There were lots of articles about the blunt (and bizarre) criticism that Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud hurled at Israel at the IISS Manama Dialogues over the weekend:. Here's AP's:
A prominent Saudi prince harshly criticized Israel on Sunday at a Bahrain security summit that was remotely attended by Israel’s foreign minister, showing the challenges any further deals between Arab states and Israel face in the absence of an independent Palestinian state.
The fiery remarks by Prince Turki al-Faisal at the Manama Dialogue appeared to catch Israel’s foreign minister off guard, particularly as Israelis receive warm welcomes from officials in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates following agreements to normalize ties.
Prince Turki opened his remarks by contrasting what he described as Israel’s perception of being “peace-loving upholders of high moral principles” versus what he described as a far-darker Palestinian reality of living under a “Western colonizing” power.
Israel has “incarcerated (Palestinians) in concentration camps under the flimsiest of security accusations — young and old, women and men, who are rotting there without recourse to justice,” Prince Turki said. “They are demolishing homes as they wish and they assassinate whomever they want.”
The prince also criticized Israel’s undeclared arsenal of nuclear weapons and Israeli governments “unleashing their political minions and their media outlets from other countries to denigrate and demonize Saudi Arabia.”
There are two important points that the media is ignoring.
One is the blatant antisemitism in Prince Turki's remarks.
Saying that Israel is incarcerating Palestinians in concentration camps is directly comparing Israel to Nazis, and the only reason to use that language is to deliberately hurt the feelings of Jews.
And what concentration camps is he talking about? The only camps in the Middle East are the ones set up by Arab nations to keep Palestine "refugees" in misery. Lebanon has one large one that is literally surrounded by a wall with watchtowers.
Yet his antisemitism doesn't end there: he is implying that Jews control the media and the politics of other countries besides Israel, "unleashing their political minions and their media outlets from other countries to denigrate and demonize Saudi Arabia."
What is even stranger is that Saudi Arabia's most strident critics are generally Israel's biggest critics, too. There is plenty to criticize in Saudi Arabia - its human rights record is horrendous - but the criticism comes from NGOs like Human Rights Watch. So not only are Turki's charges about "concentration camps" and Israeli control of the media antisemitic, they are fictional.
I have not seen any media outlet point this out, which seems like a basic journalistic task.
The second point that no one is making about the conference is that even with the Saudi barbs, here was a conference attended by countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan - with Israel.
As far as I can tell, Israel didn't attend last year's conference, because many Arab nations would have walked out if it did. This year saw not only an Israeli delegation but a speaker as well, Gabi Ashkenazi.
If Saudi Arabia can verbally attack Israel at a conference like this without resorting to antisemitic tropes, that's fine. At least Israel is now considered a part of the Middle East. Friends can and do argue. The bigger story is not Saudi criticism of Israel but that Saudi Arabia and Israel were talking with each other, publicly - something that not long ago would have been unthinkable.
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Settler companies that produce wine, tahini, olive oil and honey have signed a deal with the Dubai distribution company FAM Holding, to export their products to the United Arab Emirates, the Samaria Regional Council announced on Monday.
Israeli companies have signed agreements with the Emirates even before a normalization deal was signed between their two governments in September and ratified in October.
But Monday’s agreements mark the first such agreement to export settler goods to the UAE.
FAM Holding is in talks with other Israeli companies and is excited to sign deals to expand the business cooperation between the two countries, he said.
Among the wineries that signed deals to export to the UAE are Tura Winery, the Har Bracha Winery and the Arnon Winery, as well as Paradise Honey.
This is like a dream.
And it isn't like the UAE hates Palestinians. As I noted earlier, the UAE was working with Israel to import the Russian COVID-19 vaccine into the PA-controlled areas.
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The author, Sarah Prager, explains that she celebrated Chanukah as a child because her father was Jewish. “Each of those eight nights we’d recite the Hebrew prayer about God while lighting the menorah. We memorized the syllables and repeated them, but they had no meaning to us and my parents didn’t expect, or want, us to believe what we were reciting.”
The Times article goes on “I married a woman who was raised Catholic but who, like my parents, had left her family religion as an adult. She and I are part of America’s ever-growing ‘nones’ with no religious affiliation at all. Before we had kids, we imagined we’d choose a religion to raise them in, maybe Unitarian Universalism or even Reform Judaism. But when our first child was born four years ago, we realized that going to any house of worship and following a religion just for our children to feel a connection to something wouldn’t be authentic. We couldn’t teach them to believe in anything we didn’t believe in ourselves.”
Though she claims she is “none,” her family actually slides into the Christian dominant culture: “our two daughters will celebrate Christmas and Easter because that’s what my extended family still celebrates.”
The article says the author respects tradition. “I respect the incredible value of keeping traditions alive, especially those that centuries of persecution have sought to erase. But while I have more of a connection to Judaism than some, I am not Jewish and it doesn’t feel authentic to celebrate a Jewish holiday religiously. My kids may end up playing dreidel sometimes, but they won’t learn the prayer that begins Baruch atah Adonai, sacred words that are nonetheless empty to them,” the Times article says. “Discontinuing my family’s Hanukkah celebration fits right in with our family’s tradition of bucking tradition.”
The article was met with scorn by Jewish readers. “Oh, is it NYT publishes thin, uninformed, somewhat self-hating article on Chanukah o’clock again? I can’t even look,” tweeted Rabbi Jill Jacobs.
Rabbi Marisa Elana James tweeted, “It is an INTERESTING choice for the NYT to publish a piece ostensibly about Hanukkah where 2/3 of the way in the author writes ‘I’m not Jewish.’ Just one piece on Hanukkah by someone who is Jewish and *likes* being Jewish would be great!”
Arsen Ostrovsky wrote, “Of all the essays @nytimes could publish for #Chanukah, they chose this by @Sarah_Prager , who does not even identify as Jewish, about why she’s choosing not to celebrate this beautiful holiday. Could the NYT have any more contempt for the Jewish people?”
Where openly anti-Israel rhetoric is aired by woke politicians, media elites all too often are close behind to follow up and justify their words.
Instead of criticizing the invocation of a notorious dog-whistle calling for the destruction of Israel, CNN pundit and New York Times contributing opinion writer Peter Beinart last week defended it.
The call “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has long been understood as a euphemism for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state. So when Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) retweeted a social media post, those words were met with strong opposition from many Jews and Israelis.
The Democratic Majority tweeted, “@RashidaTlaib is not just opposed to Israeli control of the West Bank — this slogan means she sees the entire State of Israel as illegitimate and wants it eliminated. That’s an immoral and reprehensible position.”
In response, Beinart used his public position to espouse the spurious perspective that this call for the destruction of Israel actually means something else entirely: the establishment of a state in which Jews and Palestinians would live equally.
“@RashidaTlaib supports 1 state where Jews + Palestinians live equally, under the same law. Why is that less moral that the current 1 state: Where millions of Palestinians lack citizenship, due process, free movement + the right to vote for the govt that controls their lives?” Beinart opined.
Logic by Rashida Tlaib 👉🏻 RT a blood libel against Jews without doing any research on the subject.
Again this is a sitting U.S. Congresswoman throwing Jews under the bus AT EVERY TURN. pic.twitter.com/6Fld533n28
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The New Arab quotes anonymous sources that Hanan Ashrawi , a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, submitted her resignation a few days ago to President Mahmoud Abbas .
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, "President Mahmoud Abbas has not yet responded to the resignation by rejecting or accepting it."
According to the report, Ashrawi is angry that the Palestinian Authority has restored its relations with Israel last month..
There was no comment from Ashrawi.
This seems to be the same sort of resignation theatre that Mahmoud Abbas likes to do, and that Saeb Erekat had engaged in himself, to make a dramatic threat which in the end does not happen.
But isn't it interesting that the "moderate" Ashrawi, darling of international news networks, is against the idea of the PA even talking to Israel?
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- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu interviewed by Michael Doran, Dec. 3, 2020 (Hudson Institute)
Netanyahu: Jews have been fighting for our place under the sun for almost four millennia. And we haven't made this extraordinary odyssey for it to end by a whim of ayatollahs who are ideologically committed to destroy us. That's not something that an Israeli leadership should sit by and allow to happen.
Some Arab leaders have come to realize, especially in the last decade, that Israel, far from being their enemy, was their indispensable ally in securing stability, peace and prosperity in the Middle East. Some of them say so fairly openly, most of them say so quietly.
They're concerned with Islamic radicalism of a Shiite or a Sunni variety. They're concerned with developing their economies for the betterment of their peoples. They're concerned with countering Iran's aggression and terrorism, which is spread all over the area. And they see Israel as the power in the area that is willing to stand up, and often speak up, for something that they all agree with.
Far from blocking Iran's path to the bomb, the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) paved its way with gold, literally, with an enormous amount of money that was put into Iran's coffers. They promptly used it to fund an unbelievable campaign of conquest. Right after the JCPOA, you see them expanding into Iraq, into Yemen, into Iraq, seeking to establish military bases in Syria, supporting Hizbullah with greater funds, supporting the Islamic Jihad and Hamas.
If the idea was this tiger will be tamed, in fact, what the JCPOA did was to open the gates of the cage and let the tiger loose to a campaign of plunder and conquest that was threatening to overrun the Middle East in horrible ways.
Iran with nuclear weapons is a very dangerous thing for the United States. It's developing ICBMs which it wants to tip with a nuclear payload (because you don't use ICBMs for anything else) to reach America. You say that's not a real problem? Well, take North Korea, a smaller country that has a fraction of Iran's GDP. You understand what the arming of North Korea with ICBMs and nuclear weapons means to the United States. Iran is many times more dangerous than North Korea because it has a radical ideology. It chants death to America, death to Israel. They mean it.
We have peace breaking out now. And I think the United States has a vested interest to expand that peace, to support those countries that seek to broaden the circle of peace, and to constrain or roll back Iran and its proxies that seek to bring us back to a violent medievalism. The fact that we're willing to stand up and protect ourselves, but thereby also protect the neighborhood, our allies in peace, I think is a vital interest of the United States.
At the 2020 Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, sponsored by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Israeli diplomat Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said, "The Abraham Accords represented a whole new paradigm for diplomats. It gave the Arab states the freedom to make peace with Israel, while not denying the Palestinians the right to join the process when they are ready. This new structure will make peace more likely."
"Senior leadership in the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards and even more importantly the senior religious leadership in Qom have spoken about the need 'to wipe Israel off the map.' You cannot wipe a country off the map without physically destroying its population. Among polite company we call that genocide." (Gulf News-Dubai)
See also Questions for Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal - Amb. Dore Gold
Amb. Dore Gold asked Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal a number of questions at the 2020 IISS Manama Dialogue in Bahrain on Sunday:
"Do we want to be caught up in the accusations of the past, many of which are false, or do we want to present the young generation in the Middle East with a positive vision and really give leadership for a better future?...Do you, Prince Turki al-Faisal, think we have something to learn from each other...with respect to the challenge Israel has faced from the north, from Hizbullah, since the early 1980s, and the challenge you face from the south, from the Houthi militants?"
Hossein Shariatmadari, Kayhan's editor-in-chief and Khamenei's representative, directed an editorial (Nov. 28) at Iran's leaders: "How can the Zionist regime, which is on the brink of decay today and surrounded by resistance forces on all sides, so easily murder our nuclear scientists?!"
He added, "Today, all the attention of the Iranian people and the Iranian regime must be focused on two targets: the first, the harsh retaliation against the criminal Zionists that will make them regret, and the second is identifying internal elements and possible infiltrators of the enemy into Iran's intelligence security systems."
Shariatmadari also called for "attacking the important port city of Haifa, destroying the strategic facilities, and causing heavy human casualties" to reach a "real deterrent point." Dr. Sadollah Zarei, an Iranian scholar and political analyst, wrote in Kayhan that Iran's reaction to suspected Israeli airstrikes that killed IRGC forces in Syria wasn't enough to deter Israel, while "striking Haifa … will definitely lead to deterrence because the United States and Israel are not ready to participate in a war and a military confrontation."
In Iran, the dilemma is growing with regard to how and where to respond to Fakhrizadeh's assassination, and how far to stretch the regime's restraint. So far, Iran has not responded as it is "required" to by the threats it issued following the deaths of Hezbollah international operations chief Imad Mughniyeh, Soleimani, operatives associated with Hezbollah's precision missile program, IRGC personnel in Syria, important figures among the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq, and others.
It is possible that Iran will continue its policy of restraint and choose to strike "easier" targets that are allied to the United States and Israel, such as the oil facilities and strategic infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. Such an attack took place on Sept. 19, 2019, with precision cruise missiles hitting the Saudi oil processing facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais.
In this regard, on Nov. 23, the Iranian Mehr news agency broadcast a video of an Aramco oil distribution site in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, being hit by Quds-2 missiles launched by the Houthis in Yemen. Iran could be waiting for the new US administration, which might limit Israel's aggressive activities while negotiations are in the offing and test Israel-American relations, which reached new heights during Trump's presidency.
With the long-range missile attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais and periodic Houthi missile launches against strategic targets in Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that it has the operational know-how to launch surprise attacks on strategic sites, including in Israel, with stealthy, precision cruise missiles.
One way or another, Iran must conduct a thorough house-cleaning in response to the repeated infiltrations and attacks on its security and intelligence establishments. These recurring intelligence operations have targeted Iran's scientists, nuclear infrastructure (such as the explosion in the Natanz enrichment facility in July 2020) and sometimes its electricity and oil facilities. As it has in the past, the regime will publicize over the next few weeks and in the run-up to presidential elections the arrests of people ostensibly involved in the attacks and espionage, so that it may salvage some of its honor among the Iranian people, who are exposed to details of the calamities via social media, international reports and the joyful Iranian opposition.
British and Israeli military leaders have signed a joint agreement to strengthen their cooperation in a range of areas, in a move heralded by diplomats.
Much of the detail of the agreement is classified but it is thought to cover areas of warfare such as maritime, land, air, space, and cyber and electromagnetic.
UK Ambassador to Israel Neil Wigan said he was “delighted” to announce that Britain’s Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Sir Nicholas Carter and the IDF’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi had agreed “to further deepen our military co-operation”.
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The British Army already deploys Israeli drones over theatres of war and last year a senior UK said the two countries had a “first-order partnership” in cyber security.
Analysts suspect that a driving force behind this week’s announcement is the UK’s desire to transition to a digital military, potentially using Israeli-designed platforms.
BICOM adds a history of Israel/British military cooperation over the past decade:
Both militaries share a commitment to improving and integrating their multi-domain capabilities in maritime, land, air, space, and cyber and electromagnetic.
They share similar interests in the region. While Israel feels the Iranian threat far more acutely due to its relative geographic proximity, both countries wish to prevent Iran achieving a nuclear capability, curb its advanced ballistic missile programme and counter Iranian proxies, particularly in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and the shipping lanes of the Gulf.
In 2019, the UK deployed naval assets to ensure free shipping in the Gulf, while the UK is also working to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national who has been detained in Iran since April 2016 after being convicted of espionage.
The also share concerns against radical Islamist terrorism, with emphasis in recent years on the Islamic State, a mutual priority.
British financial and military support to Jordan is also a common interest, with the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom viewed as a strategic priority by Israel, which it shares its longest border with. The military and intelligence services of both Israel and Jordan cooperate closely against mutual threats of Islamist terrorism and Iranian encroachment.
In February 2019, the UK government designated all of Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. Israel would, however, like to see more pressure on the Lebanese government to stop the deployment of Hezbollah personnel in southern Lebanon and the build-up of its missile arsenal in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1701.
In July 2019, the Telegraph reported that the Metropolitan Police and MI5 uncovered a Hezbollah bomb plot in North London in 2015, just months before the UK signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement. Police discovered three tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored inside disposable ice packs when they raided four properties in north-west London, arresting a man on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. The discovery of the bomb plot was reportedly assisted by information from Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad.
There is also significant cooperation between the two countries in cyber security, described by a senior UK official last year as a “first-order partnership”. Israel is widely recognised for its unique innovation ecosystem, with close interaction between government, military, academia and industry – a model which the UK has sought to emulate.
Since 2010, the two countries have cooperated on the development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) through the Watchkeeper programme, which has been deployed by British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The British Army hopes to learn from the Israeli experience as it transitions to a more digital army. According to a report by Seth Frantzman in The National Interest, in October the British were given access to Israeli-based Elbit Systems' “Rhino mobile headquarters”. It uses advanced digital technology to link together units in the field and commanders with the best information possible to help achieve results on the battlefield. The British Army said the system helps to “reduce the size of the headquarters, makes it less vulnerable and able to make and communicate decisions faster.” Elbit has worked with the UK for years on other applications, such as battle management systems.
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Harvard University's Divinity School includes biographies of its faculty and fellows on its website.
The biography of Rami Younis, who was a Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative Fellow in the 2019–20 session, says, "He is one of the founders of the Palestinian activist group Khotweh, which was active on the issues of home demolitions and Palestinian identity in Lyd and Ramleh, mixed Jewish-Arab cities in occupied Palestine. "
Of course, Lod and Ramle are Israeli cities, well within the Green Line and not in the territories. This article on Harvard's website is saying that all of Israel is illegitimate.
Younis also refers to "Palestinian member of Knesset Haneen Zoabi," effectively saying that all Arab citizens of Israel are Palestinian - with the implication that all Jews in Israel are thieves.
No doubt Younis himself wrote his bio, and Harvard published it without any editing - because who would even think that an academic would use his biography to delegitimize an entire nation?
But Palestinians routinely use any and every means for anti-Israel propaganda.
And at this moment, Harvard is complicit in spreading lies.
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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.
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Tuesday, December 08, 2020
Elder of Ziyon
