that, regardless of whether you agree with them ideologically and regardless of whether the US, Israel, and their allies call them “terrorists,” Hamas is The Government in Gaza. This means that they are responsible for providing all municipal and local services. By declaring them a “terrorist organization,” any and all schools, hospitals, water treatment facilities, etc. are therefore transformed through some strange alchemy into legitimate military targets.

Apparently someone thinks that Israel makes targeting decisions based on CNN's nomenclature.

It is instructive to see how many Israel haters were incensed at this memo - meaning that they agree that all casualty figures for Gaza be silently filtered through Hamas.

Which goes to show how little regard for the truth Al Jazeera has, and how widespread support for Hamas is among a certain crowd.

05/21 Links Pt1: Israel’s Unqualified Victory; As Pogromists Activate, Chuck Schumer Cowers; How Europe Became Pro-Israel; Organization of American States designates Hamas a terrorist organization

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: How will we know who won the war?

In a press briefing on Tuesday, President Joe Biden's spokeswoman Jen Psaki indicated that the administration is just as unhappy with the Abraham Accords as the Iranians and Palestinians are. In response to a reporter's question about the Trump administration's peace efforts, Psaki pretended that the Abraham Accords don't exist.

"Aside from putting forward a peace proposal that was dead on arrival," she said derisively, "we don't think they did anything constructive, really, to bring an end to the longstanding conflict in the Middle East."

This asinine statement put paid the notion that Biden will ever opt for an alliance with the Abraham Accords member nations over the Iran/Hamas axis. Just as the administration refuses to even utter the term "Abraham Accords," so it insists on ignoring their political significance for the states of the region and their military capacity to contain Iran.

Despite the massive pressure that has been exerted against Abraham Accords member states to disavow their ties with Israel since Hamas opened its offensive last week, so far they have not wavered. The UAE, Bahrain and Morocco have put out mild statements on the Hamas war. Morocco sent humanitarian aid to Gaza. There have been no anti-Israel demonstrations in the streets of any of the Abraham Accords member states.

Sudan's leader, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan discussed the issue in an interview with France 24 in Arabic earlier this week. The interview was translated by MEMRI.

In his words, "The normalization [of relations between Sudan and Israel] has nothing to do with the Palestinians' right to establish their own state. The normalization is reconciliation with the international community, and with Israel as part of the international community."

Making clear that Sudan would not be bullied into ending its relations with Israel, Al-Burhan added that the decision to maintain relations with Israel is a sovereign Sudanese decision. It is "the prerogative of the state institutions," said.

Since it is clear that Israel made clear from the outset that it had no interest in conquering Gaza, Hamas will declare victory no matter how much damage it sustained from Israeli airstrikes. So too, after the Biden administration placed the threat of condemning Israel at the UN Security Council on the table in the first days of the conflict, it was clear that Israel wouldn't dare defy Biden for long once he publicly demanded a ceasefire. So Israel stood down without ever stating outright what it would view as a victory in this confrontation.

Despite the deliberate lack of clarity, Israel may well emerge the victor. Two parameters will determine who has won this round of war. First, if the Supreme Court sides with the law and respects the property rights of the Jewish land owners in Sheikh Jarrah, their ruling will deliver a stinging defeat to the Iranian/Hamas axis and their American and European supporters who insist that Jews have no property rights in the neighborhood because they are Jews.

Second, if the Abraham Accords survive the war and ties between Israel and its Arab partners expand and deepen, then Hamas and its partners will be the losing side. As for Mansour Abbas, time will tell if he is a friend or an enemy. But in the meantime, his political survival is a national interest.

Vivian Bercovici: Israel’s Unqualified Victory

Should this cease-fire hold, Israel can be assured that Hamas’ military capability is diminished in the short term. The country can take enormous solace in the fact that a ground war—which everyone dreaded—was avoided. And Israeli intelligence regarding “The Metro”—the underground military infrastructure in Gaza—seems to have been pretty darn good.

Netanyahu avoided a conflict with President Joe Biden, acceding to his clear demands in recent days to negotiate and agree to a cease-fire arrangement. And, as noted by the highly astute British-Palestinian, Ghanem Nusseibeh, Biden was able to take credit for brokering this ceasefire (actually negotiated by Egypt) by finally ending his unofficial boycott of President al-Sisi.

For its part, Hamas has demonstrated a serious ability to manage sustained and serious attacks on Israel, and they have enhanced their profile among radical Palestinians and their supporters, which may well be a majority. Recent polls among West Bank Palestinians indicate that if elections were held today, Hamas would win handily. This is why Abbas “postponed” the elections that were planned to take place this spring, attributing the move to the fictitious Israeli intention to storm and occupy al Aqsa.

Which brings us full circle.

Al Aqsa is not “occupied.” The property dispute involving a Jewish landlord who has held title to certain land in Sheikh Jarrah since 1875—on which Palestinian tenants have resided for more than 50 years, without title—remains unresolved.

And life will ease back into what passes for normal in these parts, until the next flare-up.

John Podhoretz: As Pogromists Activate, Chuck Schumer Cowers

In the city Schumer represents, in the state he represents, Jews are being attacked for being Jews and demonstrators are supporting a terrorist group that is firing rockets at Jews. Where is this vaunted shomer, this supposed guardian of his people? Spiritually cowering under his desk, terrified of a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his 2022 election. His only significant action since hostilities began was supporting a bipartisan ceasefire statement. At the beginning of the week. The statement did say Israel has the right to defend itself. How nice. And how about my kids walking on the streets of Manhattan, Chuck? Who’s defending them, if only rhetorically? Hey, Chuck: How about your kids?

I am focusing on Chuck Schumer because he is the second or third most important Democratic elected official in America, and his silence speaks volumes about his party’s heartbreaking and disgusting refusal to confront the increasingly unmasked and open anti-Semitism spewing from the mouths and tweets of AOC and her fellow Squad members and other terrorist apologists in the House—not to mention Bernie Sanders, who shames the memories of his forbears with his humanitarian concern for every other minority group on earth save the very people whose blood courses through his ice-cold veins.

There is murder in the air. Do not mistake it for anything else. And do not mistake cravenness, and cowardice, and rancid ambition for anything else, either.

Commentary Magazine Podcast: The Violence Against Jews and the Democrats’ Complicity

Street violence targeting American Jews is on the rise across America. It is being provoked and condoned by progressives within the Democratic establishment, and the party is doing nothing about it.

Douglas Murray: Why do parts of Britain erupt whenever Israel defends itself?

This has been an observable rule throughout each of the interventions in Gaza, however long or short-lived they have been. It was observable during the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Each time the eruption on British streets is worse than the time before.

This exchange, for instance, has only lasted a couple of weeks so far and looks like coming to an end fairly soon. It has not involved a land invasion of Gaza. It has involved rocket barrages fired at Israel from Gaza, responded to by Israeli precision bombing against the launch sites and other targets that Hamas and co have built in among the Palestinian civilian population. So by the standards of previous exchanges this has been minimal. Yet here are just a few of the things that have happened in the UK as a result.

- Large scale protests outside the Israeli embassy in London involving openly anti-Semitic messages, attended by leading politicians of the opposition Labour party. Nine police officers injured by members of the crowd throwing missiles at the British police.
- Convoys of cars of pro-Palestinian activists drive through Jewish-populated areas of London, broadcasting out calls to 'Fuck the Jews. Rape their daughters'.
- While her colleagues are being injured by the mob, a police officer in London promises protestors that she is on their side and says she is ´praying day and night´ to Allah. Eventually joining the crowds, raises her fist and chants 'Free Palestine'.
- Elsewhere on Britain's streets, Muslims call for Jihad.

I could go on. This is just a taster of how Britain — still technically meant to be under Covid restrictions — loses control when a comparatively minor exchange occurs thousands of miles away. Naturally politicians of the mainstream on all sides condemn the outright racism, bigotry, and intimidation. But they have no strategy — how could they? — for dealing with the growing number of people in Britain who find Israeli self-defence so appalling that it makes them call for violence, and commit violence, on the streets of Britain.

Israel can look after her own affairs. But with each conflict Israel gets dragged into the question arises: can Britain look after hers?

Israel’s Allies Bristle at Claim that Iron Dome Perpetuates Conflict

Amidst Hamas’s continued rocket attacks on Israel and the Jewish State’s ongoing response, the Washington Post has published what some lawmakers and foreign-policy experts claim is a misguided “analysis” of the consequences of Iron Dome missile-defense system.

Iron Dome, which was declared operational in 2011, has a simple charge: to protect Israeli citizens from barrages aimed mostly at population centers from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. With a success rate hovering somewhere around 90 percent, it can only be considered an unqualified success by that metric.

However, the Post piece — authored by Israeli professor Yagil Levy — submits that it also has the unintended effect of perpetuating tension and violence in the region.

Levy argues that “by intercepting almost all incoming rockets, Iron Dome released the Israeli leadership from political pressure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

While he acknowledges that Iron Dome benefits Gazan civilians as well as the Israelis by sparing them the “potentially devastating outcomes of an Israeli ground offensive,” he also believes that the “reduced pressure to resolve the conflict with Gaza also means Iron Dome gives Israelis a false sense of security, based on technological success — which isn’t guaranteed forever — rather than political solutions.”

Levy is not the first to express doubts about Iron Dome in spite of the lives it saves on both sides. In 2012, the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg passed along an anonymous critic’s concern that it would convince Israeli leaders that “the solution to Gaza will not be to simply build bigger and better walls — both on the ground and in the sky” and incentivize them “to put off hard political decisions.”

The IDF lists its accomplishments during the operation

The IDF put out this infographic of its achievements in the past two weeks:

1. Over 100km of Hamas' underground defensive tunnel system ("the Metro") destroyed.

2. 5 senior Hamas and PIJ division commanders taken out.

3. Some 20 high and medium ranking Hamas and PIJ operatives taken out.

4. Some 200 terrorists reportedly taken out.

5. Some 340 steep-shooting-range capabilities hit.

Some 230 surface-to-surface rockets hit.

Some 70 multi-barreled rocket launchers hit.

Some 35 mortars hit.

6. R&D operatives, workshops and development centers severely hit.

7. 10 Hamas government offices, 11 interior offices and 5 terror-funding banks hit.

8. Dozens of terror camps and outposts hit.

Dozens of command rooms hit.

9 multi-story buildings, used for terrorist activity, hit.

9. Enemy raids,

Dozens of attack tunnels

Dozens of anti-tank attacks

7 aerial threats

2 naval threats prevented.

10. 90% of rockets fired at Israel intercepted.

(h/r Yoel)

Hamas' Felesteen reports:

The Undersecretary of the Ministry of Local Government, Eng. Ahmed Abu Ras, called for the necessity of holding a major and central conference for the reconstruction of Gaza on its land.

In press statements, he stressed Gaza's readiness to receive supporters and donors, in order to directly see the extent of the damage caused by the occupation during its aggression on the Gaza Strip.

Engineer Abu Ras said, "We want the donors and supporters to declare their solidarity and willingness to support the reconstruction of Gaza from its land, so that they would witness the extent of the destruction caused by the aggression."

Hamas will have plenty of concrete to rebuild its tunnels!

What a waste

This was the fourth major conflict between Israel and Gaza terror groups since 2008.

Of the three previous ones, Guardian of the Walls most resembles 2012's Pillar of Defense - massive bombing campaign, many Hamas rockets, Iron Dome intercepting most of them, many rockets that fell short in Gaza killing the innocent but Israel being blamed, no ground invasion.

From everything we can see, there is something else in common with Pillar of Defense: Nothing was really accomplished.

Some residents of Israel’s south slam the government over the ceasefire with Hamas, saying the operation in Gaza should have gone on.

“We feel like we’ve gone through it all for nothing,” a man tells Channel 12 news in an interview. “We had achievements thanks to the army, but there is no strategy. What kind of ceasefire is this?”

The mayor of rocket-stricken Sderot, Alon Davidi, joins widespread attacks on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government by officials in Gaza border communities over the ceasefire with Hamas.

“I don’t understand why we’re having a ceasefire, there is no reason for a ceasefire,” Davidi tells Radio 103FM. “The prime minister and the government had our backing, there were achievements but this is not something that changes the balance of power.

Ashkelon Mayor Tomer Glam, whose city was bombarded almost non-stop with rockets from Gaza over the 11 days of fighting, voices disappointment at the ceasefire, telling the Kan public broadcaster: “We would have wanted Hamas to be eliminated but we know that won’t happen.”

More enraging is that Israel didn't even seem to demand the return of the two mentally ill Israelis being held in Gaza, Avera Mengistu and Hisham Al-Sayed, as well as the remains of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul.

Of the three previous conflagrations, Pillar of Defense resulted in the least amount of calm - less than 18 months before Protective Edge in the summer of 2014.

Hamas is pretending that this was a military victory. Obviously it wasn't. But it was a huge political victory for them - they are now recognized as the real leaders of the Palestinians, and the Palestinian Authority has supported them to the hilt the entire time.

Also, sad to say, Israel's PR efforts during the fighting was even worse than in previous wars. A belated website set up by the Foreign Ministry was worse than useless, with posters being cropped for no apparent reason and no hyperlinks to dig into the statistics they gave. At times over the years it has looked like Israel started to understand the importance of good PR, and that all fell apart here. There needs to be a rapid response team for every single incident before they gain traction and Israel haters take control of the narrative. Sometimes, it is worth giving up some intelligence information to stop the narrative from becoming "Israel is targeting children/journalists."

In the US, we are seeing that large parts of the Democratic Party essentially aligned themselves with a terror group, taking at face value that Sheikh Jarrah is a reasonable excuse for thousands of missiles.

Palestinian activists in the US are proving themselves to be antisemitic as they incite violence - one needs only to look at videos of any of the many demonstrations, even the "largely peaceful" ones, to see this - yet the media is reluctant to call out the antisemitism that has suddenly become the norm on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. Jew-haters are emboldened to attack Jews in broad daylight.

Is this the new normal in NYC? @NYCMayor pic.twitter.com/MvHCj50Kvp
— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) May 21, 2021

1/ The type of vile disinformation spread over the past two weeks across social media, the incitement & antisemitic comments made by notable members of Congress, and the doctored photos aimed at vilifying the Jewish people and the State of Israel have led to this situation in NYC pic.twitter.com/J1arHvzQqa
— The Israel Files (@theisraelfiles) May 21, 2021

I don't see anything to be optimistic about.

Pakistani MPs call to nuke Israel, quote Hitler, refer to Protocols

On CNN, Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi went on CNN, right after a UN speech vilifying Israel, and he promptly engaged in antisemitic tropes that he doubled down on, twice, when called on it. He said the Israel controls the media with their "deep pockets".when called on it, he said that this was the perception that the world has, and the only way to combat that perception was for the media to stop saying anything sympathetic to Israel.

Interviewer Bianna Golodryga did a good job holding his feet to the fire, although she still let him get off too easily, allowing him to lie by saying that the anti-Israel protests worldwide were for a two state solution and for peace - the chants at those protests for "Khaybar al Yahud" showed that this is clearly not the case.

Qureshi's antisemitism was not even close to the worst from Pakistani officials.

Earlier this week, Pakistan's National Assembly held sessions to bash Israel, and the statements made there show that Pakistan is an evil Islamist nation that celebrates hate and bigotry.

Jamaat-e-Islami’s Maulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali asked of the army chief of Pakistan, what good was a seven lakh-strong army if it can’t liberate Palestine and Kashmir? Was the nuclear bomb just an artefact to be displayed in the museum? Similarly, Jamaat Ulema Islam’s Mufti Abdul Shakoor was convinced that Pakistan could wipe out Israel from the face of the earth within minutes. After all, Pakistan was “atomi quwat”. Citing how the Taliban forced out the United States from Afghanistan, Shakoor said “Israel was just a small fry”.

Another Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) parliamentarian Asma Qadeer pleaded with the speaker to let her enroll for jihad, because it was the only option for Pakistan.

Kanwal Shauzab, national assembly member from the ruling PTI, claimed Hitler said: “I could’ve killed all the Jews but I left some to let the world know why I was killing them.” She was rewarded with desk thumping at the revelation of an incorrect quote attributed to the mass killer.

Shauzab then went onto talk about how Pakistan’s atom bomb would only be burst on Shab-e-Barat. Missing the irony of the destruction linked with the atom bomb.

State minister for parliamentary affairs Ali Muhammad Khan, however, didn’t want to nuke Israel, he preferred Muslims preparing/planning like Jews did for the next 1,000 years. Khan referred to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a fake antisemitic hoax about a grand Jewish plan for global domination. A crash course on Palestine for parliamentarians outside WhatsApp University looks like the need of hour.

Outside parliament, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) pledged Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan half-a-million workers who could join him to ensure Palestine’s freedom.

“Pakistani Muslims will sacrifice their youth and lives, but they will not accept the filthy feet of Jews in Jerusalem,” TLP leader Ashraf Asif Jalali said in solidarity with Erdoğan..

This is a nation of mentally ill, bigoted and hateful Islamists - who happen to have nukes.

05/20 Links Pt2: John Podhoretz: Israel has acted like a moral beacon in the latest Gaza war against terror; Brendan O’Neill: What’s the real reason so many people hate Israel?; Abraham Accords Hold Firm Despite Gaza Conflict

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Israel has acted like a moral beacon in the latest Gaza war against terror

The Iron Dome doesn’t just save Israeli lives and property. It has likely saved the lives of tens of thousands of Gazan Palestinians just in the past two weeks.

How? Imagine that the system didn’t exist, that Hamas had collected 30,000 rockets, and then began firing them. Israelis would perish by the hundreds or more. The response would, of necessity, be devastating. Israel would be compelled to enter Gaza with overwhelming force and go street by street, tunnel by tunnel, to locate the rocket caches and blow them up.

It is awful that 60,000 Palestinians have had to flee their homes or been rendered homeless. But every single one of them owes their current parlous condition to Hamas’ strategy of interlacing its weaponry in and around Gaza’s citizenry.

That has other consequences, as well. As Jonathan Sacerdoti recently noted in The Spectator, more than 400 Hamas rockets fired from Gaza have landed … in Gaza. Hamas simply rolls the casualties from those inadvertent acts of self-destruction into the overall toll it blames on the Jewish state.

The central emotional claim against Israel is that disproportionate death toll. But consider what we are being asked to believe here. According to Hamas’ own numbers, something akin to 20 Palestinians a day have been killed. Every civilian death is a tragedy. But the relatively small figures — compare the Gaza figures to the mass horrors of the Syrian civil war — are a testament not to Israel’s barbarism, but to its determination to avoid civilian casualties.

Israel gets precious little credit. It does it anyway. History will record Israel as a moral beacon in this regard. While there has been damage and deaths an Israel, the Iron Dome defense has prevented even more.

As for those who are lining up with a terrorist group and serving its propagandistic interests? If they’re lucky, history will forget them, and their ignominy will not haunt their descendants.

Tablet Unorthodox PodCast: Ep. 275: A conversation with Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, and an audio diary from the bomb shelters in Tel Aviv

This week on Unorthodox, we’re doing our best to process—and help you process—what’s going on in Israel and Gaza.

First we talk with Israeli journalist Matti Friedman, whose recent article for Tablet, “Jerusalem of Glue,” highlights the gap between the outward narrative of conflict and the more cohesive day-to-day reality on the ground in the city. He’s been on the show before, talking about his book Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel.

Then we take you into the bomb shelters of Tel Aviv, where Carrie Keller-Lynn and Aliza Landes, hosts of the podcast Us Among the Israelis, have been documenting their experiences as an audio diary.

Brendan O’Neill: What’s the real reason so many people hate Israel?

There’s a question that hangs like a long, dark shadow over Western leftists’ and liberals’ furious opposition to Israel, and I have never heard a satisfactory answer to it. It’s this: why do you hate Israel more than any other nation?

Why does Israeli militarism offend and horrify you more than Turkish militarism, or Saudi militarism, or American and British militarism for that matter? Why is it ‘genocide’ and ‘war crimes’ and ‘bloodletting’ when Israel takes action against Palestinian militants, but not when Turkey takes action against Kurdish militants? Seriously — what is the answer?

Turkey’s incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan is called Operation Claw-Lightning. It started on 23 April. It is part of Turkey’s long-running war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the militant Kurdish organisation dedicated to creating an independent Kurdistan and based mainly in south-eastern Turkey and northern Iraq.

Operation Claw-Lightning is a follow-up to Operation Claw, a Turkish onslaught in Iraqi Kurdistan that lasted from May 2019 to June 2020. Hundreds of people were killed or wounded in that operation. These operations, of course, are only the latest flare-ups in Turkey’s 40-year war with Kurdish militants, which has led to the deaths of around 20,000 Kurdish civilians and the destruction of between 2,500 and 4,000 Kurdish villages.

So where are the Kurdish flags on caring people’s social-media feeds? Why doesn’t Sky News have pained-looking reporters in Iraqi Kurdistan talking to families who have been displaced by the Turkish bombardment? Why haven’t tens of thousands of Brits taken to the streets to register their fury with Turkey, as they have done with Israel following its latest conflict with Hamas in Gaza?

Abraham Accords Hold Firm Despite Gaza Conflict

The current fighting with Hamas has provided the first test for the Abraham Accords.

Last Friday, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed sent his condolences to all the victims and stressed the importance of the Abraham Accords in creating a better future for coming generations.

The most widespread sentiment on social media is criticism of Hamas, an organization which has few fans in the Gulf, mainly because it has brought large-scale destruction to Gaza.

Tel Aviv University Institute for National Security Studies social media analyst Irit Perlov said that the Islamic political leaders of the Gulf see Hamas as almost representing a threat and hence the neutral declarations and lack of condemnation of Israel.

The UAE had wanted to invest in infrastructure projects in Gaza but that readiness has disappeared.