Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, September 14, 2018

Jews who want to give up Jerusalem are spitting on their ancestors' graves

During the days running up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, practicing Jews say selichot, a selection of poems (piyyutim) and prayers, composed over the centuries, that are different every day.

One of the many poems said today was about Jerusalem. 25 verses, each that begin and end with the word "Yerushalayim," that discuss both the pain of losing the city to the Romans 2000 years ago and the hope that it will be rebuilt to its former glory.

Many stanzas extol the beauty and holiness of the city.

Other parts of selichot, repeated every day and many times on Yom Kippur, also implore God to remember Jerusalem.

As I took this photo of the piyyut, I realized that my talit bag it was on says "Yerushalayim" and includes a stylized picture of the holy city.

There are no historic liturgical poems about Jerusalem in Islamic history. The Islamic pretense of loving Jerusalem is literally less than a century old, started by the viciously antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem. Before that it was ignored by the Muslim world.

Jerusalem is part of the Jewish DNA. For purportedly Jewish organizations like J-Street to argue that the holy city should not be a part of the Jewish state, and moreover that it should be shared with people who want to destroy the Jewish presence in the Middle East, is a slap in the face of Judaism.

Jews advocating Palestinian Arab rule over the holy parts of Jerusalem are spitting in the face of their own grandparents and great-grandparents who grew up with the love of Jerusalem, a love and a longing that is simply part and parcel of Judaism itself.

Don't say "As a Jew, I believe Jerusalem must be shared." The second half of that sentence negates the first half. If you believe that Israel should give up Jerusalem, your claim to be Jewish is based on nothing more than a hereditary accident, and you have no claim whatsoever to speak for Jews.

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In 1951, UNRWA was not yet a tool of Palestinian Arabs and was still willing to say negative things about the people it had to deal with.

Current reports from UNRWA would never, ever admit what they freely admitted in the 1951 Interim Report:

13. An accurate statement of the number of genuine refugees resulting from the war in Palestine is unlikely to be provided now or in the future. In fact, it is almost impossible to define closely the word "refugee," as applied to the work of the Agency, without leaving certain groups of deserving people outside those accepted, or conversely, including groups who probably should not be in receipt of relief.
14. The Agency has steadfastly resisted persistent and persuasive efforts to have it become responsible for the care and feeding of citizens of the various countries who are merely needy or destitute as a result of the war in Palestine. It has taken the stand that its funds were not provided for that purpose and should be applied only to relief and works for genuine refugees. If the needy, assumed to number more than 150,000, were added to the Agency's burden, little money would be left to apply to works projects. Many of the needy are now actually in poorer circumstances than the average refugee because the latter receives food, medical care and some clothing, little of which is available to the non-refugee. Appeals have been made by the Agency to voluntary organizations to feed and clothe the needy who are not entitled to be classified as refugees.

UNRWA failed at this mission and ended up absorbing hundreds of thousands of non-refugees as refugees. Today it confidently says there are over 5 million "refugees" without any of the caveats about their status as mentioned in 1951.

DEFINITION OF A REFUGEE
15. For working purposes, the Agency has decided that a refugee is a needy person, who, as a result of the war in Palestine, has lost his home and his means of livelihood. A large measure of flexibility in the interpretation of the above definition is accorded to chief district officers to meet the many border-line cases which inevitably arise. In some circumstances, a family may have lost part or all of its land from which its living was secured, but it may still have a house to live in. Others may have lived on one side of the boundary but worked in what is now Israel most of the year. Others, such as Bedouins, normally moved from one area of the country to another, and some escaped with part or all of their goods but cannot return to the area where they formerly resided the greater part of the time. These examples give an idea of the varying conditions that must be met in administering the relief programme.

NUMBERS OF REFUGEES
16. The Agency has accepted as realistic the figures set forth in appendix B of the first interim report of the United Nations Economic Survey Mission, but recognizes that the numbers have increased in conformity with the extremely high birthrate of the refugees. There is reason to believe that births are always registered for ration purposes, but deaths are often, if not usually, concealed so that the family may continue to collect rations for the deceased. It also is evident that many of the 99,000 mentioned in the above report as "in gainful employment" are now on rations. It is unlikely that numbers will be reduced below 800,000, and it is possible that that number may be exceeded.
17. The Gaza area, having a highly concentrated refugee population housed mainly in camps and under military control by the Egyptian army, is probably the nearest to correct in its figures concerning the numbers of refugees. At 1 August 199,000 were registered. Syria, with the smallest number of refugees on rations, is next in accuracy, with 82,000 registered. The figures for Lebanon (128,000) are confused due to the fact that many Lebanese nationals along the Palestinian frontier habitually worked most of the year on the farms or in the citrus groves of Palestine. With the advent of war they came back across the border and claimed status as refugees. Only an exhaustive and expensive census, now under way although ardently opposed by those concerned, will divide worthy from false claimants.

The census never happened.

18. The former Trans-Jordan and the portion of Palestine remaining in Arab hands and now annexed to the Hashimite Kingdom of the Jordan received the greatest influx of refugees of any of the countries adjacent to Israel -- probably more than half of all the refugees. For various reasons, the largest number of fictitious names on the ration lists pertain to refugees in this area. All earlier attempts at a close census of those entitled to relief have been frustrated, but a comprehensive survey, now under way, is achieving worthwhile results in casting up names of dead people for which rations are still drawn, fraudulent claims regarding numbers of dependents (it is alleged that it is a common practice for refugees to hire children from other families at census time), and in eliminating duplications where families have two or more ration cards. The census, though stubbornly resisted, will eliminate many thousands from the lists of refugees now in receipt of rations. The number on lists in Jordan at 31 August was 485,000 with 430,000 rations distributed.

The census never happened.

26. Strangely enough the general morale of the refugees is higher than might be expected after spending more than two years in exile under most trying conditions. Real trouble-makers are confined to a very small proportion of the total number of refugees, and food strikes and work stoppages are generally considered to be the result of organized pressure groups. There is considerable evidence indicating that subversive effort is fairly widely diffused amongst the refugees. The Arab is, however, a confirmed individualist and does not offer the most fruitful type of field in which to extol the benefits of any form of government which might propose to alter his traditional mode of life. Otherwise, it is almost inevitable that the misery and suffering of the refugees would already have made them almost completely the tools of pressure groups wishing to exploit their misery for political or other reasons.

It is unclear if this is naivete on UNRWA's part at the time. Clearly the "leaders" of the Palestinians were not interested in reintegrating them among Arab nations, and neither were Arab leaders. UNRWA caved to this.

(h/t Joe in Australia)

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09/13 Links Pt2: Do Zionists Have Civil Rights?; NY Times Attacks an Opponent of Anti-Semitism; Jeremy Corbyn and the Socialism of Fools; Operation Finale: Evil in the Dock

From Ian:

Noah Rothman: Do Zionists Have Civil Rights?

When then-presidential candidate Donald Trump famously declared his intention to be a “neutral” arbiter of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian territories and put the onus for resolving the conflict on Jerusalem, few observers could have predicted that Trump would run one of the most pro-Israel administrations in American history.

This year, the Trump administration began relocating the U.S. embassy in Israel to the nation’s capital city, fulfilling a promise that began in 1995 with the passage of a law mandating this precise course of action. The administration also declined to blame Israel for defending its Gaza border against a Hamas-led attack. Last week, the administration shuttered the PLO’s offices in Washington.

The Trump administration’s commitment to shedding the contradictions and moral equivalencies that have plagued past administrations has exposed anti-Zionism for what its critics so often alleged it to be.

This week, Department of Education Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Kenneth Marcus announced his intention to vacate an Obama-era decision that dismissed an alleged act of anti-Semitism at Rutgers University. Marcus’s decision to reopen that particularly deserving case has led the New York Times to publish an article by Erica L. Green full of misconceptions, myths, and dissimulations about the nature of the anti-Israel groups in question and the essential characteristics of anti-Semitism itself.

In reporting on Marcus’s move, Green declared the education activist and opponent of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement a “longtime opponent of Palestinian rights causes,” a designation the paper’s editor felt fine printing without any substantiating evidence. You could be forgiven for thinking that BDS itself constituted a cause of “Palestinian rights” and not an international effort to stigmatize and harm both Israel and its supporters. If you kept reading beyond that second paragraph, your suspicions were confirmed.

Green contended that Marcus’s decision has paved the way for the Education Department to adopt a “hotly contested definition of anti-Semitism” that includes: denying Jews “the right to self-determination,” claiming that the state of Israel is a “racist endeavor,” and applying a double standard to Israel not “expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” As Jerusalem Post reporter and COMMENTARY contributor Lahav Harkov observed, this allegedly “hotly contested definition” is precisely the same definition used by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In 2010, the IHRA’s working definition was adopted almost in total by Barack Obama’s State Department.

Antisemitism definition sparks backlash on U.S. Left

Washington - A debate over the definition of antisemitism that has paralyzed Britain’s Labour Party made its way across the Atlantic this week, amid news that the Trump administration would apply a similar standard on discrimination toward Jews under scrutiny there at the US Department of Education.

The matter in question is whether opposing Jewish self-determination in the ancestral Jewish homeland of Israel, a political movement known as Zionism, should be considered antisemitic. Several Western government agencies, including the foreign and justice ministries of the US, Britain and Germany, have policies that deem anti-Zionism a discriminatory practice that uniquely denies Jews the right to govern themselves.

But the Trump administration is now applying that standard in America’s schools, where anti-Israelism has raged in recent years in the form of the BDS movement meant to delegitimize the Jewish state in advancement of the Palestinian cause.

A policy paper released last month by Kenneth Marcus, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, announced that department would adopt the US State Department definition of antisemitism that applies a test of “three Ds” to determine Jewish discrimination: Delegitimization of Israel, demonization of Israel, and the subjection of Israel to double standards.

That definition classifies opposition to Israel’s existence as a form of antisemitism, according to former officials from the Obama administration, which adopted the definition.

The Senate has advanced legislation in recent months which supports the application of this standard at the education department.

Marcus also announced the reopening of a years-old case involving anti-Israelism, directed toward Jewish students at Rutgers University, in which the department would repackage its argument based on the new policy.

For Jewish New Year, NY Times Attacks an Opponent of Anti-Semitism

Over the two-day Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) holiday, the New York Times greeted its Jewish readers with a one-two punch of news stories that strayed from fact-based reporting to attack supporters of the Jewish state and denigrate a widely accepted definition of anti-Semitism.

The first article, appearing on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, was entitled “A Harsh Diplomatic View, Even Where His Boss Sees Hope” and provided a colored and dismissive rendering of US National Security Advisor John Bolton’s first major public remarks about US foreign policy.

The newspaper’s offering for the second day of the Jewish New Year was even worse: a brazenly partisan, opinion-laden characterization of Kenneth L. Marcus, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, as “a longtime opponent of Palestinian rights causes” who had pressured campuses “to squelch anti-Israel speech and activities.”
An Attack on an Opponent of Anti-Semitism

The Times makes a show of promising reporting “without fear or favor,” and yet the article, “U.S. Revives Rutgers Bias Case In New Tack on Anti-Semitism,” by Erica Green, clearly favors—worse, embraces—the antagonistic judgments of radical anti-Israel activist groups, which often slur anyone supportive of Israel as “anti-Palestinian.”

The language wouldn’t be out of place, for example, on the website of the so-called US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, an advocacy group opposed to Israel’s right to exist. Indeed, that group has used virtually the same wording about Marcus: “This is bad. Trump has nominated Kenneth Marcus – a sworn opponent of Palestinian rights – for Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the Department of Education,” the anti-Israel group asserted in a piece entitled, “The Trumpocalypse is coming to campus BDS, and YOUR senator can stop it.”

Likewise, the Times language mirrors a headline on Electronic Intifada, a virulently anti-Israel propaganda site: “Trump taps head of anti-Palestinian group as top civil rights enforcer.”

When I started blogging about BDS back in the 19th century, I tended to focus on the BDS failures, highlighting how little impact the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions “movement” was having on the exploding Israeli economy, pointing out the triviality of BDS claimed “victories,” and noting how many of their alleged “wins” were actually hoaxes, or the result of bullying or trickery.

Over the years, others have taken up the #BDSFail meme with gusto, while I’ve tended to focus on strategy and tactics for fighting anti-Israel campaigns more generally. But a recent event, one in which BDS might have played a role in sending hundreds of millions of dollars into the Israeli treasury, seemed worth noting as potentially the greatest BDSFail of all time.

By now, most readers are probably aware of PepsiCo’s acquisition of the Israeli company SodaStream for $3.2 billion. This purchase, in and of itself, represents a stunning illustration of how little the business world takes boycott treats and bullying seriously. In addition to being one of the largest M&A deals in Israeli history, the sale also demonstrates how the Israeli economy no longer relies on just high-tech hiding inside other branded devices, but that Israeli brands (in commercial goods, no less) are playing and winning on the world stage.

The fact that the purchaser was Pepsi also demonstrates Israel’s success on other fronts. For during the heyday of the Arab boycott, Pepsi was one of the brands that was willing to sacrifice the small Israeli market for the larger Arab one. But with this purchase of Sodastream, Pepsi has demonstrated that good relations with the Jewish state may be more important than what the nations surrounding Israel say or do.

Given how much effort the BDSers have put into tarring SodaStream’s name over the years, one might think this multi-billion-dollar transaction just represents a monumental example of the boycotters being ignored. But might BDS have actually played a role in creating an environment that facilitated the sale of SodaStream for billions?

To understand this thesis (which I’ll admit is speculative), you must understand the company’s CEO Daniel Birnbaum who, in addition to creating a company that took on the world’s largest beverage manufacturers and won, also worked doggedly to keep Shimon Peres’ notion of a New Middle East – where economic cooperation would supplant political enmity – alive.

When Sodastream was operating its Mishor Adumin factory in disputed territories, Birnbaum insisted that Jewish and Arab workers be paid and treated equally in any factory his company ran. And, lest you think such behavior was just for show, when he and some of his Jewish and Palestinian co-workers visited Israel to celebrate the company’s success and the Palestinians were required to undergo a strip search, Birnbaum insisted he go through one himself in solidarity.

This is the behavior not of a money-grubbing plutocrat, but of someone willing to sacrifice certain business advantages to support a non-economic cause (in this case, the notion that Jews and Arabs can live and work in peace and friendship). And for his efforts, BDSers around the globe insisted that Birnbaum was running a slave labor camp that should be condemned and shunned.

If you, like Birnbaum, are actually altruistic as well as capitalistic, if you’ve made sacrifices – financial and personal – over the years to create a successful, growing company and then used that success to improve the lives of Israelis and Arabs that other Israelis and Arabs say can never be reconciled, how are you supposed to respond to accusations by unproductive cretins like Omar Barghouti that all the good you’ve tried to do amounts to little more than Apartheid?

One thing you can do is to start making decisions based more on economics vs. politics, especially if sacrificing economics to politics has led to nothing but propaganda being directed against the company you built. For example, shutting down the Mishor Adumin and moving operations to a larger facility in the Negev, a move supported by economic subsidies, allowed Sodastream to expand while remaining profitable. And profitable growth is the key factor a suitor is looking at when deciding what premium to pay for an acquisition.

In fact, it was just a few years after this relocation/consolidation took place that Pepsico decided to pay not one, not two, but more than three billion dollars for the company (seven times sales and more than a hundred times profit, based on its 2016 financial numbers). And while Israel does not tax foreign investors when they cash out on a sale like Pepsi’s purchase of Sodastream, Israeli investors do need to include the money they made as part of their taxable income. Which means that tens of millions of the proceeds from the sale of Sodastream will soon find their way into the coffers of the Israeli government.

This is not to say that the behavior of the boycotters played a direct role in Sodastream’s successful sale. As is usually the case in business, product, positioning and profits play more of a role than politics. But if the BDSholes made it easier for the company to stop sacrificing the bottom line for a political cause that was punished, rather than rewarded, then I think every Sodastream shareholder and Israeli tax official owes Omar Barghouti a great big hug.

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Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Hating Jews is a big topic of discussion these days. They’re talking about it in the UK, where Jeremy Corbyn can’t understand why so many are making such a big deal about what he sees as merely a principle of his proposed foreign policy. And they are talking about it in the USA, where 21% of American voters said they had at least a “somewhat favorable” impression of Louis Farrakhan (that was in March, and I would be surprised if the percentage wasn’t greater today).

I should note that I’m trying to stop using the word “antisemitism,” a word invented by 19^th century German Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr to make his Judenhass more scientific-sounding. Marr also wanted to express his idea that the problem with Jews was more than just a religious, economic, or national issue: it was biological, racial. Of course this implies that Jewishness cannot be fixed. Even if a Jew got himself baptized, stopped being a money-lender, had German citizenship, or served with distinction in the German army, he was still corrupt and dangerous. We all know where this idea led.

Not using “antisemitism” also has the advantage of forestalling what I’ve called The World’s Stupidest Argument, the one that goes “Arabs can’t be antisemites because they are Semites.” No need to elaborate further on this one.

Jonathan Haidt, in his very illuminating book The Righteous Mind, tells us that the mind is like a rational rider on an emotional elephant. The rider has the ability to use linguistic reasoning to come to conclusions about the best way to proceed, and can nudge the elephant in his chosen direction. But ultimately, the elephant will go where he wants. Haidt argues that in most cases our emotions determine the positions we will take on moral, political, or religious issues, and that we try to justify them after the fact by logical reasoning. This is borne out by a consideration of Jew-hatred, which has had a mind-bendingly long line of pseudo-rational arguments adduced in its favor – everything from our failure to accept the true religion (anything but Judaism), to “racial” characteristics, to the countless Jewish conspiracy theories – but which seems to be at bottom irreducibly irrational.

Jew-hatred is found on all parts of the political spectrum, both right and left, although it is especially fecund at the extremes, where conspiratorial thinking is rife. Jews are seen as weak, cowardly, and corrupt, while at the same time enormously powerful. They are simultaneously held in contempt and feared. The accusation that Jews control the weather, which seems from the outside about as reasonable as the idea that the earth is flat, makes perfect sense to those who live inside the Jew-hating conceptual scheme.

What is most interesting about it is the way it seems to have a life of its own, mutating as societies and cultures change. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the religious aspect, blood libels, and various conspiracy theories about Jewish responsibility for plagues predominated. Later, when the causes of economic cycles proved to be as mysterious as the vector of the Black Plague, the Jews were accused of conspiring to manipulate them. Darwin’s discoveries were pressed into service as support for pseudo-scientific racial Jew-hatred, which enabled it to propagate even in “enlightened” cultures where religion was not an important factor. Jews have been accused of being behind every large-scale catastrophe, from world wars to 9/11.

The Holocaust interfered with the life cycle of the “organism” that is Jew-hatred. Although there were and are many who fully approved of Hitler’s project, and even wish that he had been able to complete it and rid the world of the Jewish menace at last, the sheer horror of the industrial techniques employed by the Nazis had a stunning impact. Certainly the emotional power of Jew-hatred was great, but opposed to it were images of piles of murdered babies, living skeletons, and piles of eyeglasses, hair, and gold teeth taken from humans that had been turned into smoke.

As a result, a strong counter-force against Jew-hatred came into being. In the West, at least, it became taboo to speak explicitly of hating Jews (or indeed any distinct group) or to advocate any kind of discrimination against them, because – well, because everyone knows where that leads. This doesn’t mean that nobody still harbored the old feelings, that Jews were economic parasites, sexual predators, conspirators, and even Christ-killers, but it was considered unacceptable to publically express these thoughts or to act on them.

But as always, the organism began to mutate. If it was no longer possible to express hatred for individuals, hating a country was still allowed (indeed, many governments encouraged hatred of rival countries). And unsurprisingly, one particular country has become the target for a hatred as popular, vicious and irrational as pre-Holocaust century Jew-hatred.

The pathological anti-Zionist, like the Jew-hater, will invent history and current events so as to “establish” that the Jewish state is illegitimate, evil, and should be extirpated from the land, which anti-Zionists believe was stolen from saintly Arabs by conniving, conspiratorial Je— er, Zionists. Like Jew-haters, who could be convinced that Jews committed ritual murder just on someone’s say-so, the Israel-haters have no trouble believing that IDF soldiers deliberately shoot at Arab children for fun, despite a total lack of evidence. The most ridiculous motives and impossible crimes are routinely attributed to Israel’s government and army, and are automatically believed by the legions of obsessive anti-Zionists.

Double standards for legitimacy, conformance to international law, treatment of minorities, and proportionality of actions taken in self-defense, are applied shamelessly by pathological anti-Zionists. Crimes like genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing are falsely attributed to Israel, when these are precisely what would be done to Israel’s Jewish population if the remedies (like the “return” of Arab “refugees”) espoused by the anti-Zionists were adopted. The ideals of human rights and self-determination are strictly upheld for Palestinian Arabs, but ignored for Israel’s Jews. Any behavior is excused if it is called “resistance to occupation,” but Israel is held to the highest possible standards in self-defense.

The truth is that pathological anti-Zionism – as Fred Maroun, an Arab, says – “is a hatred worse than traditional anti-Semitism – it rivals Nazi-level anti-Semitism.”

Maroun argues, and I agree, that the question of whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism is not important. Analytically, they are different things, although very often the same people who fit one description also fit the other. But pathological anti-Zionism is a form of irrational bigotry that is no less evil and reprehensible than Jew-hatred, racism, homophobia, misogyny, or any similar moral aberration.

But it’s only “criticism of Israel,” say those like Jeremy Corbyn, who is as thoroughly suffused with the illness as the Munich terrorists that he honored with a wreath.

No. It’s simple to tell the difference. The easy acceptance of the false accusations, the double standards, the dehumanization of Israelis, and the association with those who express their hatred by acts of terrorism leave little room for error. It’s not criticism. Like old-fashioned Jew-hatred, it resembles demonic possession.

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09/13 Links Pt1: Haley: All the Palestinians Have Ever Done Is Ask for Money and Badmouth the U.S.; UNRWA perpetuates the refugee problem; Oslo Accords: 25 years of naivete

From Ian:

Haley: All the Palestinians Have Ever Done Is Ask for Money and Badmouth the U.S.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Wednesday justified the US State Department’s closure of the Washington mission of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, saying all the Palestinians have ever done is ask for money and badmouth the US.

She also said that Washington is still waiting for them to come to the negotiating table.

“All they’ve done is have their hand out asking for money, badmouth the United States, not come to the table on the peace deal — why would we have a PLO office?” she in an interview with Fox News. “Why would we continue to fund the Palestinians?”

Asked if she thought President Donald Trump’s strong-arm tactics would change the policies of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has shunned American officials since Washington recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December, she said it was “totally up to the Palestinians.”

Haley said that the US was ready to negotiate a peace deal as soon as Abbas was prepared to join the discussions.

“If the leadership of the Palestinians came to the table, automatically you’re going to have a peace plan. Negotiations are going to happen. Neither side is going to like it,” she said. “But the Palestinians have more to gain than Israel ever will.”

Haley said that the Trump administration was continuing to work on its long-awaited peace plan, even though Abbas has washed his hands of it.

CAMERA Op-Ed The Inconvenient Truth About Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Terrorism

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the entity that rules the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) has been appointed to lead a terrorist organization. Although the press has frequently called Abbas, who also leads the Fatah movement and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a “moderate” and the PA a “peace partner,” not a single major U.S. news outlet has reported the PA chief’s new job.

According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, on Aug. 2, 2018 the official newspaper of the PA reported that Abbas was now “the one responsible for the Palestinian National Fund.”

Israel’s defense ministry designated the PNF a terrorist organization in March 2017, noting: “The fund has a crucial role in the financial support for Palestinian terrorist operatives imprisoned in Israel, and it is used as the most significant route for transferring money.”

Times of Israel reporters Judah Ari Gross and Eric Cortellessa have noted that although the PNF “is said to contain billions of dollars from wealthy Arab donors and profits from various investments,” nonetheless “there is little transparency or oversight in the management and use of funds.”

Abbas’s appointment should be newsworthy. As PMW pointed out, the PA president is now in violation of Israel’s Counter Terrorism Law 2016-5776, which stipulates that “one who heads a terrorist organization or manages it or takes part in directing the terror organization in general, directly or indirectly” faces “25 years imprisonment.” In other words, a nominal U.S. ally is now leading a terrorist organization.

IsraellyCool: Re Boot

Columnist Max Boot argues in the Washington Post that the Trump administration’s pro-Israel moves (like closing of the PLO mission in Washington and defunding UNRWA) are big mistakes, opening the door to radicals. One part of his argument is thus:

They also don’t understand that the Palestinian Authority, for all its problems, is vastly preferable to any conceivable alternative. Yes, it is corrupt and undemocratic and, yes, it engages in anti-Israel propaganda. But, far from sponsoring terrorism against Israel, the Palestinian Authority is working closely with Israel to squelch terror. In May, after the U.S. Embassy relocation, thousands of Gaza residents tried to storm the Israeli border fence, resulting in 62 fatalities. There were no such attacks in the West Bank, because the Palestinian Authority worked there to prevent them. By gratuitously insulting and defunding the most moderate Palestinian faction, Trump is opening the door to the radicals. That’s a Rosh Hashanah present Israel could do without

Yet the very same Max Boot had this to say only a couple of years ago, in a post now flushed down the memory hole (thank you Google cache!):

Predictably, Obama is even more scathing when it comes to Israel, which, unlike Saudi Arabia, is a democratic country that respects human rights. It will surprise no one who has followed closely this administration’s foreign policy that Obama blames Prime Minister Netanyahu for the failure to achieve a peace treaty, giving a pass to the leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state or even to condemn terrorism against Israel. According to Goldberg: “Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so.” If Obama has stern words for Mahmoud Abbas and the leaders of Hamas — who are the actual obstacles to peace — Goldberg does not record them.

Does Mr Boot really think the PA has changed its tune in just two years?

Jewish Rights to Israel (Part 2):
Israel’s Nation State Law

(part 1 here)

Israel’s system of Basic Laws is kind of weird. There is a saying in Israel that the things that are temporary are the ones that are most permanent and that is how we ended up with Basic Laws rather than a constitution.

The Israeli Declaration of Independence stated that a formal constitution will be formulated and adopted no later than 1 October 1948 but the war that ensued the day after the declaration was made got in the way, one thing led to another and eventually we ended up with Basic Laws - constitutional laws of the State of Israel, intended to be draft chapters of a future constitution and act as a de facto constitution until that time. Basic Laws can only be changed by a supermajority vote in the Knesset (with varying requirements for different Basic Laws and sections). Many of these laws are based on the individual liberties that were outlined in the Israeli Declaration of Independence.

The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, protecting the freedom and equal rights of Israeli enjoys super-legal status, giving the Supreme Court the authority to disqualify any law contradicting it, as well as protection from Emergency Regulations.

While the status, importance and legitimacy of the Jewish State clearly defined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence (see Part 1), until very recently, there was no law to safeguard the rights of the State of Israel as a Jewish State. In cases of legal questions, Israeli courts could not bring into consideration the importance of protecting the future of the Jewish State because there was no law on which to base such rulings. In order to amend this imbalance, a new Basic Law was passed: Israel - The nation state of the Jewish people.

The new law sparked an uproar, mostly within the Jewish world. The question is, why? Is there something wrong with the law? In order to address these questions, we must first examine the content of the law. It is short and written in very clear language.

The following is the full content of the Basic Law:

1. The State of Israel

a) Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people in which the State of Israel was established.

b) The state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, religious, and historic right to self-determination.

c) The fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

This point defines Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People in which the Zionist movement, the national movement of the Jewish people that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the ancestral land of the Jews, has been fulfilled. By extension, the right of self determination as a nation within the Jewish Nation State is unique to the Jewish People.

Is there anything wrong with these statements? Are they any different from what is written in Israel’s Declaration of Independence which clearly defines Israel as the Jewish State, Jewish rights to the land as those of the indigenous people and the rights of other inhabitants as being the same individual rights as any other Israeli citizen?

2. National symbols of the State of Israel

a) The name of the state is Israel.

b) The flag of the state is white, two blue stripes near the edges, and a blue Star of David in the center.

c) The symbol of the state is the Menorah with seven branches, olive leaves on each side, and the word Israel at the bottom.

d) The national anthem of the state is "Hatikvah"

e) [Further] details concerning the issue of state symbols will be determined by law.

Is there anything wrong with these statements defining that the current symbols of the Jewish State are the legal symbols of the Jewish State?

3. [The] unified and complete [city of] Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

This a reference to and reinforcement of the Basic Law: Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel (passed in 1980) which defined the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and secure its integrity and unity. It determines that Jerusalem is the seat of the President of the State, the Knesset, the Government and the Supreme Court. The law also deals with the status of the holy sites, secures the rights of people of all religions, and states that Jerusalem shall be given special priority in the activities of the authorities of the State so as to further its development in economic and other matters.

4. The Language of the State of Israel

a) Hebrew is the language of the state.

b) The Arabic language has a special status in the state; the regulation of the Arab language in state institutions or when facing them will be regulated by law.

c) This clause does not change the status given to the Arabic language before the basic law was created.

Hebrew is the language of the Jewish State. Is there anything wrong with that?

Up until this law it was customary to make sure, particularly in official documentation and state institutions that Arabic would appear alongside Hebrew. For those who know neither language, English usually appears as well. For convenience many times there are also other languages such as Russian and Amharic. Now the law defines Arabic as having special status, particularly in regard to language in state institutions and instructs not to change (demote) what was customary before the law. This is actually an improvement in status as it makes what was customary but not mandatory, part of the law.

5. The state will be open to Jewish immigration and to the gathering of the exiled.

This is the legal version of the statement in the Declaration of Independence with almost the exact same wording: The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles. Adding this to the Basic Law is a reinforcement of Israel’s Law of Return (passed in 1950).

6. The Diaspora

a) The state will labor to ensure the safety of sons of the Jewish people and its citizens who are in trouble and captivity due to their Jewishness or their citizenship.

b) The state will act to preserve the cultural, historical and religious legacy of the Jewish people among the Jewish diaspora.

This clause defines the relationship of the Jewish State with the Diaspora:

The State of Israel will labor to protect anyone in trouble or in captivity due to their Jewishness or Israeli citizenship – including Jews who are not Israeli, sons of Jews (not necessarily Jewish according to Halacha) and non-Jewish citizens of Israel. This set of values and feeling of responsibility has led the decision-making process of the Jewish State from its inception to this day in regard to rescuing Jews in trouble anywhere in the world as well as paying the same regard and effort to assist all Israelis in trouble, whether they are Jewish or not.

The State will act to preserve Jewish legacy among the Jewish diaspora. This is a paradigm shift from the request in the Declaration of Independence asking diaspora Jews to assist the newly born State of Israel.

7. The state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.

This clause is the one that certain groups objected to but is it really any different from what is stated in the Declaration of Independence? Or the ideals of the Zionist movement? Or that of any newly founded nation state?

If the clause denied the right of non-Jewish settlement for Israel’s non-Jewish citizens that would certainly be problematic however that is not the case.

8. The Hebrew calendar is the official calendar of the state and alongside it the secular calendar will serve as an official calendar. The usage of the Hebrew calendar and of the secular calendar will be determined by law.

This is the current custom of the country, now made law.

9. National Holidays

a) Independence Day is the official holiday of the state.

b) The Memorial Day for those who fell in the wars of Israel and the Memorial Day for the Holocaust and heroism are official memorial days of the state.

This clause defines Israel’s Independence Day and Memorial Days as National holidays (as opposed to religious holidays). This has ramifications in regard to employer obligations to employees.

10. Saturday and the Jewish Holidays are the official days of rest in the state. Those who are not Jewish have the right to honor their days of rest and their holidays. Details concerning these matters will be determined by law.

Whereas the previous clause deals with national holidays, this deals with religious holidays. In continuation of what appears in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the law determines that while the official holidays and rest day of the Jewish State are the days noted in the Jewish tradition, non-Jews have the right to honor their holidays and rest day. This can become a little complicated as Muslims, Christians (and people of other faiths) have different holidays and rest days, for example Muslims rest on Friday while Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday. Honoring the different holidays and rest days, including making it possible for employees to take vacations and receive full benefits, is already the custom of the land. Now it is reinforced by this law.

11. This Basic Law may not be altered except by a Basic Law that gained the approval of the majority of the Knesset members.

Like other Basic Laws, this law is harder (but not impossible) to overturn or change than regular laws.

Conclusion

Much has been written about Israel’s Nation State Law. Examination of the concerns raised leads one to discover that the objections are not to the actual content of the law but rather questions about what does not appear in the law:

1. “Why does the basic law not mention, as the Declaration of Independence does, equality for all citizens?”

When one understands the Israeli system of Basic Laws and notes the content of the new law, this question becomes moot.

Equality for all citizens is already enshrined in previous Basic Laws, the new law does not overturn or cancel previous laws, it only provides a legal basis upon which it is possible to balance the needs and rights of individual citizens with the needs and rights of Israel as the Jewish Nation State.

In addition, the new law reinforces the rights of minorities within the framework of the Jewish State regarding language and freedom of religion (which also effects freedom of employment).

2. “Why is it necessary to create this law when all these points can be understood from the Declaration of Independence?”

All the points in the law are elements lifted directly from Israel’s Declaration of Independence however a declaration is just that – a declaration, not a law.
Although these points are understood, it is necessary to give the court system laws on which they can base their decisions. Before this new law, there was no legal basis on which the courts could rule when questions regarding symbols of the state, holidays, language etc. arose.

3. What about Israel’s non-Jewish citizens who are objecting to this law?

Israel takes the rights of her non-Jewish citizens very seriously and has done so since the establishment of the State. It is important to examine the concerns raised and address each and every one of them – with the understanding that there are different groups making different objections. Each much be addressed separately and not lumped together as if they were the same people raising the same issues. The Israeli government is in the process of doing exactly this.

Some issues are easier than others to address:

· Some object to Israel as the Jewish Nation State, refusing to recognize Israel as the ancestral homeland of the Jewish People. These are the people who demonstrated in Rabin Square with PLO flags shouting “In blood and with fire we will free Palestine.”

· Others object to the fact that the Nation State Law does not legalize the status of minority groups in Israel. While previous laws define the rights of all individuals, including minorities, there is no law defining the status of minorities as groups. This does not indicate a problem with the existing laws but does suggest that it might be necessary to pass an additional law defining the status of minorities as groups.

· Druze and Bedouin who feel that the law drives a wedge between them and the State of Israel. This is a sentiment that must be taken seriously. Those of the Arab population (such as most Druze and some Bedouin) who have chosen to ally themselves with the Jewish State are people who we do not want to alienate.
Close examination of their objections uncovers that their complaints are not really about the law itself but about what does not appear in the law. A large portion of the objectors in this group used the discussion of the law to raise issues of inequality in day-to-day life Israel that need to be addressed in order to create a better society but do not actually have anything to do with the law or any other laws being broken, rather societal issues and some government bureaucracy that if amended would make it easier for minorities to better integrate in the general population. Others were asking for their minority status as a group to be addressed in law, which as previously stated, is not an indication of a defect in this law but that it is worth considering creating a new law for that purpose.

Finally –

Israel’s Nation State law is the realization of what the founding fathers of the reborn Jewish State detailed in Israel’s Declaration of Independence – the self-determination of an indigenous people returned to sovereignty in our ancestral homeland, the realization of 2000 years of yearning for Zion and a stunning example for all other indigenous peoples around the world.

And yes, there are a lot of people who don’t like that but that’s too bad. We are Zion, home to stay.

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