Tel Aviv, June 6 - Journalists from some of the major media outlets in the country expressed frustration and disappointment today at the relative paucity of retail hot beverage establishments catering to a young, woke crowd where they can sit and eavesdrop on conversations that dovetail with the journalists' pre-existing worldview, and then present those remarks as illuminating or groundbreaking. Reporters and columnists for Haaretz, Channel Ten, Kann radio, Galei Tzahal, and several other news operations came together this week to discuss Israel's shortage of hipster coffee shops, venues that elsewhere appear to function as a breeding-ground for overheard statements that either cast those who differ ideologically from the journalists in a negative light, or purport to indicate a shift in popular perceptions that heralds the onset of a newfound appreciation for the rightness and virtue of the journalists' own Weltanschauüng. "We have lots and lots of coffee shops, and lots and lots of hipsters," acknowledged Rogel Alpher of Haaretz. "We even have lots of hispters who frequent coffee shops. What we don't seem to have - and this is obviously a result of the far-right demagoguery of Netanyahu and his minions - is a critical mass of hipsters in coffee shops upon whom we can rely to supply us with quotable, indicative remarks that confirm what we, in our superior wisdom, already know but must find a condescending way to convey to our readers." "Twenty years ago coffee shops were barely a thing in Israel," observed Ilana Dayan, a television presenter. "We always had some people who fit the description 'hipster' though. I guess things didn't develop the same way in Israel as elsewhere, and that's a shame, because I'd love to be able to sit in a coffee shop booth within earshot of some hipsters and record the bits and pieces of what they say, with an eye toward doing a whole segment on how things are going to hell in a handbasket as indicated by snippets of overheard hipster conversations. Or maybe just tweet about it." Not all the journalists present agreed that the lack of hipster coffee shops in Israel poses an insurmountable problem. "Come on, guys," urged Gideon Levy. "Since when do you need to actually overhear someone saying something in a coffee shop to make it true? Heck, since when do something have to even be true for us to claim it's true? It's like none of you have ever read a single word I've written."
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While Israel's peace agreement with Egypt has remained pretty solid, major parts of the Sinai that Israel withdrew from have since become strongholds for ISIS-associated Islamist terror groups.
The parts of Lebanon that Israel withdrew from in 2000 were immediately taken over by the Islamist terror group Hezbollah.
The Gaza Strip, which Israel withdrew from for peace in 2005, was soon taken over by the Islamist terror group Hamas.
There is a pattern here, and it isn't "land for peace." It is "land for terrorists."
But everyone "knows" that the only path for peace is for Israel to do the exact same thing, again. The supposedly peaceful Palestinian Authority, which couldn't hold onto Gaza, is going to be strong enough to stop Hamas - which defeated it in the last elections.
Mahmoud Abbas, the man of peace, is the leader of Fatah that still has armed terror groups he promised to dismantle years ago, under the umbrella Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. Here they are in Gaza this week:
Not to mention that Abbas prioritizes paying terrorists over taking care of his own people.
The people who believe in Oslo-style peace are like cult members who discard all critical thinking skills to remain members. They worship the word "peace" while disconnecting it from its actual meaning. Previous failures are ignored or redirected into blaming Israel for Palestinian refusal to compromise or accept peace plans.
Even an intifada wasn't enough to wake up the world.
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.
Al Resalah quotes a story in Makor Rishon about a recent initiative between Israeli and Palestinian businesspeople.
While Palestinians are boycotting the Israeli approach of economic peace at the Bahrain workshop, there is another place where economic cooperation between the two sides is taking place.
The work was taking place through the Joint Chamber of Commerce in the West Bank, which is managed by Avi Sherman of the Ariel settlement and Ashraf al-Jabari of Hebron, who are conducting joint US-sponsored commercial deals.
Jabari is the only Palestinian businessman who has accepted the US invitation to attend the Bahrain summit. He claimed that other Palestinian businessmen will come to the summit and he will not be alone in it.
Jabari said, "The Bahrain summit is not part of the American peace plan, so the king of Bahrain informed me, and I trust him. We are facing an economic event only. If there are any political implications, I will not participate in it," he said.
"A US call was made to the joint Palestinian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce, and it is preferable for Palestinian businessmen and traders to participate in the Bahrain summit," Sherman said.
Jabari, a 45-year-old Palestinian businessman, founded last month a new political party preparing to run in the upcoming Palestinian elections, if they actually happen, and does not hide his desire to be close to Israel. His name is present in all initiatives between Palestinians and settlers, although he and a number of his comrades recently received threats from Fatah.
Three months ago, the Palestinian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce organized a two-day conference at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, attended by prominent Palestinian businessmen, US delegates and heads of settlement communities.
Saleh Abu Mayla, a businessman who participated in the conference, said he owned a factory to produce military boots for IDF soldiers, and he sees no reason to remove the Jews from the city of Hebron.
Khaldoun al-Husseini from Shu'fat in Jerusalem and a member of the Chamber of Commerce had breakfast with Senator Johnston at Beit Ja'abari in Hebron. Participants included the chairman of the Shomron settlement Yossi Dagan.
He has a factory in Ramallah and his distributors are deployed in most of the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah. There are more than 250 Palestinian businessmen with membership in the joint Palestinian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce, along with the same number of Israelis, he said.
The meeting in February between Jews - many from Judea and Samaria - and Palestinian businessmen did not receive very much coverage, in line with the media taking their cues from Palestinian officials in what should and shouldn't be covered. However, hundreds of Arab and Jewish business owners participated.
Here's a video about that conference, including interviews with some Arab attendees:
And much more detail as to the goals of the Chamber of Commerce in this press conference from February:
The real scandal isn't that the two groups are cooperating, but the opposition to initiatives like this both from Palestinian leaders and Westerners who pretend to care about Palestinian welfare.
To their mind, Jews in Judea and Samaria are so uniquely evil that even talking to them is a betrayal and somehow antithetical to peace.
Too many people have forgotten what the word "peace" means, thinking that it means "Oslo."
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.
Dyke Marches are community-driven, grassroots, and meant to bring together all who identify as dykes through marching as an act of visibility and protest. It is non-Pride affiliated, with no corporate sponsors, permits, or cops - our goal is to encourage activism within our community and center trans people, queers, lesbians, and other dyke identities who are oft-marginalized by the mainstream LGBTQ movement.
Please bring signs, noise makers, banners, money to donate - this march is not a parade, but a public act of protest & celebration of the diversity of our dyke community.
Invite all the dykes you know! This is an INCLUSIVE space for ALL who identify as dykes. Hatred of any kind will not be tolerated.
Through inquiries, Dyke March leadership indicated that Israeli flags and related national symbols are not welcome. When pressed about the need to create an inclusive environment for all queer women––including the many Jewish Dykes who wish to carry Jewish pride flags, representing both pieces of their inherent identities, and including the many Jewish and non-Jewish Dykes who consider Israel to be the rightful homeland of the Jewish people––organizers declared via Facebook that ‘participants [may] not bring pro-Israel paraphernalia’ including Israeli flags and pride flags with the Star of David on them. When pressed on flags and national symbols from other countries, it became clear Israel had been singled out.
This policy is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the Chicago Dyke March two years ago, in which three marchers with a Jewish pride flag were asked to leave.
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.
Recently I watched a short (10 minutes), very powerful video about Israel’s victory in the Six Days War. The film suggests that the victory was literally miraculous. It may well have been so, although miracles like the destruction of the enemy air forces or the capture of the Old City only happen when divine intervention is combined with careful preparation, struggle, and sacrifice by humans.
The film made me enormously proud of the accomplishments of the Jewish people, state, and army. And while I don’t believe in direct divine intervention in human affairs, this victory – along with the survival of the Jewish people since biblical times – made me wonder if I could be wrong about that.
So what’s the problem?
It seems to me that we have taken the gift that was given to us by Hashem and the IDF and little by little, through ignorance and weakness of will, squandered it.
The Sinai peninsula, conquered in 1967, is back in Egyptian hands. Yes, I know that we gained “peace” in return, but a better description of that peace would be that the US bribed the Egyptians to leave us alone with billions in aid, including military aid that translated into weapons that could only have been useful against us. Today Egypt has a government that sees its advantage in maintaining the cold peace; but if the Muslim Brotherhood that came to power for a short time (2012-13) with the help of Barack Obama had been more competent, we would be facing hostility no less bitter than in the days of Nasser. For this, we gave up natural resources including oil, but more important, the one thing that Israel lacks above all else, and the one lack that is most difficult to compensate for with high-tech cleverness: strategic depth.
The Gaza Strip, too, has reverted to Arab control. It is now to all intents and purposes a sovereign state, under control of Hamas, which bitterly oppresses the Arab population and uses it as a human shield in a permanent war of attrition against Israel. This came about as a result of Israel’s voluntary, unilateral abandonment of its settlements and military installations there. Gaza serves as a base for Hamas’ military activities and an excuse for international condemnation of Israel, which from time to time must defend herself against rocket attacks, incendiary and explosive devices carried by kites and balloons, and attempted incursions by terrorists, either over the border fence or by way of tunnels.
And the holiest spot in the world for the Jewish people? The very day after the conquest of the Old City, Moshe Dayan ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Dome of the Rock and gave administrative control of the Temple Mount to the Arab waqf. A “status quo” was created, in which Muslims and Jews would both be able to visit their sacred sites. However, in practice, Jewish rights were eroded little by little. Today, Jews can visit only at restricted times, can enter through just one gate, are forbidden to pray, carry objects (even water bottles), or even use water faucets dedicated to Muslim hand-washing. They are often exposed to harassment from hostile Muslims. There are few limitations on Muslims, and Arab children sometimes play football on the Mount, despite a court order forbidding it. The waqf has built several mosques on and under the Mount, and in the process destroyed or lost irreplaceable archaeologically valuable artifacts. Agreements call for archaeological supervision of construction work, but this requirement is ignored by the waqf.
As far as the rest of Judea and Samaria is concerned, the “international community,” in mortal fear of PLO terrorism and the Arab oil weapon, has been pushing and shoving at Israel ever since the 1967 war to abandon the territories that she liberated from Jordanian occupation. But it took Israel’s own Shimon Peres, in pursuit of a chimerical “New Middle East,” to stupidly bring our worst enemy, Yasser Arafat, back from exile where his organization was growing old and feeble, and allow him to establish his terrorist base in the biblical heartland of the Jewish state. We even gave him money and guns! We paid a steep price for this fashla during the Second Intifada, and we continue to pay today when Jews are murdered at random by the generation of young people raised under the educational system of Arafat and his successor, the porcine Mahmoud Abbas.
Although we can’t blame anyone but ourselves for the Oslo Accords – even US President Clinton was taken by surprise – the hostile European Union has made use of Oslo to advance its objective of forcing Israel out of the territories. In the guise of “humanitarian” aid to the Palestinian Authority, the EU today ignores Israeli zoning and building regulations and constructs public buildings to create facts on the ground in areas that, according to Oslo, are under Israeli control.
How did we allow all this to happen?
There are multiple reasons. One is that we don’t know how to negotiate. We like to think, “we are strong, we can afford to give up (whatever) in the interest of peace. The other side will appreciate our generosity.” Wrong. Whatever we give up, the Arabs take, and then ask for more. They don’t understand “generosity” – they see weakness. The negotiating process is like a ratchet: it can go in one direction – toward the Arabs – but can’t go in the other.
Another reason, often noted, is that we assume that everyone else is like us. We want peace, so Palestinian Arabs must want peace. We care about security, economic development, a good life for our children. They, on the other hand, want to get rid of us; it doesn’t matter if they would have a better life if they cooperate with us. We want an independent nation-state, but they are strongly loyal to their clans. We look for win-win solutions, but it is always more important to them to hurt Jews than to help Arabs.
Finally, the Arabs are always ready to use the “heckler’s veto,” or more correctly in this case, the “terrorist’s veto:” give us what we want or there will be no peace. What Israeli politician wants to be accused of being responsible for the unrest that follows standing up for ourselves?
What can we do differently? Unfortunately, we need to become less generous. We need to become tougher. We need to set limits, and stick to them. The EU is funding illegal construction in Judea and Samaria? Demolish it. Start with Khan al Ahmar, which even Israel’s left-leaning Supreme Court agrees must go, and which PM Netanyahu promised to remove months ago. We need to take back what we have given up, little by little, and strike hard against the “terrorist’s veto.” We are not going to get the Sinai back – and at this stage, I doubt that we want it. But the situation in and around Gaza can and must change radically. There must be a price paid for incendiary balloons, a price so high that they won’t want to pay it more than once.
The same goes for the Temple Mount. A bit at a time, the way we lost it, we must get it back. Of course there will be a reaction (i.e., a riot). But the reactions happen because the Arabs know they can get away with them. They know we will always back down, as we did with the metal detectors at the gates. They know we are afraid of confrontation, so they just push harder.
It’s a long process, and it will be painful. The Arabs are in the habit of winning; it will be hard to get them used to losing. But there are no win-win solutions for the Middle East. In this neighborhood, all the games are zero-sum.
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.
To counteract BDS it’s not enough merely to condemn the movement’s lies, Nelson writes. In a series of chapters interspersed throughout Israel Denial, Nelson shows his commitment to the imperfect yet inspiring reality of Israel, giving his own ideas about increasing peace between Israelis and Palestinians through a series of trust-building Israeli concessions like ceding parts of the West Bank’s Area C to the Palestinian Authority. The point is to create a two-state dynamic even without a peace deal. He describes his own practice of “teaching for empathy” by presenting Jewish and Palestinian poets together. Nelson’s Israel is not the mythic realm of demons fantasized by BDS advocates but an actual place that contains signs of hope.
Yet professors and students like Nelson are often denied chances to share their experiences. Instead they are silenced by BDS, which seeks to advance their agenda not through reasoned debate but by a full-frontal assault on free speech. BDS adherents have in the last few years tried to shut down 90 mostly Israeli speakers, some of whom were bona fide leftists. Tactically, the BDS movement uses violence and extreme pressure to forcefully prevent reasoned discussion about Israel on campus, and make university faculty, administrators, and students afraid.
It is in the context of the BDS movement’s campaign of continuous pressure and often violent intimidation against those who hold more nuanced, fact-based views that the apparatus of academic BDS publications and conferences should properly be understood. The jargon of po-mo theory, words like “apartheid,” and baldfaced lies about organ harvesting and biological warfare are intended to intimidate while serving as a fig leaf for the eliminationist fantasies they are intended to justify. Even when the facts are wrong, the fact that books are published and conferences are held allows nervous administrators to pretend that the BDS movement is somehow observing normal rules of academic discourse, rather than violating them.
Yet perhaps because of these social pressure tactics, BDS gets a free ride in much of the mainstream media. Their violent heckling of speakers, their traffic in disinformation, and their opposition to dialogue and open debate are nowhere mentioned, for example, in a recent New York Times Magazine piece by Nathan Thrall. When BDS looks in the mirror, what it sees is the noble faces of crusaders against injustice—but that’s because the mirror is cracked, too.
These days, American universities give awards to student BDS organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, which dutifully parrot the hateful nonsense spewed by their professors, in a grotesque parody of what a humanistic education should look like. Instead, the academy ought to follow the German Bundestag, which declared on May 17 that “the pattern of argument and the methods of BDS are anti-Semitic,” and, the Bundestag added, clearly reminiscent of Nazi-era anti-Jewish boycotts. It’s time that these words became as commonly accepted in America as they are in Germany.
In greeting DeSantis, Minister Erdan said, “Governor DeSantis has been one of the greatest and most consistent friends of Israel and of the U.S.-Israel alliance. Governor DeSantis promised that under his leadership, Florida would be the most pro-Israel state in America and he has kept his promise. In the name of the government and people of Israel, I want to thank Governor DeSantis for all that he has done.”
DeSantis’s decision to include the trip to Judea in his itinerary demonstrated two key facts.
First, elections matter. While it is true that Gillum tried to distance himself from his ties to BDS groups once they became an election issue, the fact is that he enjoyed long-standing, close ties to these groups. Gallium also harshly criticized President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and Israel’s steps to defend its border with Gaza from penetration by Hamas-organized mobs.
Had Gillum been elected, there is little chance Florida would today be leading the campaign to protect U.S. business, academic and cultural ties with Israel and defeating BDS campaigns to criminalize and discriminate Jews in the U.S. or in any part of Israel.
The second lesson from DeSantis’s visit is that the Palestinians are right about one thing: if Jewish life can be delegitimized in any part of Israel, then it will inevitably be delegitimized in all parts of Israel. You cannot defend Israel’s right to exist in general while claiming Jews are criminals for living or working or building in specific parts of the country.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he has decided to remove Airbnb from the state’s blacklist after it renounced its decision not to advertise apartments in Judea and Samaria.
“As governor, I have an obligation to oppose policies that unfairly target Israel,” DeSantis wrote on his Twitter account. “Once @Airbnb ended their discriminatory policy toward Israel, we decided to remove them from the @FloridaSBA Scrutinized Companies List.”
Florida sanctioned the global vacation website in January after it announced a decision to boycott West Bank settlements.
The state was able to make the move because, according to Florida law, any company that engages in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) actions can be placed on the Scrutinized Companies List. The state of Florida is prohibited from investing in publicly traded companies on that list or contracting with them for services. But such companies can still engage in commercial activities in the state.
In April, Airbnb announced it would back off of its plan to remove Jewish rentals in Judea and Samaria from its rental listings, to end lawsuits brought by hosts and potential hosts.
Argentina’s embassies in 20 cities around the world will mark the 25th anniversary of the terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires in a joint initiative with the World Jewish Congress.
The July 18, 1994 blast killed 85 people and injured more than 300.
The international commemorations began on Monday in Santiago, Chile, and are scheduled to continue this week in Berlin. Some of the other cities that will hold events through July 18 are New York, London, Madrid, Moscow, Brasilia, Canberra, Tel Aviv, Rome, and the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva.
On Monday in Santiago the president of the local Jewish community, Gerardo Gorodischer, remembered the Chileans that were killed in the attack: Carlos Avendaño Bobadilla and Susana Kreiman.
The Argentinean ambassador to Chile, Jose Octavio Bordon, called for international cooperation from “the democratic countries of the world to put on trial in Argentina the Iranian citizens that are under an international arrest warrant” for their alleged responsibility in the attack.
No one yet has been convicted of the bombing, though Argentina – and Israel – have long pointed the finger at Tehran, implicating several former Iranian officials, and Hezbollah in the AMIA attack and also in the March 17, 1992 terrorist attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires.
🆕PODCAST: Lyn Julius’ book, Uprooted: 3,000 years of Jewish life vanished overnight
▶️A total rebuke to @georgegalloway’s #ApartheidIsrael tropes
▶️inc @HillelNeuer’s “Where are your Jews?”@UNHumanRights with his personal permission
▶️Mizrahi history
Malki with her father Arnold.
Detail from a family group photo taken on Arnold’s birthday in January 2001
The faces of some terror
victims stay in your mind and in your heart, for instance the face of Malki
Roth. In part it’s the outrage of the act: that someone could steal away a
beautiful young girl with so much promise and talent. But it’s also her smile in
the photos, with that soft sweetness, radiating what you’re positive was an
inner beauty to match the exterior.
What happened on August
9, 2001, at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, was and remains unspeakable.
But what is truly
unbearable is this: Ahlam Tamimi, the woman behind the murder of Malki Roth and
so many others, lives free and clear in Jordan. Tamimi was released from an
Israeli prison in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. Since that time
she has married, raised a family, and built a career on her status as a hero for
masterminding the murder of Jewish children. Of this she is proud. Of this she brags.
Here is an interview with Malki’s
father, Arnold Roth:
Varda Epstein: Tell us about
that day. How did you find out? How long until you knew?
Arnold Roth: Most people know
that the truly life-changing things that happen to us come when we least expect
them. This was a hot August Thursday at a busy time for me. I was chief
executive of a drug technology company based in one of Jerusalem’s science and
technology campuses and we had a lot on our plates, most of it very good.
I went to lunch with the same
friends as usual and got back just in time to receive a frantic call from
Frimet, my wife. “There’s been a pigua and I can’t reach the children.”
I went directly into calm-husband-and-father mode, trying to say what I really
believed: “Don’t reach for the worst. Give the kids time to call in and
reassure us.” But the call ended while I was in mid-sentence.
Jerusalem had been free of
major terrorist attacks for years at that point and the grim reality of armed
guards emplaced outside supermarkets and restaurants had not yet been
instituted. But the massacre at Tel Aviv’s Dolphinarium
had happened in June and the raging terrorism that the more ideological parts
of the media repulsively called the Second Intifada had gotten started almost a
year before. In the capital, we were living on borrowed time but we didn’t
realize it.
Frimet and I phoned back and
forth several times over the next two hours. Malki was the fourth of our
children, the oldest of our daughters, and at 15 busy, energetic and independent.
Her older brothers all checked in by phone during the early afternoon.
As a rising sense of something
awful started settling in, I phoned Malki’s cell a couple of times, begging her
to call back as soon as she could. I imagine Frimet did the same.
Around 4:00 pm, and although I
had a string of meetings and conference calls to deal with, I left my desk to
go home. Frimet called me just before that to say she couldn’t bear waiting at
home, was going mad from the worry and stress and needed to do something, go
somewhere. We have a very disabled youngest child who needs constant care so
Frimet leaving the house meant I needed to be there in her place.
I think of myself as
religiously observant and believe hashgacha pratit—divine providence at
the personal, individual level—is a real thing. I was trying to negotiate private
deals with the Almighty as I walked to the bus.
Let her phone be broken. Please
let her be in an area where there is no reception. Let her be mildly concussed.
I no longer remember the scenarios. But I was hoping desperately that I could
offer something that, if it were only accepted above, would let us off the hook
that started to feel more and more real.
There was no relief at home. At
first, I was alone with our daughter whose disabilities are extreme and
profound. We didn’t know how to communicate with her at that stage in her life.
So she was not part of the anxieties; rather she was part of the normalcy.
One by one, the children
arrived home and then so did Frimet, accompanied by one of our sons who had
started his compulsory military service the previous day and was sent home to
help with the emerging crisis. He and Frimet, it turned out, had been at one of
Jerusalem’s hospitals looking for whatever there was to look for. But before
Frimet left our street to get there, she encountered Avivah, our neighbor.
Avivah’s daughter Michal, it turned out, was with our Malki from early that
morning. The mothers went to the hospital together and then split up to search.
Frimet and our son found no sign or word of Malki and came home.
We all, in our separate private
nightmares, did our praying and hoping and deal-making in the ensuing hours. As
night fell, a neighbor struggled up the stairs, ashen-faced, to tell me at the
open door that Michal’s name had just been reported on the news as one of those
killed at Sbarro five hours earlier. The world, already deeply grim, now looked
a lot blacker.
Malki and the girl next door,
Michal Raziel, 2001. The closest of friends from when we moved into the
building in 1993. The girls were standing side by side when the Hamas human
bomb--a young religious zealot with an explosive-packed guitar case on his
back--walked unchallenged into Sbarro and exploded next to them. This photo
shows the two girls a few weeks before they were murdered. They are buried in
adjoining graves in Jerusalem.
Another neighbor, at the time a
department head at Hadassah Ein Karem who had been working the phones to tap
into his network of doctor contacts, walked in and told me to get ready to go
with him. “I was told there’s a teenage girl on the operating table. I’ll drive
you there.”
It turned out not to be Malki.
But as we stood there in the miyun (emergency room) area, surrounded by people
who looked like I felt, a medical colleague of his took in the situation and as
he rushed to deal with yet another emergency case, he may have said to my
friend: “I don’t know what to tell you” or something else guarded and careful. But
in the memory of the man I now am, nearly eighteen years later, what I remember
him saying is: “Check over there in that cubicle. There’s a girl we’re about to
operate on and another one who’s dead. One might be yours.”
That’s how one of life’s
hardest moments is engraved in my memory.
We didn’t find Malki anywhere.
A hospital social worker having what was surely one of her own most challenging
days, walked over to me and, under huge stress herself, said without much
ceremony: “If you’re looking for a child here and can’t find her, and it’s now
nine hours after the bombing, you need to go to Abu Kabir. Now.”
I understood what she meant but
demurred. “I will ask one of my sons to go. At this point, it will be better if
I go back and stay with my wife at home.” As I left, the social worker calmly
did exactly what was needed: arranged for a taxi and a social worker to collect
two of my sons and bring them to Israel’s only center for performing autopsies and
identifying terror victims. It’s known as Abu Kabir after the Jaffa
neighborhood where it is located.
My two older sons phoned from
there at two on Friday morning, exactly twelve hours after the Battle of Sbarro
Pizzeria started and ended. They had found their sister. I recited the brief
and awful prayer that’s said on learning of a death and was aware of my wife
starting to scream as she ran out the front door and into the night.
April 2001: Malki with her mother
Frimet
Varda Epstein: For many
years now, you and your wife Frimet have been raising awareness of what
happened to your daughter, and the injustice of subsequent events regarding her
murderer. But what was it like in the early days, after the shiva was over?
What was it like waking up in the morning and just getting through the days?
How long was it before you found a way forward?
Arnold Roth: The first seven
days are a blur. Many people—a thousand, maybe more—passed through our hot and
bustling apartment to observe the shiva with us, to bring us comfort and
distraction. Many were people who didn’t know us at all—just reaching out
because of the enormity of the tragedy and a sense of what else is there I can
do?
Almost all the interactions
that were important to me during the first year were within the family and are
intimate to the point where I believe there’s nothing I can or want to share.
Except to observe something quite uncomfortable: that we lost friends during
this period—people whose social circle we felt ourselves to be part of and who now,
in some cases, crossed the street as we got closer or whose small talk steered
carefully away from any mention of Malki and the murder that took her from us.
I can’t say I don’t judge people. But I believe we’re all to blame for how ill-prepared
most of us are for comforting others in the wake of a violent, terror-driven
death of a loved one and especially, especially, especially (no other way to
make the point) of a child.
One aspect of this sticks out
in particular and because something constructive eventually emerged, I want to
touch on it here. Schools, even in Israel, even in Jerusalem which was
Ground Zero for murderous terror attacks during the ensuing few years, were
absolutely unprepared for dealing with the impact on school mates and
especially on siblings. This caused very considerable personal suffering for
thousands of individuals and families—almost all of it unnecessary and
avoidable. Too many people were asleep at the wheel. Things are better now (and
I credit my wife’s activism for some of why it’s better). But my impression
remains that at least some of those who were ill-equipped to deal with it
remain just as ill-equipped today. Let’s hope they’re never put to the test
again.
Malki and her family, June 2001:
The scene is at the batmitzvah of her younger sister Rivka, the last family
celebration before Malki was killed two months later.
Varda Epstein:What do you think Malki would be doing today, had
she lived to fulfill her potential?
Arnold Roth: Because she was
taken from us with such sudden finality and trauma, it’s always been hard to
think of Malki grown up. She packed an amazing amount of goodness into her
life, much of it unobserved or barely known to us. Since we modeled the Malki Foundation on those parts of her life
that we wanted very much to be remembered, I will mention that she was always
ready to help people who are struggling with challenges; that she approached
practically every situation in life with a smile; that she felt especially
close to her own catastrophically-disabled little sister and did things for her
when it was clear she would get nothing back, other than satisfaction and
contentment.
Malki was modest and friendly.
The positive impact of her life is reinforced by the messages we got then and
over the years since from age-mates, from friends in the community, from little
girls who are grown up now and who were in her charge when she was a youth
leader (madricha) in Israel’s Ezra youth movement.
So what would she be doing if
she had been spared? She would be making herself helpful and well-loved
wherever she would be and in whatever she would be doing.
Malki adored her catastrophically
disabled, blind and brain-damaged little sister Haya Elisheva. This was taken
in April 2001.
Varda Epstein:What does it feel like to have Jordan refuse to
extradite the murderer? What does it say about Jordanian values, about
Jordanian society?
Arnold Roth: The appalling woman,
a barbarian in every sense of the word, who masterminded the Sbarro massacre is
living a fabulous life. The government of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has
put its strategic ties with the United States at risk by pretending, via its
highest court, that it doesn’t have to extradite her to Washington.
Malki had American citizenship
and we have made serious, little-publicized efforts to bring Ahlam Tamimi
before a US Federal court to face terrorism charges. This is not going well for
us but it’s far from over.
Varda Epstein:Do you have reason to hope that if you keep up
the fight, Tamimi will be brought to justice?
Arnold Roth: At this point, as
well as the challenges, we have some concrete achievements: Tamimi has been
charged under US law; there is a $5 million reward for information leading to
her arrest and conviction; the US has invoked its 1995 extradition treaty with
Jordan and says it expects her to be handed over. There is a wealth of detail
and complexity behind each of these ‘achievements’ and far more to tell than an
interview like this can bear.
I will only add that I think
there will be wide surprise and disappointment among those reading this once
they know who is with us in this pursuit of justice and who is blocking the
process. Since it’s very much a work in progress, I will say no more—other than
to observe that Ahlam Tamimi does not live in hiding today, has never been in
hiding for a single hour since she was freed—over our vociferous objections—from
her Israeli prison cell and from her 16 life terms, and sent back to her
homeland, Jordan. She lives free as a bird in Amman today.
Tamimi may be the first mass murderer
in history to be given her own television program, to have operated freely for
years under her own name on Facebook and Twitter, and to be interviewed
regularly in the Arabic media—special mention here of the Aljazeera Network—without
her crimes, the people she killed, ever being mentioned.
FBI wanted poster of Ahlam Tamimi
Varda Epstein: Tamimi is someone who takes joy in murdering children. How
can this be, that she roams the streets of Jordan, free?
Arnold Roth: The question is a
cornerstone for understanding the vast gulf between the two sides of the global
debate over terrorism. One of the many professional consultants who has
traveled to Jordan on behalf of the US government (there are far more of them
than most people would guess) helped me understand this. Though we were
strangers when I reached out to her, she was kind enough to provide me with real-time
feedback during her time in Amman.
She told me the Jordanians with
whom she was conferring and working—high-achievers, intelligent and well-educated
people, movers, shakers, up-and-comers in Jordanian society—see Tamimi as a
national hero. You won’t find this is in any English-language publication or in
anything directly controlled by the Jordanian government. But black-and-white
evidence of the sentiment is only too easy to find even if you don’t go there.
They utterly reject the notion,
she told me, that just because Tamimi blew up a pizzeria and all the children
and families inside that they ought to think of her as a terrorist. She’s doing
resistance. She’s a figure of wide admiration.
If Tamimi, as I believe, is a
litmus test of Arab society’s willingness to come to terms with the reality of
Israel and with the challenge of living at peace with Israelis at some future
point… well, you don’t need me to finish the sentence.
Varda Epstein: You showed me
a blog you wrote about your Aunt Feiga. Can you tell the readers about her, the
photo you received, and Malki’s reaction to that photo?
Arnold Roth: I was born in Melbourne.
It’s an unusual and very special place to be from for several reasons.
The one I want to emphasize is
that almost all my friends, growing up, were just like me: children of “refos”—European
Jews, by far most of them from Poland, who were issued papers in and after 1947
(a change of government led to a major turn-around in Australia’s notoriously
closed approach to immigration) to come as refugees and rebuild their lives as
far away from the European killing fields as you could go.
Almost none of us had any
grandparents. Few of us had more than one sibling. All of us had parents who shared
some major dimensions: working hard, getting ahead, making a good life, giving
their children the best, and having frequent and noisy nightmares of the
Holocaust years that stole their youth, their schooling, their families, their
health.
My father’s life, the details
of which are still in some ways a mystery to me, included some special drama.
Dad was one of seventeen children, a Hassidic family from a small town in
Galicia, of whom only two, maybe three, survived the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
That sentence contains practically everything I knew up to when Dad passed away
in 1982.
Among the many stunning
discoveries that came after Dad was no longer available for me to consult him
was a cluster of four photocopies of Nazi census forms. They are from the
Krakow Ghetto, all dated August 1940, all filled in by handwriting (my father’s
was familiar to me), all with passport-style photos. Up until these papers came
into my hands, which was in 2000, I had never seen a portrait of my father as
he looked before ending up as a survivor.
The other three were of women,
one of them a sister of my father, the sum total of whose existence until that
moment was a name on a family tree that I made after holding Dad down long
enough to disclose things he was never comfortable disclosing.
The sister’s name was Feiga;
she did not survive. The census picture shows a woman of 26, a striking beauty
with distinctive eyes and eyebrows.
Malki’s eyes and
eyebrows.
Malki noticed the resemblance
immediately. It triggered some discussion, and perhaps some deeper thoughts,
about Jewish history, about irreparable loss, about family. Malki was taken
from us a little more than a year later.
Feiga (Malki’s aunt whom she never
knew--she perished at the hands of the Nazis) and Malki
Varda Epstein: What should
we learn as Jews from the story of Malka Chana Roth, HY”D?
Arnold Roth: It was always
clear to us that if we didn’t take steps to preserve a memory of Malki’s
beautiful life, that in the nature of things her murder would be reduced to a
statistic. Sounds cruel but from the perspective of Israeli society, it’s far
truer than not.
As a family, we took a few
minutes during the shiva, after the last of the visitors had departed on one of
the evenings, to consider our options. We decided to create a charity that
would give practical expression to Malki’s passion for helping children with
extreme special needs. This of course was something that fit well with the
wonderful devotion she showed for the very challenging needs of her own little
sister. But it went beyond that.
The anecdotes are many but two
stand out.
One—in the summer of 2000, a
year before she was taken from us—Malki decided to apply what she had learned
in helping her mother look after Haya, our youngest, by knocking on nearby
doors to see if there was someone else’s mother who needed a volunteer helper
with her skills. She found Ro’ei and his mother Devorah just a few streets
away.
Ro’ei, confined to a
wheelchair, non-verbal, fed by tube, a gorgeous little boy with a smiley face—had
the version of Canavan Disease whose outcome is depressingly known well in
advance. Malki loved being with him daily, cleaning him up, cheering him up,
sharing some of the overwhelmed young single mother’s load, making herself
helpful. She embraced the self-imposed mission like others of her age embrace
going to the beach. (Ro’ei outlived Malki by a few months.)
In August 2001, partnered by
Rachel, a school-friend, she insisted her way into the annual summer camp held
by Etgarim, a wonderful nonprofit that provides
summer sports, camping and the best of outdoors activity for youngsters with
special needs, both cognitive and physical. Malki told us that Etgarim wasn’t
geared up to take volunteers but that somehow the girls broke through the
resistance and became part of the team. The photos we later saw show Malki
smiling from ear to ear as she poses with campers.
We found an old disposable 35 mm
film camera in the house about 2 years ago. It turned out to be Malki’s. We
developed and printed the photos and this one turned out one of the loveliest
we have. Malki went on a walking tiyul around the Old City she so loved.
Most of what we know about
those few days we learned after the Sbarro bombing which happened just a couple
of days after Malki came home from the north. The stories they shared with us
are unbearably touching.
We named the new entity the
Malki Foundation: in Hebrew, Keren Malki [www.malkifoundation.org].
Almost eighteen years on, it has a terrific record of quiet, modest achievement,
empowering thousands of parents of children with extreme special needs—children
from every part of Israeli society without regard for religion, political
outlook, national identification or economic capability—who have made the
decision to embrace the challenge of raising their child with special needs at
home and withstanding the pressure to institutionalize the child.
We avoid intruding into the
family’s life or second-guessing them on decisions about which non-medical therapies
they feel will most benefit their child. We support physical therapy, speech
therapy, hydrotherapy, therapeutic horse riding and occupational therapy. They
choose the therapist and the times and the frequency; we pay. We want them to
feel empowered. It’s a successful model.
We also provide home-care and
mobility equipment, and for families living in the periphery—Israel’s far north
and far south—we send our own therapists right into the home. For many of them,
we could provide an open check for therapy services and they would be unable to
spend the money. Israel seriously lets such families down.
Associating tragedy, personal
loss, grief and pain with good, constructive deeds is a respected and
time-honored Jewish response. We call those deeds hesed. I don’t intend
to wax poetical in explaining why the family created the Malki Foundation but
want simply to say: it gives me the opportunity, often and before audiences I
would not otherwise reach, of saying: There was a very special young woman
called Malki and we are all poorer for her having been taken from us.
Malki will never be a statistic
but an inspiration. And in remembering her, we also realize that she and the
savage who engineered her death are not—as several dull journalists said to me
at various points in the weeks after the massacre—two sides of the same coin.
Quite the opposite: their ways will never be and never were our ways. Sounds
simple but surprisingly few public figures—diplomats, politicians, editors,
religious leaders—seem to actually understand it.
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Continuing my series of re-captioning single panel comics...
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The Palestinians should send a delegation to Bahrain and participate in the meetings. They can make their demands and propose changes in the U.S. plan. There is no good reason for them not to participate. They can object to what President Trump has done and even demand that it be undone, but their objections will have no credibility if they continue to be no-shows.
One reality should be clear to the Palestinian leadership at this point if they want a state rather than a "cause" they will never get through any means other than direct negotiations with Israel. They will not get a state from the United Nations, from the European Union, from Russia, from Iran or even from the United States. Nor will they get it as a result of BDS or university protests. They will certainly not get it through military conquest or terrorism. Only by negotiating with Israel will they achieve statehood. And it won't be on the 1967 lines or without any other compromises, such as to the so-called right of return, despite dozens of meaningless one-sided resolutions, including the one engineered by outgoing President Barack Obama during his final days in office. Both sides will have to make painful compromises. Israel has already shown its willingness to do so by twice offering compromise plans. Prime Minister Netanyahu has recognized the need for Israel to make compromises. So must the Palestinian leadership.
Israel's current political deadlock, with new elections scheduled for September, will inevitably postpone any real progress toward peace. The Palestinian leadership should take advantage of this delay to attend the meeting without having to make any concessions. They can listen and propose, knowing that no final decisions are likely to be made until Israel forms a new government in the fall.
If the Palestinian leadership persists in its refusal to sit down and negotiate, they will only have themselves to blame for the lack of statehood. President Abbas himself has bemoaned the failure of Palestinian leadership to accept prior peace proposals. Now he is the leader in charge, at least in theory. He should learn the lessons of the past, come to Bahrain and begin a process of negotiation that may be the only remaining road to Palestinian statehood.
When I started to work together with Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin on ways to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the early 1980s, the first thing we did was to speak to Palestinian leaders, businessmen, and journalists. One of our first questions was whether Israel should simply withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza. The answer we got was devastating. "We Palestinians will first kill each other, and then we will start to kill you."
Israel has repeatedly offered ways and means to establish a prosperous State of Palestine, living in good neighborly relations beside Israel. Alas, internal Palestinian divisions, conflicting external influences, and the conviction that Israel is not here to stay have prevented the establishment of a state of their own.
In Shimon Peres' memoir, Battling for Peace, he expressed Israeli fears, writing: "In our view, a Palestinian state, though demilitarized at first, would over time inevitably strive to build up a military strength of its own, and the international community, depending upon massive Second and Third World support at the United Nations, would do nothing to stop it. That army, eventually, would be deployed at the very gates of Jerusalem and down the entire, narrow length of Israel. It would pose a constant threat to our security and to the peace and stability of the region."
In October 1993, Yassir Arafat's brother, Dr. Fathi Arafat, suggested the building of working committees for "people-to-people" activities, aiming to lay the foundations of good neighborly relations. Joint teams worked for 14 months on a wide range of programs. Then the PLO decided on an "anti-normalization" strategy that meant that any Palestinian who cooperated with Israelis would be castigated. The major message understood by Israeli society was that good neighborly relations were not part of the deal, even if this would undermine Palestinian well-being and prosperity.
In October 1995, a small group of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators prepared what is known as the Beilin-Abu Mazen Understanding, which was a blueprint for a Permanent Status Agreement. In the summer of 2000, Abu Mazen (Mohammad Abbas) publicly withdrew his consent. When we phoned him, he answered in his own voice, telling us that he was not at home.
The PA has decided to stop paying for the successful cancer treatment of a 7-year-old Palestinian child Majed Muhammad Majed Ah-Sha'er in Israeli Ichilov Hospital, in order to keep paying salaries for terrorists. The decision was made despite the fact that Ichilov is the first hospital outside the United States using a new cancer treatment "that holds promise for lymphoma and leukemia patients."
According to the boy’s father Majed Muhammad was diagnosed with Leukemia in 2015, and was sent for treatment in Israel:
"He has been transferred to hospitals in the occupied interior (i.e., Israel) since the outbreak of the disease. He added that he has received full treatment and that the response [to the treatment] has been good. He also said that the doctors have emphasized that check-ups need to be made every six months in order to complete the treatment and necessary medical tests." [Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, May 28, 2019]
Majed's father explained that the new request for approval of his son's next trip was submitted "to the relevant bodies in Ramallah, but his referral to Ichilov Hospital was not approved and the doctors have said that he is expected to be referred to a different hospital in the occupied West Bank."
He added, "The reason that the referral to the hospital in the occupied interior (i.e., Israel) was not approved is that the president [Abbas] has decided to stop the referrals to the Israeli hospitals but there are sick people who are still being treated in the occupied interior."
With Israel's dramatic victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Jewish progressives faced their greatest challenge. The New Left, splintering along racial and ideological lines, grew critical of the Jewish State, equating its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the evil imperialist impulses of the United States in the Cold War. Many in the New Left rejected Zionism, labeling it a chauvinistic, even racist, manifestation of nationalism.
At the 1967 Conference for a New Politics held in Chicago, for example, African American delegates pressed for passage of a resolution that characterized the June 1967 conflict as an "imperialist Zionist war." As Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael said at a 1968 convention of the Organization of American Students, "We have begun to see the evil of Zionism and we will fight to wipe it out wherever it exists, be it in the Ghetto of the United States or in the Middle East."
Jewish New Leftists in Berkeley responded by creating the Committee for a Progressive Middle East in March, 1969. The Committee intended to strike a balance between the strident anti-Zionist influences growing with the New Left and the much less critical Zionist voices of Hillel and other Jewish groups. Radical Jewish Zionists, despite their attempts to locate progressive Zionism within the boundaries of the New Left, failed to re-unite Jewish leftists with an ever more radical, and anti-Zionist, movement.
The rise of Black Power also alienated Jews from the New Left, which had, by the mid-1960s, come to locate black militancy in its movement's vanguard. The rise of ethnic nationalism ended the inter-racial civil rights movement of the Martin Luther King, Jr., years. Jews, once valued as liberal America's most committed social reform advocates, faced a Black Power-inspired critique that labeled them white oppressors.
When Jewish New Leftists sought a strategic alliance with Oakland's Black Panther Party, for example, they were rebuffed. As one Jewish New Leftist explained, "Even if I were a superaltruistic liberal and campaigned among the Jews to support the Panthers' program, I would justifiably be tarred and feathered for giving aid and comfort to enemies of the Jews. I would rather it were not this way, but it was you who disowned us, not we who betrayed you." The end of the civil rights movement at home combined with Jewish concerns over the New Left's critique of Israel when, in 1969, Eldridge Cleaver told a New York Times reporter that "the Black Panther Party in the United States fully supports Arab Guerillas in the Middle East."
By the early 1970s, the New Left lost most of its earlier Jewish influence. Jews, weary of anti-Zionism, occasional antisemitism, and the rise of ethnic and racial consciousness, turned inward, applying many of the New Left's political strategies to Jewish communal concerns [such as freeing Soviet Jews].
Doesn't the radical wing of the New Left sound like the "progressives" and socialists of today? And J-Street sounds like the group of people who tried and failed to bridge the gap between the insane hateful Leftists and accepting the state of Israel.
Just as in the UK now with the Labour Party, the obvious antisemitism of the Left finally pushed the Jewish liberals too far as they realized that there was no place for them. American Jews who support the Left have not yet reached that point. And some of them are too far gone, as they have subsumed their Jewish identity to their new religion of progressivism.
Here's an interesting JTA article from 1972 showing a debate about the New Left at the time, and again the arguments sound familiar:
Participants in the American Jewish Congress’ tenth annual American-Israel Dialogue debated vigorously today whether the New Left was good for the Jews, Zionism and Israel. The debate was launched Monday night by Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who assailed the New Left, and continued yesterday by Histadrut Secretary General Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, who disagreed with Eban, but with reservations.
“We assume that anti-Semitism on the left can be rectified,” said Marie Syrkin of New York, Zionist editor of the Herzl Press. “It’s a myth to say the New Left is anti-Jewish,” countered Paul Jacobs of San Francisco, who once ran for the Senate on Black militant Eldridge Cleaver’s Peace and Freedom ticket. Leftist anti-Semitism can be purged more easily than rightist anti-Semitism, Miss Syrkin claimed. “There’s a wide spectrum of belief among the New Left.” retorted Jacobs, citing Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone as non anti-Zionist New Leftists.
Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg. AJ Congress president, said the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel had led Jews to desert the political right. Prof. Theodore Draper of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University suggested that Jews would be better off if they did not “mortgage” their future to either side.
Some speakers took pains to deny any anti-Semitism in the New Left. Others sought to discredit the notion that anti-Semitism was the brainchild of either modern socialism or the American Jewish New Left. Prof. Abraham Udovitch of Princeton pointed out that anti-Semitic tendencies had cropped up in “all redemptive movements” of Christian Europe, a full 600 years before the advent of socialism. (Yesterday, Ben-Aharon claimed that anti-Semites were omnipresent in the Old Left.) Prof. Henry Feingold of City College, New York, insisted that anti-Semitism had been “tacked on” after the New Left adopted its political views.
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If this plan never sees the light of day, we won’t shed any tears. At J Street, we’ve been 100 percent clear that the effort led by Jared Kushner and David Friedman is not a good-faith attempt to bring about a peaceful, lasting and viable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
How do they know? They just do!
Instead, it’s designed to punish and alienate the Palestinians while embracing the hardline positions of the settlement movement -- helping the Israeli right to entrench the occupation and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
How do they know? They just do!
Whether or not the world ever sees the details of their proposal, we know that everything this White House has already said and done has exacerbated the conflict and imperiled the long-term future of both peoples.
How has the conflict been exacerbated? Were the Palestinians negotiating with Israel during the Obama years?
How has the long term future of both peoples been imperiled? They just know!
From slashing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and unilaterally recognizing Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, to refusing to support the two-state solution or even recognize the existence of the occupation, the Trump administration has empowered creeping annexation in the West Bank and undercut the prospects for peace.
How do they know that Israeli building in areas that everyone knows would remain Israeli undercuts the prospects for peace? They just do!
The number of assumptions made by so many people who regard themselves as pro-Israel centrists is astounding. They just know that two states would end the conflict. They just know that Palestinians will abandon support for terror. They just know that calling Israel a Jewish state makes peace less likely. They just know that Palestinians aren't serious about the "right of return" for millions of the descendants of those who left in 1948.
The underlying assumption behind all of these assumptions is that they just know that the Palestinian decision makers are rational actors.
Are the Palestinian leaders rational?
They have rejected peace plans (and an Obama peace framework) numerous times. These would have led to a state and they said no. Doesn't that prove that they don't really want a state?
They have said that their top economic priority is to pay the people who have killed or tried to kill Jews as well as the families of the terrorists. Doesn't that prove that they really don't care about peace?
They have rejected US aid and Israeli tax dollars that are absolutely needed for their people. Doesn't that prove that the Palestinian leaders don't care about their own people?
But every time the Palestinians do something outrageous like these and many other examples, these "pro-Israel" liberals fall over themselves to justify the indefensible. The peace plans were an insult to their dignity, even though they went to (and beyond) 100% of the land area of the territories. The payments to terrorists are just like social security. They cannot accept aid with strings attached because they have pride.
Even if these excuses were true, it shows that Palestinians are not rational actors. They do not prioritize real peace and a state side by side with Israel. They do not teach peace to their children. They lionize terrorists. The list goes on and on.
If the Palestinian leaders are not rational now, isn't it the height of stupidity to assume that they will suddenly become rational and act the way Westerners do if they are rewarded with a state? What evidence is there that any of the assumptions about how they would act after an agreement will pan out?
A two state solution, which the entire world agrees is desirable, is the biggest case of wishful thinking in history. Assumptions with no basis in fact are tossed around as if they are proven true. Anyone who doubts it is vilified as being against peace or being Islamophobic or racist or whatever.
From everything we are hearing from Jared Kushner, he went into this by not making any of the assumptions that have not panned out. He looked at it with eyes that were not blinded by decades of conventional wisdom. And he is trying to find a solution that will make both sides as happy as both sides could be given the nature of the conflict.
It probably will fail, but not one diplomat in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been as clear-eyed and objective as Kushner has been. (The main reason the "pro-Israel" liberals don't believe this is because he is a religious Jew. Yes, that is stereotyping, and it is yet another false assumption from the "experts."
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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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Thursday, June 06, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
Tel Aviv, June 6 - Journalists from some of the major media outlets in the country expressed frustration and disappointment today at the relative paucity of retail hot beverage establishments catering to a young, woke crowd where they can sit and eavesdrop on conversations that dovetail with the journalists' pre-existing worldview, and then present those remarks as illuminating or groundbreaking.
