Accession by Jordan does not compel it to conclude with Israel any of the arrangements mentioned in the Protocol. Jordan commits itself to the respect of the obligations contained in the Protocol towards States which do likewise. Jordan undertakes no commitment toward States whose regular or irregular armed forces do not observe the provisions of the Protocol.
It sure sounds like Jordan was saying two things:
1) The Protocol is only between High Contracting Parties, and since it did not recognize Israel as one of them, it was not obligated to refrain from using poison gas or biological weapons against Israel.
2) If it accuses Israel of using such weapons, for example by claiming as Mahmoud Abbas once did that Israel might poison the water supply of Palestinians, then that is an additional reason why Jordan would claim to be justified in using poison gas against Israel.
A further question can be asked: since Jordan's peace treaty with Israel, does this reservation on the prohibition of poison gas still apply, or does Jordan have to explicitly remove it from the record? As of this time, Jordan's reservation is still documented by the ICRC without any further comment. And Jordan's reservation saying that it doesn't apply to Israel is not conditional.
So Jordan may believe it has the legal right to use chemical WMDs against Israel - today.
(h/t Irene)
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This morning there was a car ramming attack where a Palestinian ran his car into IDF soldiers, injuring three.
The driver was killed.
Al Resalah reports that the terrorist, Ramzi Adnan Abu Yabes, 32, was the head of the nursing department at the Arab Rehabilitation Society in Bethlehem.
This is not the first doctor or other medical professional involved in attacks against Israelis.
Medical professionals are taught the basic concept of "First, do no harm." Apparently there is a Palestinian exception to that rule.
UPDATE:
(h/t Renato)
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The United States Agency for International Development announced that half of its employees in the West Bank and Gaza will be let go in the coming weeks and by early 2019, the operations will be completely shut down.
The humanitarian agency is one of the largest and most important in the region.
The U.S. State Department informed USAID last week that by next month the agency would have to present a list of 60 percent of its employees to be dismissed as the first step in the shutdown that will be finalized by 2019.
The USAID chapter in the West Bank and Gaza began operating in 1994, focusing mainly on economic issues including water, infrastructure, education and health. USAID has invested about $5.5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza in the construction of roads, schools, clinics and community centers.
USAID also buys medical equipment, provides humanitarian assistance to those in need of medical care and teaches lifesaving techniques to doctors from Gaza and the West Bank via Israel and other countries. In recent years USAID has conducted in-service education for teachers, built schools and worked on projects to keep young Palestinians in the education system.
USAID has been fairly concerned in making sure that it does not fund any people or groups associated with terrorism. At the same time, it has not been effective in training ordinary Palestinians to abhor terror and to accept Israel. Palestinian thinkers have warned that USAID promotes "normalization" but the PA has pushed back heavily against any such initiatives.
The purpose of foreign aid should be ending the need for its existence, and we provide development assistance to help partner countries on their own development journey to self-reliance – looking at ways to help lift lives, build communities, and establish self-sufficiency.
Our efforts are both from and for the American people.
USAID demonstrates America’s good will around the world; increases global stability by addressing the root causes of violence; opens new markets and generates opportunity for trade; creates innovative solutions for once unsolvable development challenges; saves lives; and advances democracy, governance, and peace.
By those standards, has USAID been successful in the territories?
Are Palestinians more pro-American? Clearly not.
Did USAID address root causes of anti-Israel violence? Clearly not.
Did it open new markets in the territories? If it did, those markets are minuscule.
Did it advance democracy? Certainly not.
Did it advance governance? It seems that on the contrary, the Palestinian leaders are now dependent on foreigners to build their governance structure, and after over 20 years, one would think they would be more self sufficient if these foreign teams from the US and EU really were teaching them how to be self-sufficient.
Did it advance peace? No, although it possibly kept the status quo.
The head of USAID once said “I believe the purpose of foreign assistance is to end the need for its existence.” By that measure, USAID has failed Palestinians, and withdrawing it should be to their benefit - they have the tools, they just choose not to use them.
There is a danger to Israel by the removal of USAID. Infrastructure projects are needed no matter who funds them and if there is no safe water, for example, Israel will end up being more involved in Palestinian affairs rather than disengaging from them.
Chances are pretty good that for the medium term, the EU will happily make up the shortfall from the absence of USAID. But that pushes the main problem off - if the purpose of this aid is to build self sufficiency, then the programs must have that goal in mind from the start, instead of creating a welfare society where Palestinians expect the West to do everything for them, as exists today.
It is absurd that so many years after Oslo the Palestinians have not learned to build their own institutions. Zionists in the 1920s and 1930s essentially built their state institutions without foreign assistance and they were ready in 1948 to govern themselves.
The world needs to look at exactly why "Palestine" has not progressed significantly in self-sufficiency since 1994.
it won't like the answer - that the "State of Palestine" is not meant to be a place for Palestinians to live safely and with dignity, and instead it has always meant to be a springboard to destroy Israel. Any aid they get towards that goal is welcome, and any aid they get that frustrates that goal is rejected.
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“Suppose the Exodus from Egypt had never occurred. Suppose the Romans never exiled the Jews. Suppose also that there had been no Jews in antiquity. Even then, the justification for establishing their nationhood in Israel would be valid along the lines I tried to explain in my article “From rabid Zionism to egalitarian Zionism” (November 9, 2018).
Shlomo Sand’s response to my arguments (“The twisted logic of the Jewish historic right to Israel,” November 16, 2018), misses that central point. In this sense he’s like Naftali Bennett. The education minister carries an ancient coin in his pocket in order to prove Jewish ownership of the land since antiquity. Sand’s understandable revulsion at the Jewish-national implications of Bennett’s version of nationalism, based on that coin, leads him to reject Zionism in its entirety.
The justification I tried to provide for this ideology frees us both from Bennett’s coin and from Sand’s contentions against it. It’s anchored not in the history of the Jews in antiquity, but rather in two pivotal facts regarding their history in modernity.
Fact 1: A major component of the Jews’ social profile in modernity, in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their surroundings, is that of group originating in Palestine in antiquity. It doesn’t take a historian to recognize this fact. Suffice it to read the Passover Haggadah, be a tourist in Florence or listen to the “Passions,” preferably Bach’s.” (h/t dov)
For the full article click via twitter:
Israel is important as an embodiment of Jewish self-rule not only for its own Jews, but for world Jewry as a whole | Opinionhttps://t.co/6deq5zCZad
Monday is the tenth anniversary of the Mumbai terror attacks, and the event is being marked with a renaming ceremony at the Chabad center that was one of the targets.
On November 26, 2008, ten terrorists from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) group entered Mumbai by sea and launched a coordinated gun-and-bomb assault on multiple sites in India’s most populous metropolis, killing 166 people — including six Jews at the Nariman House.
A decade after the carnage, the Chabad center is being renovated, and the fifth floor — where the murdered Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg lived with their two-year-old son Moshe (who survived the attack, thanks to the heroism of his nanny, Sandra Samuel) — is to be named the “Nariman Lighthouse” and serve as a memorial to the victims of the Mumbai attacks.
“We hope that viewing this will teach visitors the power of adding light,” Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky — the current head of the Nariman House — told Lubavitch.com. “We want to create waves of good that will spread until the whole world is filled with it.”
Former intelligence officer slams France’s “short-termist” policy to help militant groups for immediate securi
France worked closely with Palestinian Authority during the late 1990's and 2000's, including during the Second Intifada ("uprising") against Israel, providing training and delivering "sensitive intelligence" to the PA's security services, a former officer in the French secret service told i24NEWS on Wednesday.
Speaking with i24NEWS defense correspondent Mattias Inbar on his French-language weekly Defense program, Pierre Martinet said that “France, via its secret service, trained Palestinian agents in France” and that the French government delivered “sensitive materials to the Palestinian administration via the diplomatic bag”.
The diplomatic bag is an expression to describe a physical package that is used by a diplomatic mission to exchange correspondences with its home country. It cannot be officially scrutinized by another country’s border protection agencies and benefits from the same kind of diplomatic immunity as its owners.
The ‘bag’ can be anything, but is most often an actual suitcase.
"Unofficially we have collaborated with different [foreign] services, more notably with Palestine at different times. We worked with them on training and delivery of certain materials....through back-channel diplomacy," Martinet said.
Check out this abstract of a paper published at the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication by Atef Alshaer, who lectures at the University of Westminster and who wrote this while at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London:
This article sheds light on poetry written by two of the most prominent leaders of Hamas, assassinated by Israel in 2003 and 2004, respectively: Ibrahim al-Maqadmah and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Both leaders took part in the creation of Hamas and propagated its ideology in political, cultural and other fields. Poetry, being the premier form of artistic expression in the Arab world, is used by the leaders of Hamas to present their experiences in Israeli prisons, and their vision and involvement in the Palestinian struggle. The sentiments that their poetry expresses, reveal deep and nuanced cultural, political and philosophical dimensions. The poetry of Hamas can be characterized as one of commitment, suffering, pain, longing, defiance, and certainty.
The paper is even worse, as Alshaer refers to the murderous leaders of Hamas as "intellectuals" who suffered a "cruel fate":
Al-Rantisi became the movement’s leader following the assassination of founder Ahmad Yasin by Israel in 2004, and was himself assassinated by Israel later that year. Ibrahim al-Maqadmah was also assassinated by Israel in 2003. Both had similar life experiences, and ultimately shared the same cruel fate, like many other Palestinian intellectuals.
See? Israel doesn't target Hamas terrorists who blow up buses and pizza shops with women and children - it targets Palestinian intellectuals!
The entire paper is filled with love of Hamas and denial of its violent nature. In this section, Alshaer claims that Rantisi only wants peace, a desire frustrated by Israel:
In these lines, al-Rantisi shows an existential paradox, wherein Palestinian lives have been disrupted and deprived of normality: on the one hand, there is the desire to live in peace and to see fulfillment of one’s needs and desires, and on the other, there are the forces which have rendered impossible the fulfillment of these needs and desires. Confronted by this dilemma, al-Rantisi chooses to resist injustice.
"Justice," of course, is the destruction of Israel.
Rantisi's poem urging his son to take up violence is interpreted romantically by Alshaer:
Better to die than to live as a coward… here you are rotting in a prison with no
price/ tomorrow you die, and you will be buried/ O, pity on me, to whom you
would leave your sons/ and the wife you will leave behind to wolves…I fear that
you would be exiled tomorrow/ you would leave your house derelict; complain
over the ruins/ you search for a trusted friend/ to cry for you or share the suffering
with you…I forewarn you my son not to bow to an idol, not to return the sword
to the sheath/ go in life as you like; I would not be satisfied with such a life
without struggle.
This is a moving poem, clouded by paradoxes and occasional mysteries,
such as when he fears that his wife would be left to wolves if he dies. Wolves
are depicted as representing the ultimate danger; he understandably is racked
with worry over the state of his wife and his sons if he is not to be with them.
Here, the poet depicts himself as ‘the man, guardian, of the house’ who ensures
the safety and security of his family. But finally, Al-Rantisi beckons his son
not to give up: what is at stake deserves sacrifices; not doing so would be tantamount
to surrendering to the forces that deny Palestinians a life of dignity
and peace.
The keywords that Alshaer uses to describe this paper shows his romanticizing of the terror group:
Alshaer, who clearly shares Hamas' philosophy, does admit that Hamas' poetry proves that Hamas is not interested in peace with Israel but in creating an Islamic state:
[W]ithin the grand scheme of Hamas’ ideology, an independent
Palestinian state is only a stepping stone towards the realization of a larger
Islamic polity that would encapsulate territories larger than Palestine, and ultimately
culminates in an Islamic caliphate.
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In 2012, the ADL condemned Russia awarding the Pushkin Medal literary award to a Syrian writer, Ali Ukla Ursan, who had expressed antisemitic beliefs and supported the 9/11 terror attacks.
They quoted Ursan as saying "The covetous, racist and hated Jew Shylock who cut the flesh from Antonio's chest with the knife of hatred, invades you with his money, his modern airplanes, his missiles and his nuclear bombs."
It is not surprising that the Zionist racists are rooting and renewing their terrible crimes, ready to re-establish their criminal history, against the so-called "goyim," Christians and Muslims in particular. But the silence the world on all of this, this terrible racist crime, represented by the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its criminal practices, is surprising and insulting and condemnable.
Ursan eventually gets to his real point:
And "Bibi", located in the center of the celebration, participating in the anniversary of the end of the Great World War. For this occasion he celebrated the Nakba of innocent Palestinian Arab blood, to drink there...The Zionist racists are celebrating their religious feasts, where they make their unleavened bread on the high holidays, thoroughly soaked in the blood of the Goyim. The terrible incident that took place in the "Bab Touma" neighborhood of Damascus, is still in memory. On February 6, 1840, Eid al-Fitr, two innocent human members of the "Goyim = the Gentiles" Padre Tomasso, a Christian cleric and pharmacist, followed by Ibrahim Amara, were massacred by the people of the Bibi Netanyahu...On the evening of the festive day, on Sunday 11/11/2018 (Bibi celebrated) with the blood of "Goyim = Gentiles" of Muslims in the Gaza Strip, Mohammed Baraka, and the Mujahideen al-Qassam Brigades: Muhammad Majid al-Qara, Alaa al-Din Fawzi Vseifis, Mahmoud Attallah Musbah, Mustafa Hassan Abu Odeh, Omar Naji Abu Khater and Khaled Muhammad Qweider from the Salah al-Din Brigades.
In a column last month Ursan describes "Zionists" (obviously meaning Jews) by saying "they have chosen to lie down in the ladder of human decay by disguising themselves as a common human being......They are racist killers, spoilers in the land through history..."
Just some everyday antisemitism in Arab media.
(h/t Alex)
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The president of Chad, Idriss Déby, will visit Israel this week, an unprecedented trip for the leader of the Muslim-majority nation in Central Africa, which does not have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.
His arrival was confirmed Sunday by state-owned media in Chad.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem has in recent years intensified its contacts with various Muslim states in Africa, including Mali and Somalia.
Senior Israeli officials have recently traveled to N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, to prepare Déby’s visit to Israel and to prepare the ground for a possible renewal of diplomatic relations.
I only found the story in a single Chad news site so far, in Le Tchadanthropus-Tribune, which notes that Israel has provided security services for the country for years:
Credible sources say Idriss Déby will pay an official visit to Israel on Sunday, November 25, 2018. This will be first official visit since his coming to power, and the first since the break-up of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1968.
Israel has always been at the heart of the MPS security system... One can still recall the close cooperation in terms of listening and intelligence between technicians from the Jewish state and the ANS team at the time. Chad's political police (ANS) had benefited from sophisticated intelligence equipment to deal with Sudan and rebellions that coveted the presidential chair. Many observers still remember having heard on the Chadian radio exchanges between the current chief of intelligence Sudan Salah Gosh and officials of the Chadian rebellion. This interception of the communications was made thanks to the technical tools of the Israelis.
In addition, RAM armored vehicles and some of the current equipment of the presidential guard also come from Israel.
Today in the current context, many observers of the Chadian policy analyze this trip in relation to the current security situation in the country.
... Let's hope Déby does not say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel to attract the good graces of Zionism ...
The presence of an advance team from Israel was noted in one other newspaper and greeted with suspicion:
About twenty Israeli citizens have been staying in Chad for a month; their arrival and stay are directly managed by Deby in person, even the ANS is not involved. With the direct involvement of Deby, speculation is high on their exact role; some think they would be in charge of Deby's personal safety, others argue they assist with wiretapping. The fact remains that Chadians have the right to know their true status... aid workers, or even mercenaries like the pilots of fighter jets paid for by the Chadian taxpayer?
This is yet another breathtaking diplomatic breakthrough by Netanyahu. Muslim-majority nations can no longer be expected to automatically adhere to the boycotting of Israel that occurred after 1967.
These diplomatic wins have a snowball effect. In the past, even if a Muslim-majority nation might have wanted to expand relations with Israel, they would have faced the prospect of being economically isolated by the Arab world. But now with Israeli officials openly visiting Gulf states that fear has evaporated; the Arab world's fracture over the one previously unifying stance about Israel has opened the floodgates for other nations to more openly look out for their own best interests.
The Arab and Muslim lockstep on being anti-Israel has ended, and the Palestinian leadership is panicking.
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Abbas was similarly blindsided by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to Oman, and Minister of Culture and Sports Miri Regev’s visit to Abu Dhabi for the world judo championships.
The recent almost-war with Hamas taught us a lot about the terror regime. It also taught us a lot about Hamas’s rival, Fatah, and the Palestinian Authority it controls in Ramallah. Israel’s most urgent task is to understand the implications of what we now know.
The first thing we learned about Hamas is that its control over Gaza is all encompassing.
This week, the media published the communications between Hamas forces during their battle with IDF Special Forces in Gaza on November 11. From those communications we learned that Hamas forces detected the vehicle carrying the Israeli forces very quickly. While they didn’t know who was in the vehicle, they knew the vehicle was suspicious and dispatched a force to intercept it.
Hamas’s ability to detect the vehicle and act swiftly to intercept it demonstrated the terror regime’s ability to use both technological and physical assets to maintain its control over Gaza in a manner reminiscent of the Stasi in East Germany.
THE ALMOST-WAR with Hamas last week also taught us that contrary to the longstanding assessment of the IDF’s General Staff, Hamas is not at all interested in reaching a long-term ceasefire with Israel and therefore there is no point in trying to negotiate one.
For the past several months, various experts inside the Israeli government and military and in foreign countries have claimed that Hamas’s leadership in Gaza is split between two factions.
Prominent historian Simon Schama on Friday called for commemorating the expulsion of over 800,000 Jews from Arab countries that followed the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
“This is so important — 800,000 Jewish refugees — When exactly next week is the day of commemoration of THEIR naqba?” Schama asked, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” commonly used to describe the experience of Arab refugees during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
Schama’s acclaimed recent book and TV series, “A History of the Jews,” includes a detailed account of the uprooting of Jewish communities from North Africa to Yemen, in which he contrasts the silence around this question with the attention given to the Palestinian issue.
November 30 — a week from today — is marked in Israel as an official commemoration of the expulsion of the Jews from the Arab countries and, later, from Iran. It falls, symbolically, one day after the anniversary of the UN resolution in favor of partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, which is officially commemorated by the UN as an “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.”
The November 30 commemoration in Israel has been held since 2014, when it was formally established in legislation passed by the Knesset.
Many Jewish organizations in the US and around the world also remember the expulsions on the same day.
Jewish leaders are calling for new editions of the Bible and Koran to carry warning messages which highlight anti-Semitic passages in the holy texts.
The recommendations have been made in a new document called ‘An End to Antisemitism! A Catalogue of Policies to Combat Antisemitism’.
It was produced following an international conference organised by the European Jewish Congress, at which academics gathered to discuss how prejudice and discrimination can be tackled.
Among the policies mentioned in the document was the idea of warning messages in holy texts, a topic discussed in a chapter entitled 'recommendations regarding Religious Groups and Institutions'.
The document reads: 'Translations of the New Testament, the Qur’an and other Christian or Muslim literatures need marginal glosses, and introductions that emphasize continuity with Jewish heritage of both Christianity and Islam and warn readers about antisemitic passages in them.
'While some efforts have been made in this direction in the case of Christianity, these efforts need to be extended and made consistent in both religions.' (h/t jzaik)
Here's a video of Islamic Jihad female terrorists learning how to use guns. Most of them are using wooden replicas of guns, but some are actually shooting. The video is interspersed with photos of female "martyr" heroes who have blown up and stabbed Jews.
It is a sick society that produces, promotes and condones stuff like this.
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National identity was replaced by factional interest groups. Morality was replaced by a Marxist view of the world based on competing power blocs. Biblical morality was replaced by man-made, universalizing ideologies, such as moral and cultural relativism or multiculturalism.
Above all, the Western nation could never defend itself by force. Every conflict had to be resolved through negotiation, compromise and peace processes – even with non-negotiable, genocidal agendas. Hence the terrible Iran nuclear deal, and the reframing altogether of the Arab war of extermination against Israel as a conflict between two rival claims to the land.
In the Western progressive mind, therefore, Israel is damned many times over: as a (supposedly) Western, ethnic nation that defends itself with force.
Perhaps even more enraging to the Left than that, the ancient kingdom of Israel was the original paradigm nation, on which at some level America and Britain modeled themselves.
The current resurgence of antisemitism in the West is part of a far deeper and wider struggle. It’s a fight between two views of the world and of humanity itself. A fight over how we should live in this world, what it means to be moral and what it means to be human. And Jews are on both sides in this great battle.
But if the West is ever to learn to love the Jewish people and their nation in Israel, it will first have to learn to love again the Western nation itself.
Twenty years ago almost no one in the West had heard of Female Genital Mutilation. Then in the 2000s, thanks to a few brave and vocal campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, knowledge of this barbaric practice began to spread.
Originally there was some queasiness about taking up the subject at all. Lawmakers and opinion formers took a while to work out their line. There was an early question mark over whether FGM wasn’t just the same as male circumcision. Most people swiftly learned that the difference was, gynaecologically speaking, almost everything. There were some hold-outs among people who thought that since FGM was practiced among Muslims there might be something ‘Islamophobic’ about objecting to the mutilation of young girls’ genitals with knives. On such fine judgement calls (‘child mutilation’ vs the suspicion of prejudice?) is the modern liberal conscience formed.
Eventually by this decade most countries in the West had settled on a consensus that FGM was wrong. Although the question of exactly what to do about it remained.
In the UK, a law banning the practice has actually been on the books for three decades. Yet to date only a handful of people have been charged with the offence and there has not been a single successful prosecution. Some of the reasons are understandable. Collecting evidence in such cases is difficult, and it often relies on children giving evidence about someone close to them. Nevertheless there is a huge question mark over the whole matter. If thousands of girls are being tortured and mutilated in your country every year why would the state not move heaven and earth to bring all those responsible to justice?
Sadly, for most Israelis and Jews around the world, it is just another day. However, according to a law passed in 2014 by Knesset member Dr. Shimon Ohayon, November 30 is now the official day of commemoration for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
It should be an important day on the official global Jewish calendar, because the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa are an essential part of Jewish history, even for those of us who did not come from there.
One of the issues I was able and proud to raise during my time in government was the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa — communities massively predating Islam and the Arab conquest of the region in the seventh century — and the appropriation of their assets, estimated in today’s prices to be many billions of dollars.
Unfortunately, this history — the forced exodus of Jews who, along with their descendants, constitute the majority of Jews in Israel — is barely studied, mostly ignored, and seemingly of little interest to the general population and Diaspora Jewry.
Apart from the great work of organizations like Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and Harif, I was amazed that the issue had only seldom been raised in any meaningful way around the world.
Growing up in a thriving Jewish community, attending a Jewish school, and being involved in the Jewish community and Zionist organizations, I am astounded now, thinking back, how little was taught about the long and illustrious history of the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa, and their subsequent expulsion.
I recently unveiled an algorithm to determine what people or groups of people have the highest "victimhood" scores, which in today's environment means that those with higher scores are automatically considered more righteous than those with lower scores. Read there for details on how it works.
Thanks to L. King, I can now present an interactive version of the calculator, where you simply check off the categories that apply to whoever you want to rank and it will calculate the total!
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So alongside being the only country that pop stars refuse to play in, and the only country whose academics are boycotted on Western campuses, and the only country whose dancers and violinists cannot perform in cities like London without gangs of people screaming them down, and the only country whose produce is routinely avoided by luvvies and liberals, now Israel is the only country that has been politically punished by holiday app cum conscience of the Twitterati, Airbnb.
Airbnb has taken the extraordinary decision to stop advertising homes for rent in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It is extraordinary because Airbnb still advertises places to stay in Tibet, a place many Tibetans consider to be unjustly dominated by China. And in Crimea, recently annexed by Russia. And in Northern Cyprus, a Turkish-ruled statelet since the mid-1970s, which only Turkey recognises as a legitimate state, and to which Turkey has sent huge numbers of settlers in recent decades. Why are Turkish settlers less offensive to the Western conscience than Jewish ones? Why is it OK to rent a holiday apartment in Turkish-settled Northern Cyprus but not in Israeli-settled parts of the West Bank? Anyone?
What’s more, you can still get Airbnb places in countries which in recent years have executed far worse acts of war and militarism than Israel has. Saudi Arabia, for example, which has plunged Yemen into one of the most barbaric crises of humanity of recent decades: no Airbnb pangs of conscience about doing business in Saudi. And in Turkey, whose recent treatment of Kurds in Syria, and in Turkey itself of course, has been bloody and chilling. But never mind all that — roll up, roll up, get yourself an Airbnb hangout in the state that has repressed and murdered huge numbers of Kurds!
It is only Israeli-claimed territory that is singled out. It is only Jewish settlements that are punished. It is only apartments being offered for rent by Jewish people who believe in the idea of Greater Israel that are delisted. Only those people. But we shouldn’t be surprised. It is always only those people. Israel is always singled out. It is treated by right-on Westerners as being more wicked, more toxic, more evil and more destructive than any other state on Earth. That is why they boycott it, rage about it and take to the streets about it in a way they never do about Turkey, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. They hate Israel more than any other place. The question is: why?
Why indeed. Certainly antisemitism is there in the mix. So too is leftist ideology which ludicrously regards Israel as a colonialist oppressor.
The question remains, however, why the Palestinian cause rather than any other became the issue of issues for the western left. One crucial factor is surely the strategic alliance in the 1970s between the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and the former Soviet Union to turn it into precisely such a defining cause.
Millions of dollars were spent on bombarding the universities and other western institutions with lies about Palestinian and Middle East history. Arafat and the Soviets had a joint interest in creating an entirely fake Palestinian identity, intended not only to bring about the destruction of Israel by casting it as the pariah of the world but also to undermine and destabilise the west by destroying its ability to understand the true threats to life and liberty and to mistake its friends for its enemies and vice versa.
The demonisation of Israel thus exhibits the signature motif of Soviet totalitarianism: a passage through the mirror into a nightmarish world where black is white and lies are truths and everything is the negation of reality, and those who state the facts are stamped upon as enemies of the people.
Which is why the extreme animus against Israel as displayed by the Quakers, Airbnb and a myriad others in so-called “progressive” circles isn’t just a double standard and vicious prejudice but also seems utterly, surreally, brain-fryingly mad.
PORTNOY, the British-Israeli singing duo, released a song late Thursday slamming Airbnb for its recent decision to remove listings in West Bank settlements.
"I'm gonna take you off my phone/ Until you stop discriminating on my home," the brothers sing in the new catchy clip. "I'm gonna take you off my phone/ Just like you wiped us off of your own."
The brothers, Sruli and Mendy, were outraged by the Airbnb decision this week, and wanted to add their voices to the call for the company to "stay out of politics... we should all boycott them instead," Sruli told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
On Wednesday, they posted a clip to their Facebook page with a short version of the song "we wrote in about 20 minutes." But they were shocked and furious when it disappeared from the site with no explanation.
"Three hours after we released it, it just vanished from Facebook," Sruli said. "We didn't get a message from Facebook that there was a violation - it just disappeared as if it was never there... it felt very violating."
Many people have found the Official EoZ Intersectionality Victimhood Calculator that I released ths week to be very helpful in figuring out who is the bigger victim in any conflict, according to today's "progressive" groupthink.
However, the Calculator's utility goes beyond comparing people or groups in conflict. It can also explain individual events.
I saw this tweet:
Seriously - one tweet wrecked Roseanne.
What does it take for Sarsour?
Roseanne Barr's score in the calculator is a very bad -17:
Woman +6
White -1
Republican or conservative -3
Jew -3
Identifies proudly as Zionist -8
Trump supporter -8
Anyone with a score below zero is presumed to be immoral or evil. A single wrong step is enough to justify this prejudice by the supposedly colorblind "progressive" crowd. So a single tweet from Roseanne with her horrendous score and she is not given the opportunity to apologize, or to explain - her tweet is viewed as confirmation of what everyone "knew" about her to begin with. The media, including her bosses at ABC, are not going to give her a second chance. Her tweet confirmed the existing bias inherent in her poor intersectionalist victimhood score.
Now let's look at Linda Sarsour's score:
Woman +6
Muslim +5
Arab, other Middle Eastern +5
Wears hijab +2
Palestinian +2
That is a +20, an excellent score for the left-wing and their sympathizers.
In this case, Sarsour presumed to be righteous, because she checks off so many of the "victimhood" boxes which give a moral authority to anyone who happens to fit the "correct" categories. She can say whatever she wants and she is given the benefit of the doubt, and when she seems to cross a line or ten the progressive crowd is more than willing to overlook her words and judge her purely based on her intersectional victimhood score.
Sarsour has an additional advantage, which is that any reporter who might consider objectively documenting the many outrageous things she has said that prove her hate and bias needs to worry about appearing misogynist, Islamophobic and anti-Arab. The fear of blowback has a chilling effect on what gets reported in most media. People with scores below zero are enthusiastically attacked by most mainstream media reporters, people with high scores are treated with kid gloves.
There you have it. The idea that the world is fair is a joke - the only real way to measure people's righteousness is by using the Calculator and embedding the scores' bias into your consciousness. That is what a significant percentage of "progressive" time is spent doing.
The bias that the calculator exposes is real, and it affects real people. The irony is that the very people who bristle at the idea that they are biased are actually the real bigots.
UPDATE: For the record, I believe Roseanne's explanation for her tweet not being intentionally racist. There have been many people of color who I never identified as such based on their light skin without seeing articles that identified them as such, most recently Meghan Markle.
Full disclosure: A couple of years ago Roseanne had donated to EoZ.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Tiyach and Tayach is a company that specializes in preservation and restoration projects of historical buildings in Israel.
One of its projects is to restore the historic Hassan Bek mosque in Jaffa.
Its description of the history of the mosque includes a disturbing detail: (apparently taken verbatim and autotranslated from the Wikipedia Hebrew page on the mosque):
Between 1914 and 1916 Hassan Bek built a magnificent mosque in the northern part of Jaffa, in the Manshiyeh neighborhood, to block the expansion of Tel Aviv.
The mosque, designed by Ben Zion Gini, the Jewish city engineer in Jaffa, was built with a tower disproportionately high for the building itself, and it controls all of its surroundings.
For the purpose of establishing the mosque, which he dedicated to himself, Hassan Beck employed a lot of forced laborers (a custom in the Ottoman Empire), which he ordered to work day and night to complete the task quickly.
The effort was so great that many of them were injured or even died during the construction.
...
Construction materials were taken from residents of the area who were forced to sign that they give the materials as a gift.
During the mosque construction, Ottoman army soldiers kidnapped Jewish youths from Tel Aviv and especially from the “Yemenite vineyards” for forced construction of the mosque.
Two of these young men were: Zechariah (Yahya) Valani and Shalom (Salem) Massuari.
Hassan Bek did not finish the construction of the mosque before he left his post in March 1916.
The Supreme Muslim Council, which understood the importance of the mosque for the Arab national cause, invested the necessary funds and the construction of the mosque ended in 1923.
Officially, the Ottoman empire ended slavery in the late 19th century but I cannot find any other source at this time of forced laborers for Islamic or state projects.
If accurate, this is a disturbing chapter in history that has not been researched fully.
(h/t Michelle)
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Faisal al-Fayez, chairman of the Jordanian Senate, issued a statement on what is necessary to achieve a two state solution.
"There must be pressure on Israel by the superpowers, including the United States," he said.
He said that it is up to the Palestinians to decide what is acceptable in any deal. "If the Palestinians accept the solution we will accept the solution and if they do not accept it, we will not accept it," he said.
His statements on Jerusalem seem at odds with the official Palestinian position, however. While Palestinian leaders insist that there is no peace without them being in control of every inch of what Jordan illegally annexed in 1949, Jordan seems to want to maintain some control over that area itself.
Al-Fayez stressed that "The king can not give up Jerusalem. The subject of Hashemite tutelage is very important, there is a spiritual relationship between the Hashemite kings and Jerusalem."
"Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders is a red line, there can be no solution except for the satisfaction of the Palestinian people."
At no point did al-Fayez say that Jerusalem must be the Palestinian capital. Moreover, he seems to be insisting that Jordan maintain control over (at least) the religious sites in Jerusalem even if Palestinians gain it as their capital.
This means that Jordan does not intend for Palestinians to have complete control over what the world calls east Jerusalem in any peace deal!
Any sovereign state would be insulted at the idea of another country controlling part of its capital, but Jordan seems to be insisting on having some control over Jerusalem even under Palestinian sovereignty.
Al-Fayez is contradicting himself by saying on the one hand that Jordan will accept whatever solution the Palestinians accept, and then saying that Jordan must maintain some control over Jerusalem separate from Palestinian control.
This is a fundamental disagreement between the Palestinian leadership's public statements and Jordan's official position.
The common denominator is that all Arabs agree that Jews must not have any control over the city that has been the central part of Jewish spirituality and identity for some three thousand years. Everything else is mere details.
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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
