Social media has been filled with anti-Israel statements from people who say that their expertise in morality and the Middle East comes because they are Jews by an accident of birth.
A large number of American Jews are Jews in name only.
Fully 27% of Jews do not call themselves Jewish by religion - and the number increases to 40% for those under 30.
Nearly 50% of US Jews hardly ever do anything associated with Jewishness.
25% of US Jews say they have hardly any Jewish friends.
Only 11% of Jews who don't identify with Judaism as a religion give charity to Jewish causes.
Not surprisingly, the Jews who have the least to do with Judaism are the ones who hate Israel the most. 18% of "Jews of no religion" support BDS, far more than the average.
Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask what levels of Jewish education Jews in America had. It seems obvious that those who know the least about their own religion and history are the ones who are the most likely to hate Israel now, and many of those get a thrill out of identifying "as a Jew" to buttress their ignorant opinions of Israel.
The survey is sad. It shows an American Jewish community that has utterly failed at attracting and keeping young people (with the exception of Orthodoxy.) Although most Jews still strongly support the Jewish state, the survey shows a growing disconnect between American Jews and Israel.
It shows exactly where the "As a Jews" are coming from.
I don't think it is going to happen. The people of Lebanon would not tolerate a Hezbollah starting a war now when they are in such bad shape from COVID and the country being on the brink of bankruptcy. They are still upset over the 2006 war.
But Hezbollah follows the orders of Iran's Supreme Leader, and Iranian media has been talking for weeks about how weak Israel is and how it will be destroyed soon. They wrote lots of stories about the Syrian anti-aircraft missile that ended up near Dimona, about a chemical factory fire in Haifa. Iranian media is following the events in Israel on a minute by minute basis. The Ayatollah Khamenei has been tweeting a lot about Israel.
Hezbollah rockets are much more powerful and accurate than Hamas rockets. And they have 150,000 of them, of varying types.
Hassan Nasrallah can invent an excuse to start shooting and claiming that Israel started it. Only last week he warned Israel not to make any aggressive moves.
Let's hope this doesn't happen, but if Israel is too cautious in confronting Hezbollah, Khamenei might interpret that as weakness and think he has an opportunity.
Articles extolling rocket fire, celebrating dead Israelis, exhorting Israeli Arabs to start an uprising, promises for more bloodshed.
Here's the English version, directed at the Western anti-Israel, primarily leftist audience:
Here, the emphasis is on victimhood, quoting Ilhan Omar and Tayyip Erdogan on how awful Israel is, and "defending" Al Aqsa.
The two messages are exactly opposite. And the West insists on believing what Palestinians say in English without realizing that everything is propaganda - in both languages.
It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the United States of a full-blown Saudi-Israeli peace agreement or even of significant steps in that direction. The 9/11 attacks announced that a doctrine of radical intolerance had taken deeper root inside the Muslim world than we had realized—a doctrine that seeks to wall off Muslim societies from non-Muslim influences. The Emiratis, the lead players in the Abraham Accords, see peace with Israel as part of a multipronged effort to refute this intolerant view of Islam and Muslim history. Saudi Arabia is the most powerful Arab country and, thanks to its guardianship of Mecca and Medina, one of the most influential countries in the entire Muslim world. It has also long been the fortress of conservative Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic literalism. If the country toward which all Muslims pray five times a day, and to which some 2 million make annual pilgrimages, develops openly friendly relations with the Jewish state, the implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere would be profound.
Yet the Biden administration has forbidden its officials from even using the term “Abraham Accords,” which, under the influence of the Realignment, it abhors. Because the accords are politically popular, even in Democratic circles, the administration will refrain from expressing its abhorrence frankly, and will look for every opportunity to claim that it looks favorably on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In reality, however, the Biden team has no intention to expand the Abraham Accords, whose very existence is a blot on the Democrats’ record. It refutes the dogma preached by the Obama administration that peace between Israel and the Arab world must begin with a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.
More importantly, the accords are also a threat to the Realignment itself. The Saudi-Israeli thaw resulted in part from the sense of threat they share about the rise of Iran, and the increasing unreliability of the American security guarantee. A strong partnership between Riyadh and Jerusalem would inevitably become the primary node of opposition to the Realignment from within the American alliance system. A desire to end any unsupervised discussion of expanding the Abraham Accords is probably an additional reason why the Biden administration devoted its first days in office to publicly disparaging Mohammed bin Salman and privately pressing him to kowtow to Tehran. “Do not dare assist Israel” was another implicit command that the Khashoggi values barrage delivered to Riyadh.
When Biden took office, he faced a fork in the road. On one path stood a multilateral alliance designed to contain Iran. It had a proven track record of success and plans of even better things to come, as the recent act of sabotage at Natanz demonstrated. The alliance’s leading members were beckoning Biden to work against a common foe, but also to promote greater cooperation and possibly even an official peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. On the other path stood the Islamic Republic, hated by its own people and, indeed, by most people in the Middle East. It offered nothing but the same vile message it had always espoused. Standing with it were all of the most malignant forces in the Middle East, who either look directly to Tehran for leadership or thrive on the chaos it sows.
Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.
As Israel Hayom's Ariel Kahana reported, Ben-Shabbat didn't take Sullivan's hostile dressing down in silence. He responded appropriately, "As the sovereign, Israel is handing the events responsibly and in a measured way despite the provocations."
Ben-Shabbat added, "International intervention serves as a prize to the rioters and their dispatchers that had hoped that international pressure would be exerted against Israel."
Less than 24 hours after their phone call, Hamas proved Ben-Shabbat was right. With a tailwind from the White House, Hamas gave Israel an ultimatum: Remove your security forces from the Temple Mount and Sheikh Jarrah by 6 p.m. or you'll live to regret it. In other words: Give up your sovereignty over Jerusalem by six or else.
Lo and behold, shortly after 6 p.m., the air raid sirens sounded throughout Jerusalem and its environs as Hamas attacked the capital with rockets from Gaza. As the evening progressed Arab Israelis in Ramle and Lod and other mixed cities carried out what can only be called a pogrom against their Jewish neighbors. They burned yeshivot, schools and apartment buildings and beat and tried to lynch Jews that fell in their paths. After they were done, they went to the local hospital emergency room, threw rocks at the medical staff and patients and tried to kill the Arab Israeli doctors and nurses on the scene for "collaboration" with the Jews.
The medical staff had to evacuate with the patients to protected areas while the police dispersed the attackers with stun grenades – in the ER.
The official readout of Biden's national security adviser concluded by mentioning that Sullivan, "expressed the Administration's commitment to Israel's security."
A bit more "commitment" like this and Israel will find itself in short order fighting a regional war.
Since Israel’s establishment, Palestinian leaders have missed countless opportunities to make peace and secure a state because of their rejectionist attitude. From a purely political standpoint, their adamant refusal to accept Israel costs them more in negotiating power every year. For example, the negotiating standpoint after the UN’s Partition Plan would have been far more advantageous for the Palestinians than where it stands today – and in almost every single subsequent peace offer, the Palestinians chose to sabotage their own future in terms of land, self-determination, cooperation with Israel and, yes, Jerusalem.
While the Palestinians never had Jerusalem – even east Jerusalem, which was under occupation by Jordan – their actions today demonstrate why they never will. For that, they have only themselves to blame.
The recent uptick in violence began at the start of Ramadan with a disturbing TikTok trend of Arabs assaulting Jews and filming it. The response was an equally disturbing pushback of far-right Israeli Jews who rioted in Jerusalem, even chanting “death to Arabs.” But neither of these activities came from nowhere. The Kahanist Right in Israel has been emboldened by vile racist leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who maneuvered their way into the Knesset to the great shame of our entire nation.
Yet on the other side, we have entire generations raised on glorifying violence against Jews. Most recently, we see Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority all ramping up their incitement to violence, with the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, Iran, dousing the entire situation with kerosene and lighting the match.
Iran-allied Palestinians even recently put up billboards with Iran’s slogan for Jerusalem Day at the entrance to Kalandiya in the West Bank. This is far from the first time Palestinians have promoted Iranian propaganda, but it is a clear and continued indicator of where Palestinian alliances lie – and they aren’t with their fellow Arab states.
The PA prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh is very happy that people are dying, because that has "returned the Palestinian issue to the agenda of the world's priorities."
This is important to understand. Since the Abraham Accords, Palestinians have been feeling irrelevant - the worst feeling for them.
They felt that the world no longer cared about them - which is largely true since they couldn't even fix their own issues and kept blaming everything on Israel. The Arab world has been sick and tired of the Palestinian issue for years, unless it helps their own political agendas.
Instead of working towards peace, the Palestinian Authority wanted to feel important, to be cover stories in Time magazine and the New York Times.
As Palestinian Media Watch has documented, the PA has worked to incite violence in Jerusalem for weeks before Ramadan. TV music videos glorified martyrdom. They know this stuff works on heir people. Sure enough, it did - starting with the TikTok attacks on religious Jews.
So they again started the "cycle of violence," quite consciously. And this led up to rockets and bombing Gaza - which, interestingly, doesn't hurt the Palestinian Authority one bit.
Now that they easily manipulated the anti-Israel media and politicians to condemn Israel for imagined crimes of "ethnic cleansing #SheikhJarrah" and "targeting civilians in Gaza," they are ecstatic.
How does it help them?
It doesn't. But Palestinians live in a zero sum game world, and they literally believe that anything that hurts Israel helps them.
It is a caveman mentality. The UAE doesn't have it, but many Arabs do - when Israel looks bad, somehow that helps its enemies.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh actually bragged that his rockets managed to disrupt some Yom Yerushalayim celebrations.
It would be a pathetic joke if it didn’t mean that Hamas and other Palestinian groups want to kill Jews to feel relevant. Much better to feel important than to feel impotent.
There are no winners in such a worldview. And until Palestinians realize that Israelis feeling secure is a prerequisite to peace, there will be none.
As news came that two women in Ashkelon had been murdered as
a result of direct hits to their homes, my son wrote the following on our
family Whatsapp group in the Hebrish shorthand typical of my 12 EFL children: “A
jeep full of an Arab family just drove by the bus stop blaring their horn,
fingers in v shape out the window.”
“Where was this?” I asked.
It was on a main thoroughfare in Jerusalem, on Derech
Hevron, in broad daylight. And it’s not the first time this has happened, but
something that happens whenever they managed to pick off one or more of us:
They cheer when we die. They cheer when we die and we do nothing to deter them.
While my son was writing this to me, a friend in Ashkelon
was sharing phone footage and voice recordings from a female friend, describing
the devastation surrounding her. Two 20-story buildings on either side of her
building had taken direct hits. Every window of every car, up and down her
street, had been shattered from the impact of the twin blasts. The footage she
recorded with her phone showed a man down on the ground, shaking uncontrollably,
with obliterated buildings and the rubble of what was once a hardware store, surrounding
him.*
As my friend was sharing these items with me, he was
debating whether or not to travel to a suburb of Jerusalem for a bar mitzvah.
The decision was made for him almost immediately when the residents of Ashkelon
received a notice from the mayor of that town, telling people to stay home. My
friend gave up on traveling to the bar mitzvah, but thought he’d go to the mom
and pop grocery store to pick up some fruit and vegetables. Just then, the
sirens began to wail once more. And then more sirens.
Some of us become inured. We figure whatever happens, happens.
So after a few minutes of mulling it over, my friend wrote, “If I'm not back in
half an hour, you can have the scoop.”
What could I do but laugh at that, and yes, gallows humor is
a necessary coping mechanism. And also, for some of us, it remains a bit
surreal until such time as it becomes all too real, and perhaps a person won’t
survive to know that, God forbid. But yeah, if a missile has one’s name on it,
God forbid, there isn’t much you can do.
My friend, in fact, moved from Jerusalem to Ashkelon during
one of the heavier barrages of missiles not too many years ago. He wanted to be
with our people in the periphery, who suffer the most from our “cousins” in
Gaza. This was a way he could contribute, just by being there, one of them,
strengthening our Jewish presence in that part of the country. I admire that,
and I wish others would emulate him.
But here I am in Gush Etzion, another important part of our
country, a place that deserves to be strengthened with a greater Jewish
presence. Even at this distance, I heard the booms when the missiles hit
Jerusalem and its environs, some ten miles away from us. Had I not heard those
booms, it would not matter. The attacks affect us all in many ways, no matter
where in Israel we live. Whatsapp is a lifeline for our family, and every
morning and evening, we are checking on our children in the south, our children
in Jerusalem. We worry. We worry what will happen. We are all, to one degree or
another, hyper-vigilant.
And so I wonder, and wonder some more, each time this
happens: What is the solution?
We cannot turn the clock back to before Ariel Sharon did the
unthinkable and expelled thousands of Jews from their homes, though he promised
not to, though we the people, voted against the move. Ariel Sharon empowered
the Arabs, and now they cannot be deterred, short of turning Gaza into a
parking lot. And if we were to do so, the fallout on world Jewry could
potentially be very bad, at this time of burgeoning antisemitism.
Meantime, the world is not on our side.
What is the solution? Do we do it anyway? Would our
government have the chops to order it done?
My friend, the one in Ashkelon, suggested we bomb the fancy
malls, restaurants, and shopping centers in Gaza, so the before and after
photos get shared in the media, so that at last the world can see that Gaza is
NOT, contrary to popular world belief, a concentration camp. But it wouldn’t
matter. It wouldn’t matter. They will show the dead Arab children, the dead Arab
pregnant women, and not our own. They will present the facts in the wrong
order: “Israel Bombs Gaza in Retaliation for Rocket Attacks,” and not “Gaza Shoots Missiles into Israel, Israel Retaliates.”
They hate us. They hate us because we are Jews. They back
the people who are murdering us, who send colorful balloons with attached
incendiary devices to tempt our children so that they might be blown to
smithereens. Our children are not children to them, but vermin. Because our
children are Jewish. And that makes us subhuman to them. And so our murderers,
those who rise up to kill us in every generation and at every chance they get, are lionized by the world.
They are apparently sorry that Hitler, yemach shmo, did not finish the job. Biden shows it when he
restores funding to UNRWA and the PA and even tops it up some more by the millions. He shows it when he begs Iran—desperately—to
let him give them more money so that the mullahs can obliterate us with the weapons they
will build with America’s help. And American Jews voted for this--they voted for these things when they overwhelmingly voted for Biden.
As I write this, the IDF has coined a new name for the
newest in a long line of operations meant only to stop the rockets until the
next time. Because everyone knows they can’t be stopped for good unless we take
the ultimate step of obliterating Gaza. That new name is Operation Guardian of
the Walls, a clear reference to the walls that surround the Old City of Jerusalem,
the supposed center of our current conflagration. In a nutshell, Arab tenants
refused to pay rent to their Jewish landlords, and after many years of hashing
it out in court, they’re being evicted.
In the last 24 hours, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have launched continuous attacks on Israel from Gaza.
The IDF is operating in response to these attacks by striking terror targets and operatives in Gaza.
It’s how it is everywhere. You don’t pay rent, you get
booted out. Nowhere else in the world would you have world condemnation for the
lawful, rightful eviction of BUMS who
refuse to pay the rent.
But we are Jews. And the world hates Jews. They don’t think
we have a right to our lawful property in our indigenous territory. They don’t
think we have a right to be in Jerusalem, our holy city for thousands of years.
And actually, it’s not that they don’t think we have the right to these things.
It’s that they hate us so much that they want us to be without shelter,
without homes, without any sort of life at all. They want us dead. And they
want to give the spoils to those who shoot missiles at us and cut us down in the streets.
By the time this goes into print, a lot will have happened.
But it is all fairly predictable. The Israeli government will retaliate because
now they have to, because Israeli citizens have been killed. But the actions we
take will fall way short of solving the problem. Because everyone knows we won’t
turn Gaza into a parking lot. And the ones who are most keenly aware of this
are the Arabs themselves—the ones shooting missiles into Jerusalem, those
sending balloons to burn our crops and hurt our children, the ones cheering and
flashing the victory sign in broad daylight on major Jerusalem thoroughfares to ordinary Jewish Israelis waiting to take the bus home after a long day of work.
It grinds my gut. And I know I am not the only one. We wait and
wait and wait some more. We wait for the government that will solve this problem.
We wait for God.
*Note that I did not share these privately shared phone items here. If it’s not approved
by government censors, I don’t share it, because “Loose lips sink ships.” No
desire to help the enemy improve its aim. (The clips I did share here have been
cleared for publication.)
As I write here in Jerusalem, sirens have sounded and explosions have been heard. It appears that rockets were fired by Hamas at the city. I am posting this now before finding out what is happening.
Further to my piece here yesterday about the Jerusalem riots, here’s some more information you won’t read in the venomously slanted media coverage which continues to obscure the Palestinian Arabs’ incitement and attacks that sparked these disturbances and which continues falsely to blame Israel instead for its behaviour. In this twisted reporting, much of the British and American media continue to parrot the Palestinians’ narrative which, as always, seeks to obscure their own murderous and bigoted aggression by pretending that their Israeli victims are the aggressors while the Arabs are merely defending themselves.
While the Israeli police have struggled to contain the continued Arab rioting, as you can read in these accounts here and here, this is what the senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad tweeted: People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it here and just cut off (their heads). It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state. You shall find the strongest in enmity towards the believers to be the Jews and the polytheists. The Jews have spread corruption and have acted with arrogance, and their moment of reckoning has come. The moment of their destruction at your hands has arrived.
Anyone spot the little word here that the British and American media somehow always miss? Yup, he’s inciting against the Jews. Not Israelis — Jews. Because the Palestinian Arabs’ war against Israel is a war against the Jews, as it has been for the past hundred years. This is something that liberal media and politicians simply refuse to acknowledge or report. When they refer to Palestinian “resistance”, they are describing Palestinian Jew-hatred; and when they talk about Israel’s “disproportionate” responses, they are describing Israel’s determination to defend its people against the intended mass murder of Jews.
In the riots on the Temple Mount, everything is coordinated: The ideological line is that of the Muslim Brotherhood. The operation on the ground and the incitement is handled by Hamas, the Islamic Movement, and some Arabs in eastern Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority, as usual, is along for the ride. The goal is to move the conflict onto religious lines after the nationalist issue turned out to be insufficient for a conflagration. The way to do this is through the same old lie, "Al-Aqsa is in danger."
This claim has served as the catalyst for terrorist attacks, rioting, and now a semi-uprising whose purpose is to weaken Israel's hold on and sovereignty over the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The discourse that radical Islam drags the world into focuses almost entirely on the Temple Mount's holy status for Muslims. No one mentions that the state of the Jewish people, which recaptured the holiest place in Judaism in 1967, then placed it in the hands of a competing religion, Islam, for which it is only the third-holiest site. There is no example of another concession like this in interfaith relations anywhere in the world.
Today, one often hears the false charge that Israel is ‘building tunnels under the Temple Mount‘, or that, ‘The Al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger of being bombed and destroyed. This is a true and serious Zionist threat’. There are dire warnings about how the ‘Jews invade the Mosque’ and even that Jews are ‘injecting chemical substances into the walls of the mosque in order to cause its corrosion’. This article examines one of the lesser-known origins of these myths and legends: remarks of the British politician Alfred Mond in 1921 which, though he subsequently clarified them, were purposefully distorted by the Arab leadership as a justification for violence for decades after.
Who was Alfred Mond?
Sir Alfred Moritz Mond (1868 – 1930), industrialist, plutocrat, politician and philanthropist, knighted as the 1st Baron Melchett, was born to parents who had immigrated to Great Britain from Germany. Although both his parents were born of Jewish parents, they did not consider themselves practicing Jews and he was not raised as a Jew. His wife, Violet (sister of the Foreign Office muralist Sigismund Christian Hubert Goetze), was also of Jewish heritage but her parents had converted. They were married in the Anglican Church and the children were raised as Christians.
Mond’s father, Ludwig, was a chemist and had emigrated from Germany to England in 1862. He developed a process for processing soda ash and later, another for extracting nickel. After founding a chemical engineering firm he became extremely wealthy in that he discovered that adding 3.5 per cent nickel to steel greatly increased its strength. Alfred was a director in his father’s businesses and expanded them. In 1926, he brought about the merger of four separate companies to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the world’s largest industrial corporations at the time and became its first chairman. He was one of the wealthiest Englishmen at the time.
He involved himself in politics and sat as Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1923, becoming a member of David Lloyd George’s government as First Commissioner of Works from 1916 to 1921 and Minister of Health (with a seat in the cabinet) from 1921 to 1922. He then switched party and sat in Parliament from 1924 to 1928. Upon his death the obituary of The Times noted he had triumphed over ‘a bad voice, a bad delivery, and a presence unimpressive to all but the caricaturists’.
Although not identifying as Jewish, nevertheless, Mond was frequently the victim of antisemitic attacks in Parliament. T.S. Elliot’s poem, ‘A Cooking Egg‘, published in 1920, includes these lines: ‘I shall not want Capital in Heaven, For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond: We two shall lie together, lapt / In a five per cent Exchequer Bond,’ and he was targeted by Henry Hamilton Beamish (an early promoter of the Madagascar Plan for Jewish deportation to that island of the east coast of Africa) and his The Britons group which, in a poster, ‘The Jews’ Whose Who’, attacked Mond as a traitor to England.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, part of Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, proudly lists its rocket attacks for Monday:
1: The bombardment of the usurped Majdal (Ashkelon) with 4 missiles.
2: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) with 3 missiles.
3: Shelling the Zionist settlements inside our occupied lands with rockets and mortar shells from all the governorates of the Gaza Strip.
4: Shelling the usurped Majdal with 3 missiles
5: The bombing of the usurped Sderot with 6 missiles.
6: The usurped Kissufim was bombed with 5 mortar shells.
7: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with 5 mortar shells.
8: Shelling Nahal Oz with 3 mortar shells.
9: Shelling the usurped Kissufim with 3 missiles.
10: The usurped Sderot was bombed with a missile
11: The bombing of the third eye (?) with 4 missiles
12: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with two mortar shells
13: The bombing of Karm Abu Salem with two mortar shells
It is a revolution until victory
These are the "moderates" that the world says is ready for peace with Israel.
Note that they call all Israeli towns "settlements."
Here's the photo-illustration on their site, proudly portraying lots of rockets dropping on an Israeli civilian community while residents - who are all soldiers - flee:
Meanwhile, Hamas has abandoned its pretense of only attacking "military sites" when they shoot rockets. They made up that excuse once when the UN lightly chided them for indiscriminately attacking civilians, so for years they claimed that their rockets were only aimed at "military sites" in Sderot or Ashkelon. Now they proudly admit they are targeting civilians, as this press release from this morning shows:
* 05:30 Al-Qassam Brigades launch a large missile strike on the occupied city of Ashkelon.
* 04:17 Al-Qassam Brigades fire a missile burst at the Zionist Yad Morkhai usurped
* . 02:35 Al-Qassam Brigades bombard usurped Miflasim with two heavy mortar shells
* 01: 00 Al-Qassam Brigades bomb Sderot with two rocket-propelled grenades
* Between 23:30 and 00:00, Al-Qassam Brigades bombed the usurped Zionist Sderot with two missiles.
Islamic Jihad's press releases of each rocket attack look practically the same.
There is no difference between Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Just because two are explicitly Islamist and one is more secular, they all agree that attacking civilians is perfectly fine.
Ashraf has no idea if his family was killed by Israel or Hamas. He just wants to bury them.
But the New York Times later interviewed another relative, Bashir. He is convinced it was an Israeli missile, and Israel is solely responsible for all suffering:
But as the conflict expanded and the airstrikes began, it quickly became deadly.
In Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza, the Masri family was grieving for two young boys who were killed on Monday evening. Ibrahim, 11, and Marwan, 7, had been playing outside their home when a missile struck, according to their uncle, Bashir al-Masri, 25.
For Mr. Masri, the attack showed that Israel had no concern for civilian life.
“They target buildings with children, they target ambulances, they target schools,” he said by telephone. “And all the world, beginning with America, says that people in Gaza are terrorists. But we are not terrorists. We just want to live in peace.”
He also called on Israel to end a blockade on Gaza that has placed heavy restrictions on goods and materials, lest they be used to make weaponry. The blockade, coupled with similar restrictions by Egypt, has crippled Gaza’s economy and led to high unemployment.
“God knows how we live in Gaza — and the number one reason is the Israeli siege,” said Mr. Masri, who is one of the roughly 50 percent of Gazans without work. “They want to kill us. But they cannot.”
Suddenly, the media switches from a grieving relative with no idea how his family was killed into another who is practically a Hamas spokesperson repeating anti-Israel talking points word for word who is certain he knows Israel is behind it.
Hamas makes a point of letting Gazans know that they cannot say anything outside the party line.
It is also possible that the Gaza stringer for the NYT, Iyad Abuheweila, gave him leading questions like "What do you think about the inhuman Israeli blockade?" The New York Times reporters could not enter Gaza so they fully relied on the local stringer to get the quotes.
Either way, there is intense pressure from Gaza officials to control the narrative, and threatening residents happens often.
If the New York Times was truly interested in reporting the truth, they would have mentioned the IDF denial of shooting that rocket, and that many Gaza rockets have killed Gaza kids over the years, and that the other Mr. Masri had no idea where the missile came from. Instead they gave him a platform to propagandize on behalf of those who killed his family.
(CORRECTION: originally I thought both newspapers interviewed the same person. h/t Israellycool.)
Yom Hevron is not as well known as Yom Yerushalayim, but perhaps it should be.
The Six Day War didn't only liberate the holiest city for Jews, but it also liberated the second holiest city - and the city that has the third holiest site as well.
Hebron has been sacred to Jews even longer than Jerusalem was, ever since Abraham buried Sarah there.
Judea and Samaria are filled with places that Jews (and some Christians) are familiar with from childhood. It has far more Biblical sites than Israel within the Green Line.
Bethlehem is where Rachel is buried. Shiloh is where the tabernacle (the portable proto-Temple) was kept for 369 years. Bet El is where Jacob had his famous dream.
All of these sites, which had been Judenfrei during the 19 years of Arab rule, became available for Jews to visit and live, all soon after Jerusalem was liberated.
It is something to celebrate - especially since much of the world wants to take them all away again.
Sharansky reasons that until there is a fundamental internal transformation of Palestinian Arab society that embraces democracy, there can be no realistic negotiations. He roundly condemns Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a terrorist. He views his successor Mahmoud Abbas as a pale and equally corrupt reflection of his predecessor. Sharansky is under no illusions about Palestinian leaders. He believes that they still are wedded to the goal of Israel's elimination. Sharansky underscores his point by quoting Soviet dissident and creator of the USSR's hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov: "Never trust a government more than it trusts its own people."
Sharansky comes down hard on the Iranian regime as ideologically the most dangerous of enemies, claiming that he is in agreement with prominent Iranian analysts such as, Uri Lubrani, the last Israeli unofficial ambassador to Iran; Dr. Bernard Lewis, the most accomplished western Islamic scholar, and Ron Dermer, the long-serving Israeli ambassador to the US. Sharansky has sharp words of condemnation for Barack Obama; he accuses the former US President of having abandoned Iran's dissidents by his refusal to offer even verbal support for anti-regime demonstrators during their nationwide protests in 2009.
Sharansky... is a fierce critic of the "new" campus-based anti-Semitism, and catalogues several programs that Israeli and some American Jews have developed to lend courage to Jewish-American youths to defend, fight back, and celebrate their Jewish identity in the face of radical Jew-haters as well as self-hating American Jews who serve as a poisonous brew that eventually destroy both the institutions of democracy and the freedoms of individual liberty.
Former Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer suggested Sunday that Israel should prioritize the “passionate and unequivocal” support of evangelical Christians over that of American Jews, who he said are “disproportionately among our critics.”
“People have to understand that the backbone of Israel’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians. It’s true because of numbers and also because of their passionate and unequivocal support for Israel,” Dermer said in an onstage interview at a conference organized by Makor Rishon, a news outlet affiliated with the national religious community
The interview marked Dermer’s first public remarks since he ended a marathon seven-year term in January as Israel’s ambassador in Washington, where he became known for having the ear and “brain” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Dermer was lauded for using that relationship to play a key role in advancing several pro-Israel decisions taken by the Trump administration. However, the premier and his ambassador were accused of undermining Israel’s traditional bipartisan support in Washington by cozying up to the Republican party where the ideological differences of opinion on Israel are minimal, while alienating Democrats — the party supported by the vast majority of American Jews and whose last president Barak Obama sparred regularly with Jerusalem on a number of key issues.
In a wide-ranging interview, the former envoy was pressed on whether Netanyahu had placed too much emphasis on evangelical Christians in the US.
Dermer dismissed the suggestion and argued that Israel actually hasn’t designated enough time in engaging with evangelical Christians.
My friend, former Ambassador Ron Dermer, is 100% correct. I am someone who saw things for 3 years from the inside-way, way in the inside. From my perspective, Israel does indeed have a lot to be grateful for as a result of the leadership of @Netanyahu. https://t.co/bJTrMegad7
— Jason D. Greenblatt جيسن غرينبلات (@GreenblattJD) May 10, 2021
Nikki Haley: Ex-UN Ambassador: What Countries Say Behind Closed Doors | Rubin Report
18 far left radicals have signed onto a bill vilifying the Jewish state, threatening to pull aid.
Why?
Because Israel is enforcing her laws attempting to stop rioters from burning down Jerusalem.
20 civilians, including 9 children, were killed this evening, Monday, in an Israeli raid on Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip.
Local sources told Wafa that the occupation planes held two bombing raids east of Beit Hanoun, and continued targeting our people in the Gaza Strip, which led to the death of 20 civilians, including 9 children, in addition to the injury of about 65 citizens, 3 of whom were seriously wounded, and were transferred to the Beit Hanoun and Indonesian Hospitals. In the northern Gaza Strip, some of them were transferred to Al-Shifa Hospital due to the seriousness of their injuries.
Our correspondent reported that violent raids by the Israeli warplanes targeted homes and civilian properties in different areas of the Gaza Strip, during which dozens of rockets and missiles were fired.
He confirmed that the raids targeted a group of citizens, a vehicle, a motorbike, and two homes in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, in addition to an Israeli missile strike in a yard behind the Al-Omari Mosque in the town of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, and a shell fell on a house for the Abdul Nabi family in the Al-Jarn area of the town, and the Al-Kashef land in its east was targeted.
Wow - it sounds like the IAF is only hitting civilians and civilian targets!
Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, warned the Zionist enemy of a "strong, painful and above expectations" response if it bombed civilian facilities.
Abu Ubaidah, the Qassam spokesman, said in a tweet: "We warn the Zionist enemy that if they bomb civilian installations or homes for our people in Gaza, our response will be strong, painful and beyond the enemy's expectations."
Sounds like Israel has only hit military targets!
Just more proof that Palestinian media lie, all the time.
The IDF has confirmed that 3 children that Hamas blamed on Israel was in fact from an errant Hamas rocket, according to Times of Israel.
Understanding the Current Sheikh Jarrah (Jerusalem) Property Dispute
Professor Avi Bell
A call for discrimination
The current dispute in Sheikh Jarrah involves several properties with tenants whose leases have expired, and in a few cases squatters with no tenancy rights at all, against owner-landlords who have successfully won court orders evicting the squatters and overstaying tenants. The litigation has taken several years, and the owners have won at every step. The squatters and overstaying tenants have appealed against the eviction orders to the Supreme Court. The only decision that stands before the Israeli government is whether to honor the courts’ decisions and enforce the eviction orders if affirmed by the Supreme Court, or whether to defy court orders and deny the property owners their legal rights.
Critics claim that the Israeli government should (or even that international law requires the Israeli government to) deny the owners their property rights, but these claims are not based on any credible legal argument. Rather, the critics focus on the fact that the owners in the disputed cases are Jews while the squatters and overstaying tenants are Palestinian Arabs. The critics demand that Israel discriminate against and disregard the property owners’ lawful property rights due to their Jewish ethnicity. It’s obvious that critics of Israel would pay no notice to the dispute if the owners were Palestinian and the squatters and overstaying tenants were Palestinian. Likewise, it’s clear that critics of Israel would demand rather than oppose Israeli enforcement of the courts’ judgments if the owners were Palestinian and the squatters and overstaying tenants Jewish.
Critics of Israel in this case have adopted the bigoted position that property rights should depend on ethnicity and that Jewish ethnicity should be the grounds for denying legal property rights. In doing so they have distorted the facts, perverted international law, and attempted to intimidate Israel’s courts and law enforcement officials into adopting the critics’ bigotry.
The legal basis of the parties’ property rights
The legal rights of the parties themselves were resolved decades ago, in favor of the property owners. The owners in these disputes acquired their rights through an uninterrupted chain of transactions from predecessors in title in the 19th century. These legal rights were acquired under Ottoman law, and remained good through all different government regimes since then (British Mandatory, Jordanian occupation and purported annexation, and Israeli). No one seriously disputes the validity of the transactions through which the current owners acquired rights from their predecessors in title.
The tenants in these disputes acquired their leasehold rights through a chain from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property in the 1950's. Their rights as leaseholders (not owners) were reaffirmed in several court rulings culminating in 1982, when Israel’s civil courts issued rulings adopting settlement agreements between the leaseholders’ predecessors in title and the owners. The rulings and settlement agreements established that the tenants had “protected leaseholds” under Israeli law (a status superior to ordinary leaseholds under Israeli, Jordanian and British law) but that the owners still had good title ownership. The tenants enjoyed and continue to enjoy the benefits of the protected tenancies until today; this is why their leaseholds continued uninterrupted for more than half a century, until the recent expiration of the leases (in some cases due to serious breaches of the terms of the lease, in others due to the natural expiration of the lease rights). The squatters, of course, possess no legal rights at all.
The only break in the owners’ uninterrupted chain is the sequestration of the properties from 1948-1967 by the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. Jordan, which had illegally occupied east Jerusalem and the West Bank during its illegal invasion of Israel in 1948, denied Jews the right to exercise any property rights over land in the Kingdom during the entirety of its 19-year occupation (Jordan has continued this discriminatory practice to date). Having expelled all Jews from the lands it occupied, Jordan transferred custody over all Jewish-owned property to the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property. In accordance with the British legislation on enemy property on which the Jordanian law was based, Jordan’s sequestration of enemy property only extinguished owners’ rights completely if the state seized title by eminent domain or if the Custodian transferred title to someone else. Importantly, in the case of the Sheikh Jarrah properties, the Jordanian Custodian did not purport to transfer ownership of the properties to anyone else. Instead, the Custodian leased some of the properties to Palestinian Arabs (the predecessors in title to the current overstaying tenants).
After the Six Day War of 1967 ended Jordan’s occupation of east Jerusalem, Israel adopted legislation that vindicated the private property rights of persons of all ethnicities. The 1970 Law and Administrative Arrangements Law (Consolidated Version) preserved the rights of private parties who received title from the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property, notwithstanding the illegality of Jordan’s occupation. (Persons who received rights from the Jordanian Custodian were all Arabs, since Jordanian law denied property rights to Jews.) Where the Jordanian Custodian had held custody over the sequestered properties through 1967, the 1970 law assigned custody to the Israeli Administrator General and Official Receiver with instruction to release custody to the property owners. And where Jordan had seized the property by eminent domain for public use, the 1970 law assigned ownership of the property to the state of Israel for continuation of the public use.
Ironically, if the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property had assigned title to the predecessors of the current Palestinian Arab holdover tenants over the lands it seized from Jewish owners, Israeli law would have respected the resulting title. The reason the holdover tenants in Sheikh Jarrah lack ownership today is not because the state of Israel has denied the Palestinian Arabs any rights they acquired, but, rather, because the government of Jordan declined to give the Palestinian Arabs title to the land Jordan had seized.
Media distortions of the dispute
Many of the media accounts of the recent court judgments regarding the properties in Sheikh Jarrah have distorted the facts. Contrary to claims in some media accounts, Israel did not grant anyone ownership to any of the affected properties on the basis of ethnicity. Israeli law respects and upholds the property rights of persons of all ethnicities. Israel has even respected the property rights created by prior regimes that explicitly discriminated against Jews in their property laws—the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate of Palestine, and the Jordanian occupation regime.
Contrary to claims in some media accounts, Israel has not created different rules for “enemy property” based on ethnicity. The ethnic dimension to the current-day property disputes is historic discrimination against Jews by a country other than Israel: Jordan denied Jews all ability to exercise property rights during its illegal occupation of east Jerusalem 1948-1967. Israel has declined to continue Jordan’s discriminatory practice, but it has respected the legal results of Jordan’s actions. Ironically, Israel has been so respectful of the private property rights of Palestinian Arabs that it continues to uphold private Palestinian Arab property rights that are based on Jordanian discrimination against Jews.
Contrary to claims in some media accounts, the Israeli government has not decided to evict anyone in the current disputes. It is private parties, rather than the government of Israel, that have brought their claims to court. Landowners have done what they do throughout the civilized world—they have exercised their private rights to evict holdover tenants by going to court and winning an eviction order. The landowners rightly expect that Israeli police and enforcement authorities will respect the law and carry out eviction orders. Contrary to claims by pro-Palestinian advocates, the state of Israel has not issued any eviction orders against Palestinians in these disputes.
Contrary to the impression created by some media accounts, there has been no recent adjustment of the parties’ property rights in favor of Jews or to the disadvantage of Palestinian Arabs. The parties’ rights were established by voluntary transactions over many years and reaffirmed in a legal compromise and court rulings many decades ago. The Palestinian Arab litigants in these cases are now attempting to overturn more than a century of property transactions and overturn long-settled law in order to prevent the Jewish owners exercising their lawful rights. The only involuntary transaction in the chain is the Jordanian 1948-1967 sequestration of Jewish property which is the source of the Palestinian Arab lease rights that have been upheld by the courts.
Contrary to the impression created by some media accounts, the property disputes do not involve any exotic or unusual Israeli laws. The leasehold and trespass legal issues at stake are similar to those found throughout the world, other than the unusually strong rent control and tenant protections given to the protected tenants (Palestinian Arabs in this dispute). The ownership laws at issue are likewise similar to those found throughout the world, and simply follow the chain of voluntary transactions. The only exotic element in the case is Jordan’s 19-year sequestration of all Jewish-owned properties as “enemy property,” which has been respected to the detriment of the Jewish property owners.
Contrary to the statements in some media accounts, none of the properties in the current dispute has been seized by the state of Israel. None of the property disputes turns on Israeli laws of land use or land planning or absentee property.
Contrary to the statements in some media accounts, the question in the land disputes is not whether “Jews owned the property prior to 1948.” The ethnicity of the owners is not legally relevant to the dispute, and does not serve as the basis of any legal rights in this case. The historical ownership is relevant only because it is part of the chain of title leading to the current owners’ title. What has been litigated is the current rights of current property owners.
Official distortions of international law
Likewise, many critics of Israel have fabricated provisions of international law to insist that Israel is required to discriminate against Jews in east Jerusalem because, in the critics’ view, east Jerusalem is territory belligerently occupied by Israel. These claims are not only without foundation in international law, they also undermine international legal authority by creating a fake international law intended to be used in bigoted fashion.
Contrary to the claims of the critics, nothing in the law of belligerent occupation, or any other provision of international law, requires Israel to adopt and enforce the racial and ethnic land discrimination that is part of Jordanian law. In fact, Israel would violate international law (such as provisions in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) were it to continue the Jordanian ethnic discrimination, or adopt the distorted views of international law proposed by critics of Israel.
Contrary to the claims of the critics, there is nothing in the Geneva Conventions or any other part of the laws of belligerent occupation that forbids Israel to carry out court orders enforcing private property rights of landlords to evict their overstaying tenants. The claim that property rights of Jews must be disregarded while other property rights must be upheld or even enhanced has no basis in the law and is morally offensive.
Contrary to the claims of critics, international law does not require, or even permit ethnically-based denials of the legal rights of property owners due to alleged flaws in other Israeli laws. Some critics have claimed that Israel’s land planning laws, land use regulations and 1950 Absentee Property Law are problematic or biased. Whatever the merits of such claims, the claims of the parties in the current Sheikh Jarrah disputes have nothing to do with Israel’s land planning laws, land use regulations or the 1950 Absentee Property Law. Nothing in international law permits Israel to deny individual Jewish landowners their legal rights as punishment for the alleged guilt of their polity in adopting other, unrelated laws.
Contrary to the claims of the critics, permitting private Jewish landowners to exercise their rights in court does not constitute “illegal settlement activity.” No reasonable interpretation of the various provision of the Geneva Conventions and other treaties cited with respect to the legal dispute on “settlements” could possibly lead to the conclusion that international law requires stripping Jews of all private property rights in land in areas that critics of Israel call “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” While critics of Israel like to pretend that international law forbids Jews to reside in any lands claimed as part of the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” that claim has no foundation in international law.
In light of the reactions from Washington to the Hamas and Fatah-inspired Arab violence in Jerusalem, it is hard to see how Israel will be able to maintain a constructive dialogue about its relations with the Palestinians with the Biden administration or more broadly, with the Democrat Party. Indeed, the reactions coming out of Washington to the Arab violence in Jerusalem indicate that Israel will be hard-pressed to conduct a constructive dialogue with Washington about anything, and this will be the case regardless of who forms the next Israeli government.
Saturday, Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren published a shocking post on her Twitter account in response to the Arab riots in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, which started in earnest last Thursday. The progressive powerhouse wrote, "The forced removal of long-time Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah is abhorrent and unacceptable. The Administration should make it clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately."
Warren's statement isn't a demand for justice for Arabs. It is a demand for injustice for Jews. Warren has become the first senior US official to call for Jews to be barred from doing something specifically because they are Jewish since Ulysses Grant barred Jews from entering Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky at the height of the Civil War.
The situation in Sheikh Jarrah is cut and dry. Buildings in the neighborhood that were purchased by Jews 146 years ago were illegally seized in 1948 by Jordan as its forces illegally occupied eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem in the course of the pan-Arab invasion of the nascent Jewish state. During the course of Jordan's illegal occupation of those areas of Jerusalem, the Jordanian Registry of Enemy Property illegally leased the Jewish-owned buildings to Arab tenants.
When Israel liberated the Jordanian-occupied areas of Jerusalem in 1967, the owners of the buildings reasserted their property rights. Their ownership over the properties in Sheikh Jarrah was duly registered in Israel's land registry in 1973. But when the owners tried to retake poss. Their refusal instigated a now 48-year legal battle between the owners and the squatters which is scheduled to finally come to an end this week.
In countless court decisions, judges found time after time that the Jewish owners were the legitimate owners and the Arabs were illegal squatters. The Arab squatters admitted this was the case in 1982. And yet, 39 years later, the children and grandchildren of the squatters from 1982 still refuse to leave the buildings.
During the administration of former US president Donald Trump, Palestinian violence declined as a result of Trump’s refusal to pander to Palestinian blackmail. Not only did Trump move the US embassy to Jersualem, he empowered a rapprochement between the Gulf states and Israel which left the Palestinian cause abandoned. He also cut funding to the Palestinian Authority as a consequence of its continued incitement and support of terrorism against Israeli Jews.
The Biden administration, which is stuffed full of officials with a baleful record of hostility to Israel, immediately restored funding and diplomatic recognition to the Palestinian Authority, started to try to drive a wedge between Israel and Saudi Arabia and made clear that it would give Israel short shrift and empower its genocidal foe, Iran.
This US shift in support effectively gave a green light to the Palestinian Arabs to renew their murderous onslaught against the Jews of Israel.
And so what’s been the response by the Biden administration and the EU and various European states to this co-ordinated campaign of incitement, murder and other attacks on Israeli Jews? Far from condemning these Palestinian aggressors and inciters, the EU and US have instead condemned their victim, Israel. They have warned against its planned evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, and repeated their habitual and historically illiterate lie that Israel is in illegal occupation of Jerusalem, the ancient historic capital of the Jewish people — the only people for whom it was ever their capital city.
But hey — the Bidenites, EU states and western “liberals” promote the Holocaust-denying Jew-hater Mahmoud Abbas as a statesman; declare that his terrorism-supporting, Jew-demonising, Israel-exterminating Palestinian Authority deserves to run a state; give it the funds which enable it to continue its incitement and support for terrorism; require Israel to compromise its security to facilitate the creation of an entity which aims to destroy it; parrot the false narrative of Israeli illegality while conniving at the Palestinians’ attempt to hijack both international law and Jewish history; and label murderous Palestinian attacks on Jews as “resistance”.
And then they have the sheer gall to urge a return to “calm”. They are themselves accessories to evil.
This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.
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Elder of Ziyon
