Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Sun Tzu, Putin, and the Iran Deal (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As I write, there are Russian tanks in Donbas. Does that mean that we are on the verge of a new European war, as US President Biden suggests? I doubt it. I believe that Vladimir Putin is a student of Sun Tzu. He knows that Ukrainian leaders know that they can’t stand against Russia without outside help, that most of Europe can’t fight, and the few countries that can – won’t. He knows that he has been storing up foreign currency and working to make Russia more self-sufficient for several years to insulate Russia from the financial weapons that will be deployed against her. Above all he knows that America, divided, exhausted, fragile, neurotic, and led by an old man far out of his depth, does not have the will to act strongly enough to stop him.

I date the beginning of the collapse of the US as a world power to 9/11. American political and cultural elites all bought into the idea that this was not a skirmish in the struggle between Islamic and Christian civilizations that has been ongoing for at least a millennium, but rather a “War on Terror,” where the terrorists had “perverted” Islam. “Islam is peace,” pronounced George W. Bush a week later, when Ground Zero and the Pentagon were still smoldering. To this day, we have not learned to know our enemy.

Shortly thereafter, the US sent troops to Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, they did not send enough men, and depended on local Afghans to do much of the fighting. They also decided to trust their Pakistani “allies” to cover the back door to Tora Bora. As a result, Bin Laden escaped and was not captured until 2011. But American involvement in Afghanistan continued until Biden oversaw the embarrassing rout of remaining Americans in August 2021.

In February 2003, the US demonstrated its military might when it attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, scaring the hell out of the Iranian regime which, because of its secret nuclear program, expected to be next. American troops captured Baghdad less than a month later. But the military victory was squandered by the remarkably ignorant attempt to remake Iraq into a western-style democracy and the suppression of the Sunni minority that had controlled Iraq under Saddam. The war devolved into an insurgency in which the insurgents were supplied and bankrolled by Iran and Syria. Most Americans left Iraq in December 2021, although a small number remain. Meanwhile, Iranian-controlled militias have solidified their control of much of the country.

These wars cost trillions of dollars and numerous lives, and planted a debt bomb in the American economy that is only beginning to explode today. They demonstrated the truth of Sun Tzu’s belief that sheer military superiority is not enough. “There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare,” he said, and the prolongation of these wars – which were begun with inadequately defined or impossible goals (e.g., establishing democracy in Iraq), has greatly weakened the nation, militarily, economically, psychologically, and politically.

But not only has the real strength of the US declined in recent years, its image as a superpower has been shattered by a series of unnecessary errors. Notable was Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on his threat to punish Bashar al-Assad for Syria’s cruel use of chemical weapons on civilians in 2013. Another misadventure was the original Iran deal, signed in 2015, which did not provide for adequate inspection of nuclear sites, did not limit – even weakened previous limits – on ballistic missile development, and which essentially granted Iran the right to develop nuclear weapons ten years after its signing. It was a signal to virtually everyone (except Obama’s sycophants) that America had chosen the path of appeasement. And there is no need to dwell on the message sent by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Putin has been watching, and learning. And so has the Chinese leadership, which has studied Sun Tzu if anyone has, and if Putin succeeds, will be encouraged even more to move on Taiwan.

Now the Biden Administration is about to sign another deal with the Iranian regime, and if preliminary reports are to be believed, it will be even weaker and more dangerous than the first. The fact that the American collapse in Vienna is happening at the same time that the crisis in Ukraine is developing is likely to make US negotiators, under the pro-Iranian Robert Malley, even more anxious to give the Iranians everything they want and get it over with.

This is another unnecessary loss for America, which may someday even be a target for the weapons it is allowing the Iranian rogue regime to have. Last month, three US negotiators quit because of Malley’s “soft negotiating stance.” It’s hard to understand why US officials have chosen to surrender here. Where is the American interest in increased worldwide terrorism, the expansion of Iran in the Mideast, and the message of weakness sent to US rivals everywhere?

The deal doesn’t make sense. So what is behind it?

In order to answer that question, we need to know who is behind it, because it’s highly doubtful that Biden or Tony Blinken is determining foreign policy in this administration. And here there is only speculation. My informed guess is that there is an influential group including Malley as well as former Obama Administration officials – Barack Obama himself, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others – that are guiding the administration’s Mideast policy. Their plan grows out of an idea first voiced in the 2006 Iraq Study Report (which was partly authored by Rhodes. See my discussion here).

The original idea was to reduce pressure on US troops in Iraq by buying off Iran and Syria so they would stop supporting the insurgents that were killing US soldiers with Iranian IEDs. The payoff would be the (possibly fatal) weakening of Israel, which would have been forced to give the Golan Heights to Syria, and to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, where a Palestinian state would be established. Obama, who was closely aligned with the Palestinian cause, adopted many of the ideas in the 2006 document, probably via his advisor Rhodes.

I think that this group now views with alarm the possibility of the rise of a new power bloc in the Middle East, composed of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and others. Such a bloc would be very powerful, much more so than even a nuclear Iran, and resistant to control. I also think they see (correctly) that it would mean the end of the Palestinian dream of “return” – and the end of the Jewish state – to which Obama and Malley are ideologically committed. By strengthening Iran, they hope to drive a wedge between the members of this newly coalescing bloc, and return Israel to its isolated status in the region.

Needless to say, this group is acting against American interests. An Israeli-Sunni bloc would almost certainly align with the US, providing intelligence and support for Western interests in the Mideast. On the other hand, since the 1979 revolution, Iran has viewed the US as the “Great Satan” that is their most important enemy, even more so than Israel, the “Little Satan.” Iran is far from America, but its terrorist subsidiary, Hezbollah has increasingly stronger branches in Latin America, where it partners with drug cartels. Given the porous southern border, the potential for terrorism inside the US is great.

I think we can sum up what’s wrong with this policy with one more aphorism. This one is not by Sun Tzu, but it certainly could have been:

He who fights his friends instead of his enemies is guaranteed to lose.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

02/23 Links Pt1: The Killing Fields of Ukraine; Israel supports Ukraine’s sovereignty - without mentioning Russia; Why Arabs Do Not Trust the Biden Administration

From Ian:

The Killing Fields of Ukraine

As Russian troops threaten Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin denies the very existence of the Ukrainian people, it is worth remembering the tragedy that took place between November 1918 and March 1921, when Russian and Bolshevik armies invaded the independent Ukrainian state that had been established in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. All civilians, whether they identified as Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, or none of the above, became victims of that conflict, commonly referred to as a “civil war.” But the 3 million Jews who lived in the region—about 12% of the overall population—suffered a distinct fate.

Between 1918 and 1921, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions—both of which were commonly referred to as pogroms—were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine. This was not the first wave of pogroms in the area, but its scope eclipsed previous bouts of violence in terms of the range of participants, the number of victims, and the depths of barbarity. Ukrainian peasants, Polish townsfolk, and Russian soldiers robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, stealing property they believed rightfully belonged to them. Armed militants, with the acquiescence and support of large segments of the population, tore out Jewish men’s beards, ripped apart Torah scrolls, raped Jewish girls and women, and, in many cases, tortured Jewish townsfolk before gathering them in market squares, marching them to the outskirts of town, and shooting them. On at least one occasion, insurgent fighters barricaded Jews in a synagogue and burned down the building.

The largest of the anti-Jewish massacres left over a thousand people dead, but the vast majority were much smaller affairs: More than half the incidents resulted only in property damage, injury, and at most a few fatalities. The numbers are contested, but a conservative estimate is that 40,000 Jews were killed and another 70,000 subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure as a direct result of the attacks. Some observers counted closer to 300,000 victims. Most historians today would agree that the total number of pogrom-related deaths within the Jewish community between 1918 and 1921 was well over 100,000. The lives of many more were shattered. Approximately 600,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation.

Vic Rosenthal: Will there be a Magic Carpet for Ukrainian Jews?

This morning’s paper discusses the plans being made for the possible aliya of the roughly 250,000 Ukrainians who are eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Several government ministries and the army are making preparations to bring them to Israel, provide identity documents, places of temporary residence, and financial aid for them, if it should happen that war breaks out in Ukraine and many of them want to come.

This recalled previous mass immigrations to Israel since the founding of the state: the “displaced persons” of Europe, many of them survivors of Nazi concentration camps; the refugees expelled from Arab countries after 1948; the Eastern and Central European Jews who no longer had homes in Europe; the Yemenite Jews brought home in 1949 by Operation Magic Carpet; the Jews from the institutionally anti-Jewish Soviet Union; and the continuing operations to rescue the Jews of Ethiopia.

In addition to those waves of aliya there is a continuous stream of immigrants arriving from various other places such as South America, Western Europe (especially France), and the US and Canada. The flow waxes and wanes along with economic and political changes, and of course antisemitism. In recent years, Ukraine has accounted for the second largest number of olim (after Russia).

Israel’s Law of Return says that any Jew or the child or grandchild of a Jew or their spouses, can come to Israel and be granted Israeli citizenship. Exceptions are made for someone who “is engaged in an activity against the Jewish people,” criminals, those who are a danger to “public health or security of the state,” and “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.”

And who is a Jew? The law says one who is “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” As everyone knows, the question of conversion is a hot potato, with the religious establishment insisting that only an Orthodox conversion – and indeed, only some Orthodox conversions – are acceptable, while the Interior Ministry, which controls granting citizenship, accepts non-Orthodox conversions outside of Israel.

Biden Ignoring Budapest Memorandum Commitments to Ukraine

To induce Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons inherited on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S., Great Britain and Russia agreed to provide assurances. If Washington were to allow Russia to gobble up the rest of Ukraine, it would tell non-nuclear states they must have nuclear arsenals because they cannot rely on the nuclear weapons powers for security.

Biden's threats have been unpersuasive and so far Putin has not been persuaded.

Biden immediately sanctioned the two regions but did not impose costs on the bad actor, Russia. He has promised further measures, but only after an invasion. Moreover, his sanctions are unlikely to be so severe as to force Putin to leave Ukraine. In fact, on the 15th of this month, Biden made it clear that sanctions would be less than regime-threatening.

It is now time for the United States to remember the promises made—those in writing and those made informally.

Putin, after all, will not stop at Ukraine.

"Apartheid" is the new "Occupation" - a term used purely for propaganda purposes

The far-left, anti-Israel +972 Magazine has jumped on the "apartheid" train, and in so doing they unwittingly describe what is really behind the coordinated attack on the legitimacy of the Jewish state:

First, we believe it should be recognized as an essential fact that, through decades of colonial expansion, Israel has effectively erased the Green Line and consolidated a single regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In doing so, consecutive Israeli governments have made it crystal clear that the state seeks to uphold permanent domination over Palestinians — whether through military rule in Hebron, unequal citizenship in Jaffa, siege in Gaza, or forced exile in Ein al-Hilweh.

To better reflect these facts, we have changed the standard language we use to describe the regime in Israel-Palestine. When +972 was founded, the word “occupation” sufficed for many. Today, as a result of both developments on the ground and the tireless activism of Palestinians and allies, the word “apartheid” has become a more apt description of the system of separation and supremacism that exists between the river and the sea. This term does not negate the framings of “occupation” or “colonialism” — both of which we also use on the site — but rather is intended to help establish a baseline from which readers, journalists, and other observers can understand the present realities.

Of course, nothing has changed over "decades." Israel controls essentially the same territory it did during Oslo - in fact, less, since it abandoned Gaza. At least 95% of Palestinians live under Palestinian rule in their day to day lives (notice that not one example of +972's "river to the sea" argument mentions Areas A or B where nearly all West Bank Palestinians live.) The number of settlements is virtually the same as they were in 1993.

There haven't been "decades of colonial expansion." If peace was possible during Oslo, it is possible now. The main thing that changed since Oslo is a little thing called an intifada where Palestinian leadership chose to murder Jews instead of compromising with them. And even after that, Israel offered peace multiple times and it was rejected.

The +972 crowd doesn't want to talk about that.

Since they started, they wanted to talk about "occupation." And then they expanded the definition of the term "occupation" to include places that are certainly not considered occupied under international law. For years they and their allies hammered at the "illegal occupation" and "colonialism" that simply doesn't exist.

Being against "occupation" is ultimately a legal argument, and people get bored of legal arguments. It doesn't grab one's attention unless one is already a hater of the Jewish state. The word "occupation" doesn't make people angry - after all, most people have occupations, most people occupy their homes.

The "occupation" experiment failed.

So the haters of Israel came up with a new strategy - not that new, since it was hatched in Durban in 2001. But it was decided among the modern antisemites that they need a word to replace "occupation," a word that horrifies people, a word with emotional baggage whose relationship to reality is not important.

"Apartheid" also has a legal definition, and the attempts by B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty and now +972 to shoehorn that definition to Israel have all failed spectacularly. But they know that they are not trying to argue facts and international law - they know they lose that battle.

The current "apartheid" campaign is not based on facts but on emotions. It is not law but propaganda. Its goal is to demonize and delegitimize Israel, the only country on the planet that gets treated this way.

This little +972 essay pretty much admits all of this. They are saying that they want their readers and the world to associate the word "apartheid" with Israel and to make them believe it by sheer repetition. Which is exactly what they used to do with "occupation."

It is all propaganda. The strategy is written by +972 right here. And it explains why all these organizations pretend that they independently came up with the same slur to describe the most tolerant state in the region.

The most absurd part is +972's very next sentence, right after they say that they are using the A word to demonize Israel to the world:

Second, we are reasserting our commitment to accurate and fair journalism.

It is easy to dismiss such obvious lies and contradictions in consecutive paragraphs. But the fact is that these modern antisemites have learned well from the previous ones and what has been proven in studies: repeating lies makes people believe them.

Telling the truth is not an antidote to this incitement. But it is the only tool we have.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

To the West, Arabs love to say that Jews were welcomed and treated well under their benevolent rule.

In Arabic, things are somewhat different.

A Boston based organization named Diarna describes itself:

Diarna (דיארנא ديارنا “Our homes” in Judeo-Arabic): The Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life is working to digitally preserve the physical remnants of Jewish history throughout the region. We are in a race against time to capture site data and record place-based oral histories before even the memories of these communities are lost. Diarna pioneers the synthesis of digital mapping technology, traditional scholarship, and field research, as well as a trove of multimedia documentation. All of these combine to lend a virtual presence and guarantee untrammeled access to Jewish historical sites lest they be forgotten or erased.

Jordanian news site Al Ghad warns about the dangers of Jews wanting to catalog and map their heritage in the Muslim world - the very heritage that Arabs claim to be so proud of.

For the fourteenth year in a row, the “Diarna” project silently continues to work on the penetration of the Jewish presence in the Middle East and Arab societies, especially to legitimize the Israeli entity and its occupation.

The project claims the existence of Jewish heritage sites in Arab countries and Iran and demands their restoration.

The Jewish project, which is based in Boston, reveals a tremendous service it provides to legitimize the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land and grant that occupation more incursion in Arab societies historically and culturally, while strengthening the normalization agreements signed by Arab countries

The founders of the expansion project claim that they apparently aim to preserve the Jewish heritage in the Arab countries, but by browsing between the lines of the project’s official website on the Internet, it is based on a tripartite plan that is close to seizing and occupying under the pretext of ownership.

According to the website; several teams of the Jewish project organize “friendly” visits to Arab countries, where they claim the presence of Jewish heritage sites and demand their restoration, whether with the efforts of the same state or with the support of the project.

As soon as the restoration efforts reach advanced steps, Diarna works hard to demand the restoration and ownership of these sites to be among the Jewish heritage, and finally, it dares to ask for compensation for the Jews who lived in those countries, claiming that they are “Jewish property and heritage.”

Diarna is a non-political project.

The project says nothing about "demands" or "compensation." This is all in the fevered imagination of the antisemites of Al Ghad, who see a threat every time they see a Jew.

Anyone who opposes the cataloging and documenting of Jewish heritage sites in Muslim lands is simply a Jew-hater.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

From the Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian exports of scrap iron from Gaza are slated to double now that a new iron-shredding machine, the second of its kind, has been placed at the Kerem Shalom crossing.

“Following work with many offices on both the Palestinian side and the Israeli side, the new iron-shredding machine has begun operating,” said the head of Israel’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration’s Economic Department Aviv Hindi.

“This addition will make possible a doubling of iron scrap exports from the Gaza Strip, will give employment to many Gazan residents, and will provide for the economic welfare of many families,” he said.

“It is all part of a civilian policy that we have recently been advancing, on the understanding that civil stability leads to stable security.”

Each machine has a monthly output of some 6,000 tons of iron, allowing for a monthly profit of more than NIS 2.5 million per machine.

Which means that Israel is bringing millions of dollars a year to the economy of the sector whose leaders swear they will destroy Israel.

Sounds like apartheid, doesn't it?

But wait, there's more:

It’s part of a number of steps to ease Gaza restrictions taken by the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, headed by Maj.-Gen. Rassan Alian.

Major General Rassan Alian is not Jewish. He is Druze.

Wow, the harder you look, the more apartheid you find from those Jewish supremacists!

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

02/22 Links Pt2: The Naqba dynamic: A sobering analysis of Arab-Jewish relations; The European Left and the Jewish Question 1848-1993 Between Zionism and Antisemitism

From Ian:

The Naqba dynamic: A sobering analysis of Arab-Jewish relations

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD
Israeli Nobel Laureate author Shmuel Yosef Agnon, writing in the aftermath of the Arab pogrom in 1929, described reality:

"Among the people of Talpiot [in Jerusalem] were many [Jewish] optimists who said the Arabs would never come into Talpiot; after all, many of them earned their living there…On the way we met some Arabs, from their faces we could see they had come to loot. [Someone] asked if he should kill them. Krishevsky said NO! We all knew that if it had been the other way around they would have done the opposite."

In a scenario of an all-out violent struggle, the state of Israel will gain the upper hand. Its security resources and experience, national will and moral urgency, will outweigh any combination of Arab grievances, guns, and an impulse to foment turmoil. When de-escalation fails, new rules will prevail. Israel may then set a strategic goal to turn the corner in this lengthy and bitter conflict, and not be limited to just riding out the storm as a transient altercation. Were the Arabs cautious in assessing the balance of forces, they would stop short of pushing the process to the end-point. When the aggressor loses, as in the 1948 Nakba debacle, he has only himself to blame.

WHO WILL GO?
The PLO Covenant from 1964, in Article 6, recognizes the right of Jews to stay in liberated Palestine on the condition that they resided there before 1917; the rest – all of them! – must leave. Bear in mind that Palestinian refugee return will be the complement to Jewish expulsion.

Ahmad Shuqayri, the first leader of the PLO, had coined the phrase of "throwing the Jews into the sea" three days before the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War.

It did not happen.

Yasser Arafat, three years after the 1993 Oslo Accord, shared a forecast with Arab diplomats in Stockholm: "There will be a migration of Arabs to the West Bank and Jerusalem…We will make life unbearable for the Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion; Jews will not want to live among us. We Palestinians will take everything."

This has not happened.

Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet, expressed his people's anguish and wish in addressing the Israelis in 1988: "Take your names with you and go…go where you wish. We have the future…leave our country. So go, it is time for you to go. We have work to do in our land."

An anticipated Jewish national disaster demands decisive action to frustrate an evil design aimed at Israel's existence; or it could be too late. After Jordan expelled Palestinians in 1970, Lebanon in 1982, Kuwait in 1991, Libya in 1995, and Syria in 2015, it becomes morally unobjectionable for Israel to be no less forthright in responding to subversive and disruptive Palestinians in days of crisis and breakdown.

It is time for the Palestinians to go.

*The Zohar (Parashat Lech Lecha) relates that the Ishmaelites [considered the ancestors of the Arabs], descendants from Abraham, earned the right to rule the Holy Land when it is empty of everything for a long time…Then they will block the children of Israel from returning to their place – until the right of the Ishmaelites expires.

The time arrived for the Jews to return home.

Book Review _ The European Left and the Jewish Question 1848-1993 Between Zionism and Antisemitism

While many look to the rise of both Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany to understand the Left’s evolution on the Jewish question, one period of time that is often overlooked is that of fin de siècle France and Italy — the opening of a century disfigured by the Shoah and the murder of millions of innocents.

While it can be argued that the First Zionist Congress, the founding of the Bund and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1897-1898 all presented paths to the Jewish future, the ideological turmoil in France and Italy after the deaths of Marx and Engels coloured the trajectory of the European Left at the onset of the twentieth century.

During the nineteenth century, France had had its fair share of anti-Semites on the Left such as Alphonse Toussenel and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Charles Fourier, the instigator of a utopian socialism, termed the Jews ‘a parasitic sect’. French history from the defeat in the Franco- Prussian war to the Dreyfus Affair to the Petàinist regime in 1940 is peppered with the obsession of discovering the hidden Jewish puppet masters — and making them pay for their disloyalty.

Michel Dreyfus, in an excellent essay, explains that this path was not linear, but notes that anti- Semitism in France regained momentum during the inter-war period. The French Right which had always regarded the verdict in the Dreyfus Affair as ‘a judicial coup d’état’, blossomed. Figures such as Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras feared that the Jews would gain influence in France as a social class rather than as a religious community.

Michel Dreyfus argues that Poland, Germany and Austria all revelled in anti-Semitism after 1933 and France and Italy after 1937. With the exception of the Protestant areas of Germany, these were all Catholic countries.

Fathom – The Three Best Recent Books on the Yishuv during the British Mandate, recommended by Donna Robinson Divine

Before hashtags told us what to think and how to feel, it was slogans that stirred up energy for political causes. Repetition could turn the slogan into an idiom wielded by politicians but also shape how the people understood history and identity. This is how the slogan ‘Negation of the Diaspora’ – urging Palestine’s Jewish residents to cast off Jewish lifestyles forged in ‘exile’ – became a core Zionist principle shaping the narrative of the Jewish National Home in British Mandate Palestine. ‘Negating the Diaspora’ provided Palestine’s Jews with an explanation for their past as well as a direction for their national future. The hegemonic status of the slogan has hovered over Zionist historiography too, sometimes lending it a romantic quality. In recent years, however, the phrase has been critically rethought by a new generation of scholars, as illustrated by these three brilliant books about the British Mandate period.

Birthright Politics in Zion: Judaism, Nationalism, and Modernity Under the British Mandate, Indiana University Press, 2017
In her path-breaking work, Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman focuses on the reasons that drove Jewish women in Palestine to limit the number of their children. Population growth was central to the development of the Jewish National Home, but the role of women in determining family size is typically overlooked because of the many challenges in knowing how to coax out the data. Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman was among the first to place Palestine’s Jewish birthrates in the relevant comparative contexts – the Jewish world from which most immigrants came and the modernising influences they carried with them to Mandate Palestine. Ironically, Zionism’s own national ambitions triggered the very clash of imperatives that kept fertility rates low particularly for immigrants. More children generated more work for the very woman who sought liberation through agricultural labor while the harsh economic circumstances that immigrants had to endure also kept birth rates low. What Jews living in Palestine realised was that a new national identity was more easily proclaimed than summoned into existence.

Carnival in Tel-Aviv: Purim and The Celebration of Urban Zionism, Brill, 2016
While Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman has reshaped the study of the Yishuv by probing the personal, Hizky Shoham has reconstructed it by examining Jewish life in the public domain. His work concentrates on religious observance, showing that the gap between what Zionist leaders said about Palestine’s Jewish society and the way in which most people ordered their lives was striking. Even as they denounced the religion of their parents as doomed to extinction, Zionists were beholden to the Jewish canon and calendar. Whether feeling the stirring of an atavistic awe or simply continuing a lifestyle that met family and community needs, religion remained a core element of British Mandate Jewish culture. A parade at Purim or a carnival giving people of a certain social class the opportunity to show off their status helped the Jewish story take on a performative majesty displaying its rituals when European Jews were desperately trying to keep theirs hidden. Part of the goal was designed to imprint the Jewish story on Palestine’s landscape, changing identity not so much by announcement as by lived experience.

Oriental Neighbors: Middle Eastern Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, Brandeis University Press, 2016
In their trailblasing study, Moshe Naor and Abigail Jacobson examine the multiple ways the Oriental and Sephardi communities identified with the idea of homeland but had a troubling relationship with many of the institutions gaining political power over Jews in the years of British rule. During the Ottoman Empire, Jews from the Middle East helped European immigrants [Zionist and non-Zionist] negotiate through what appeared to them alien imperial economic and political domains. When British rule dismantled the Ottoman Empire, it rendered the vital functions of these Jews as cultural bridges irrelevant. And in spite of sharing language and culture with the country’s Arabs, there was more demand for Middle Eastern Jews to report on Palestinians than to establish a dialogue with them based on common interests. No surprise, then, that Jews from Middle Eastern countries were recruited to become Zionism’s first generation of spies.

Elder Comix: Who are the privileged whites?

A couple of days ago, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch tweeted:

For decades, Human Rights Watch has been led by Ken Roth—who gets a salary of more than $650,000—and an elite group that is predominantly white privileged.

Here's a snapshot of the co-chairs, directors and officers who run the organization.

Does @HRW believe in white supremacy? pic.twitter.com/uS9VdT4jFi
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) February 20, 2022

Also, last year a report found that Amnesty International has a culture of white privilege.

That inspired this cartoon:

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Hamas Is Getting Ready To Compete With Fauda (Daled Amos)

by Daled Amos

I recall listening to my rabbi speak on Shabbos -- years ago, when I was just a kid.

In order to illustrate a point, my rabbi mentioned an article that a German actor, dressed as Hitler for a movie he was appearing in, went out on the street in character. According to the report, the actor was astounded at how Germans on the street came up to him and greeted him warmly.

I looked online for some record of this, but did not find it.

What I did find was an article from 2015 about a different German actor and his experience when he went out in public as the Nazi dictator:

An actor dressed as Hitler on the streets of Germany was begged to bring back labour camps, kissed and made to feel like 'a pop star' - casting an uncomfortable light on growing support for right-wing extremism in the country.

Oliver Masucci plays the Nazi leader in 'He's Back' ('Er ist wieder da'), a biting social satire by author Timur Vermes which was released in German cinemas this week.

From the preview on Youtube, it was clear that while no one could have been fooled into thinking that the Nazi dictator had actually returned, there were clearly a lot of Germans who would not pass up the chance to be seen with him.

...and thought there was nothing too outrageous that couldn't be said in order to commemorate the moment.

On the other end of the spectrum, people who masqueraded as Jews got a very different kind of reception.

In that same year, a non-Jewish Swedish reporter walked around the city of Malmo while wearing a kippah just to see what the response would be. He was hit once, cursed multiple times and finally had to flee, out of fear that things would get worse.

A similar experiment was done in France -- again in 2015 -- with similar results: being called names and being spit at. By contrast, when the experiment was imitated in London, the person doing it was basically ignored.

I'm writing about this because of a TV show that Hamas is making.

According to AFP, Hamas is jealous of the success of Israel's hit show Fauda -- about an Israeli counter-terrorist squad. The idea is "to broadcast a drama about the spirit of our resistance," in this case to depict a botched 2018 Israeli operation in Gaza in which 7 Hamas terrorists and one Israeli officer were killed. The operation, which was uncovered in Gaza and required a quick retreat back to Israel, was apparently either an information-gathering mission or related to captives/missing persons in Gaza. One of the 7 Gazans killed was a Hamas commander, but Israel denied the operation's goal was assassination. It is likely though that that is exactly how the Hamas TV show will portray it.

But AFP is not interested in the operation or what its purpose was.

Instead, AFP wants you to know about how much Gazans hate the Arab actors depicting Israelis:

One of them is Jawad Harouda, aged in his early sixties and with a husky voice, who portrays the head of Israel's Shin Bet domestic security service in the new TV series.

To get into character, Harouda said he "soaked up the script", but added that being too convincing can lead to trouble.

"Some women look at me and pray that I die," he said, leaning back in his boss's chair in the fake Shin Bet office.

"I'm happy when people insult me. It means I've succeeded ... The actor is a chameleon, he must be able to act out all colours."

..."In one series, I played a Jewish woman," said one actress, Kamila Fadel, who added that she may have been just a little too convincing for her own good.

"After the series was broadcast, a woman tried to strangle me," she recounted.

"She told me: 'I hate you, you are hurting us so much'. On another day a 13-year-old boy threw a stone at my head thinking I was Jewish... This means I played my part well." [emphasis added]

So in order to convince their audience that they are Jews, these actors have to be a "chameleon," "act out all colors" and "play their part well?"

Big deal.

Anyone walking down the street in Malmo, Sweden -- which has a large Muslim population -- can get the same reaction from complete strangers, without saying a word, just by wearing a kippah. No acting necessary.

Given the children shows in Gaza that teach kids to hate Jews, the summer camps where children can learn to act out attacking Jews and the other forms of incitement that Hamas uses -- hatred of Jews is so systemic that it is hard to see what all the fuss is about actors being attacked for being identified as Jews on TV.

And these attacks that these actors look upon as a source of pride is seen elsewhere as hatred that needs to be combatted.

The AFP article itself misses the point as well.

It describes Fauda as nothing more than a show that "portrays a military unit...that launches raids inside Palestinian territories" and against which Hamas wants "to flip the equation, to show the Palestinian point of view, to broadcast a drama about the spirit of our resistance."

The description by the Associated Press of the first season of the show gives a little more context, describing the show as "the adventures of an undercover Israeli commando team who immerse themselves in the heart of Palestinian society to capture a terrorist behind a wave of suicide bombings."

By taking their cue from Hamas and reducing the Israeli and Gaza TV shows as a propaganda war, AFP completely overlooks one of elements of Fauda that has made it so popular:

In addition to the shootouts and chases, it also delves into the politics and personal drama of the commandos and terrorists, depicting their motivations and family lives, often in a sympathetic manner.

The creators, though they identify as Zionist Jews, don’t shy away from showing the uglier sides of the West Bank occupation and the struggles of the other side. They even look to smash one of the greatest taboos of all, exploring the possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian romance.

That may be one of the reasons why, as AP points out, Fauda has fans among Arabs and even among Palestinian Arabs. And that may be what actually has Hamas worried, since they see Gazans watching the show as a form of normalization with Israel.

Neither AFP nor Hamas seem to realize that one of the strong points of Fauda is that it does not present the conflict as black and white, that it is willing to portray the other side sympathetically.

And that would take real acting.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

02/22 Links Pt1: On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel; Anti-Israel Bias and NGO Links of UNHRC’s Gaza Committee of Inquiry Members; Israel crosses grim 10,000 death mark

From Ian:

Amnesty International’s Problematic Israel Report

Eugene Kontorovich, director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University Scalia Law School, believes “there is clearly a coordinated campaign by far-left NGOs to mainstream the apartheid accusation, with an eye o[n] getting it adopted and ‘made official’ by the ICC [International Criminal Court] and the UNHRC.” Kontorovich continued, “Having a U.N. agency, even a discredited one like the UNHRC, accuse Israel of apartheid will certainly give diplomatic momentum to those who seek to destroy Israel.”

Herzberg sees Amnesty’s report as “timed to feed into a March 2022 report where U.N. Human Rights Council Rapporteur Michael Lynk will accuse Israel of apartheid, which in turn will serve [as] the basis for the Human Rights Council's Commission of Inquiry on Israel levying of the charge. They also hope their reports will influence the ICC to indict Israelis for a crime against humanity.”

Schanzer said, “This [report] was designed to be ammunition, and it will be.” Schanzer concluded, “All of this could potentially build in a dangerous direction.”

That direction isn’t an entirely new one. This effort recalls the United Nations’ declaring in 1975 that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” While the United Nations finally repealed that resolution in 1991, Soviet-style anti-Zionism lives on.

Izabella Tabarovsky, senior associate with the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center and research fellow with ISGAP, told me, “Soviet antizionist propaganda deeply influenced [the] Western left back [in] the 1960s-1980s. Soviet propaganda was comparing Israel to South Africa already in the 1960s and applying the apartheid label regularly ... These comparisons were as baseless then as they are today, but they fulfilled a political purpose.”

Anti-Israel activism remains a popular and unifying cause among leftists; it can also imperil local Jews. Tabarovsky observed: “Demonization of Israel and Zionism creates an atmosphere of antisemitic incitement that endangers Jews in the diaspora in very real ways—we saw it last May. ... In my research, numerous people told me that demonization of Israel by Soviet press in the run-up to the Six Day War created such an antisemitic atmosphere that they feared for their personal safety. ... They were sure that there would be pogroms,” because inflammatory rhetoric has consequences.

Even before releasing this report, Amnesty was an organization whose members voted against actively combating rising antisemitism in Britain in 2015. So Paul O’Brien, executive director of Amnesty USA, can’t be taken seriously when he tweets, “We want to be very clear—it is unacceptable and inappropriate for this report to be used as justification for any recrimination against the Jewish people. We condemn antisemitism in the strongest possible terms.” Indeed, that tweet’s no more credible than Amnesty’s report on Israeli “apartheid.”

On Amnesty’s car-crash interview in Israel

Their responses to simple questions were, for the most part, a mix of exasperation, ignorance, self-contradiction, and conspiratorial magical thinking. Luther in particular was almost comically unprepared for the most obvious of questions, and he seemed genuinely resentful at being asked them.

The most obvious question, of course, is why the obsessive and disproportionate focus on Israel in the human rights community. There are a few coherent, even if not terribly persuasive ways, to deal with the question. One would be to argue that all of the attention of Amnesty, HRW, the UNHRC and others is completely justified because Israel truly is a unique evil on the global scene and much worse than all other countries combined. Another would be to deny completely that there is a disproportionate focus on Israel. And a third would to be acknowledge it, maybe claim that it is a problem of other organisations, but argue that in this specific case it is not what is happening.

What is incoherent is trying to do all three, which is precisely what Luther does. He wants to ‘push back’ on the idea that there is a large focus on Israel. Two sentences later, he tacks in the other direction: ‘I’m not sure what the problem is.’ And later again ‘I don’t think there evidence for that.’ When confronted with the specific example of the UNHRC, which year after year passes more resolutions against Israel than all other countries combined, Luther is flatfooted. He avoids the question, isn’t sure about the facts. He seems unaware of the ‘permanent item’ dedicated to Israel on the Commission’s agenda, when no such item exists for any other country.

No one expects an Amnesty director to sound like AIPAC speaker. But it is not expecting too much for someone whose entire professional life is dedicated to the topic of human rights in the Middle East to have an opinion of some kind on the matter.

And it’s jarring that people who believe so fervently in human rights don’t see something amiss in this. Let’s imagine a village with 193 families in it, and the local police assigns one of its only cops to follow only one family’s car and constantly measure its speed, and the tax department goes over every receipt of this same family looking for irregularities, and a grand jury sits permanently to investigate any possible crimes of this same family, and the local paper has a reporter permanently assigned to sniff out any infidelities or disputes inside the family. You don’t need to be an expert with 20 years experience (as Luther reminds us in the interview he has) in the field of human rights to understand what is wrong with this situation.

When Berman comes back to the UN issue one last time, Luther gives perhaps the most astonishing response. He says Israel has actually managed to ‘shut down scrutiny using the power of its relationships’ and charges that the UN is actually a locus of inaction because Israel ‘has influence over powerful allies who then manage to stop it, stop the scrutiny.’

And that of course is the appeal of anti-Israel activism in the West: the sincerely held belief that by engaging in it you are somehow standing up to dark powerful forces at home. There’s a word for this pathology.

Over the past month, Russia surrounded Ukraine with 150,000 soldiers, fighter jets, attack helicopters, artillery, rockets and warships.

During this time, @amnesty tweeted not one word on Russia or Ukraine.

Instead, their pinned tweet since Feb. 3rd is about attacking Israel. pic.twitter.com/bBxtM8ZrCy
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) February 22, 2022

How Amnesty International went from being a noble human rights organization dedicated to protecting prisoners of conscience, to a morally corrupt group of ideologues supporting radical Islamists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes and terrorists.

??:https://t.co/65rzD0Ag3T
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) February 22, 2022

Congratulations to Amnesty International for directly inspiring Students for Justice in Palestine at Northwestern University to unfurl a banner on campus calling to boycott racist and genocidal Israeli Hummus.

(@Amnesty, remember: Hummus good, Hamas bad.)https://t.co/ddZl3i1gg7
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) February 21, 2022

Earlier this month, a new Palestinian law was published that granted president Mahmoud Abbas powers to issue or revoke the red diplomatic passports pretty much at will, with no regard as to whether the recipients are diplomats or not.

In essence, it is yet another way to control his people.

Indeed, yesterday Abbas revoked the diplomatic passport of his Fatah rival Nasser al Kidwa, who is a former Palestinian envoy to the UN and also former foreign minister - pretty much the definition of a diplomat. But Kidwa created a rival faction within Fatah last year, so he is an enemy of the Palestinian dictator.

Kidwa even said that it makes no sense for him to go through the Palestinian judicial system to protest this ruling, since it is all rigged by Abbas anyway.

Similarly, Abbas withdrew the diplomatic passports of many members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, which is dominated by Hamas, even though the law used to be that they can use these "VIP" passports for life.

This is a clear violation of the right of movement - by the Palestinian leadership. Yet Gisha, the Israeli NGO that supposedly is dedicated to promoting the right of Palestinians to have freedom of movement, has not said a word about this law that passed on February 6.

Gisha, which has embraced the word "apartheid" to describe Israel, suddenly doesn't care about freedom of movement -- its entire purpose -- when Israel cannot be blamed.

Similarly, the non-Arabic media has been silent on this very clear unilateral and dictatorial move by Mahmoud Abbas.

People really care about Palestinian human rights - as long as they can blame the Jews. Without that critical precondition, these same caring human rights professionals don't care about Palestinian human rights at all.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

The fatal mistakes in South Africa's ruling on antisemitic speech

Palestinian prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh thanked the the Constitutional Court in South Africa, which - he claimed - ruled that anti-Zionism is not considered anti-Semitism.

He said, "We demand that the rest of the countries adopt this decision as a reference and a legal precedent."

The court said no such thing. It ruled that in some circumstances, it can be clear that an anti-Zionist statement can be antisemitic, and it obliged someone whose antisemitism was couched in "anti-Zionist" terms to apologize.

I read the full ruling. It attempts to balance the imperatives of free speech against those of combating hate. Although I cannot find the full submission, the ruling praised the amicus curiae of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation (SAHGF) which, it says, helped it distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism:

[I]t is noteworthy that the preceding analysis and this Court’s jurisprudence, most recently detailed in Qwelane, reveals that words cannot always be taken for their plain meaning. The first amicus aptly emphasised that there exists a long narrative of anti-Jewish rhetoric. This has dominated world history for thousands of years, and culminated in the Holocaust. Due regard to this context and history must be observed when dealing with expressions that are allegedly anti-Semitic, because many socially acceptable words may become a proxy for anti-Semitic sentiments. Focusing on the plain text and ignoring the objectively ascertainable subtext would be ignorant, inappropriate and antithetical to what our Constitution demands.

This is accurate, and it describes perfectly why anti-Zionism is antisemitism. There are no comparable movements against any other sort of nationalism as there are against Zionism. Very few critics of China call themselves "anti-Sinoists." The very existence of the phrase "anti-Zionist" as a unique expression of opposition to self-determination of Jews is what proves its is fundamentally antisemitic, and it is exactly a proxy for modern antisemitism.

The main problem with the South African ruling can be seen in this parenthetical phrase:

In response, Mr Masuku relied on the expert evidence of Prof Friedman to show that there was a distinction between anti-Semitism and legitimate criticism of the State of Israel (anti-Zionism).

I don't have the text of Prof. Friedman's testimony but the judgment text here indicates that the Constitutional Court accepts a definition of anti-Zionism is "legitimate criticism of the State of Israel." That is the opposite of the truth: legitimate criticism of Israel is in no way "anti-Zionism." It is the obsessive, lie-filled, hateful and illegitimate criticism of Israel that is anti-Zionism. That same hate behind anti-Zionism has animated antisemitism for millennia.

It is noteworthy that the testimony of Pref. Friedman, here referred to as "expert," was openly derided in the earlier Equality Court case at which he gave that testimony:

The evidence of the respondents’ expert witness, Friedman, is of course, opposing that of the Commission’s witnesses. I deal with the contrasting views below. First, the trite approach to such opposing views. Expert witnesses are usually required to assist the Court, and not the party for whom he/she testifies....

[It] is difficult, in the circumstances of this matter, to accept the evidence of Friedman. I say this for the following brief reasons: the opinion does not demonstrate convincingly that Friedman is indeed an expert on the issue of anti-Semitism, and its proper inter-relationship with anti-Zionism in the context of the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although the evidence shows that Friedman has immense interest in these matters, these have not been the focus of his academic career. In addition, he somewhat showed that he is partisan which on its own, offends the approach and principles to expert testimony described in the preceding paragraph of this judgment.

Whether the Constitutional Court was quoting Friedman or added the parenthetical phrase on its own, if the court has an incorrect definition of anti-Zionism, it will sometimes rule incorrectly.

There is one other major flaw in the judgment.

It quotes an earlier case to determine whether a statement is racist: it is “accepted that the test to determine whether the use of the words is racist is objective – whether a reasonable, objective and informed person, on hearing the words, would perceive them to be racist or derogatory.”

This definition excludes the use and power of dog-whistles - statements that include meanings that would be clear for a specific, intended audience but which would go over the heads of most "reasonable, objective and informed persons."

Dog-whistles are not always intended as hidden messages for one's supporters. Sometimes they are intended to cause pain to one's opponents.

There were three statements that Masuku made at an anti-Israel rally at Wits University that the court ruled did not cross the threshold into hate speech and direct threats against the Jewish community:

“COSATU has got members here even on this campus; we can make sure that for that side it will be hell.”

“[T]he following things are going to apply: any South African family, I want to repeat it so that it is clear for anyone, any South African family who sends its son or daughter to be part of the Israel Defence Force must not blame us when something happens to them with immediate effect.”

“COSATU is with you, we will do everything to make sure that whether it’s at Wits, whether it’s at Orange Grove, anyone who does not support equality and dignity, who does not support rights of other people must face the consequences even if it means that we will do something that may necessarily cause what is regarded as harm.”

Orange Grove is a Jewish neighborhood. But the court ruled that Masuku's might not have meant that as an attack on the Jewish community using this tortured logic:

In these statements, Mr Masuku cajoles that he would confront his opponents whether it was at Wits University or whether it was at Orange Grove. The HRC contended, and the Equality Court accepted, that the reference to Orange Grove was meant as a reference to a predominately Jewish neighbourhood. Mr Masuku contended that his reference to Wits University and Orange Grove was simply because these were the sites of the most recent marches and rallies, and of the offices of two major defenders of Israel’s actions in Gaza (which are also prominent Jewish associations). It is not conclusive either way that a reasonable reader who would have known that Orange Grove was a predominately Jewish suburb would also not have been aware of the march to the offices of the SAJBD and SAZF which are in Raedene, a small suburb between Orange Grove and Linksfield.

If the offices of those two organizations aren't in Orange Grove itself, how much more evidence do you need to realize that Masuku's reference to Orange Grove was specifically towards Jews? This was a clear dog-whistle to threaten Jews in a way that Jews (and antisemites!) would immediately recognize, yet that a "reasonable reader" might not understand.

This shows that the "reasonable reader" test is not enough for determining whether a statement is hate speech.

While it is welcome that the court ruled that Masuku must apologize for his statement where he compared the Jewish community to Hitler, these two flaws could hurt future judgments on similar cases.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Saudi-American academic couldn't visit the Al Aqsa Mosque because of Palestinian hate

Najat Al-Saeed is a Saudi-American independent academic researcher who teaches in Dubai and writes for Israel Hayom.

Earlier this month she tweeted details about her trip to Israel, causing much discussion in Arab media.

Now she has written about her experiences during her short trip to Israel for Al-Hurra. It was virtually all positive.

The one slight discomfort that she felt came not from Israelis - but from Palestinians.

Ever since the Abraham Accords, Palestinian Muslims on the Temple Mount have been harassing and intimidating any Muslim with a Gulf accent who wants to visit Al Aqsa Mosque.

Here is how Najat describes her visit to Jerusalem and the third holiest site in Islam:

My impression before my visit to Jerusalem was that it is a small and religious city, but I was surprised that it is larger than I expected, and it is not only a religious city, but also a contemporary city. I saw the religious side of the city I saw when I visited the Old City of Jerusalem with the wonderful tour guide, Shaked Berry, who coordinated with Sharaka (an NGO that supports peace between Israel and Gulf stets) and I saw a true incarnation of the three major Abrahamic religions: the Temple Mount and the Western Wall for Judaism, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for Christianity, the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque for Muslims. The Old City is divided into the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter and the Jewish Quarter.

The confusion I found on my trip like many Muslims is that we always imagine the Dome of the Rock, a holy Islamic shrine, to be the Al-Aqsa Mosque....

Therefore, the moment I stood in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque was solemn, because I saw myself in front of a long history, and the truly touching moment was when I heard the call to prayer for the Maghrib prayer while I saw people of different faiths walking in the square. But what struck me was that I could not go inside the mosque because of security warnings, especially after there were several incidents against Gulf Arabic-speaking visitors, especially when the visitor knows that they are from the Gulf countries, so I preferred not to speak in Arabic and go immediately to the Christian neighborhood and then the Jewish one.

Palestinian antisemitism is so entrenched that they not only try to discriminate against Jews, but also against Muslims who have the audacity be be friends with Jews.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

02/21 Links Pt2: Jewish history is under attack; 59% of Israelis hide being Jewish when traveling abroad; Ultra-orthodox Jewish group funding escape for abused Afghan refugees

From Ian:

Jewish history is under attack

This was illustrated when in the same week as Whoopi’s comments, Amnesty International published a report claiming that Israel is an apartheid state. The report, which is chock full of lies, doesn’t once mention Palestinian terror or Israeli security considerations, nor does it recognize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancient homeland. Amnesty made sure to omit these facts to ensure that the world perceives Israel as a colonialist, apartheid state so that it can legitimize BDS and attacks against Israel.

Even more disturbing, an increasing number of Jews have fallen prey to this false narrative. Jewish progressive organizations like IfNotNow, J Street, and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) promote a revisionist history that denies the Jewish people’s indigeneity to Israel and perceives Zionists as white colonialists. They don’t even recognize their own history.

In George Orwell’s dystopian fictional society of 1984, he says, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

Let’s be clear about the Jewish story - the Jewish people are not victims. We are a people that thrived despite the persecution and oppression we have faced. We are a resilient nation that loves life, a people rooted in faith and traditions. We cannot allow the haters to erase our history and take control of our heritage of nearly 4,000 years. We must learn about our remarkable story of who we are and where we come from so that we can ensure the world knows the truth.

Mark Twain famously asked in his essay ‘Concerning the Jews,’ “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Our secret is and has always been our commitment to remembering our extraordinary past, treasuring our traditions, and passing them on to future generations. When we remember, we can ensure the world never forgets.

Israeli American and Israeli Arab couple go to YouTube to defend Israel

Yoseph Haddad, CEO of Together Vouch for Each Other, a nonprofit which seeks to unite Jewish and Arab Israelis, remembers the instantaneous connection he had with his fiancé, Emily Schrader, CEO and cofounder of the digital marketing firm, Social Lite Creative and former digital director of StandWithUs.

“When we met, we immediately clicked,” he said. As Israeli activists, they came up with the idea of hosting a YouTube series together where they discuss breaking news stories, events and politics directly affecting the Middle East.

They want to present the side of Israel to a Western audience that doesn’t always get accurate facts about what is really happening from mainstream news. The first episode debuted February 2.

Haddad, an Arab Israeli Christian, was born in Haifa and raised in Nazareth.

“I did grow up in Nazareth, but most of my family, grandparents and cousins, were in Haifa, and Haifa is the biggest mixed city in Israel. So you would see Jews, you would see Druze, you would see Arab Muslims, Arab Christians in this wonderful big city. I used to play football there with my friends. We grew up Jews and Arabs together. we didn’t care that this guy is an Arab and this guy is a Jew.”

On October 4, 2003, a female suicide bomber blew up Maxim, an Arab-Jewish-owned restaurant in Haifa that Haddad and his family used to frequent. Twenty-one civilians were killed.

“This could have been me,” Haddad stated. “So when a terrorist comes and attacks like this, there’s no discrimination between Arabs and Jews... an Arab from Israel, and a Jew from Israel, it really doesn’t matter, because if you’re an Israeli, you are a target for terrorism.

“This is our country. We’re born here. I hold an Israeli passport, I have an Israeli identity. We work in order to bridge gaps and live in partnership or we don’t have a brighter future for both people, Jews and Arabs.” Haddad was a commander when he served in the IDF from 2003-2006, and also participated in the Second Lebanon War in 2006.

Yesterday, Ali Dawah, an anti-Israeli YouTuber with 700,000 followers, came to confront me in London.
I quickly realized that he only knows how to shout that Israel is killing Arabs, but he has no idea on what is really going on in Israel. This how I silenced him... pic.twitter.com/BFIHESeklA
— ???? ???? - Yoseph Haddad (@YosephHaddad) February 21, 2022

Speakers corner today in #UK: When an antisemitic YouTuber with 750k followers gets called out for refusing to condemn the murder of Palestinian and Israeli Arab kids by Hamas and Hezbollah ??

Thanks @YosephHaddad, @israel_advocacy! pic.twitter.com/tHWBvn2dVw
— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? (@emilykschrader) February 20, 2022