AFP reports that a mob blocked the route of a UNIFIL convoy in southern Lebanon on Friday.
The UN forces issued a statement saying that "a large group of civilians... dispossessed the UNIFIL patrol of items and equipment," without specifying what equipment was taken.
The Lebanese Army had to come in to extricate the UNIFIL forces, but their equipment was not returned.
This was not a spontaneous, popular action. Hezbollah controls the area and the population. This was orchestrated by Hezbollah, possibly to send a message to UNIFIL as to who is really in charge.
Not to mention that this way, Hezbollah gets free equipment upplied by the United Nations without the UN issuing a peep of protest.
The UNIFIL website does not have any news about this.
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According to an cademic paper on the Pocono resort economy 1865-1940,
In the 1930s, anti-Semitism became more pronounced with many places noting their Christian-only policy. According to ads in the Lackawanna booklets, twenty-three resorts were "restricted" in 1939, double the figure for 1933. In fact, the real number of "restricted" places was higher, because some were less blatant in their bias. A former employee of a resort that did not openly discriminate told the author of an unofficial quota for Jews.
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Making the moderates and soft Zionists aware
It is important to make headway with more moderate elements of the left, just as it was and remains vitally important to educate them on the issue of antisemitism. Make no mistake, without these elements of the left – you will not win the argument, as many will come out to defend the right to boycott even if they do not adhere to the movement themselves.
This is made worse by the deliberate vagueness of the BDS movement. As boycotting settlement goods adheres to one of the three BDS goals, left-wing Zionists become reluctant to call it out for what it is. Part of their politics aligns with some of the goals of BDS and therefore they see aligning with BDS detractors as a defacto support of Israeli settlement policy. These people must be made to realise that standing up against an antisemitic movement that seeks the destruction of the state of Israel is the ethical thing to do.
The problems with BDS
Therefore, if the antisemitic discrimination inherent in BDS is to be challenged, some of the problems with BDS must be made clear:
- Why does BDS make up stories about Jewish people committing crimes? This is what antisemites have always done.
- BDS does nothing to protect Palestinians in Lebanon, where they face severe persecution. So BDS cannot claim to be about human rights or protecting Palestinians.
- Why does BDS claim it is a ‘call from within’. Not only do they lie about their formation but they also target Israel – Israelis made no such call.
- BDS is deliberately vague. They are not explicit in their goals because they need to hide them.
- Why does BDS make demands about Israeli Arabs, when they are by far the freest Arabs in the region?
- Why do BDS talk about laws that do not exist and then say the Jews must conform to those laws or be punished. This is what medieval Christianity did to the Jews.
- Dozens of despotic nations are serial human rights abusers. Far, far worse that Israel. Why pick on the one Jewish state?
- If BDS is about human rights, why do so many supporters wave flags from despotic Islamist nations?
Call ‘boycotting Jews’ out for what it is
BDS simply needs to be called out for what it is. This is not about free speech. You are not free to illegally discriminate. BDS is just another in a long line of antisemitic movements that chooses boycotting Jews as an initial way of weakening them. It has no place in unions, on campus or on our streets. The BDS movement should be treated as we would treat any of the antisemitic boycott movements from the last 2000 years. They should be shunned wherever they try to sell their hate.
It is likely that the Palestinians would not have been able to hold out for another four years and would have eventually returned to the negotiating table with Israel, although this time with an understanding that compromises would be necessary.
The question now is what will the Biden administration do if it even finds the time to try and restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What happened at the UN last week should serve as a reminder of what is not needed. Israelis and the Palestinians don’t need plans, resolutions and proposals that look good on paper and at academic conferences, but have nothing to do with reality.
The countries that voted in favor of the five anti-Israel resolutions at the UN showed that they are detached from reality and from what is happening in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Moreover, anti-Israel resolutions and meetings of the Security Council are not going to bring the sides together.
What can work? An understanding by the Palestinians that they will not simply get what they want and that they will need to compromise to achieve independence, statehood and peace.
For them to understand that, Biden will need to make it clear that the US is not going back to the days of president Barack Obama and the refusal to veto anti-Israel resolutions like 2334 that passed at the end of his presidency.
A group of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals, 122 in all, endorsed a statement last week published by The Guardian newspaper that attacked the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. These intellectuals were concerned because the definition continues to be adopted by hundreds of governments, local authorities, and civic associations in the United States and across the world as an effective instrument for countering the hatred of Jews.
As is often the case with statements such as these, what wasn’t said was as telling to the critical reader as what did make the text.
It’s not that these Arab intellectuals endorse antisemitism. They declare early on that “no expression of hatred for Jews as Jews should be tolerated anywhere in the world.” They recognize, too, that antisemitism “manifests itself in sweeping generalizations and stereotypes about Jews, regarding power and money in particular, along with conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.”
Yet despite featuring the names of some of the Arab world’s most respected academics, writers, and filmmakers (arch-foes of Israel all), the statement on the IHRA definition at no point acknowledges that antisemitism as a social and religious phenomenon is deeply embedded within the Arab civilizations that these intellectuals represent. Instead, antisemitism is depicted as someone else’s problem, primarily Europe’s.
It is hard to take seriously the expressed commitment to fighting antisemitism in this statement in the face of such blatant airbrushing of Middle Eastern history. For millennia, Jews occupied a precarious place in Arab and Islamic societies, occasionally experiencing more benign rulers, but frequently serving as the targets of official discrimination and popular violence. That history, importantly, includes the Holocaust, as witnessed through the destruction of Jewish communities in German-occupied North Africa; the anti-Jewish riots in Baghdad, Cairo, and other cities; and the broader ideological affinities between the Nazis and Arab nationalists, many of whom would come to power and expel their Jewish populations in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, and other countries in the coming decades.
As usual, for Palestinians, everything must be politicized to be against Israel.
The latest example is Palestinian prime minister Mohame Shtayyeh's video speech at the lighting of the Bethlehem Christmas tree. During his address, he compared Israel to COVID-19 more than once, even referring to Israel as a "pandemic."
We will not surrender, neither to the virus nor to the occupation measures, and we will accomplish what we have started .
...
We presented a message in the political steadfastness in the face of the colonial occupation pandemic, and in the face of the seizure of our money, and we presented a message in the national steadfastness in the face of the disease pandemic.
This is the hate that Palestinians grow up with and receive every day of their lives.
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Incredible #PalestineWrites Lit Festival continues. In Nature under settler colonialism lawyer Rabea Eghbariah discussed bizarre fact that Israel has criminalized the picking of zatar & akoub (tumble thistle) & lifted camels and removed them as a road problem #amwriting
Thus the control of herbs commonly used in Palestinian cooking and camels used by Bedouins is part of settler colonialism and continued efforts to erase Palestian life. Making and eating zatar is now an act of resistance!!! #PalestineWrites
What is she talking about?
A far more objective description of the akoub issue is related in this February Undark article:
FOR JUST UNDER three months a year, towards the end of the winter rains, Samir Naamneh and his wife Nadya get up at 4 in the morning, gear up in improvised camouflage, and pack into a truck headed from Arraba, their Arab village in Israel, to the Golan Heights. During this season, the volcanic plateau is carpeted with delicate wildflowers and dotted with hundreds of endangered gazelles. To the trained eye, the lush, grassy slopes are also bursting with an unassuming, wildly lucrative thistle known as akoub.
“It’s healthy because it’s from the wild,” says Samir, who has been illegally foraging akoub with his wife for the last 15 years, in defiance of an Israeli ban intended to prevent over-harvesting of what officials consider an endangered native species.
While a handful of Jewish farmers in Israel have been cultivating akoub to feed the feverish demand among Palestinians, illegal harvesting remains the main method for getting akoub to market, where it is often bought in bulk and frozen for off-season consumption. If caught by Israeli authorities, akoub pickers have long faced substantial fines and arrest.
In 2005, when Israel put akoub on its protected species list and imposed the ban on its collection, the plant’s wild population was being devastated by commercial harvesting. But authorities say the ban has helped to replenish the plant’s numbers, and in August announced that the policy would be amended this year to allow small-scale collection for personal consumption. Even so, Samir, who is one of hundreds working in clandestine networks to fuel the akoub black market, says he’ll continue to illegally gather the plant in large quantities.
“We feel, and we know, and we’re sure, that the laws are made, on principle, against the Arab residents of the country, to hurt their livelihoods,” says Samir, 57, standing at his straw-thatched roadside produce stand outside the central market in Arraba, a sprawling community of just over 26,000 about an hour outside the Golan Heights. “It’s part of the pressure that Israel puts on us to starve us out.”
The Israel Nature and Parks Authority, however, asserts that it is their mandate to prevent akoub’s disappearance from the wild. Unchecked harvesting “is liable to obliterate the plant completely, which is something that would damage our legacy as well as the landscapes of our childhood,” according to the Nature and Parks Authority website.
Shuki Donitza, the head of law enforcement at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, who was responsible for the revised policy, says there is a crucial difference between the individual families who harvest akoub and the loosely organized networks of dealers...
Donitza says that under the new policy to be enforced this akoub season, rangers will be instructed to relax their approach to more carefully differentiate between commercial pickers and those whose collections weigh within the newly allotted limit. “At the end of the day,” he says, the rationale is “to save the environment — for all of us.”
Notice that there is nothing stopping Arabs from building lucrative akoub (and hyssop, for zaatar) farms, which would be legal. Instead they insist on plucking them from public lands (sometimes dangerous lands like minefields in the Golan Heights) and selling them.
The idea that Israel is targeting Palestinian spices is slander. Israel has 257 plant species under protection.
A far as the camel ban mentioned, well, 15 people have been killed in recent years from car collisions with camels. Making laws to keep camels off the roads is hardly discriminatory, unless you consider camel grazing to be more important than human lives.
The libels never stop.
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Time magazine published an article by Sanya Mansoor, "The Trump Administration is Cracking Down Against a Global Movement to Boycott Israel. Here’s What You Need to Know About BDS" that pretends to be an objective piece - but is in fact a one-sided piece of pro-BDS propaganda.
Here are some of the most egregious examples:
BDS was formally launched in 2005 by a coalition of about 170 Palestinian grassroots and civil society groups.
To discuss the origins of BDS without mentioning its true origins at the notoriously anti-Israel and antisemitic Durban conference of 2001 is to deliberately hide its Jew-hating origins.
Recall that the US and Israel left the conference because of its antisemitic focus, as well as the removal of language against antisemitism in its final statement. The conference resolution included language that called Israel "a racist apartheid state," guilty of the "systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing ... and state terror against the Palestinian people." The language was so one-sided that even Amnesty and Human Rights Watch expressed concern about the final resolution, but said that the good outweighed the bad so they ended up supporting it (a pattern that has only become worse in the years since then.)
BDS started in 2005—just one year after the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that “Israel’s building of a barrier in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal.”
The article here and elsewhere tries to make BDS appear to be only against "settlements" and not Israel's existence as a whole. BDS has nothing at all to do with the ICJ opinion.
Boycotts, although a common form of non-violent protest and an effective way to raise awareness around an issue, are often not effective in creating a significant or immediate economic dent or policy change. In the late fifties, the African National Congress in South Africa called for foreign governments to withdraw investments, halt trade and enact a broad boycott South African consumer goods, academia and sports. In the 1790s, English and American abolitionists boycotted sugar produced by slaves.
And in the 1930s, Nazis started boycotts against Jewish-owned stores. Why is that not given as a historical example of a boycott?
However, the next example is meant to be a bridge between these two examples of boycotts and BDS:
In 1945, the Arab League—a collection of close to two-dozen Middle Eastern and African countries began an economic boycott of Israeli companies and goods.
Really? "Israeli" companies and goods? Because the language of the 1945 boycott didn't say "Israeli" - it called to boycott Jewish businesses and goods! The specific language was "Products of Palestinian Jews are to be considered undesirable in Arab countries."
In some ways, BDS continues and was born out of the lack of alternative ways to express Palestinian grievances. “Every other form of Palestinian resistance has been criminalized and made unavailable,” says Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at Rutgers University. “It’s not that BDS is integral. What do we have besides it?”
Practically no critics of BDS are quoted (except for a brief quote by Rabbi David Wolpe.) while crtitics of Israel are quoted at length. As far as answering the question by Noura Erekat - whose Palestinian origins are not mentioned - perhaps one alternative is if the Palestinians would negotiate with Israel in good faith and accept the existence of a Jewish state, as Bahrain and the UAE have.
The article also includes a link to the BDS webpage - but the article has no similar links to any BDS critics.
The BDS national committee says that it does not advocate for any particular solution to the conflict in terms of a “one state” or “two state” solution but that their focus is on Palestinian human rights and regaining control of occupied territories. “Under international law, no political regime, especially a colonial and oppressive one, has any inherent “right to exist,” said Omar Barghouti, human rights defender and co-founder of the BDS movement, in an email to TIME. “No state, whether apartheid South Africa in the past or apartheid Israel today, has a right to be racist or supremacist, privileging part of its population based on identity, and excluding another part, which happens to be the indigenous nation.”
These statements calling Israel "racist" and "supremacist" and "apartheid," are accepted as fact by the writer, even though they are easily provable lies - apartheid South Africa did not give Black citizens equal rights and Israel does give all citizens equal rights.
And it would not be difficult to show that Barghouti's statements contradict the first sentence - BDS considers all of Israel to be illegitimate, so of course it doesn't support a two-state solution that still allows Israel to exist as the only Jewish state, while Arab and Muslim and Christian and French and Greek and Italian states are not considered to be inherently racist.
BDS advocates the dismantling of Israel and replacing it with another Arab state (via one-state solution) or two Arab states (via "right to return.")
Is BDS anti-semitic?
BDS leaders and supporters have vehemently denied that the movement is anti-semitic, saying that they “target the Israeli state” for “serious violations of international law” and do not go after “any individual or group simply because they are Israeli.” When Pompeo conflated BDS with anti-Semitism, Palestinians, as well as national and international civil rights advocates, objected.
Mansoor gives practically no arguments that prove that BDS is an antisemitic movement.
BDS doesn't recognize the Jewish people as a people, only a religion. It advocates boycotting only Jewish businesses in Israel, not Arab-owned businesses. It puts a litmus test on Israeli Jews, and only Jews, to declare themselves to be explicitly anti-Zionist in order to allow them to speak on campus - and it often objects to Jews in any political role on campus unless they are anti-Zionist. it objects to only the Jewish state and not any other state that defines itself in ethnic terms.
You wouldn't know any of this from this article.
She also doesn't mention that the German parliament and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared BDS to be antisemitic. Instead she frames it as only being opposed by right-wing Jewish groups and Mike Pompeo.
“If you say anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism then you’re basically condemning all Palestinians as anti-Semites because they decide to exist,” Erakat says. The reason that BDS has been met with fierce opposition is because it “morally challenges Zionism as a political project,” she adds.
This is an absurd lie - no one says that normal criticism of Israel or "Palestinians existing" is antisemitic.
Jews and Jewish groups are not united on the issue about whether BDS is anti-semitic. While many conservative Jewish groups criticize BDS for unfairly singling out Israel and worry that it’s ultimate aim is to delegitimize any notion of a Jewish state, dozens of progressive Jewish groups have taken issue with the characterization of BDS as anti-Semitic, fearing that doing so overshadows “legitimate critiques of Israeli policies.”
Only 3% of Jews in the US consider themselves "generally not pro-Israel" and only a fraction of them would go further and say that they are actively anti-Zionist. This paragraph implies that the topic is hotly contested when in fact the "dozens" of progressive Jewish groups are only a sliver of the Jewish community. This is dishonest reporting on every level.
Almost one quarter of American Jews under 40 support the boycott of products made in Israel, according to a National Jewish Survey of 8000 Jewish voters in the 2020 election from J Street, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group that identifies as progressive—they oppose Israeli occupation but are also against the global BDS movement.
A careful look at the results of the poll(of 800 Jews, not 8000) show that this is not true. There were two questions, one about boycotting Israeli products in general and one about boycotting products because of Israel's policies in the West Bank. The people polled gave inconsistent answers to the second, loaded question and almost certainly understood the second question to refer only to "settlement" products.
Student bodies at a few dozen U.S. colleges have voted to divest from or boycott companies that profit from Israeli occupation and human rights violations, according to the National Students for Justice in Palestine, whose chapters have been advocating for BDS.
And how many have voted down BDS resolutions? And what it the trend? A real reporter would find out. Mansoor just parrots quotes from BDSers.
This is not an objective description of BDS. It is a thinly disguised piece of pro-BDS propaganda.
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Here's a news flash for Saudi Arabia: Presumptive President-elect Joe Biden is looking to fundamentally restructure the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The only way for Riyadh to stop what's coming might be to normalize relations with Israel right now.
Biden's nominee for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, reportedly held regular calls with far-left foreign policy activists during the presidential campaign and expressed an openness to cutting off arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In an interview shortly before the election, Blinken announced that a Biden administration would "undertake a strategic review of our bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia to make sure that it is truly advancing our interests and is consistent with our values." Translation for Riyadh: Buckle up for a rough ride.
Absent a seismic shift—like a normalization agreement with Israel—the Saudis should prepare for the worst. Congress has the votes to send a bill to the president's desk to halt U.S. arms sales to the kingdom. Such a bill passed the Senate just last year, when Republicans held a wider margin than they will in 2021—and before the kingdom angered a number of oil state Republicans by crashing the price of oil and pummeling the U.S. energy industry. This time around, when that same bill reaches the Oval Office, there will be nobody to veto it.
The incoming State Department brass will also likely reopen an investigation into the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to determine whether U.S. human rights sanctions should be imposed on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or "MbS," as he is known. To preserve the bilateral relationship, the Trump administration shielded MbS from direct sanctions retribution in 2019—a decision likely to be reversed in a Biden administration.
Against the backdrop of a complete reset in U.S.-Saudi relations, President-elect Joe Biden is also making it clear that he will press for a full re-entry into the Iran nuclear deal without any preconditions. He could very well turn back the clock four years and flood the Islamic Republic with billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which would enable Tehran to recapitalize both its Revolutionary Guard and its sprawling terror operations throughout the Middle East. Biden could renew American support for the enrichment of uranium on Iranian soil and acquiesce to the expiration of international restrictions on transferring advanced arms to the mullahs.
Saudi Arabia said it remains open to fully normalize ties with Israel and join the Abraham Accords. According Saudi Arabia Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan it was critically important to get Palestinians and Israelis back to the negotiating table that delivers a Palestinian state within the “lines that are globally understood to eventually constitute a Palestinian state.” The remarks were made at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Manama Dialogue Conference which is taking place from December 4 to 6.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister says that Palestinian statehood would deliver peace and noted the King Fahad peace initiative at Fez in 1982 and 2002 Saudi plans have suggested full normalization in the past with Israel. “Israel will take its place in the region but in order for that too happen and for that to be sustainable we need for the Palestinians to get their state and settle that situation.”
The remarks were made at the annual and important conference that is held in Bahrain. The conference took place this year at the Ritz Carlton in Manama. Israel participated openly for the first time with several participants and press releases from the conference said Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi was scheduled to address the event virtually.
According to Al-Arabiya the remarks by the foreign minister are part of the speculation that Saudi Arabia could follow the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to join the Abraham Accords. In November reports indicated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to Saudi Arabia, although Riyadh denied he met the Crown Prince. Saudi Arabia is seeking to repair its image in Washington with the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden. It has also hinted that it may be open to some mending of fences with Turkey and Qatar. Turkey and Qatar are allies and Saudi Arabia led other Gulf states to break relations with Doha in 2017. Turkey sent troops to Qatar. Turkey has been openly opposed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar has used its media to try to undermine global support for Riyadh.
This isn’t what Israelis want to hear right now, but it’s nonetheless true. They need to hold another election. The prospect of a new administration in Washington is cause for concern, even if it may not prove to be the end of the world. But the challenge that this will pose requires Jerusalem to speak with one voice.
An Israeli government with the prime minister’s office at odds with both the defense and foreign ministries is a luxury the Jewish state might have been able to afford as long as President Donald Trump was in the White House, and the U.S.-Israel relationship was one rooted in close cooperation and a common vision about strategic issues. But with President-elect Joe Biden about to take office with a foreign-policy team committed to the failed Middle East policies of the Obama administration, Israel’s margin for error is about to be reduced. Even if that means that Israelis must suffer through the agony of a fourth election inside of two years, a divorce between unity government partners Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Benny Gantz has become a necessity.
After having held three inconclusive elections inside of a year, yet another trip to the ballot box would seem to be the last thing the Jewish state needs. In April and September of 2019, and then again in March of this year, Israelis headed to the polls to elect a Knesset. Each time resulted in a stalemate with neither Netanyahu nor his chief rival—Blue and White Party leader Gantz—able to muster a majority.
The standoff finally ended in April of this year, when Gantz split his party by joining a unity government with Netanyahu. Doing so made no political sense for him since the only point of Blue and White was to topple the prime minister rather than to enact different policies. Indeed, on all of the important war and peace issues, Gantz tried to run to the right of Netanyahu. But realizing the futility of the continued stalemate and responding patriotically to the crisis that the coronavirus pandemic presented to the nation, he decided that throwing in with his nemesis was the right thing to do.
Israel's Hadassah Medical Centre is currently in talks with the UAE over the sale of 1.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine for Palestine, Quds Press reported yesterday.
According to the news site, the Israeli public radio Kan, reported that the negotiations between the two sides related to the Russian vaccine.
Kan noted that the Israeli Ministry of Health has not yet approved the Russian vaccine and it is not expected to approve it in the near future.
If I am reading this correctly, even though Israel does not trust the Russian vaccine for its own citizens, it allows Hadassah and the UAE to work to get the vaccine to Palestinians, which presumably do approve it.
This story blows up all the narratives: that Israel doesn't want to provide Palestinians with medicines, that the UAE hates Palestinians, that "normalization" is a catastrophe for Palestinians.
So far Russia has agreements to sell its vaccine to a number of countries including India, Venezuela, Mexico, China, Egypt and Brazil.
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Among those who understood the depth of former US President Barack Obama’s hostility to Israel, there’s understandable anxiety about the Obama retreads and acolytes among the foreign policy and security nominees being chosen by the prospective president-elect, Joe Biden.
Obama’s hostility is assumed to derive from his left-wing mindset which regards Israel, falsely and ahistorically, as a colonialist occupying power. He demonstrates this in his new memoir, A Promised Land, in his profoundly distorted account of the origins of the modern State of Israel.
There is, however, a deeper reason why both Obama and the left find Israel so intensely problematic, and why a Biden presidency will once again have Israel in its cross-hairs. This isn’t about foreign policy. It’s about the programme for America itself.
The core of the left’s agenda is to remake the western world; and the agenda of Obama and the American left is to remake America.
Their target is the western nation-state and its culture. The core precepts of that culture are articulated and enshrined within the different histories, laws, religions, institutions and traditions of individual western nations.
The left, however, deems the western nation-state to be evil because it declares itself superior to cultures that don’t share its values while excluding those who don’t belong to it.
Hence the left’s constant undermining of immigration laws in their attempt to erase national borders; their refusal to grasp that citizenship is a bargain between the citizen and the state to which he or she belongs; and their savage denunciations of those who uphold such notions as racists or xenophobes, in order to erase their voices altogether from the cultural conversation.
The nation, its specific attributes and the borders that define its territory must instead give way to a Kumbaya vision of the brotherhood of man expressed through trans-national institutions and laws.
Much of this erosion of western values has already been achieved, in schools and universities, through the culture wars. Obama’s strategy in his eight years in the White House was to weaponise this agenda through the presidency.
Out of the hundreds of terrorist attacks etched on Israel's collective memory, the slaughter at the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem stands out as one of the worst. On Aug. 9, 2001, when summer vacation was in full swing, Hamas terrorist Muhammad al-Masri entered the restaurant in the city center carrying a bomb hidden inside a guitar. When it detonated, it killed 15 people, including half of the Schijveschuurder family (both parents and three children, and two other children were seriously hurt), wounded a total of 140, and left an indelible trauma.
The victims included six American citizens, four of whom were wounded – including Chana Nachenberg, who remains in a vegetative state – and two of whom were killed – Shoshana Greenbaum, a 31-year-old teacher from New Jersey who was six months pregnant, and 15-year-old Malki Roth, who died alongside her friend Michal Raziel.
In a response that was considered harsh at the time, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered that the Palestinian Authority offices in Jerusalem, primarily the Orient House, be shut down. And as the horrific days of the Second Intifada continued, the public's attention shifted to the even more deadly attacks that soon followed.
Twenty years after the Sbarro catastrophe, one matter remains unresolved. The 22-year-old suicide bomber had been driven into the heart of Jerusalem by a pair of terrorists, Mohammad Daghlas, who was behind the wheel, and Ahlam Tamimi, a Palestinian TV anchor who used her press pass to get through the security checkpoints on the way to the capital. Tamimi directed the suicide bomber to his target destination, and immediately fled the scene. She got on a bus at Damascus Gate and heard radio reports that the number of Jews who had been killed was mounting.
"There was great joy on the bus. People congratulated each other, even though they didn't know each other. They didn't know about my part," Tamimi said later in several interviews. Later that evening, she reported on the attack without revealing the part she had played. A few weeks later, the IDF arrested her. She was sentenced to 16 life sentences and another 15 years in prison. While in prison, she announced that he had married her cousin Nizar Tamimi, who had murdered Beit El resident Haim Mizrahi in 1993.
A decade after Tamimi was imprisoned, Israel made a deal for the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. Tamimi and the driver were both released, and subsequently, Tamimi arrived in Jordan. She was the only Jordanian citizen among the 1.027 prisoners who were released in the deal.
Nizar Tamimi was also freed. He was supposed to remain in the West Bank, but someone in the Israeli establishment helped him move to Jordan, duping Malki Roth's father, attorney Arnold Roth, who had been trying to keep the couple from being reunited.
This week, we mark yet another agonizing birthday.
My sweet daughter, Malki, would now be 35 years old if Hamas operative Ahlam Tamimi had made some misstep on Aug. 9, 2001.
But Tamimi was and still is a seasoned, determined, efficient and bloodthirsty terrorist.
In the Sbarro bombing, which she confesses she masterminded and which she calls “my operation,” seven babies and children perished with nine adults—some parents alongside their offspring. It was an unmitigated massacre.
Never could we have imagined that her murderer would now be free as a bird—and protected by a ruler who is coddled by both the United States and Israel—King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Tamimi’s stated determination to kill Jews is matched only by the determination of world leaders to ignore our pleas to correct the travesty of justice that Tamimi’s freedom embodies.
Our letters, phone calls, op-eds, tweets and front-page advertisements have fallen on deaf ears. They have only elicited excuses, evasive double-talk, or total silence from most of the people who could easily assist us if they cared to.
There are no obstacles in their path:
- Legislation has existed for years empowering the United States to arrest, try and convict terrorists in U.S. courts under U.S. law if they kill a U.S. national, which Malki was.
- In 1995, an extradition treaty was signed and ratified between the U.S. and Jordan, and accepted as valid by both countries. The State Department still takes that view.
- Tamimi was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2017. A $5 million State Department reward for her capture and conviction was announced in 2018.
- Legislation enacted in 2019 empowers the U.S. to impose a foreign-aid sanction on any country failing to abide by its treaty obligation to the U.S.
None of the steps that could be taken to right this moral wrong has been taken.
Al Resalah News has photos of "settlers storming Al Aqsa courtyards" yesterday.
But not everyone in the photos are "storming."
Here's a guide.
Stormers all have something in common, but it is a little hard to define.
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The Trump-haters are circling Trump’s liferaft promising a comprehensive Middle East peace – but Trump can repel their determined efforts to sink it if he is not nominated as President when the Electoral College votes on 14 December.
United Nations Secretary-General Guterres is not remotely interested in pursuing Trump’s Peace to Prosperity Vision - which calls for Israeli sovereignty to be extended to about 30% of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) - with an independent demilitarized Palestinian Arab State being established in the remaining 70% and Gaza (Peace Plan).
Guterres remains committed to supporting Palestinian Arabs and Israelis resolving the conflict:
"in line with relevant UN resolutions, international law and bilateral agreements in pursuit of the vision of two states."
Guterres will be exhorting international support for UNSC Resolution 2334 – which Obama and Biden shamefully failed to veto on 23 December 2016 – abstaining instead - as they were departing the White House.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) seemingly does not have any interest in Trump’s Peace Plan - a PLO official recently declaring:
“We have received many positive messages from the Biden team in the past few days. We are looking forward to opening a new page with the Biden administration after the damage caused by the Trump administration.”
The PLO refused to negotiate with Israel on Trump’s Peace Plan even before its details were published last January.
Biden also seems certain to trash Trump’s Peace Plan if elected America’s next President.
In an interview with the New York Times Tuesday, presumptive President-elect Joe Biden reaffirmed his plan to return the US to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The US will rescind its economic sanctions on Iran if it complies with the nuclear deal's limitations on its nuclear activities. Once this happens, Biden said he will seek to negotiate a new, longer-term nuclear deal with Iran's ayatollahs. The current deal expires in five years.
Biden insisted the goal of his policy is to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. But practically speaking, Biden's policy guarantees Iran will develop a nuclear arsenal and the missiles to deliver them. This is true both because the nuclear deal will expire, and Iran will be free to build nuclear bombs as it likes in 2025, and because the 2015 nuclear deal has no effective enforcement mechanism.
The UN inspectors tasked with ensuring Iranian compliance are only permitted to enter civilian nuclear sites. Since Iran has sole authority to determine if a site is civilian or military, it can and has rendered the deal's inspection regime a pathetic joke.
It goes without saying that Israel cannot accept this state of affairs. Just as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was compelled to oppose Barack Obama's nuclear deal, so Israel has no choice but to strongly oppose Biden's plans.
Unfortunately, Israel is currently incapable of clearly opposing Biden's plan that will give the mullahs the means to carry out their plan to destroy the Jewish state. That is because currently, Israel doesn't have one government. It has two governments pretending to be a unity government. But in practice, they disagree on everything, including how to handle Biden's Iran policy and pursue contrary policies on all issues.
Netanyahu's Likud government recognizes the danger posed by Biden's Iran policy. Last week, Netanyahu loyalist Ambassador Ron Dermer said flat out that it would be "a mistake" for a Biden administration to return to the nuclear deal.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz's Blue and White government doesn't understand the danger.
Hudson Institute: A Conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down with Hudson Senior Fellow Michael Doran to discuss the dramatic improvement in Israel’s relationship with the Arab world, the sources of Israel’s rising power, and the major factors shaping the prime minister’s strategic vision.
The history behind the story of Hanukkah is painful and complex. In the days before the Maccabean Revolt, Judea was firmly under the control of the Seleucid Empire. The Jewish elite of Judea had become largely Hellenized - the dominating culture of the day. In reality, the Jewish zealots led by the Maccabees fought as fiercely against assimilated Jewish Hellenists as they did against the Selucid Empire. The ancient rabbis, writing about 300 years after the Maccabees, were all too aware that the military victory of the Macabees was short lived and they did not want to glorify it. They chose a reading in the Haftarah to go alongside the painful history - “Not by might and not by power but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” (Zechariah 4:6). They wanted to underscore the dangers of putting our ultimate faith in military power over spirit.
The choice of Haftarah for Chanukah is because it talks about rededicating the Temple as well as Zechariah's vision of a seven-branched Menorah.
While it is true that the rabbis initially didn't want to emphasize the military aspect, they certainly didn't eliminate it. As the Maharal of Prague wrote, "The main reason that the days of Chanukah were instituted was to celebrate the victory over the Greeks. However, so that it would not seem that the victory was due only to might and heroism, rather than to Divine Providence, the miracle was denoted by the lighting of the Menorah, to show that it was all by a miracle, the war as well."
This is obvious by looking at the Al HaNissim passage addition to the prayers. It emphasizes the miraculous aspect of the military victory and doesn't mention the miracle of the oil at all.
JVP then says something strange:
Another story we tell during Hanukkah is that once the Maccabees made it to their desecrated temple, they found a Menorah that ritually needed to be kept lit at all times with only enough olive oil for one day. This small amount of oil kept the lamp lit for EIGHT days - lasting the time it took for a replenishment of oil to arrive. This is a mysterious divine creation of abundance from scarcity that we lift up. And this story is made up. (Check out the Talmud - Shabbat 21b.) Our Rabbis took the opportunity to teach the stories they wanted to lead us with. They reimagined history, in order to teach us something about who we could become–– a people with faith, not in militarism, but in a different kind of future. We are following in their footsteps.
The Talmud says the story is made up?
Shabbat 21b is the origin of the miracle of the oil story! It isn't mentioned in the Books of the Maccabees; it was first described in the Talmud:
The Gemara asks: What is Hanukkah, and why are lights kindled on Hanukkah? The Gemara answers: The Sages taught in Megillat Ta’anit: On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the days of Hanukkah are eight. One may not eulogize on them and one may not fast on them. What is the reason? When the Greeks entered the Sanctuary they defiled all the oils that were in the Sanctuary by touching them. And when the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil that was placed with the seal of the High Priest, undisturbed by the Greeks. And there was sufficient oil there to light the candelabrum for only one day. A miracle occurred and they lit the candelabrum from it eight days. The next year the Sages instituted those days and made them holidays with recitation of Hallel and special thanksgiving in prayer and blessings.
Where here does it say that it was made up?
The entire anti-Zionist view of Chanukah is necessarily bizarre because the plain story of the re-establishment of a Jewish government in Eretz Yisrael, and especially Jerusalem, contradicts everything that they believe.
You can be sure that when they refer to the Haftarah for that Shabbat, they don't want you to look at the very first verse: "רָנִּ֥י וְשִׂמְחִ֖י בַּת־צִיּ֑וֹן - Shout for joy, Fair Zion!"
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Monday, December 07, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
