Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, September 09, 2023

09/09 Links: Oslo is dead: A Palestinian state will never exist; Rashida Tlaib to speak at major anti-Israel conference; Morocco earthquake: 1,300 dead, 56 Israelis missing

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The cruel lessons of the Oslo debacle remain unlearned

The consequences of Oslo and the Gaza withdrawal, which allowed the strip to be transformed into a terror fortress as well as an independent Palestinian state in all but name, have been calamitous for Israelis. Time and again, they are forced to grab children and herd the elderly, and run full-speed to bomb shelters during rocket and missile barrages launched from the Strip. That’s a steep price to pay for a debating point.

But both Oslo and the Gaza withdrawal are held up by some as necessary, despite the horror they produced, because anything must be tried in the pursuit of peace, even if lives are lost in the process.

As much as supporters of Israel should have learned that the willingness of the Palestinians to end the conflict was misjudged, they should also have absorbed that the international community, mainstream press and foreign-policy leaders aren’t any more sympathetic to Israel as a result of the risks it ran and sacrifices it made than they were before 1993.

Indeed, it is entirely possible that they are less sympathetic to an Israel that was willing to gamble with the likes of a veteran terrorist like Arafat. Instead of saluting their courage for opening themselves up to the perils of empowering terrorists for the sake of peace, the world interpreted Oslo very differently. Rather than a generous gesture in which tangible assets and territory to which Israel had at least as good a claim as the Arabs were given up in exchange for the hope of some quietude, the international community viewed it as an Israeli admission of guilt for holding onto stolen goods.

To a large extent, most Israelis have absorbed these lessons as the election results that repeatedly put Oslo opponent Benjamin Netanyahu in the prime minister’s office have proved. But the success of the movement against judicial reform to some extent illustrates that the Israeli left is far from dead or understands how wrong they were 30 years ago when they were in charge of the country’s fate.

And as long as the United Nations still pushes the lying Palestinian narrative about Israel’s illegitimacy and its being an “apartheid state,” the international community still acts as if Oslo hadn’t demonstrated the Palestinians’ unwillingness to make peace no matter what they were offered.

That’s also true with respect to the United States where the Biden foreign-policy team remains undeterred by Abbas’s expressions of hate. They are still financially supporting a Palestinian government led by a Holocaust denier and antisemite, and trying to undermine Netanyahu in the vain hope that Abbas or a successor will finally vindicate their policy of pressuring Israel to weaken its security and give up its rights to parts of the ancient Jewish homeland.

Three decades of proof of Palestinian rejectionism hasn’t lessened the clamor for more land for peace trades that will lead to even more harm for Israel.

Thinking back 30 years ago, one can’t blame those who celebrated what they were told was a deal that would end the conflict. But we can fault those who refuse to draw conclusions from what followed. The pursuit of peace is an honorable calling, but when such efforts lead to more violence rather than conflict resolution and empower antisemites—as was the case with Oslo—then honoring the good intentions of those involved isn’t justified. In a world in which antisemitism is on the rise specifically because of the hatred for Israel that Abbas helps incite, actions that strengthen antisemites who are responsible for the murder of Jews shouldn’t be seen as noble or worthwhile. Much as we might want to still honor those who were prepared to gamble on peace, Sept. 13, 1993 should be remembered as a day of infamy for Israel and the Jewish people.

Oslo is dead: A Palestinian state will never exist

BY ANY measure, the Oslo experiment was the diplomatic equivalent of the Titanic, a grandiose exercise in hubris that crashed and sank, sending countless innocents to an early grave.

Nevertheless, until today Israel continues to suffer from Oslo, as various American and international leaders persist in their prattle about the necessity of a “two-state solution” and the need to create an independent Palestinian state.

With cult-like certainty, these fantasists continue to preach that conferring statehood on the Palestinians would put an end to the conflict with Israel.

Needless to say, they ignore the Palestinian track record of scuttling negotiations, effectively torpedoing attempts by premiers such as Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert to give them virtually everything they wanted on a silver platter.

Those who continue to mouth the mantra of a “two-state solution” are simply overlooking the obvious lesson that Oslo embodies: Israel must never again give up territory under any circumstances, and most certainly not in exchange for false promises of peace.

We cannot place our security in the hands of others and, no matter what, we must never allow a hostile Palestinian terrorist state to be established in Judea and Samaria, as it would pose a direct threat to the future of the country.

Oslo and its underlying principle of “land for peace” was an illusion founded upon the delusion that appeasing terror, rather than opposing it, was the answer.

But this is not a battle over borders, and it never has been. It is a clash of civilizations, a struggle between the Jewish people, who are reclaiming their ancestral homeland, and our numerous foes.

The fact is that there has never been a Palestinian state in all of history, and there isn’t one now.

And Israel should make clear, once and for all, that there never will be.

Thirty years on, we can say with confidence that Oslo and everything that it stood for is dead. Rather than trying to revive it, we would do well to offer it a fitting eulogy.

House Democrat Rashida Tlaib to speak at major anti-Israel conference: 'Treasonous'

"Squad" Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) is slated to be a speaker at a conference headed by an anti-Israel coalition that has come under fire for being linked to Palestinian terror groups, a flyer shows.

Tlaib will appear between Oct. 27-29 in Houston, Texas, at the national conference for the United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which has reportedly fiscally sponsored the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee and accused Israel of "apartheid," "ethnic cleansing," and "genocide," according to the campaign's website.

"It is anti-American and even treasonous for Tlaib to speak at a USCPR conference that falsely condemns America as an 'imperialist,' and aims to 'mobilize action' against America, Israel, Jews, and Jews on American college campuses," President Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, the oldest pro-Israel American nonprofit group, told the Washington Examiner. "The leadership of the Democratic Party should publicly condemn Rashida Tlaib and demand she not speak at this anti-American, anti-semitic conference."

News of Tlaib's forthcoming appearance at the USCPR event comes as she continues to face heightened criticism from Republicans and her Democratic colleagues over her anti-Israel positions. In May, Permanent Israel Representative to the United Nations Gilad Erdan said the congresswoman's "ignorance and hatred toward the Jewish people and the state of Israel know no bounds," following Tlaib posting on social media that "the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians."

Many House Democrats, including Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Elaine Luria (D-VA), Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and Ritchie Torres (D-NY), notably condemned Tlaib last September upon her alleging that “Israel’s apartheid government” does not align with “progressive values.” Tlaib joined other left-leaning Democrats in July to boycott Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s joint address to Congress, releasing a joint statement with Rep. Cori Bush (R-MO) that dubbed Israel "an apartheid state."

USCPR, which fundraises through its U.S. charity called Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, has routinely slammed efforts by Israel's government to thwart terrorism. This includes its signing of a statement in August 2022 that took issue with its move to designate six Palestinian groups as proxies for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — a U.S.-designated terror organization.

The BDS National Committee, which Tablet revealed in 2018 was sponsored by USCPR, includes the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, according to its website. The council's members have, in turn, included U.S.-designated terror groups, such as the Popular Front, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Palestinian Liberation Front, and others, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the BDS coalition website, and the U.S. State Department.

Jeffrey Berk, head of the pro-Israel advocacy group TruthTells, said it's "incomprehensible" Tlaib would choose to be affiliated with USCPR — calling for her to be censured.

Video of UNRWA students extolling murdering Jews and seeking martyrdom

This is what is being taught in UNRWA schools.

UNRWA keeps denying it. And it keeps getting caught.

Askar - UNRWA: Cradle of Killers

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09/08 Links Pt2: Israel critics unfairly slander the most humane army in history; ‘Seeing’ the Palestinians; Musk vs. Greenblatt is the unspeakable vs. the uneatable

From Ian:

Israel critics unfairly slander the most humane army in history

Israel’s detractors accuse the Jewish state of intentionally killing Palestinian civilians. Moreover, they maintain that because in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict many more Palestinians have died than Israelis, Israel uses disproportionate force. Finally, they imply this death toll is the outcome of Israel blocking a solution to the conflict. Of course, each of these accusations is an outright lie.

The truth is, the Israel Defense Force does its utmost to avoid civilian casualties. The IDF’s Code of Ethics stresses the importance of protecting civilians no matter what “side” they are on. By contrast, Palestinian terrorists deliberately put civilians in harm’s way in a cynical attempt to defame the Jewish state.

The most reprehensible lie about Israel’s battlefield practices is that the Jewish state purposely targets civilians. A 2021 news bulletin by Amnesty International, for example, stated that Israeli forces showed “shocking disregard” for Palestinian civilians because they targeted residential buildings.

What Amnesty omits is that Palestinian terrorists live in residential buildings and often use them as bases of operations. During the 2021 Gaza conflict, for instance, Israel targeted and destroyed the home of Yahya Sinwar, the most senior Hamas leader in the territory. Whenever Israel targets buildings in which civilians may be present, standard IDF procedure is to warn residents using text messages, phone calls and “roof knocking”—firing warning shots at the roof of the targeted building.

Israel has actually risked the lives of its soldiers to avoid civilian casualties. In Jenin this past July, for example, rather than relying on its massive artillery and airpower, the IDF sent soldiers into the Jenin refugee camp, where terrorists hid side-by-side with civilians in their homes. Civilian casualties are inevitable when the enemy invites it. Nevertheless, only 12 Palestinians were killed in the Jenin operation, of whom nine were combatants. Yet, the United Nations still accused Israel of using disproportionate force.

That Israel uses disproportionate force is a common libel used by the United NATIONS and NGOs like Amnesty International, because Palestinian casualties far exceed Israeli casualties. But it is the goal of any army to ensure that enemy casualties outnumber its own. When police raid a den of armed drug smugglers, citizens don’t demand proportionate casualties.

Palestinian casualties are also higher because terrorist groups use civilians as human shields. During the 2014 Gaza war, for example, terrorists shot rockets into Israel from UNRWA-run schools.

Nevertheless, the IDF has had great success preventing civilian deaths in Gaza. This was the view expressed by General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said, “Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties.” Gen. Dempsey even sent a team of officers to study how the IDF’s tactics regarding the minimization of civilian casualties could be applied to U.S. forces.

No wonder retired British colonel Richard Kemp has called the IDF “the most moral army in the history of warfare.”

‘Seeing’ the Palestinians

Moreover, I am not entirely without empathy for the Palestinians. It does not give me joy that many of them live as refugees. I do not take pleasure in the fact that they have to wait at checkpoints. I know that when an army exercises control over non-citizens, there are bound to be abuses. I am not happy about the deaths of non-combatants in military operations. My reflex is to be sympathetic to any people seeking national independence—I wouldn’t be a Zionist if it were otherwise.

There is also the fact that Palestinian claims cut to the bone of any Jew. We have a long history of suffering, oppression, exile and dispossession. When others claim to have suffered such things as well—such as the Uyghurs today—we are naturally sympathetic. We want to stand up for the weak and downtrodden because we have often been the weak and downtrodden. It is easy to make us feel guilty when we are accused of being the oppressors and the persecutors.

I have even gone so far as to engage in a small thought experiment: What, I asked myself, if everything the Palestinians say about us is true?

This experiment helped me reach certain conclusions: First, even if we were as bad as the Palestinians claim—which we are not—we would still be a people like all other peoples. We would still have a right to self-determination of some kind in some part of our indigenous homeland. Our behavior at any given moment is irrelevant to that right, which is absolute.

Second, even if the accusations were true, Israel has tried multiple times to address them and reach some kind of reconciliation with those who believe we have wronged them. Each time, reconciliation has been rejected in the most violent manner possible. Many Israelis have paid with their lives for these attempts. To simply pretend that these attempts never happened or have no moral import defames those martyrs to peace.

As a result of this thought experiment, I find myself less plagued by the idea that I may not “see” the Palestinians, because I believe Israel has done everything it could to “see.” The extra mile was gone, and it did not work. It did not work because the Palestinians did not want it to work.

That was their choice. One must accept it, but they must accept that, as a result of that choice, their movement can make no moral demands on any of us. If there is to be a reconciliation, it will have to come from a different choice: The Palestinians must choose to see us.

Mark Regev: How Israel's US embassy reacted to the 9/11 attacks

Far from being gung-ho, embassy security was following a protocol that was being implemented at government buildings across the greater DC area due to fears about additional hijacked planes heading towards the capital. Until today, no one knows for sure what was the intended target of a fourth aircraft, which crashed in Pennsylvania after its passengers physically confronted their hijackers.

The embassy’s political team, I among them, relocated to the ambassador’s residence, nearby but far enough away to be a secure location, where over the following hours we were in constant contact with Jerusalem over the day’s dramatic events, offering advice as to the appropriate Israeli government response.

Sharon set the tone. In a televised address to the nation, he proclaimed: “The fight against terrorism is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and way of life.” Israel, he declared, was prepared to provide the US with “any assistance at any time.”

Sharon was governing a country agonizing under the Second Intifada’s unremitting suicide bombings and ubiquitous fatalities. Across Israel, many hoped that with America experiencing Islamist terror firsthand, Washington policymakers could now better appreciate the realities that Israelis had been facing daily.

How the Palestinians reacted to 9/11
PLO chair Yasser Arafat followed the events from his seaside office in Gaza City, while his security services expeditiously suppressed spontaneous manifestations of Palestinian joy surfacing in the aftermath of the bloodshed in New York and Washington.

But having no authorized security presence in Jerusalem, Arafat was unable to curtail such expressions there, and footage from the Old City’s Damascus Gate showing Palestinians celebrating America’s calamity was widely circulated. In a calculated act of damage control, Arafat rushed to Gaza’s Shifa Hospital and donated blood for the 9/11 wounded in front of the cameras.

That confusing and crazy day also produced an incongruous meal. Ofra Ivry, the ambassador’s spouse, had a planned luncheon event at the residence for a Washington women’s group that was canceled in the wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks. She generously insisted that the already-prepared food not go to waste and that the evacuated embassy staff partake.

Postscript: Every year on the anniversary of 9/11, the International Institute for Counter Terrorism at Reichman University, headed by Prof. Boaz Ganor, hosts its World Summit. The conference attracts some 1,400 participants from 65 countries: politicians, defense and intelligence officials, police officers, private sector security specialists, and academics. Billed as the “most influential event in the field of counter terrorism today,” the summit begins on Sunday.

A tweet from today. Follow the links for all the proof you need to show that boycotting Israel is really boycotting Jews, and it always was.

__________________________________

I see Visualizing Palestine released a video about how noble boycotts are.

But their history is missing a great deal.

Because the historic Arab boycotts of Israel were explicitly boycotts against JEWS through at least the 1970s. And BDS histories admit that their campaigns are a continuation of the earlier boycotts.

For those who want to see proof:

Arab boycotts against Jews 1891-1945:

Boycotting "Jewish businesses" in the 1950s:

Continuing on through the 70s and then how the anti-Jewish boycott suddenly morphed into pretending to be "anti-Israel":

From the start through today, BDS is aimed at Jews only. Arab Israelis aren't boycotted:

So spare me the slick videos. Boycotting Israel was always, and remains today, an anti-Jewish boycott. And as such, it is reprehensible.

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

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Will Israel be a part of the Middle East railway being discussed?

From TOI:

Leaders of the United States, India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were working to finalize a joint infrastructure deal that could be announced this weekend at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi, according to an official familiar with the matter.

If it comes together, the arrangement would involve ship transit between India and Saudi Arabia, then trains through Saudi Arabia and the UAE, likely to Jordan, then ship transit to Turkey and onward from there by train, according to a diplomat familiar with the negotiations.

Biden is aiming to use the G20 to show participating countries that the US and its like-minded allies are better economic and security partners than China.

Axios adds that this was all Israel's idea:

The idea for the new initiative came up during talks that were held over the last 18 months in another forum called I2U2, which includes the U.S., Israel, the UAE and India, according to the two sources.
The forum was established in late 2021 to discuss strategic infrastructure projects in the Middle East and to serve as a counterweight to Beijing's growing influence in the region.
Israel raised the idea of connecting the region through railways during the I2U2 meetings over the last year. Part of the idea was to use India's expertise on such big infrastructure projects, one source said.
The Biden administration then expanded on the idea to include Saudi Arabia's participation.

But it appears that the US is excluding Israel from this unless they broker a Saudi-Israel agreement - although one is really not dependent on the other. It still sounds like the US is leaving Israel out to dry unless it does what the Biden administration demands.

Back in the 1930s, Palestine Railways advertised itself as the "Gateway to the East":

And they added a line to Lebanon in the 1940s as well.

How....normal!

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09/08 Links Pt1: A Nazi speech in Ramallah tells a much larger tale; The Arafat I knew was undermining Oslo from the very start

From Ian:

The Arafat I knew was undermining Oslo from the very start

From Arafat’s perspective, the Oslo Accords of September 1993 were not intended as harbingers of peace, nor was he being “brave” in signing them. Rather, he was a master of hypocrisy.

For instance, Israeli security had found a wanted terrorist concealed in the boot of a car Arafat and his entourage were driving triumphantly into the Gaza Strip from Egypt in 1994.

“We knew straight away that what Arafat said publicly was very different from what he did, or wanted to do, more privately,” said the officer in charge.

That double-speak was confirmed when a reporter made a secret recording of Arafat speaking on a tour of South Africa. Arafat told worshippers at a mosque that the PLO’s apparent acceptance of Israel’s right to exist was just a subterfuge for overall conquest.

To this day, Palestinians, often slavishly reported by the mainstream media, continue to claim that Israeli hardliners sabotaged the Oslo Accords.

True, there was little progress towards a “final settlement” that the Accords had envisaged should take five years. But the reality of what stopped serious progress was somewhat different.

Arafat really did not feel he needed a “final status”, which would condemn him to the obloquy of most of the Palestinian and Arab elite, and which would reduce him to the leader of a small and unimportant “state”.

He felt much more comfortable politically and psychologically in being portrayed internally and around the Islamic world as a revolutionary, not as a statesman, or, worse, as a sell-out. During our interview with him he was pleased to show us his tiny bedroom, still displaying some small holes made, he said, by Israel shrapnel. In reality, he had a much grander bedroom reachable by a corridor to the other side of the Mukataa.

What Arafat desired and got was a path to continued and expanded influence and international importance. The Accords were in many ways a propaganda and financial victory for the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

JPost Editorial: Mahmoud Abbas is a delusional liar and is unfit to lead the PA

The Palestinians deserve to hear the historical truth
Steffen Seibert, the German ambassador to Israel, was quick to respond to Abbas’s outrageous claims.

“The recent statement of President Abbas on Jews and the Holocaust is an insult to the memory of millions of murdered men, women, and children. The Palestinians deserve to hear the historical truth from their leader, not such distortions,” Seibert tweeted.

Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, also rightfully slammed Abbas’s statements, tweeting that “this is the true face of Palestinian leadership. Just as Abbas blames the Jews for the Holocaust, he also blames the Jews for all the Middle East’s issues. While he spreads this pure antisemitism, he also pays Palestinian terrorists for murdering Israelis and publicly commends Palestinian terrorism.”

“The world must wake up and hold Abbas and his Palestinian Authority accountable for the hatred they spew and the ensuing bloodshed it causes. There must be zero tolerance for Palestinian incitement and terror,” Erdan added.

Abbas’s statements were unfortunately nothing new. In May, he accused Israel of lying like Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. And last year, sitting alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Germany at a press conference, he accused Israel of perpetrating “50 holocausts,” drawing the German leader’s condemnation.

His views were developed as a young man when he wrote a lie-riddled doctoral thesis with the title, “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis.”

Given his detachment from reality on this subject and his advanced age, how can Abbas possibly be considered a clear-headed thinker or leader when it comes to the critical issues that fuel the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Abbas has been in power since 2005 and has increasingly consolidated his control of the PA.

In 2018, he dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the PA’s legislature, and during the last two decades, he has instituted reforms that have weakened the judiciary in a successful campaign to take single-handed control of the Palestinian political system.

The Palestinian people deserve better leadership that will bring them into the future, instead of dwelling on the lies and distortions of the past, in which Abbas is clearly still living.

Caroline Glick: A Nazi speech in Ramallah tells a much larger tale

Abbas attacked the United States and the British. “America was a partner to the Balfour Declaration. Who invented that [Jewish] state? It was Britain and America—not just Britain,” he said. “I am saying this,” he explained, “so that we know who we should accuse of being our enemy, who has harmed us and took our homeland away, and gave it to the Israelis or the Jews.”

Abbas’s appalling statements weren’t novel. He has made similar anti-Jewish diatribes throughout his career. Indeed, Holocaust denial, Holocaust projection, conspiracy theories, Nazi apologetics, Islamic jihadist anti-Jewish epithets, denial and appropriation of Jewish history and Soviet anti-Semitic gaslighting have all been major features of his long career as a Palestinian terrorist and political warrior against the Jewish state.

Abbas’s statements make him an anti-Semite. But they also make him a faithful disciple of the founder of the Palestinian national movement and the Arab war against the Jewish state, the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el Husseini, a Nazi agent whom Abbas has praised as a “pioneer.”

Husseini was a pioneer, in the war against the Jews.

Beginning in the 1920s, Husseini began fusing European race-based anti-Semitism with Islamic Jew hatred when he translated into Arabic and published “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Husseini, like his friend Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, was an early supporter of the Nazis. Through Nazi funding, in 1936 he launched the Arab terror war against the British and the Jews of pre-state Israel which continued until 1939.

In June 1941 Husseini incited a pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad, and the Farhud, a massive pogrom against Iraqi Jewry, in the city. Ahead of a pursuing British force, Husseini made his way to Berlin, where he met with Hitler in November 1941 and set up shop. Husseini was an active supporter of and participant in the annihilation of European Jewry. He blocked the rescue of thousands of Jewish children in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. He drafted thousands European Muslims to an SS division that engaged in the annihilation of Yugoslavian Jewry. He was a close associate of Adolf Eichmann and other top Nazis.

Just as significantly, Husseini operated a short-wave radio station that broadcast throughout the Arab world from Berlin. Husseini’s broadcasts fused Islamic Jew hatred with Nazi anti-Semitism to create a hybrid form of genocidal Jew hatred directed at the Jews of the Islamic world, including especially, the Zionist Jews in pre-state Israel.

Husseini was arrested as a war criminal after the war and held in France, pending trial at Nuremberg. But the French allowed him to escape to Egypt in 1946, thus enabling him to start a new chapter in his war against the Jews.

Here we come to another important aspect of Husseini’s legacy. Before becoming a Nazi agent, Husseini sometimes worked with the British and the French.

In Mandatory Palestine, Husseini’s allies were the often anti-Semitic British officers who dominated Britain’s military government. It was at the urging of these officers that the Zionist but feckless High Commissioner Herbert Samuel appointed Husseini to serve as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and enabled him to become the sole leader of the Arabs of the Palestine Mandate.

Husseini was able to work with all sides because key figures on all sides shared his Jew hatred, which Husseini knew how to tailor to their specific prejudices. In this manner, both before, during and after the Holocaust, Husseini was able to use his fervent hatred of Jews to develop Western opposition to Zionism.

The Palestinian president again recited the most contemptible anti-Semitic canards. Apparently the Holocaust denier is still a Holocaust denier. I call on the international community to condemn his severe anti-Semitism; the time has come for it to pass from the world.
— Benjamin Netanyahu - בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) May 2, 2018

This is what I have been saying for some time, every 19th-century European "scientific" quackery, from the racial sciences, Marxist sociology, to anti-capitalist demonology made their way into the foundation of modern Arab political culture and Palestinian identity. "Not real… https://t.co/X1g0Ys1Pjm
— Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (@HusseinAboubak) September 7, 2023

Not too long ago, the West was convinced that there was "linkage" between the Palestinian issue and everything else in the Middle East. The only reason that they thought so was because Arab leaders kept insisting it was so; they used the Palestinian issue as a means to distract their own people from their own human rights issues.

It turned into a convenient myth for Palestinians as well, because they would routinely threaten the West saying that if they don't get their way, the entire region would explode in Arab fury. Only Israel giving in to Palestinian demands would bring peace to the entire region.

After the Abraham Accords destroyed the "linkage" myth, people who were invested in the myth kept pretending it was true. So instead of welcoming peace between Israel and Arab states, they complained that the Palestinian issue was not resolved - and of course Israel was to blame.

UNRWA's chief Philippe Lazzarini spoke at a ministerial meeting of the League of Arab States this week. Besides begging for funds, he also said that he wants the Arab states to put the Palestinian issue back as their top priority, just like they pretended to in the good old days of "linkage."

The discussion today needs to be elevated from a financial to a political one, a discussion addressing Palestine refugees’ dignity and wellbeing and through it, the stability of the region and the quest for peace.

The League of Arab States and its members, especially those who host the refugees are key partners.

You are also our allies in our efforts to raise funds and ensure that global solidarity with Palestine Refugees remains strong.

I say this as Palestine Refugees have waited 75 years for a political solution.

They have always relied on the Arab world for solidarity.

They have no closer ally, no better partner.

This is UNRWA admitting that the Arab world no longer even gives much lip service to caring about Palestinians.

The reasons are well known: the Palestinians themselves cannot unify or hold elections, they have not done anything to promote peace, the Gulf states realized that Israel is a more reliable and profitable partner than the Palestinians are.

If Lazzarini really cared about Palestinian "dignity," which he emphasized, he would be asking the Arab states to naturalize Palestinians as citizens. He alluded to this issue in this sentence:

180,000 Palestine Refugees in Jordan, who fled from Syria or from Gaza in 1967 live in poverty and growing debt.

He is only counting the 180,000 Palestinians in Jordan who are not citizens - not the nearly 2 million who are.

So he knows the truth, that citizenship is the answer to the issue, and UNRWA has no business sending money to the Palestinian citizens of Jordan whose welfare is properly the responsibility of their kingdom.

He knows it - but he won't say it out loud because it is in his interests to keep UNRWA growing, not shrinking. To ask for more funds every year, not to cut services that the world should not be giving to people who aren't refugees by any definition.

Instead, UNRWA wants the world to keep pressure on Israel for a "return" that will never happen. And he needs Arab solidarity on that issue; after all, if the Arabs themselves no longer care, why should anyone else?

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Paris withdraws award given to Abbas in 2014. Here are others he has received that should be revoked.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo on Thursday revoked the prestigious Medal of the City of Paris awarded to Mahmoud Abbas in 2015, according to an open letter she wrote to the Palestinian Authority president on Thursday evening.

In the letter, obtained by Israeli and French media, Hidalgo wrote that she is revoking Abbas' medal, known in French as La médaille Grand Vermeil de Paris, due to his recent comments in which he expressed a "clear desire to deny the genocide to which the Jewish populations of Europe were victims at the hands of the Nazi regime."

This revocation of the award - which was given by the same Anne Hidalgo -is more effective than a hundred condemnations from a hundred world leaders.

To be sure, it is overdue - Abbas has said many antisemitic things between 2015 and now - and his Holocaust denial PhD. thesis should be enough to make anyone reluctant to ever award him anything. But even so, this revocation is welcome and important.

After all, many prominent people have condemned Abbas before for his previous antisemitic statements, and it meant nothing. Abbas ignoring condemnations makes him look stronger to his people.

But revoking an award directly strikes at the honor/shame mentality. He was proud of that award.

Over the years, Abbas has received a couple of other awards from the West, as well as a few from elsewhere.

In 2017, Abbas received the German Steiger Award. However, it looks like the award is no longer given and its webpage has been deactivated.

In 2013, Abbas received the Mediterranean Award for Peace in Naples. I cannot find too much information about that award.

In 2007, he received the Crans Montana International Economic Forum award. Its website barely mentions it now.

These organizations should revoke those awards now. Even if the awards are meaningless - and most of them are - everything is about symbolism, and the most effective weapon the West has against Palestinian intransigence and antisemitism is shame.

If the organizations that gave these awards were really interested in peace, they themselves should be ashamed to be associated with Mahmoud Abbas, and they should do everything they can to distance themselves from him today.

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Adam Sandler plays a sleazy Jew
in "Uncut Gems"

Bahauddin Yusuf writes in Egypt's Al Ahram that it is terrible that Robert Oppenheimer is portrayed as a sympathetic character in the Oppenheimer movie:

The movie “Oppenheimer” deals with the story of one who should be one of the most hated figures in the history of humanity, the Jew Robert Oppenheimer, simply because he is responsible for making the nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese in the massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Then, after the end of the war, it created a new chapter of conflict between the superpowers, as well as chapters of terror that befell humans because of nuclear threats.

The director of the Oppenheimer movie Christopher Nolan was aware of the risks or the calamities that could befall him if he dared to present the real picture of the Jewish physicist, which is that he was arrogant and lustful, so he tried to circumvent the matter and resorted to cramming dozens of scenes that sought to convince viewers that Oppenheimer was a peaceful scientist who did not know the disastrous consequences of his project...

Other than Oppenheimer, there are dozens of films and series that present the Jew in the image of the ideal person keen on social peace, advocating freedoms, democracy, and human rights, as well as enjoying super intelligence, the most famous of which is the movie “Independence Day” by the star Will Smith, which presents the Jewish engineer David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), a genius scientist who discovered the aliens’ plan to invade Earth and devised a plan to defeat them, and the movie “Schindler’s List” directed by permanent supporter of the State of Israel Steven Spielberg, as the film depicts the tragedy of the Jews in Nazi Germany on the one hand, and the nobility, humanity and chivalry of the German businessman Oskar Schindler in saving more than 1000 Jews From the oppression of the Nazis by hiding them in his factories.

Yusuf then goes on to list other examples of sympathetic Jews in TV shows, which clearly bother him a great deal.

One can imagine this Egyptian seeing a sympathetic Jew in a movie and getting steaming mad.

He then explains the reason why Jews are supposedly never portrayed as bad people: because the Jews control Hollywood, duh!

And he ends off saying that if any Jew is portrayed as less than ideal, a "black fate" awaits the people behind that movie.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

09/07 Links Pt2: NGO Monitor: Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism; Why We Should Stop Saying ‘Pro-Israel’; The Fiddler in a Desert War

From Ian:

NGO Monitor: Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

In October 2023, the newly-launched Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) will host a two-day conference, “Battling the ‘IHRA definition’: Theory & Activism,” to “explore the political, historical, and cultural conditions that enable IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] campaigns, and share theoretical insights and organizing tools to support resistance.” The conference will feature eight panels on “theorizing, mapping, and political education,” as well as “share materials, and focus on building attendees’ support networks to push back on IHRA campaigns.”

The IHRA working definition of antisemitism, represents the international consensus definition of this hateful ideology. It is based on similar texts composed in reaction to the antisemitic UN Durban conference on racism in 2001. Forty governments, as well as thousands of intergovernmental and local institutions, have adopted and endorsed the IHRA framework as the cornerstone to guide their policies in combating antisemitism.

The ICSZ conference is related to broader NGO campaigning seeking to discredit and replace the IHRA working definition.These concerted efforts have emerged precisely as NGO antisemitism has become a central feature of political discourse about Israel and Zionism. Many NGOs that claim to represent human rights and humanitarian values instead promulgate antisemitic rhetoric and tropes, tolerate antisemitism from executives and staff with little to no repercussions, and consistently dismiss consideration of antisemitism as a human rights issue.

About ICSZ
In August 2023, two activists from US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI),1 San Francisco State University Professor Rabab Abdulhadi and University of Massachusetts Boston Professor Heike Schotten, co-authored an article explaining the rationale for launching ICSZ. They described the Institute as “explicitly anti-Zionist” and “strictly committed to abiding by the BDS picket line.” Abdulhadi and Schotten additionally link the Institute to “the long history of struggle” against efforts to “conflate Zionist politics and ideology with Jews or Jewishness.”

According to its “Points of Unity,” ICSZ affirmed that “Zionism is a settler colonial racial project. Like the US, Israel is a settler colonial state. The Institute opposes Zionism and colonialism, and abides by the international, Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.” ICSZ strives to be “the first step toward establishing a new academic discipline that will wrest the study of Zionism from its “presumed exclusive location in Jewish Studies…Critical Zionism Studies…does not simply interpret the world but also works to change it” (emphasis added).

ICSZ plans on granting “annual fellowships for students and academics, conferences, [and] publications.”

NGOs Co-sponsoring the Conference
ICSZ is coordinating its conference with a host of anti-Israel NGOs.

According to ICSZ, “The organizing collective is thrilled to be working with such an incredible, powerful, and varied set of co-sponsors.” Pro-BDS NGO co-sponsors include the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Friends of Sabeel North America, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), USACBI, Sparkplug Foundation,2 and various branches of Students for Justice in Palestine.

The Soviet spin doctors who sowed the seeds of left-wing Israelophobia

As a sign of the diplomatic objectives of Israelophobic disinformation, teams of Zionologists, as they were called, were supervised by Ivan Milovanov, head of the Kremlin’s Middle East section, who personally rubber-stamped all output on “international Zionism”.

Diplomatic leaders from the developing world who visited Moscow were assured of goodwill if they joined in condemnations of “imperialism and Zionism”, while Russian embassies overseas covertly disseminated the toxic disinformation. In the early 1970s, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, set up a special propaganda council at the embassy in DC. Its aims included: shearing off public support for the Jewish state; causing people to question the loyalties of “Zionists”; driving a wedge between the governments of the United States and Israel; and convincing the US public to abhor “the brazen face of the leaders of the newly minted Zionist ‘higher race’ from Tel Aviv”. Parallel KGB operations worked to sow division between Jews and blacks in America and undermine Jewish communities.

These efforts were bolstered by worldwide Soviet sympathisers. Whether he did so cynically, in earnest or simply by osmosis, the revolutionary icon Che Guevara — who visited Gaza in 1959 — made his own contribution to the spread of Israelophobia.

In 1967, in an article for Britain’s New Left Review, he mapped out the struggle between “imperialism” and socialists across the globe. When he came to the Middle East, he offhandedly described “Israel, backed by the imperialists, and the progressive countries of that zone”. This was “just another of the volcanoes threatening eruption in the world today”, he wrote.

In reality, of course, the Jews were not a tool of imperial powers but a wandering people with indigenous roots seeking to form a postcolonial state. And the Arab countries were among the least “progressive” in the world. But when ideology comes first, reality makes little difference. In 1990, just before the USSR collapsed, its official newspaper, Pravda, published a belated mea culpa of sorts. “Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the antisemitic propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascist origin,” it admitted. “Hiding under Marxist phraseology, [propagandists] came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general.”

But it was too late. The virus had been released. As Dr Jovan Byford, the psychologist and conspiracy theory expert, pointed out, it had reached the point where “the far-left in Britain and on the Continent viewed Middle Eastern politics almost exclusively through the prism of Soviet anti-Zionism”.

In the minds of millions around the world, Soviet agitprop succeeded in redefining Zionism from an answer to millennia of persecution to a bourgeois, imperialist project. In this way, it wiped antisemitism clean, allowing progressives to indulge an old hatred by convincing themselves that they were merely taking a principled stand against Israel.

Across the decades, the Cold War communists and contemporary Israelophobes both say: we’re not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist. But theirs is a deep and ancient bigotry, resting on disinformation and paranoia.

Nearly six decades on, Soviet Israelophobia continues to grip the modern left. It finds an easy target in those lacking knowledge about Israel, Zionism and Jews, and possessing impulses inherited unchallenged from previous centuries.

White-Collar Law Firms Sponsor Award for Anti-Israel UN Official

Several white-collar law firms are sponsoring an event next month that will award the United Nations official responsible for pursuing war crimes charges against Israel.

Navi Pillay, the chairwoman of the U.N. body investigating alleged Israeli human rights crimes, is slated to receive the American Branch of the International Law Association's 2023 Outstanding Achievement Award, according to promotional materials for the event.

The event is sponsored by several law firms, including Gibson Dunn, Debevoise & Plimpton, and White & Case. These firms' financial support for the event is already generating pushback from pro-Israel advocates who are pressuring them to pull their endorsements.

A similar controversy erupted around last year's association conference, when White & Case and others backed a panel discussion titled "Racism and the Crime of Apartheid in International Law." That event featured speaker Omar Shakir, a longtime Israel critic who claims the world's only Jewish nation is trying to "maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians."

This year's award for Pillay, who will also deliver a keynote address, is driving even fiercer opposition among Israel's defenders in light of the U.N. official's efforts to use the United Nations as a vehicle to erode the Jewish state's legitimacy.

"It is deeply surprising that not only major law firms like White & Case and Debevoise & Plimpton are headline sponsors of the [association's] conference where a recognized anti-Semite, Navi Pillay, is being honored," said Robert Garson, the president of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. "That Gibson Dunn and Cardozo Law School are lesser sponsors indicates that [the association] has duped them into lending their name to this conference, by failing to disclose the honorees, in advance."

"All sponsors," Garson added, "should reconsider having their names allied to Ms. Pillay, who has been roundly criticized even by U.N. delegates for her unhealthy focus on Israel."

From TeleSUR:

On Tuesday, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry underlined the urgent necessity to provide the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) with financial contributions in order to continue its services.

In a meeting with the UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini in Cairo, Shoukry stressed Egypt's willingness to support the agency, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

According to Shoukry, Egypt will continue to coordinate with international actors in order to give the agency the financial and political support it needs to offer essential services to Palestinian refugees.

Look at how strongly Egypt supports UNRWA!

Then look at UNRWA's list of governmental funders (for 2021, the latest I can find.)

Egypt gave UNRWA a total of $20,000 in aid.

That's less than $1700 every month.

That's far less than the average cost of a used car in the US this year.

Lots of Arab nations are very generous towards UNRWA - with their words.

With their pocketbooks, not so much.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

From the official Palestinian Authority Wafa news agency:

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas, said today that what was recently attributed to President Mahmoud Abbas in a television program regarding the Jewish issue was a quotation from writings of Jewish, American and other historians and authors.

If a Jew says it, that's a "get out of jail free" card for antisemitism! No wonder so many antisemitic Jews are so popular!

He affirmed that these remarks do not constitute denial in any way of the Nazi Holocaust.

No, merely justification for it.

Abu Rudeineh emphasized that “President Mahmoud Abbas's position on this matter is clear and unwavering, which is a full condemnation of the Nazi Holocaust and a rejection of anti-Semitism.”

Yeah. Sure.

“We express our strong condemnation and outrage at this frenzied campaign [against President Mahmoud Abbas] for just quoting academic and historical quotations,” said Abu Rudeineh in reference to an outcry of international reactions over misinterpreting of the President's remarks.

And there you go. Abbas has nothing to apologize for - it is the people offended by his obvious Jew-hatred who are wrong!

This is Israel's "peace partner."

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Bill: Have Children Run Knesset While School Out; Improved Functioning Expected (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook page.

Jerusalem, September 7 - Late summer has long proved a challenge to Israeli parents, as during the latter half of August, few, if any, camp options exist for children, and school does not resume until the first of September. A new legislative proposal aims to change that, and experts believe it would also make the parliament more efficient, effective, and competent: send the kids to the plenum and committee sessions to conduct the regular affairs of the lawmaking body.

A parental rights lobbying group urged Members of Knesset - currently on recess until after the Jewish holiday season ends in October - to adopt the proposal, which calls for childcare responsibilities to be transferred to the legislators so that parents can maintain a normal working schedule and not be forced to take precious vacation days or to forfeit wages and job security for not working. The move, the group argues, will allow the productive people in Israeli society to maintain their productivity, while giving the unproductive politicians something productive to do.

"The late August vacation is a relic of a more socialist age in Israeli society," explained Dvir Shoham, chairman of the HELP Coalition, which advocates for "sane policy" and the removal of undue hardship for parents. "Mandated vacation, which is what many of us face for our children, and sometimes ourselves as well, is bad for families' solvency, bad for the economy, and bad for those ill-prepared or ill-equipped to handle non-stop childcare duties for the entire period."

"Politicians need to step up and do something useful for once," he continued. "That's why we need this bill. We can all send our children to the Knesset, or even to the local or city council, where the children will conduct the everyday business of those bodies, and the children will do at least as good a job of it as the elected 'leaders.'"

Analysts agreed with the last point, but observed that it all but guarantees the proposal's failure. "No politician in his or her right mind will endorse a scheme that demonstrates his or her uselessness as a politician." noted commentator Ben Caspit, "Well, other than being in office. That always seems to bring out the uselessness in public figure."

"On the other hand," he added, "since a voluble chunk of progressive culture insists on the affirmation of anything anybody but a white heterosexual male says, including 'affirming' the 'expressed' gender preferences of single-digit children, this would be the logical extension of such a view. Put the children in charge. At the very least, they couldn't perform any worse than the current crew."

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

09/07 Links Pt1: US antisemitism envoy and EU denounce Mahmoud Abbas’s speech; The Palestinian peace process was meant to increase terrorism

From Ian:

US antisemitism envoy and EU denounce Mahmoud Abbas’s speech: Distorts the Holocaust

The US and EU on Thursday condemned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for a recent speech about the origins of Ashkenazi Jews and Adolf Hitler’s motivations, with the latter saying it fuels antisemitism and insults Holocaust victims.

US Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt slammed the “hateful, antisemitic remarks” made by Abbas in a speech last month to his Fatah party’s Revolutionary Council.

“The speech maligned the Jewish people, distorted the Holocaust, and misrepresented the tragic exodus of Jews from Arab countries,” Lipstadt wrote on X.

“I condemn these statements and urge an immediate apology,” she added.

Lipstadt’s condemnation came as the EU also denounced Abbas’s comments, saying they contained “false and grossly misleading remarks about Jews and antisemitism.”

Abbas repeated a number of antisemitic canards he has uttered over the years, including that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler had Jews slaughtered because of their “social role” as moneylenders, not because of enmity toward Judaism.

“Such historical distortions are inflammatory, deeply offensive, can only serve to exacerbate tensions in the region and serve no one’s interests,” read the EU statement. “They play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated for.

“Moreover, they trivialize Holocaust [sic] and thereby fuel anti-Semitism and are an insult to the millions of victims of the Holocaust and their families,” continued the European condemnation.

France’s embassy called the speech “clearly unacceptable” and stated that it “unequivocally strongly condemns antisemitism and the denial of the Holocaust in all its forms, as well as its determination to fight tirelessly against these scourges.”

2018

UNESCO lies: Jericho is not in 'Palestine' because no such state exists - opinion

UNESCO is at it again, and this time they’re targeting one of the most ancient and historically significant cities in the world: Jericho. The World Heritage Committee is set to vote on whether to list ancient Jericho as a Palestinian World Heritage site. This is not just a distortion of history. It’s an outright theft of Jewish heritage.

Let’s get one thing straight: Jericho is not in “Palestine.” There is no such state. The land is disputed, and many Israelis, including myself, see it as an integral part of Israel. By attempting to attribute Jericho to a “State of Palestine,” UNESCO is not just overstepping its mandate; it’s taking a blatant side in a geopolitical conflict. This is not education, science, or culture; this is political warfare.

UNESCO engages in political warfare
UNESCO has a track record of anti-Israel decisions. Remember when they denied the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and Hebron?

Those weren’t just slaps in the face to Israel; they were affronts to Jews and Christians worldwide.

Now, they’re about to add another insult by undermining the biblical significance of Jericho. The Palestinian Authority’s application does mention the city’s biblical importance but then has the audacity to claim it’s archaeologically false. This is a direct insult to every Jew and Christian who respects the Bible.

And let’s not forget the PA’s ongoing efforts to erase Jewish history. They’ve destroyed archaeological evidence on the Temple Mount and vandalized Jewish sites in Judea and Samaria. Instead of being held accountable, they’re being rewarded by UNESCO. This is not just wrong; it’s obscene.

UNESCO’s actions are not just damaging to Israel; they’re damaging to UNESCO itself. The organization was founded to promote peace and cultural understanding. By taking a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they’re undermining their own mission. They’re not preserving world heritage; they’re politicizing it.

This isn’t just about one city or one heritage listing. This is about the integrity of an international organization that is supposed to be impartial. If they can unilaterally decide the status of Jericho, what’s next? Will they start rewriting the history of other disputed territories too?

It’s time for UNESCO to get out of the business of politics and back into the business of culture, science, and education. They need to drop this outrageous proposal and focus on what they were actually created to do. If they don’t, they’re not just failing Israel; they’re failing the world.

In a time when the Abraham Accords have shown that peace and mutual recognition are possible, UNESCO’s actions are a step backward. They’re not just undermining Israel’s sovereignty; they’re undermining the very possibility of peace and mutual respect.

Here is the abstract of a paper by Walaa Alqaisiya, published in Political Geography, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier:

Beyond the contours of Zionist sovereignty: Decolonisation in Palestine's Unity Intifada

This article takes the May 2021 uprising in Palestine, known as the Unity Intifada, as a prism to map old and new political geographies between coloniser and freedom-fighter, whose significance extends beyond the temporal limits of the May event. The first part of the paper investigates the role of identity and cultural geographies in re-enforcing Jewish claims to sovereignty. It shows how the Zionist production of pink (sexed/gendered), red (racializing/indigenising) and green (environmental) markers, is used to draw the contours of settler legitimacy and intensifies when faced by growing indigenous rebellion. The second part addresses the decolonising possibilities engulfing the Unity Intifada. It examines the role of youth, including women and queer collectives, and how their actions invoke new political and material taxonomies beyond the liberal peace structure to which Palestine has succumbed since the Oslo agreements. Overall, the article advances the political geographies of decolonisation by challenging the maintenance of settler colonial violence within the popular, political, and intellectual imaginary of ‘Israel/Palestine.’ It does so by tracing the spatial and epistemic value of decolonisation theories that extend from interactions across indigenous, queer feminist, critical race, and eco-materialist debates.

That is a lot of obfuscation to give a message that Palestinian violence is wonderful and must be encouraged.

As with most such academic papers, the author "talks past the sale:" she takes lies like Israel's "colonialism" or terrorists as "freedom fighters" as being so obvious that they need no proof or citations and uses them as building blocks to selectively chose whatever evidence they claim supports their propaganda. She has no need to explain how, exactly, shooting rockets into civilian population areas or ambushing and shooting drivers on the road is "freedom fighting."

In the first paragraph, Alqaisiya asserts "Nakba is a structure not an event (Wolfe, 2006)." But the Wolfe paper says "Invasion is a structure not an event." The author redefines "nakba" for her own purposes from the standard Palestinian line that it means the (fictional) expulsion of 700,000 Arabs in 1948 - now it means the arrival of Jews to the region decades earlier, framing it as an "invasion."

Her assumption is that Jews had no right to migrate to Palestine to escape persecution in Europe or the Middle East throughout the centuries. The right for persecuted minorities to seek refuge is unchallenged - unless they are Jews returning to their ancestral homeland, the exact opposite of colonialism.

She knows what she is doing. The peer reviewers of Political Geography are not experts in the history of the region, and they are also probably reluctant to challenge a Palestinian's narrative of her "truth." She, and many other academics, take advantage of these factors, plus the general anti-Israel atmosphere in academic circles, to spread lies and agitprop without fear of being exposed.

And just in case a reviewer might notice Alqaisiya is not exactly objective, she says in her "Methodology" section that her hatred of Israel is a strength, not a weakness:

[G]iven the role played by social media in circulating activist online campaigns and commentary about the Uprising, a digital ethnographic component shaped the methodological approach of the article. Not only did this method help direct the selection of primary sources that ‘capture how self-identity is formed, structured and expressed on digitally based platforms,’ (Kaur-Gill and Dutta, 2017: 3) but it also aligns with the epistemic base of decolonising research (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), recognising the author's own positionality as Palestinian. Indeed, the majority of the discussion across the two sections emerges from the author's political and scholarly engagement within decolonial feminist and activist online spaces, in Palestine and beyond, which responded to the Unity Intifada's plight. The aim of advancing the sovereignty of indigenous knowledge, therefore, is at the heart of this article's methodological approach (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012).

In English: "I am a Palestinian, therefore my anti-Israel activism and opinions are worth more than any objective source. My obvious bias is the core of this research, and I then choose my secondary sources to fit my bias. And if you object to that methodology, you are oppressing me."

Here is a key paragraph:

It was as the bombs were dropping on besieged Gaza, devastating entire families and amounting to war crimes, that Israel took part in the annual international song competition, Eurovision. Israeli participation in such events unveils a cultural site for Zionist pinkwashing, delineating a sexed/gendered self that reifies the logic of settler colonial domination. The country's 2021 representation through the figure of a Jewish Ethiopian woman, Eden Alene, reveals how race plays a defining role in settlers' (subjects and state) efforts at indigenising colonial settlement. I read Alene's 2021 Eurovision contest participation as an attempt to neutralise Zionism's mounting crisis during times of growing confrontation with the indigene's resistance via the crafting of ‘an alternate (hi)story.’ This Zionist self-indigenising narrative, which also activates forms of cultural exchange with Indigenous nations and their plight elsewhere, further intertwines redwashing and greenwashing efforts.

It hardly needs to be mentioned that Israel didn't choose the dates of Eurovision, and that the contestants were chosen way before the May mini-war in Gaza. But Alqaisiya "reads" the two events coinciding as a Zionist response to the bad publicity of defending itself from rockets. The author then doubles down and spends several paragraphs railing against previous Israeli entries in Eurovision as symbolizing "pinkwashing."

To anti-Zionist fanatics, Israel is by definition an illiberal state. Therefore, any counter-evidence - like transsexual, gay-friendly and Black contestants for Eurovision being fully embraced by most of Israeli society - must be interpreted as a cynical attempt by Israel to hide its hate for LGBTQ and people of color. The contestants' own Zionism is further proof of Israeli illiberalism and attempts to obscure its "apartheid." In short, any facts that decisively disprove the assertion of Israeli evil are themselves further proof of Israeli evil.

Occam's Razor is shredded in favor of conspiracy theories.

Again, the peer reviewers might not be expected to understand the history of the scurrilous "pinkwashing" and "redwashing" and "greenwashing" accusations throughout this paper. But they should at least click on the references to see if they say what Alqaisiya claims. In this same paragraph, the link to her saying that the Gaza war in 2021 amounts to war crimes goes to an Al Jazeera article which says "The United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has said Israel’s recent attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip that killed more than 200 Palestinians may constitute “war crimes” if they are shown to be disproportionate." This is a deliberate misquote, one of dozens, and that minor example should have been enough to raise flags for any reviewer at Political Geography.

So many of her other footnotes link to articles that do not say what she claims. Another example:

Predating Alene's participation was Netta Barzilai's win of the 2018 Eurovision contest with the song ‘Toy,’ whose feminist LGBTQ vibes (Cook, 2019) invoked the celebration of Israel as a place that shares the progressive liberal values of Europe. Israel has been at the core of embodying attributes of ‘European identity’ (Ayoub and Paternotte, 2014) as they link to feminist and LGBTQ issues.

The link says that LGBT rights are emblematic of European identity, but that has nothing to do with Israel actively claiming to be European. This is Alqaisiya's way to tell readers that Israel is a foreign European outpost in the Middle East that doesn't belong, and that Jews are really European converts and not descended from the Children of Israel.

Yet another example: A footnote about the organization StandWithUs says "The Israeli government heavily funds this US-based organisation to disseminate hasbara (public diplomacy for the Israeli government) through ‘citizen activism,’ whose goal is to mobilise young people in Israel, the US and Britain to stand up for Israel and Jewish people. (See Bazz, 2015; StandWithUs, 2022). " "Bazz" in 2015 reported that Israel planned to pay StandWithUs about $250,000 for a specific one year project, but it fell through and as far as I can tell, SWU does not get any funding from the Israeli government.

It would take a month to show the many such inaccuracies in this paper - and this is all what Political Geography should have done, and failed to do.

The entire paper is online, so you can see for yourself how Alqaisiya has little regard for truth. Every paragraph includes lies (including the Depo-Provera slander I mentioned that are spread in multiple academic papers).

I don't know what kind of peer review Political Geography engages in, but it is apparent that not only do they not do basic fact checking, they don't even flag a paper like this that all but brags that it is intended to be Palestinian propaganda.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!