Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, July 02, 2015

Interesting Gaza fact hidden in a tragedy

Yesterday, 4-year old Hadeel Abu Salem Sbejh and her 3-year old sister Jana Omar Abu Sbejh drowned in a tragic accident in a swimming pool in the Maghazi "refugee" camp in the Gaza Strip.

In other news - Gaza "refugee camps" have swimming pools.

Back in 2010, when an Olympic-sized pool was opened in Gaza, I wrote "Let's hope that the Free Gaza flotilla is bringing in some much-needed goggles."

2010 image of Gaza water park

UNRWA releases new Gaza Pallywood propaganda film

Here is a brand new propaganda film from UNRWA:

Why is it propaganda? Because every scene is staged not to reflect reality but to maximize fundraising.

Gaza kids don't meet in the middle of the artificially maintained rubble of Shujaiyeh to create makeshift see-saws.

Gaza kids don't spontaneously gather to dance to a kid who created makeshift drums. Pre-teens don't say "I want to see my society progress, and I want to have a hand in that progress." Boys and girls generally don't play together anywhere, let alone in a Muslim sector like Gaza. They certainly don't put their hands together to celebrate the wonderful idea of throwing a hard-to-find bottle into the sea with their hopes and dreams written in a note.

There is at least one bottling plant in Gaza. I don't think that bottles are that valuable a commodity that they have to wonder where to find one. (Where they found a cork in alcohol-free Gaza is an entirely different issue.)

The words are scripted. The scenes are rehearsed. The subjects are acting. And the camerawork, from the first shot to the last, is expensive. (The film theme seems to have been chosen to tie the Police song "Message in a Bottle" to the UNRWA "#SOS4Gaza" campaign.)

This film was written and directed to show the world that Gaza kids are just like Westerners. Because the last thing UNRWA wants you to know is that it teaches hate and antisemitism and extols the virtues of martyrdom, or that its "human rights" curriculum teaches hate, or that its teachers support terror.

This video is not meant to tell the truth. On the contrary - UNRWA spent tens of thousands of dollars on this film to hide the truth.

07/01 Links Pt2: Abbas Admits "Palestinian People" Don't Exist; Obama’s Unicorn Deal With Iran

From Ian:

Palestinian Authority Head Admits "Palestinian People" Don't Exist

The Palestinians are one of the more ridiculous historical hoaxes. If you believe the media, they're an ancient distinct people with a historical claim on the land of Israel.
In reality they're a collection of invaders, colonists and migrants. A sizable group among them, the Afro-Palestinians, are African Muslims who arrived there in the 20th century to fight against Israel.
Many other Arab Muslims came to work in industries created by the British Mandate. The entire thing became more convoluted when Jordan was split off under one of the Hashemite kings creating a country full of the same Arab Muslims, but who are deemed not to be Palestinians, even though Jordan is in fact full of "Palestinians". It got sillier when Jordan seized parts of Israel and annexed them, at which point the "Palestinians" there ceased to be "Palestinians" who needed national rights, but became "Palestinians" again once Israel liberated the area.
But this has to be denied because otherwise the mandate for a "Palestinian State" collapses. Sometimes though the truth slips out.
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has described Jordanian and Palestinian Arabs as "one people living in two states," during a meeting with the head of the Jordan Football Association on Tuesday. Bethlehem-based Maan News cited the Jordanian al-Ghad newspaper as saying that Abbas arrived in Jordan from Doha along with several other senior PA officials, including its intelligence chief Majid Faraj. The Arabic-language Al-Quds news outlet directly quoted Abbas, who it said "stressed that the relationship between Jordan and Palestine is the relationship of 'one people living in two states,' adding that this relationship will not be affected by anything."

The Pope, the Queen, and why we didn't bomb Auschwitz

It was an important, meaningful gesture that a ceremonial visit on June 26, 2015 was made to Belsen by Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. She laid a wreath on the monument there and stopped at the stone honoring Anne Frank.
The Queen did not speak at the place, resembling the behavior of General Eisenhower, unable to describe the horrors he was witnessing when he visited the liberated Ohrdurf camp on April 12, 1945.
The queen’s visit is symbolically important not only in itself, but also implicitly to refute and rebuke the atrocious fabrications of Holocaust deniers, such as Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, who have argued that the image of Belsen is essentially a product of hateful wartime propaganda.
The remarks made and the question posed by Pope Francis, and the visit of Queen Elizabeth II to Belsen, remind the world today of the hatred and intolerance of extremist forces in the past.
Today, there are echoes of the past Nazi brutalities in the actions and rhetoric of Islamist terrorists. The pattern in past and present is similar: mass graves, indiscriminate murders, villages and towns burned, historic sites destroyed, barbarism at the gates of civilization, the misuse of children to commit war crimes, the extent of human evil and depravity.
In his speech on June 4, 2009 at the camp of Buchenwald, where 56,000 had been murdered, President Barack Obama was conscious of the Nazi crimes and of the need to be vigilant about the spread of evil in our own time.
At a moment when the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is expanding its control of territory and when European and American youngsters are joining IS and becoming jihadists, the Western world must recall the results of evil.
The lesson must be learned. The Western democracies must act decisively to counter Islamist terrorism and overcome those who exhibit and are eager to implement their capacity for evil and anti-Semitism.

Obama’s Unicorn Deal With Iran

What’s curious is that the deal that the Obama Administration now celebrates is based on the same principles that the White House now derides as fairy tales. Like parents putting their children to bed, the White House once sang lullabies to congress and U.S. allies to quiet their concerns about the administration’s diplomatic approach to the Iranian nuclear program. Comparing the administration’s past public statements about the deal with its current positions is a lesson in the political uses of fairy tales:
There was a time when the administration was intent on dismantling the Iranian nuclear program. As John Kerry said in December 2013, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran “because we knew that it would hopefully help Iran dismantle its nuclear program. That was the whole point of the regime.”
Today, the administration is not talking about dismantling anything. The whole point of the deal, as the White House sees it, is simply to extend Iran’s break-out time to a year, which won’t really be a year, according to the administration, but is still somehow a useful round number.
It used to be that the White House wasn’t going to let Iran enrich any uranium at all. As former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said in April 2012, “Our position is clear: Iran must live up to its international obligations, including full suspension of uranium enrichment as required by multiple UN Security Council resolutions.”
However the Joint Plan of Action in November 2013 acknowledged Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

UNHRC report tried to justify Hamas firing rockets from civilian areas

The UNHRC Davis report wrote:

473. International humanitarian law prescribes that parties to the conflict should take all feasible precautions to protect the civilian population and civilian objects under their control from the effects of attacks and to the maximum extent feasible avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.^{^[1]} The commission notes that this obligation is not absolute and that even if there are areas that are not residential, Gaza’s small size and its population density makes it particularly difficult for armed groups always to comply with these requirements. The ICRC Commentary on Additional Protocol I notes that several delegations of the Diplomatic Conference commented that for densely populated countries, the requirement to avoid locating military objectives within densely populated areas would be difficult to apply.^{^[2]}

But when the ICRC said that, they were referring to normal countries who cared about their civilian population!

This sub-paragraph covers both permanent and mobile objectives. As regards permanent objectives, governments should endeavour to find places away from densely populated areas to site them. These concerns should already be taken into consideration in peacetime. For example, a barracks or a store of military equipment or ammunition should not be built in the middle of a town.

As regards mobile objectives, care should be taken in particular during the conflict to avoid placing troops, equipment or transports in densely populated areas.

In both cases it is likely that governments are sufficiently concerned with sparing their own population and that they will therefore act in the best interests of that population.
[...]
Several delegates at the Diplomatic Conference stressed the fact that for densely populated countries this provision was difficult to apply.

When the government is manifestly not concerned with the safety of its population, these caveats do not apply.

And the UNHRC report goes on to note that this is indeed the case::

[I]n a number of instances, Palestinian armed groups appear to have conducted military operations within or in close proximity to sites benefiting from special protection under international humanitarian law, such as hospitals, shelters and places dedicated to religion and education. The United Nations Board of Inquiry into specific incidents that occurred in the Gaza Strip between 8 July and 26 August 2014 found that in some cases Palestinian armed groups conducted military operations in the vicinity of UNRWA schools. In one case, it noted military activity by both Palestinian armed groups and the IDF in the vicinity of Beit Hanoun Elementary Co-educational “A” and “B” school, which was being used as an UNRWA designated emergency shelter. In the case of the Jabaliya Elementary “C” and Ayyobiya Boys School, an area adjacent to the school was reportedly used by Palestinian armed groups to fire projectiles. In the case of the Nuseirat Preparatory School Co-educational “B” School, the “presence of weapons and other evidence” indicates that Palestinian armed groups may have fired 120 mm mortars from the premises of the school. In another case, media reports quoted the Greek Orthodox Archbishop in Gaza as stating that the church compound, in which approximately 2,000 civilians took refuge, was used by Palestinian armed groups to fire rockets.

In the end the UNHRC concludes in a wishy-washy manner:

Given the number of cases in which Palestinian armed groups are alleged to have carried out military operations within or in the immediate vicinity of civilian objects and specifically protected objects, it does not appear that this behaviour was simply a consequence of the normal course of military operations. Therefore the obligation to avoid to the maximum extent possible locating military objectives within densely populated areas was not always complied with.

The UNHRC's quote of what a minority of delegates to the ICRC conference thought is utterly irrelevant to the situation of an armed group that deliberately and provably chose to embed its arsenal among the civilian population. Its conclusion is close to correct, but its decision to quote a contrary opinion that doesn't apply to Gaza and Hamas is an indication of how much the commission tried to justify Hamas actions that endangered civilians.

Study: In Theory, Arab MKs Able To Represent Israeli Arabs, Not Palestinians (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Umm El-Fahm, July 1 - A team of researchers at Tel Aviv University say they have proven that at least theoretically, it is possible for elected representatives of Israel's Arab political parties to work to better the lives of their constituencies, as opposed to their current focus on furthering the interests of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its subsidiary, the Palestinian National Authority. Results of the study, with some analysis, will be published in the July issue of the journal Political Science, due out next week.

The researchers studied the voting patterns and relevant legal and cultural principles that govern parliamentarian behavior in Israel and elsewhere, and found reason to conclude that while the current group of 12 Arab MKs has shown no desire, ability, or need to represent the people who actually elected them, and to make the lives of those people better instead of holding them and their quality of life hostage to a dream of negating Israel as a Jewish state, it nevertheless remains in the realm of human possibility that those elected officials might choose to perform what elected officials are supposed to do, specifically, working to improve, in measurable ways, the lives of the constituencies who elected them.

Lead study author Professor Albert Facepalm of Tel Aviv University explained in a telephone interview that his team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers looked for all known impediments to an MKs' involvement in the pursuit of the actual welfare for Arab citizens of Israel, and found none. "We made a thorough examination of the circumstances of each of the twelve Arab MKs. That included an analysis of their access to information and their ability to comprehend it, as well as the availability of data indicating the most pressing needs of Israel's Arab citizens," he said. "But there was nothing to explain why the most they have done for those citizens is to denounce the system that employs those selfsame politicians as inherently racist and to declare that it has no right to continue existing."

Facepalm said the team was similarly unable to find an explanation for why those MKs appear not to focus on genuine issues within the Arab community in Israel that do not require an impassioned litany of real or imagined Zionist offenses. "Underage marriage, domestic violence, lack of women's empowerment, honor killings - the only context in which you can count on an Arab MK to mention these ills plaguing Israeli Arab society is if the issues can be framed as the fault of Israeli policy," he noted. "We are at a loss as to a scientific basis for explaining that phenomenon, because, at least theoretically, there's nothing preventing these political figures from trying to accomplish something constructive."

The study also found that MK Basel Ghattas had a sick tan for someone who is supposed to be a legislator in the Knesset, a mostly indoor facility.

07/01 Links Pt1: Lawless Administration Won’t Enforce Law Against Israel Boycotts

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: New federal law fights European boycotts of Israel

In plain English, this means U.S. courts cannot enforce judgements that doing business in or being based in the West Bank or Golan Heights violates international law, or particular European rules. There are not as of yet any such foreign judgements to speak of; indeed, legal challenges to business activities across the Green Line have consistently been rejected by European national courts. The real importance of the foreign judgements provision is establishing and strengthening U.S. state practice on this international legal issue.
That is, one underlying purpose behind the series of relatively minor EU restrictions on business across the Green Line is to establish an entirely novel principle of international law (applicable only to Israel): that these areas are for completely off limits for Israelis. The Europeans claim the mere presence (forget habitation) of Israelis in these areas can be a crime under international law. The new law rejects this contention, event to point that it will not recognize foreign judgements arising from it. This would include, for example, the purchase of property in the West Bank by Americans.
Finally, another under-appreciated provision states that boycotts and divestment of Israel by governments violates the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the cornerstone of international trade law. Such a finding by a major third-parrty state should make the EU quite worried about the possibility of Israel challenging their impending restrictions in the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution mechanism.
More broadly, the law – and the state laws it will spawn – represents a major refutation of the conventional wisdom that boycott pressure on Israel is growing irreversibly and ineluctably. In this account, it is Israel’s policies, rather than the single-minded animosity of its opponents, that fuels boycott efforts, and nothing short and changing those policies will help. In short, in this view, the boycott pressure is at least in part legitimate. This view was championed by the left-wing J-Street group, which opposed the Roskam Amendment. They did not manage to convince a single congressman. Despite the efforts of such ostensibly pro-Israel groups, Americans understand that the movement to single out Israel for economic punishment is unreasonable, discriminatory, dangerous to Israel’s security, and contrary to long-standing U.S. policy.

State Department backs away from anti-BDS law’s language

The US State Department backed away Tuesday from controversial language included in the anti-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama a day earlier, indicating official discomfort with a clause that critics say intentionally blurs the lines between Israel and the West Bank.
“By conflating Israel and “Israeli-controlled territories,” a provision of the Trade Promotion Authority legislation runs counter to longstanding US policy towards the occupied territories, including with regard to settlement activity,” State Department Spokesman Jack Kirby wrote in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon. “Every US administration since 1967 – Democrat and Republican alike – has opposed Israeli settlement activity beyond the 1967 lines. This administration is no different. The US government has never defended or supported Israeli settlements and activity associated with them and, by extension, does not pursue policies or activities that would legitimize them.”
Kirby’s comments referred to the part of the Trade Promotion Authority law which sponsors said were designed to discourage European governments from participating in BDS activities by leveraging the incentive of free trade with the US.
The provisions require US trade negotiators to make rejection of BDS a principal trade objective in Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with the European Union, instructing them to discourage “politically motivated actions to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel and to seek the elimination of politically motivated non-tariff barriers on Israeli goods, services, or other commerce imposed on the State of Israel.”

Lawless Administration Won’t Enforce Law Against Israel Boycotts

Kirby is right that the U.S. government has never formally recognized the right of Jews to live in Jerusalem or the West Bank. But he’s wrong to assert that President Obama’s policies are entirely consistent with that of his predecessors. This administration has made an issue of the existence of 40-year-old neighborhoods in Jerusalem in a way that is unprecedented since it treats the presence of Jews in parts of Israel’s capital as being just as illegitimate as the most remote West Bank settlement. Moreover, no previous administration has ever considered boycotts of Israel, whether of the entire country or of the half million Jews who live on the other side of the 1967 lines as legitimate. Kirby’s statement is an implicit endorsement of some Israel boycotts while opposing others.
Nor does the focus on settlements aid the cause of peace as the administration claims. Israel has already made far-reaching offers of withdrawal from the West Bank including statehood that has been repeatedly rejected by the Palestinians. The refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn is the obstacle to peace, not the presence of Jews in Jerusalem or the West Bank.
As I have written previously, the notion that it is okay to boycott some Jews but not others is one that sends a dangerous signal to Israel’s enemies. Once it is deemed lawful to anathematize parts of the Israeli economy, it is a slippery slope to treating all such boycotts as legitimate. Since the original Arab boycott that sought to strangle the Israeli economy was only broken by U.S. efforts to ban trade with those who enforced the boycott, a Congressional effort to move against BDS now was entirely in keeping with longstanding U.S. policy. But since this administration is obsessed with the idea of banning settlements, it is prepared to let a Europe in which a rising tide of anti-Semitism has fueled support for BDS activity get away with such boycotts.
This is a disgrace, but any thought of a legal challenge to the decision is a waste of time. Since the U.S. Supreme Court gave President Obama the right to invalidate laws about Israeli rights to Jerusalem in a decision handed down earlier this month, he can be confident that he will be granted similar latitude to ignore anti-BDS law.
But it isn’t just friends of Israel who should be outraged about this decision. This is an administration that views law enforcement as an option, not an imperative. Just as he did on immigration, where he ignored the will of Congress and used executive orders to effectively annul legislation by not enforcing those concerning illegal immigrants, President Obama regards his personal opinion as being above the law. That is a dangerous tendency to substitute his preferences for the rule of law ought to scare all Americans, regardless of their views about trade or Israel.

HRW more biased against Israel than UNHRC report

As biased as the Davis report was against Israel, Human Rights Watch is worse.

The first paragraph of HRW's description of the Davis report says:

The commission appropriately highlighted the extensive death and destruction from last year’s fighting, especially in Gaza, where 1,462 Palestinian civilians lost their lives, including 299 women and 551 children.

Those figures, that HRW states as fact, came from the UN OCHA-OPT. But the Davis commission in its summary report properly put that in context:

While the casualty figures gathered by the United Nations, Israel, the State of Palestine and non-governmental organizations differ, regardless of the exact proportion of civilians to combatants, the high incidence of loss of human life and injury in Gaza is heartbreaking.

Davis admits that the percentage of civilians killed may be much lower than the UN's figures, and given that we have specific names and sources showing that scores of the "civilians" were actually members of terror groups, this is an appropriate caveat. But Human Rights Watch doesn't bother with such subtleties.

HRW also does what it always does when pretending to be even-handed - it only mentions Hamas rockets. The commission also showed lots of evidence that Hamas fired from the vicinity of schools, hospitals and mosques, evidence that HRW does not want people to talk about (my next post shows that the Davis commission still downplayed even that.)

Arutz-7 reports:

The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Palestinian terror group Hamas, has claimed responsibility for the shooting attack near Shvut Rachel on Monday night.

Four Israeli civilians were injured in the terror attack, with one, Malachi Moshe Rosenfeld, a 25-year-old resident of Kochav Hashachar, succumbing to his wounds on Tuesday evening.

The Al-Qassam Brigades asserted the attack was part of "a series of quality operations" carried out by the group's members in recent months, and that the attackers opened fire at point-blank range on a car of "settlers" before managing to escape safely.

On Tuesday, sources in the IDF and the Israel Security Agency (ISA or Shin Bet) admitted that a terror cell appears to be at large in the Binyamin region north of Jerusalem, although they did not say if the cell had any connection to Hamas.

This is being widely reported in Arabic media. They say that the responsibility claim was taken by a Hamas-affiliated cell, the "Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha groups." It was reported in Hamas media like Felesteen but not at the Hamas or Al Qassam websites.

The Hamas website did praise the latest series of attacks against Jews and called for more of them. It also called for Arabs to protect the terrorists.

The same cell took credit for the murder of Danny Gonen last week.

No one can claim anymore that these are "lone-wolf" attacks.

White House gives moral support to boycotting Jews in Judea/Samaria

The State Department spokesman released this statement after President Obama signed the anti-BDS bill:

The United States has worked in the three decades since signing the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement - our first such agreement with any country - to grow trade and investment ties exponentially with Israel. The United States government has also strongly opposed boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions targeting the State of Israel, and will continue to do so.

However, by conflating Israel and “Israeli-controlled territories,“ a provision of the Trade Promotion Authority legislation runs counter to longstanding US policy towards the occupied territories, including with regard to settlement activity. Every US. administration since 1967 Democrat and Republican alike - has opposed Israeli settlement activity beyond the 1967 lines. This Administration is no different. The US. government has never defended or supported Israeli settlements and activity associated with them and, by extension, does not pursue policies or activities that would legitimize them.

Administrations of both parties have long recognized that settlement activity and efforts to change facts on the ground undermine the goal of a two-state solution to the conflict and only make it harder to negotiate a sustainable and equitable peace deal in good faith. As we advance our trade agenda, we will continue to strengthen our economic ties with partners globally, including Israel. We will also continue to uphold policies integral to preserving the prospect ofa two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This description of historic US policy plays fast and loose with the facts. While it is true that US administrations have discouraged Jews from living in Judea and Samaria, President Reagan said "As to the West Bank, I believe the settlements there - I disagreed when the previous Administration referred to them as illegal - they're not illegal." And President Clinton's administration tended to often refer to the territories as "disputed" and said to the UN it is "unproductive to debate the legalities of the issue." And, of course, George W. Bush wrote a letter acknowledging that there are areas of Judea and Samaria that would inevitably end up in Israel in any agreement, a fact acknowledged by the PLO as well.

After Oslo, before the sui generis arguments against Israel became thought of as settled international law, the legal advisor to the International Red Cross, Dr. Hans-Peter Gasser, concluded that his organization remained in the territories not because of occupation but because of an agreement with the PLO:

There are bigger issues, however, with this State Department statement. as has been pointed out before, there is a huge double standard between how the world regards Arab Israelis living in the territories versus Israeli Jews. There is no uproar when Arabs move from east across the Green Line or when Israel announces building projects in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

Similarly, there are no calls to sanction Israeli Arabs who open up businesses in the territories.

So when the US declares its opposition to "settlement activity" it really means "Jews," not Israelis.

The same hypocrisy can be seen when this statement says it is against "efforts to change facts on the ground." The EU and Arabs daily build houses and plant olive trees in territories whose status are up for negotiations but no one calls these "efforts to change facts on the ground."

Yes, one can say that the US has always opposed Jews moving into the territories even if it has not always been consistent in explaining why. But the Obama White House has gone way beyond this by giving a green light for organizations and even other nations to boycott Jews, and only Jews, who want to live in their ancestral homes, even if those Jews would be willing to live under Arab rule.

How exactly is this not antisemitism?

06/30 Links Pt2: Obama signs anti-BDS bill into law; IDF Appoints Special Team to Plan Strike on Iran

From Ian:

Obama signs anti-BDS bill into law

After a grueling legislative battle, US President Barack Obama signed into law a controversial trade measure that also contains landmark legislation combating the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in Europe.
The broader legislation faced an uphill battle after Obama’s usual allies — Democrats in the House of Representative — bucked his authority and voted against key provisions out of concern that liberalization of trade could impact American jobs.
But on Monday, Obama signed into law the so-called “fast track” authorization that will allow US trade negotiators to work out a long-awaited deal with Asian states known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Trade Promotion Authority legislation also contained the anti-BDS provisions, which make rejection of the phenomenon a top priority for US negotiators as they work on a more distant free trade agreement with the European Union.
These guidelines, sponsors hope, will discourage European governments from participating in BDS activities by leveraging the incentive of free trade with the US.

IDF Appoints Special Team to Plan Strike on Iran

A source close to Ya'alon was quoted by Walla! saying, "nothing has changed regarding the military option. Our working assumption is that Iran is lying all the time, beyond the fact that it is funding and directing terror in the Middle East. It (Iran) is our most bitter enemy today, even though we don't share a physical border with it, and we must not put off any kind of preparedness against it."
"In the end we don't believe Iran. We don't believe the (nuclear) project will be stopped. Therefore the (military) option will remain. ...We need to be ready also for the day in which Israel will need to make decisions alone. (What) if it becomes clear they are pushing the envelope in breach of the agreement? Or if Iran goes down deep underground (with its nuclear facilities)? And if new sites are found? Will we wait for the US to take care of them?"
"You have to prepare yourself for all of the threats. Not only for Gaza and Lebanon," added the source. "The military option costs money but the more time goes by, you're better prepared to carry out the mission."
Indicating Israel's growing preparedness ahead of a potential military clash with Iran, the IAF held a special drill with the Greek air force two months ago, in which roughly 100 members of the IAF took part including dozens of crews from all the F-16i squadrons.

‘Seeds of Conflict’ could sow confusion

One day in 1913, a group of Arabs stole some grapes from the vineyards of Jewish pioneers in Rehovot. An altercation followed, leaving one Arab camel driver and one Jewish guard dead. The incident marked an irrevocable break between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and planted the seeds of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Far-fetched as it may sound, this is the theory advanced by a one-hour PBS documentary, ‘Seeds of Conflict,’ shown in the US on 30 June. Grievances between different communities, once happy to mingle in coffee houses, were allowed to fester, the programme argues, and the conflict soon took on the proportions we know today.

In truth, it could be argued that the breakdown of the traditional dhimmi relationship was one of the root causes of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Perhaps the decisive incident took place, not in 1913, but in 1908, when the Hashomer Hatza’ir pioneers of Sejera dismissed their Circassian guards — who protected their settlement against Bedouin raids — and replaced them with Jewish guards. For the Jews, this was an ideological statement of self-sufficiency. But for the neighbouring Arab fellaheen, they had crossed a red line. They had reneged on their part of the bargain: the dhimmi, who was not allowed to bear arms, should always look to the Muslim for protection.
The arrival of the young Zionist pioneers, with their socialist vision of a brave new world, threatened to overturn the existing pecking order. Yet many Arabs benefited from the influx of European Jews. As the Jews toiled to drain the swamps and make the desert bloom, waves of Arab immigrants flooded in from neighbouring countries, eager to take advantage of the jobs and prosperity created.
The program’s creators say that 1913: Seeds of Conflict dispels a number of myths and is ‘an admittedly arbitrary glimpse that captures the Palestine of a hundred years ago’. But to substitute a tale of ‘European colonialists’ invading Palestine in order to trouble a multiculturalism of mythical equality would be to indulge in dangerous revisionism.

What the US has thrown under the bus to get a bad deal with Iran

The Wall Street Journal reported:

Iran secretly passed to the White House beginning in late 2009 the names of prisoners it wanted released from U.S. custody, part of a wish list to test President Barack Obama’s commitment to improving ties and a move that set off years of clandestine dispatches that helped open the door to nuclear negotiations. The secret messages... included a request to blacklist opposition groups hostile to Iran and increase U.S. visas for Iranian students, according to officials familiar with the matter. The U.S. eventually acceded to some of the requests, these officials said, including help with the release of four Iranians detained in the U.S. and U.K.: two convicted arms smugglers, a retired senior diplomat and a prominent scientist convicted of illegal exports to Iran.... With a deal in sight, some worry the U.S. will give up too much without getting significant concessions in return.

The Israel Project has released a factsheet to journalists covering the Iranian nuclear talks in Vienna. It includes this amazing list of principles the White House has been willing to throw under the bus to pursue a nuclear deal:

-- China expansionism: Last week the NYT reported that the Obama administration has been loath to pressure China on a range of issues because they need the Chinese on Iran.

-- Russia expansionism: Articles have been circulating since 2014 suggesting the same thing is going on with Russia, and that Obama has taken a soft line on Ukraine because he needs the Russians on Iran (even Roger Cohen (!) rushed last November to editorialize against what he called the Iran-Ukraine tradeoff).

-- Middle East alliances: Differences over the Iran deal have badly undermined Washington's traditional alliances with Jerusalem and Riyadh.

-- Syria/U.S. WMD credibility: The President declined to enforce his Syria red line against the reintroduction of weapons of mass destruction to modern battlefields, shredding the U.S.'s nonproliferation credibility and leaving the French seething in the process. Administration spokespeople have been left trying to convince reporters that chlorine bombs don't count.

-- IAEA credibility: The IAEA has been kneecapped as the P5+1 global powers moved to conclude a deal with Iran, a country that still owes the agency answers on a dozen unresolved questions.

-- UN sanctions credibility: The U.S. has looked the other way while the Iranians busted through binding U.N. sanctions and has ceased providing information to a U.N. panel charged with monitoring the integrity of the U.N.'s sanction regime.

-- Iranian human rights: Obama administration officials kept the Green Revolution at arm's length so as not to inflame Tehran's paranoia about regime change.

-- Congress/Democrats: The President and his allies have repeatedly clashed with Congress, including with Congressional Democrats, over Iran diplomacy. There have been two full-blown media campaigns, each lasting several weeks, in which sitting Democratic lawmakers were accused of being warmongers beholden to Jewish money. Versions of those accusations came from administration spokespeople talking to reporters from White House and State Department podiums.

The US standing in the world is immeasurably worse in the reckless goal to appease the world's major state sponsor of terrorism whose pursuit of the ultimate weapon is barely hitting a speedbump as a result of the imminent deal.

Back in the day, the American Library Association (ALA) concerned itself exclusively with such issues as librarians’ pay and conditions, actual and attempted censorship of materials held by or recommended for acquisition by individual libraries, and – it seemed almost to the point of obsession – the comparatively low status of librarianship. The heavyweights of the American library world (I speak from experience) tended to be men – out of all proportion to male numbers within the profession – and they were acutely conscious that the prevalence of women in their field ensured that librarianship, like teaching and nursing, was considered a “female occupation,” with all that portended for pay scales and for status.

Not uncommon were articles in the professional literature bemoaning the fact that librarians were not accorded the status of doctors, lawyers, and tenured university teachers. Indeed, while women were the mainstays of the public library system, men dominated the most prestigious bastions of the profession – academic and research libraries – holding most of the administrative positions and what was considered the ne plus ultra of rank and file library jobs: employment at the reference desk. But for all that, their egos chafed at the realisation that they were categorised as campus “general staff,” not as “academic staff”. Starting about 1970 – the incipient women’s movement notwithstanding – there was a vigorous campaign to attract more males to university librarianship, in order to boost the profession’s standing vis-à-vis the academic staff: if the male recruit had a “subject” MA (that is, a master’s degree additional to the Master of Library Science or MLS), he was virtually guaranteed a quick and steady rise, the more so if he had a “subject” PhD.

I would not be surprised to learn that this inferiority complex, this quest for recognition, on the part of sections of the library profession has propelled some members of the professional body – the ALA – to ape such academic and quasi-academic bodies as the American Studies Association and Modern Languages Association in their support for or initiatives favouring BDS, more specifically the “Academic Boycott of Israel”. Such an affirmation of solidarity with other proponents of the “Academic Boycott” sends a signal that the ALA represents professionals who are equal partners in academia with professors and scholars. Flirtation with BDS on the part of librarians is an odious development that in my view militates against the role and spirit of the profession: as information providers librarians and their representative body should stand for liberalism in that word’s traditional and best sense, and discriminate against nobody.

And then, regardless of such a motivation or possible motivation on the part of certain BDSers in the ALA, there are the hard-line radicals within the profession whose anti-Israel antics two years ago were described by Lee Kaplan. As he notes (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13691#.VY6LAPlEDIU), inter alia:

‘These recent “delegates” were, in part, from the American Library Association in the US, but in particular they represented a roundtable of radical communists and anti-Semites in the Association who hate Israel. Still others are librarians in Canada and EU countries. All were due to return to their respective countries on July 5th. They vaunted themselves as great humanitarians, but their goal was to give support to and conduct propaganda for the terrorist groups that would end the Jewish state. Their purpose was to found yet another way to delegitimize Israel, by gathering “evidence” that Israel destroys Palestinian books and has stolen Palestinian “literature” and should be shunned by the world’s library systems.’

One of the associated groups in the Israel-demonisation process is an organisation calling itself Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP). Apparently it consists of people who self-describe as practitioners of those occupations, so presumably one need not be a professionally qualified librarian or archivist in order to belong: this does not seem to bother the ALA, which once upon a time would have distanced itself from any persons claiming to be librarians but who lacked the MLS from an accredited “library school”. Anyway, LAP has its own Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/events/390037541182068/), from which we learn that on June 27 this year members attended the ALA conference in San Francisco:

Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) members will be at the 2015 American Library Association Annual Conference in San Francisco this weekend, and we want to see you! We'll be holding a reportback on our recent trip back to Palestine, followed by a screening of "The Great Book Robbery," followed by a casual meetup. Come to any or all of these events….

Now Showing @ ALA: The Great Book Robbery
http://alaac15.ala.org/node/30941
Saturday, June 27, 4-5:30pm
Moscone Convention Center, 123 (N)
This documentary is about the systematic "collection" of 70,000 Palestinian books by Israeli forces (including librarians) before, during, and after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The film tells the story of the books and what has become of them -- many are now labeled "Abandoned Property" at Israel's National Library -- and explores issues of library ethics and cultural heritage. The film will be followed by a Q&A with LAP members
Runtime: 57 Minutes
Preview: https://vimeo.com/6303260

No doubt these librarians, archivists, and other anti-Israel propagandists (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3841252,00.html) spreading this canard about stolen books are unaware – and, if aware, unconcerned – that in Hebron in 1929 Jewish manuscripts, including notable ancient documents, were looted from Jewish homes and synagogues. I’m told by a specialist in Israeli history that it's possible that some of this loot surfaced among Jewish manuscripts shown by Arab dealers to the Rockefeller Museum. Furthermore, says my informant, Jewish homes and synagogues/yeshivot were looted in the Old City of Jerusalem in 1929 and 1936-38; during the latter period, there was a pogrom in the south Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talpiyot, and at least one important Hebrew writer residing there had his books vandalised and plundered. (Hat tip: E.G.)

Norman Bentwich, Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in 1948, with regard to the work of the Ministry of Minorities, set up to safeguard the welfare of Arabs (and other non-Jews) in the newly-proclaimed Jewish State:

'Perhaps the most striking work in the Ministry is its effort to develop cultural life, in the midst of the uneasy truce, for the Arab population. It has already established some fifty primary schools in the towns and villages, with free education. A former Jewish Inspector of the Mandatory Education Department is in charge of the schools; another, an Oriental Jew, with a thorough knowledge of Arabic, assists him. The Ministry has also established one or two Arab clubs for reading and recreation, and has promoted a daily Arabic newspaper, El Yom (The Day). This is the first Arabic daily to appear in Israel. Several of the staff are Arabs, who have full freedom of expression; and some educated Arabs write to the Palestine Post, the English[-language] daily, voicing grievances about rent and employment, and the like.

A remarkable cultural enterprise is the establishment in Jaffa of an Arab library, which includes close on 100,000 books and periodicals salvaged from private houses that were deserted and broken into during the fighting. It includes, too, some Arab manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, which may have value for scholars. The books and manuscripts are being catalogued by a Jewish scholar of Baghdad. The library is housed in a private mansion of one of the richer Arabs of Jaffa, and there is a project of making it a cultural centre. The whole cost to the Government so far has been only a few hundred pounds.

In Jerusalem 30,000 books were similarly salvaged and handed over for safe-keeping to the [Hebrew] University of Jerusalem. It is likely that the owners of the books will come to identify their property and collect it back; but the action of the Ministry will have prevented looting and destruction, and it has received the appreciation of the Arab population.'

Hardly a case of deliberate plunder! I recommend the whole of Bentwich’s article to the librarians. They of all people should be able to find it easily enough. It’s in the Jewish Chronicle (31 December 1948) and is entitled "Arabs in Israel". I’ll have more to say about it in a future article.