It turns out that this was a campaign launched in November by the Nasser al-Aqsa Organization in Lebanon and the Palestinian Center for the Resistance of Normalization.
That latter group, which has only a handful of Twitter followers, has a list of the evils of normalization:
Normalization - highest treason No matter what the occupation does, it will remain a germ in this region, besieged by the immune system (resistance to normalization) in order to destroy it in time. Normalization is a loss of honor and dignity, a surrender to the occupation Normalization is to recognize the right thief who stole your brother's house and expelled him and his family to the street, and open your house to steal from you and to expel you and your family later Normalization with the Zionists and recognizing them as a crime, it is morally treacherous, political suicide, historical falsehood and shame Normalization with the Zionist entity is a waiver of the sanctities of the nation and the Aqsa Mosque, "the first Muslim qibla." Normalization is a crime no different than being a traitor to one's religion, Arabism and homeland
Normalization, of course, just means treating the Jewish state like any other. You know, peace. The Palestinians are in an absolute panic over the wave of Arab nations who are more and more willing to move their covert ties to Israel to become overt - above the table, as this cartoon shows in "before" and "after" (read left to right:)
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A few weeks ago my father, Harry Lumish, passed of natural causes just short of his 99th birthday.
The odds of a man born in 1920 and living to the age of 99 are about 200 to 1.
He arrived in this world in Medzhybizh, Ukraine -- the home of Baal Shem Tov and the Chasid Movement -- during a period of violent pogroms. I assume that many of those folks in Crown Heights are actually relatives of mine, but I do not know.
My grandfather, Beryl, fled with his immediate family, including my grandmother, Sarah, from Medzhybizh, because they were not fond of sword and rifle-wielding Kossacks. They were running for their lives. They sought legal access into the United States but were not obliged by the United States government. They were able, however, to relocate briefly to Argentina.
Shortly before the paperwork came through and my family received permission to legally migrate into the United States, my grandfather died and his daughter, my aunt Betty, was born in Argentina. Not long thereafter Sarah passed through Ellis Island with Harry and Betty in her arms on their way to Brooklyn. Before my grandmother got on her feet, they stayed at the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of that borough. Family legend has it that Sarah actually scrubbed floors at that institution in the early-mid 1920s.
The rest of my father's side of the family who stayed in Medzhybizh were slaughtered by the Germans during World War II under Operation Barbarossa, which was the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Medzhybizh was simply on the road in one of the German routes to Russia. When the Nazis arrived they separated the Jews from the non-Jews of that small town and put both populations to road building. When that task was done they had the Jews dig ditches. When the ditches were dug they had the Jews line-up within those ditches.
I feel reasonably certain that you know what happened after that. That was when my family lost the great majority of my father's side.
His story, though, like that of many millions of other Americans, is a sort-of classic American truth. He and Sarah and Betty came through Ellis Island with nothing. My dad ran around Brooklyn as a child during the Depression. He described himself as a "wild kid" which is hard for me to grasp because the guy who raised me was a middle-class accountant and philatelist.
{And, I have to say, I have a great deal of affection for that mint Israeli stamp collection that he poured through over decades.}
Shortly before 7 December 1941, which Franklyn Roosevelt referred to as "a date which will live in infamy," he enrolled in St. John's College in New York. His intention was to become an accountant. Unfortunately, the world powers got in the way of that small personal endeavor and they dragged him off to the Central Pacific; Kwajalein, the Marshall Islands, Enewetak. He became a skinny twenty-year-old corporal with a rifle slung over his shoulder, sleeping in foxholes as Japanese snipers shot at United States soldiers from trees.
He lasted the duration of the American participation in the war, but he came through OK... otherwise I would not even be here.
Upon returning home to New York City, he met my mother, Rita, from the Bronx, finished his degree, built a family and moved into the suburbs while listening to Glenn Miller. He did it with practically nothing. What he had was the GI Bill of Rights which paid for the rest of his education.
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The Israeli Air Force struck two Hamas positions in the eastern Gaza Strip on Sunday in response to an explosive device that was flown into southern Israel earlier in the day, the army said.
On Sunday morning, a bomb was flown into Israel using a large cluster of balloons and a drone-like glider device, landing in a carrot field in the Sdot Negev region of southern Israel shortly before noon.
In retaliation for the cross-border attack from Gaza, Israeli military helicopters attacked two observation posts east of Khan Younis that are controlled by the coastal enclave’s Hamas rulers, the Israel Defense Forces said.
“IDF attack helicopters struck two military positions belonging to the Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip in response to the balloon-borne explosive device, which was launched by a model drone,” the army said.
In addition to the posts near Khan Younis, Palestinian media reported that the IDF had attacked targets near Jabalia, in northern Gaza, and in the Zeitoun area of Gaza City, in the central Strip. The IDF refused to comment on those reports.
The military did not say who it believed flew the bomb into southern Israel, but said it held Hamas responsible as the rulers of Gaza.
“The IDF will continue to act in defense of the citizens of Israel and against terrorism from the Strip,” the army said.
A drone-shaped device from the Gaza Strip exploded in an agricultural field of an Israeli kibbutz northeast of the coastal enclave on Sunday, causing neither injury nor damage, police said.
Security forces had been sent to the carrot field in the Sdot Negev region where the object landed, the Israel Defense Forces said.
The object was shaped like an unmanned aerial vehicle, with a wingspan of over 1.2 meters (4 feet), and was carried into Israel by dozens of colorful helium balloons. Though similar to a drone in appearance, the device was apparently not capable of flight.
The name of a Gazan engineering college was printed on the side of the drone lookalike.
Police said the device exploded as a bomb disposal robot examined it. The drone lookalike was then carried away.
The Los Angeles Times published a column on Friday evening excusing the charges of antisemitism against the leaders of the Women’s March.
The op-ed, written by the newspaper’s columnist Robin Abcarian was titled, “Can you admire Louis Farrakhan and still advance the cause of women? Maybe so. Life is full of contradictions.”
In the column, Abcarian claimed that she thinks “it is possible to be repulsed by [Farrakhan’s] hateful rhetoric about white people, especially Jews, and still appreciate some of the empowerment work that he has done in the black community.”
Though she criticized the Women’s March organizers for taking too long to respond to accusations of antisemitism, Abcarian wrote that the fruits of the march were so inspirational as to eclipse that.
“While organizers of the Women’s March battled over who said what to whom about Jewish people when, and the merits of a noted antisemite, American women stood up by the millions and changed the country,” Abcarian wrote. “For that, everyone involved in the Women’s March can take a bow.”
But many people – Jewish and non-Jewish alike – were far from moved by Abcarian’s dismissal of antisemitism by both the Women’s March and Farrakhan.
A tweet from the newspaper’s “L.A. Now” Twitter account with a link to the article was subject to what’s known on Twitter as “the ratio.” As of Sunday morning, the tweet had been liked just 294 times, while it had been the subject of close to 2,500 irate replies on the social media platform.
Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.
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Over more than half a century of occupation, Israel has mastered the arts of monitoring and surveilling millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself. Israel is now packaging and selling this knowledge to governments that admire the country’s ability to suppress and manage resistance. Israel’s occupation has thus gone global. The country’s defense exports reached a record $9.2 billion in 2017, 40 percent higher than in 2016 (in a global arms market that recorded its highest ever sales in 2017 at $398.2 billion). The majority of these sales were in Asia and the Pacific region. Military hardware, such as missiles and aerial defenses, was the largest sector at 31 percent, while intel, cyber, and information systems comprised 5 percent. Israel’s industry is supported by lavish domestic spending: in 2016, defense expenditure represented 5.8 percent of the country’s GDP. By comparison, in 2017, the American defense sector absorbed 3.6 percent of US GDP.
The article decries how Israel is making so much money by selling weapons and cybersecurity software that, Loewenstein implies, are solely created to crush Palestinians.
The reason the story sounds reasonable is because Loewenstein is framing Israel's existence in terms of how Palestinian Arabs view it. When you use a flawed framework it is easy to make anything look bad.
But the real background for Israel's leadership in defense and cybersecurity tools isn't because of its supposed desire to repress the Palestinian people. It is because over the decades, Israel's enemies (including but not only the Palestinians) have sought to destroy it, and in many cases Israel had to create its own defenses from scratch.
So when Hamas shoots rockets into Israel, Israel creates Iron Dome (a notable example not mentioned in the article.) Of course Israel would like to export Iron Dome to other countries.
When Hamas and Iran (Hezbollah) dig tunnels into Israel, Israel has to devise new methods to detect and stop them. One day that technology may be commercialized.
Israeli spies, like those of every other country, look for new ways to hack phones and computers.Whether that technology should be exported to repressive regimes is a reasonable question, but it is hardly unique to Israel - every Western power exports weapons and cybersecurity software to other countries that may or may not use them in the most moral of ways. (Loewenstein's main example is the rumor that Saudi Arabia used software from an American-owned Israeli cybersecurity company to track Jamal Khashoggi's movements. Given that Khashoggi voluntarily entered the Saudi embassy where he was murdered, it seems unlikely that the Israeli software is responsible for his death, but that's Loewenstein's main example of the evil of Israeli security tools.)
In short, Israel has been for 70 years a country under siege from its neighbors, near and far. It needed to develop ways to defend itself. This is the primary job of every nation. To twist that into a horrible plot of how Israel is oppressing Palestinians and using that know-how to profit from it is an inversion of reality. But when one looks at the world through "occupation glasses" where Israel is viewed as nothing more than a single-minded oppressor of a group of people, then the story writes itself.
The readers of such trash usually don't understand that the Israel being written about is a funhouse mirror reflection of reality, because the cherry-picked facts are mostly correct - it is the context and framework that are far off base.
It is the job of editors to separate the propaganda from the reality, but the New York Review of Books employs editors that seek such anti-Israel propaganda to begin with.
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Not something I usually do, but here’s a thread with some thoughts on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the myopia of groups like IfNotNow, and J Street 1.
Over simple, I know, but I posit that there are 3 principal dimensions to the conflict.
First, the conflict over lands captured by Israel in 1967.
Second, the conflict over the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Third, the conflict between open societies and the retrograde forces of radical Islam.
The first conflict is essentially solvable by trading land for peace. Although the peace with Egypt is cold, Israel traded the Sinai for peace some 40 years ago and it has held. Although it didn’t involve much land, the peace deal with Jordan has also endured since 1994.
The second conflict is not solvable by trading land for peace. The objective is to unwind the creation of the state of Israel, whether by force or creation of a binational state which would functionally be the death knell of self-determination for the Jewish people.
The third conflict is also not solvable by trading land for peace. The likes of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah view Israel as a cancerous tumor, and would excise it if they had the means. They subscribe to the maxim of thinking globally, but acting locally - Dar-al-Harb.
Basically, this is a three level game. If Israel yields every dunam captured in 1967, the move would end the conflict over those lands, but it would be a blunder in conflicts 2 and 3, strengthening the forces arrayed against Israel (which would not be liberal and democratic).
And the conflicts are also asymmetric in that Israel is being asked to yield something tangible– land – for something intangible – peace. This against the backdrop of a region in utter turmoil, where the Arab nation state as a concept isn’t working out all that well.
So even assuming that the likes of IfNotNow and J Street have good intentions (which is questionable), the mistake they make is discussing the conflict solely in terms of the “occupation” – i.e., the conflict over 1967. While I agree that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is inflammatory to the Palestinians (even though most live under full Palestinian control in “Area A”), that presence is not the cause of the conflict. The existence of sovereign Israel itself is the bone in the throat.
IfNotNow / J Street and their ilk ignore that Israel’s withdrawal from every inch of Gaza in 2005 did not pacify Gaza in any respect. This proved empirically, to all those who called for Israel to take “risks for peace,” that the conflict is not really about 1967.
These strident critics of Israel ignore that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is not the cause of Gaza’s bellicosity, but the result of it. The Gazans destroyed greenhouses and built attack tunnels.
These critics ignore that the PLO was founded in 1964 and that the Fatah logo still includes a map of the entire land of Israel and crossed rifles.
They ignore the “3 nos” of the Arab League at Khartoum in 1967: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel.
They ignore that until the end of the cold war, the Arab-Israeli conflict was an active front of that war. The Palestinians were aligned with the Soviet Union. It is no accident that the Madrid process began in 1991.
So essentially, since the end of the Cold War (during the course of which creating a Soviet-aligned state would have been utter folly), Israel earnestly sought to end the conflict over 1967. Oslo was based on the assumption that the conflict was about 1967.
Israel yielded much. They allowed Arafat (despite the ocean of Jewish blood on his hands) into the land with trappings of a head of state. They allowed Palestinians to police themselves. Palestinians gained something they *never* had in history – territory over which they had control.
But this was not enough. The Palestinians recognize only their rights, not their responsibilities. And they recognize only Israeli responsibilities, not Israeli rights. The failure of Oslo, empirically, should have made the other dimensions to the conflict manifestly clear.
Simply put, by fetishizing Israel’s presence in the West Bank as the cause of the conflict, the likes of IfNotNow and J Street strengthen the hands of those who seek to unwind 1948 and the hands of those who would like to raise the flag of militant Islam over the land.
This is not to say that Israel should not, in its own interests, try to reach a better accommodation with Palestinian residents of the West Bank, improve conditions in Gaza, and to do its part to provide carrots and not only sticks. Israel could do better. But myopic focus on the “Occupation”, ignoring difficult truths, and taking back up the boycott strategies propounded by the Arab League since 1945, does not serve the cause of peace.
To the contrary, it provides air cover for abject enemies of Israel to make gains in the conflicts over 1948 and over the rights of non-Muslims to enjoy sovereignty in the Middle East, all while cloaking themselves in the language of progressivism and human rights.
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While Hamas is happy to boast openly about their fighters tearing at the border fences in Gaza and hiding behind civilians to evade Israeli soldiers—the New York Times makes no mention of this. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as faceless killing machines, without a single reference to the fire kites, terror tunnels, rockets or cross border explosive devices utilized by the Palestinians, or to the double war crime of Hamas targeting Israeli civilians by firing rockets from behind Palestinian civilians.
These Israeli civilians are not occupiers or usurpers. They live in Israel proper not in occupied or disputed territory. This area was built from scratch by Israelis on barren desert land and the Israelis have a right to be protected from fire bombs and mobs determined to breach the protective fence. How would other nations respond to such threats? Certainly not by treating these dangerous mobs as peaceful protestors merely exercising their freedom of speech and assembly.
The Times's absurd conclusion that the shooter may have committed a "war crime," ignores the law of war crimes.
Contrast what Israel does with how the Palestinians treat terrorists who willfully target and kill Jewish children, women and other civilians. The Palestinian Authority pays their families rewards – in effect bounties -- for their willful acts of murder. Hamas promotes and lionizes terrorists who kill Jews. But you would not know any of that from reading the one-sided New York Times screed....All in all, it is a shockingly irresponsible report.
And we avert our eyes and let them get on with it. To do otherwise would mean confronting awkward facts that might disturb safe certainties. Why talk about the Palestinians jailed for selling land to Jews when we can demand Israel release the Palestinians jailed for killing Jews? Why talk about the stipends paid to the families of terrorists who murder Israelis when we can condemn Israel for the security fence built to stop the terrorists getting in? Why talk about the Palestinians’ insistence that the West Bank be rendered Jew-free before they pledge to accept a state there when we can repudiate Israel’s cunning scheme to ‘Judaise’ Judea? Why talk about Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian president, and his explicit, on-the-record, even book-length distortions of the Holocaust and Zionism when we can decry Netanyahu’s chauvinism and alliances with fellow chauvinists? Why, in short, face up to the real ‘obstacles to peace’ when we can pretend building houses in the West Bank is what’s really holding things back?
Interrogating Palestinian politics, culture and social attitudes terrifies liberal souls because we might find things we don’t like. Things like Issam Akel’s sentence. Like jihad-themed kindergarten graduations. Like rocket launchers set up in civilian areas. Things that can’t be willed away with a sombre head shake and a plea to ‘both sides’. Things that might lead us to question the Palestinians’ interest in peace. Question our entire approach to the conflict since at least 1967. Question the viability, or even desirability, of a Palestinian state.
I’ve always railed against liberal blindness and hypocrisy on Palestinian extremism as a product of anti-Israel bias. I’m not so sure anymore. I’m starting to wonder if the real bias is against the Palestinians. We expect Israel to operate like Belgium south of Beirut and castigate it for failing to live up to our values (or what we claim to be our values). We expect almost nothing of the Palestinians, and certainly not for them to conduct their affairs as we do (or tell ourselves we do). In Jerusalem, we see Boers; in Ramallah, Zulus. This is not pro-Israel — it is based on the myth of Israel as a white European colonial enterprise — but it is flagrantly anti-Palestinian. Yes, these two cultures are distinct (though there is a deal of crossover). Yes, Palestinian culture has a lot of work to do to catch up on democracy, human rights, minority rights, and much else besides. But none of this is inherent to being Palestinian; these are political and social values and they, and the cultures that espouse them, can change. This, however, is at odds with the underlying assumptions of Western policy on the Middle East in which Israeli misdeeds are aberrations to be condemned and corrected while Palestinian misdeeds are shrugged off, excused or justified. This is just who they are.
The sentiment is sympathy but the logic is pure bigotry. We are not friends of the Palestinians. We are not lending them solidarity by indulging their outrages. We are treating them like a savage tribe from an Edgar Wallace adventure, benighted but noble in their own way, wide-eyed grateful to the white man for understanding their backwards customs. There is your racism. Issam Akel is going to jail for selling land to a Jew and our hearts break for his jailers because they couldn’t possibly know any better.
Talk of antisemitism moving from the margins of American society into the mainstream often centers on white nationalism, that is, Jew hatred from the right. One need look no further than the November elections, in which two Holocaust deniers received 56,000 and 43,000 votes in bids to win Congressional seats in Illinois and California, respectively.
Presumably, many registered Republicans who voted for these antisemitic candidates were ignorant of their extremism and reflexively chose the candidate with an “R” next to their name.
And at least the Jewish community could take comfort in the fact that from the outset, the Republican Party categorically rejected both candidates, each of whom lost by wide margins.
White nationalists, it would seem for now, are still universally denounced and abhorred by all people of conscience.
On the other hand, there’s far too much tolerance for antisemitism on the left, which often masquerades under the cover of anti-Zionism. To make matters worse, it’s sometimes abetted by Jews themselves. All of which brings me to the case of Marc Lamont Hill, a professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University in Philadelphia and former CNN political commentator.
In November, Hill was fired by CNN after appearing at a UN event during which he endorsed a political slogan associated with Palestinian extremists calling for Israel’s destruction. Speaking at the UN’s annual “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” Hill called for “action” to “give us what justice requires…a free Palestine from the river to the sea [emphasis added].” He also stated that Palestinians have a right to “resistance” against Israel without specifically ruling out acts of violence and terrorism.
The question isn’t whether CNN should have fired Hill; rather, it’s this: Why did it take CNN so long to part ways with a contributor with a long history of antisemitism and vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric?
For years, Hill used his appearances on CNN to portray Israel as a contemptible Apartheid state guilty of committing “ethnic cleansing,” a claim he repeated during his UN diatribe. Not surprisingly, he’s a staunch supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and considers BDS founder Omar Barghouti, who rejects Israel’s right to exist, someone “we must stand behind.”
In 2015, merely weeks after he tweeted about fighting antisemitism, Hill traveled to the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, which he insisted was in “Palestine.” During the visit, he declared that he had come to a land “stolen by greed,” thus reinforcing the ugly antisemitic stereotype of greedy Jews.
In October of that year, Hill wrote an opinion piece in the Huffington Post entitled, “Why Every Black Activist Should Stand with Rasmea Odeh.” In it, he referred to Odeh, a convicted Palestinian terrorist, as a “venerable woman” and “freedom fighter.” As far as Hill is concerned, the murder of two young Israeli Jews in a 1969 bombing planned by Odeh wasn’t a horrific crime – it was an act of “justice.”
None of these troubling issues was enough for CNN (let alone Temple) to fire Hill. Nor, shockingly, was his close association with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam founder whom the ADL has called the “leading anti-Semite in America.” Farrakhan once called Adolf Hitler “a great man,” and recently, he compared Jews to “termites.” In August 2016, Hill uploaded onto Instagram a picture of the two smiling together. His caption read, “Been blessed to spend the day with Minister Louis Farrakhan. An amazing time of learning, listening, laughing.”
We Jews aren’t laughing. That CNN, which claims to be “the most trusted name in news,” could keep Hill under contract for so many years is indicative of a much larger problem.
A recent column by Bret Stephens in The New York Times was headlined “Donald Trump is bad for Israel.”
Others may think a more appropriate headline would be: “The New York Times is bad for Israel.”
The paper is regarded as the bible of America’s intellectual classes. Yet for years, its coverage of Israel has been a disgrace.
Of course, it’s entitled to criticize Israel as it would any other country. But it doesn’t treat Israel like any other country. It singles it out for demonization based on falsehoods, distortion and selective reporting which makes no attempt at objectivity, fairness or truth.
Last weekend, it published a 4700-word story on the life and death of Rouzan al-Najjar, a young Gazan female doctor who was killed during the riots on the southern border last June.
The story, by its Jerusalem correspondent David Halbfinger, oozed sympathy for al-Najjar and her cause. It described the rioters as “protesters”, obscuring their leaders’ aim of storming the border to murder Israelis.
It presented Al-Najjar’s death with studied but false equivalence as part of a “cycle of violence” with simplistic “narratives” on either side.
Israelis were then portrayed as trigger-happy killers who “obliged” Hamas’s aim of using bloodshed to win international sympathy and whose snipers – despite the IDF’s stated tactic of aiming at rioters’ legs unless they presented an immediate danger – deliberately shot Gazan civilians in the back.
This included al-Najjar. It was only towards the end that the story revealed she was in fact killed accidentally, when an Israeli bullet struck the ground away from her and ricocheted into her body.
Leaked documents seen by NGO Monitor and an analysis of public statements from NGO officials indicate that Amnesty International will conduct a series of intense campaigns singling out Israel in early 2019.
In this process, Amnesty will delegitimize Jewish historical connections to Jerusalem and elsewhere, as well as promote discriminatory boycotts (BDS) against Israel.
The Campaigns
Amnesty’s 2019 attacks will include at least two components: Amnesty’s Blacklist: A “new campaign targeting some of the businesses that are profiting from human rights abuses by operating in the illegal Israeli settlements.” This language mirrors that used by UN bureaucrats preparing the UNHRC blacklist. The list is aimed at economically damaging companies that are owned by Jews or do business with Israel, and is ultimately meant to harm the Jewish state. Amnesty’s campaign is timed to bolster this UN blacklist, for which Amnesty has been lobbying intensively, and to serve as an alternative should the UN not publish its list.
Amnesty documents, seen by NGO Monitor, also show the NGO specifically seeks to censure companies that educate the public about Jewish history and historical ties to Jerusalem.
“Ban Israeli settlement goods”: A continuation of a campaign to press governments, in particular the UK, to “to ban Israeli settlement goods from entering your markets, and to stop companies based in your country operating in settlements or trading in their goods.” Amnesty has built dedicated website sections for this purpose. In addition, it has supported legislation in Ireland that, if enacted, will criminalize visiting Jewish historical and holy sites, including Jerusalem’s Old City, and purchasing goods and services from Jews located for whatever reason or duration in Jerusalem and over the 1949 Armistice Lines.
Amnesty’s Antisemitism Problem
Amnesty’s 2019 attacks on the Jewish state come at a time when NGO is facing increased criticism over its own deeply-rooted antisemitism.
In 2018, Amnesty antagonized the British Jewish community by cancelling a debate sponsored by the UK’s Jewish Leadership Council, scheduled to be held at Amnesty’s Human Rights Centre in London. And when Amnesty conducted “an unprecedented large scale analysis of abuse against women on Twitter,” it included sexism and racism against female journalists and politicians, but not antisemitism.
Nearly six years ago I gave a lecture at Yeshiva University on how to answer anti-Israel arguments. Since the lecture was over an hour and twenty minutes, I decided to break it up into 20 sections, one each to answer one popular anti-Israel argument.
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.
This brings us to the second reason why a pro-Israel fight with Trump over Syria seems counterproductive. Though Israel benefited significantly from the American troop presence in Syria, its most pressing needs are diplomatic support in general and support for its ability to defend itself in particular. And on both, Trump remains a vast improvement over his predecessor.
Granted, Israel hasn’t fought any wars since he took office, so there’s no guarantee of how he would act. But there’s no reason to think that he wouldn’t provide the needed support, given his administration’s staunch defense of Israel at the United Nations to date.
In contrast, Israel did fight a war while Barack Obama was president, so it knows what it’s like to be without American support. During the 2014 Gaza war, Obama’s administration famously refused to resupply Israel with Hellfire missiles. It sought to pressure Israel into a cease-fire agreement that met all of Hamas’s demands and none of Israel’s. It issued an endless stream of condemnations of Israel during the fighting, rather than supporting Israel’s right to self-defense against the thousands of rockets Hamas fired at Israeli cities.
Then, in 2016, Obama also stripped Israel of America’s diplomatic protection. The U.N. Security Council resolution against the settlements, which he allowed to pass, laid the groundwork for international sanctions against Israel and even prosecution at the International Criminal Court.
And that’s without even mentioning the minor detail that it was Obama who abandoned Syria to Iran and Russia to begin with. Tehran financed its massive Syrian intervention with the billions of dollars it reaped from Obama’s flagship act of diplomacy, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. And Moscow entered the Syrian war only after waiting more than three years to make sure that America wasn’t planning to get involved. By the time Trump took office, Russian-Iranian domination of Syria was a fait accompli to which America’s scant 2,000 troops could make little difference.
None of this justifies the Syria withdrawal. It’s a terrible idea, and not only, or even primarily, because Israel benefited from having American troops blocking Iran’s long-desired land route through Syria to Lebanon. It further empowers Russia, Turkey and Iran—none of which wish America (or Israel) well. It also may enable a resurgence of the Islamic State, just as America’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 did. Abandoning the Kurds to Turkey’s tender mercies after they have been America’s best foot soldiers against the Islamic State for years is not only a moral crime, but a strategic one, as it will undermine America’s ability to recruit local allies in the future. And America will save little in terms of either lives or money by ending this low-cost, low-casualty mission.
But from a pro-Israel perspective, none of this changes two basic facts. First, there are things Israel needs from Trump more than troops in Syria. And second, asking America to keep soldiers anywhere for Israel’s sake violates a sine qua non of both the Israeli ethos and the bilateral alliance—that Israel defends itself by itself.
As Abbas' Fatah Movement celebrates its 54th anniversary, its dominant messages to its people are celebration of 54 years of violence together with the promise of more violence in the future. Fatah is declaring to Palestinians once again, similar to what Palestinian Media Watch documented in previous years, that Fatah has not and will never "drop the rifle" or abandon terror - what it euphemistically calls "the armed struggle."
The image of the rifle is the main theme of this year's celebrations. In the picture above, which Fatah posted on its official Facebook page, two young girls holding assault rifles are shown leading a march of uniformed men, who are also holding assault rifles.
This picture also posted by Fatah includes four assault rifles. In addition to the large rifle, one is part of the logo of the 54th anniversary, and two are in Fatah's regular logo in the upper left.
Fatah's posted text promises more violence: "We will not relinquish our right to resist the occupier using all available ways and means." The expression "all ways and means," particularly when accompanied with the rifles is a reiteration of Fatah's promise of continued violence and terror.
Text on image: "The Palestinian National Liberation Movement - Fatah Long live the anniversary of the outbreak of the Palestinian revolution Jan. 1, 1965" [Official Fatah Facebook page, Dec. 27, 2018]
Another post which Fatah labeled "The official logo of the 54th anniversary," includes the four most important symbols for the PA and Fatah. The first is the map that includes all of Israel covered by the colors of the Palestinian flag symbolizing future destruction of Israel and Palestinian rule over all the land. The second symbol is once again the rifle in the center. The third symbol is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The fourth is the key symbolizing the future "return" of Palestinian "refugees" to the homes they claim in Israel. [Official Fatah Facebook page, Dec. 26, 2018]
Taking a step back, ethnic cleansing is, generally speaking, an organized attempt by an ethnic or religious group to remove a different ethnic or religious group from a given area or territory through expulsion or murder. The PA forbids the sale of land to Jews, encourages and rewards the murder of Jews, and refuses to accept the existence of a Jewish homeland. It endorses attacks, both physical and political, against Jewish civilian communities in the West Bank (i.e., Israeli settlements), and has refused multiple peace offers from Israel to become a state. The clear logical conclusion is that the PA wants no Jews in a future Palestine. How is this not an attempt at ethnic cleansing?
Accusations of ethnic cleansing against Israel, however, would be laughable if they were not so vile, so full of visceral hatred. Such claims are also obviously false and easily refuted. First, 1.878 million Arabs currently live in Israel, 20.9 percent of the country's total population. These Arabs enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens, living in a thriving democracy. Many even take to the streets to protest Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, without fear of punishment. Moreover, recent polls indicate that the Arabs will again have the third largest party in the next Knesset, Israel's parliament. Ethnic cleansing would mean expelling or killing Arabs, not embracing them.
In the West Bank, Palestinians effectively run and control their own government. Yet many Palestinians still try to work in Israel, where they earn much higher wages. Furthermore, by all estimates, the Arab population in the Palestinian territories has skyrocketed since the founding of Israel in 1948—in other words, literally the exact opposite of ethnic cleaning or genocide. In fact, the Palestinians themselves claim that Arabs will soon outnumber Jews in the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Regardless of the truth of such claims, victims of ethnic cleansing would not make them in the first place.
So next time someone accuses Israel of committing ethnic cleansing, ask a very simple question in response: What about the Palestinians?
This week, Rashida Tlaib will be one of our first 2 Muslim congresswomen. Ilhan Omar is the other. Tlaib's swearing-in will be noteworthy because she will be sworn in using Thomas Jefferson's own copy of the Koran.
Tlaib, of course, will not be the first to use Jefferson's Koran for the swearing-in -- Keith Ellison used it, amidst all kinds of discussion and debate back in 2007. At the time, Ellison said his use of Jefferson's Koran
demonstrates that from the very beginning of our country, we had people who were visionary, who were religiously tolerant, who believed that knowledge and wisdom could be gleaned from any number of sources, including the Koran.
Two volume set of the Koran, translated by George Sale
Snapshot from YouTube video
Yair Rosenberg touches upon the use of Jefferson's Koran, noting the complicated history of Thomas Jefferson’s Koran. The complication is that Jefferson's copy of George Sale's 1734 translation of the Koran has the following introduction:
“Whatever use an impartial version of the Korân may be of in other respects, it is absolutely necessary to undeceive those who, from the ignorant or unfair translations which have appeared, have entertained too favourable an opinion of the original, and also to enable us effectually to expose the imposture.”
According to Rosenberg, this original intent of Sale's edition of the Koran to convert Muslims makes its use "particularly appropriate for this occasion, not in spite of the prejudice within it, but because of it." That is because it serves as a reminder that Islam has been part of American history from its beginning, while on the other hand, Sale’s translation reminds us of the fear and misunderstanding of Muslims.
Fair enough. Islam has been part of US history from the beginning -- but how?
And might there have been any other motivation for Jefferson to own a copy of the Koran?
The Barbary states, modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, are collectively known to the Arab world as the Maghrib (“Land of Sunset”), denoting Islam’s territorial holdings west of Egypt. With the advance of Mohammed’s armies into the Christian Levant in the seventh century, the Mediterranean was slowly transformed into the backwater frontier of the battles between crescent and cross. Battles raged on both land and sea, and religious piracy flourished.
The Maghrib served as a staging ground for Muslim piracy throughout the Mediterranean, and even parts of the Atlantic. America’s struggle with the terror of Muslim piracy from the Barbary states began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776, and continued for roughly four decades, finally ending in 1815.
In 1786, a meeting was arranged in London for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain in order to negotiate a peace treaty protecting the US from the threat of Barbary piracy.
During the meeting
These future United States presidents questioned the ambassador as to why his government was so hostile to the new American republic even though America had done nothing to provoke any such animosity. Ambassador Adja answered them, as they reported to the Continental Congress, “that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
London emphasizes that this all happened long before Western colonialism made its way to Muslim lands -- before oil interests drew the US in and long before the re-establishment of Israel.
There is more to that copy of the Koran than an intent to convert Muslims.
Here is 4-minute video with more background on why Jefferson actually read the Koran:
You cannot argue about the Crusades without noting the conquests of the Islamic empire into Northern Europe. Similarly, you cannot properly appreciate the complexity of the symbolism of Jefferson's Koran without noting the history of the Barbary pirates and their jihad against the United States.
You need the balance from both sides of the story in order to appreciate just how complex and multifaceted a symbol Jefferson's Koran really is.
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Today, in Hebron, the Fatah party headed by Mahmoud Abbas is holding a conference that is being heavily touted in their social media.
Last night, in Nablus, the same Fatah headed by the same Mahmoud Abbas held a parade and rally to mark the 54th anniversary of their first terror attack.
Here's what that looked like:
The world only gets to see the first face.
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Monday, January 07, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
