Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, April 25, 2023

Proud to be a Zionist - 75th Anniversary Edition

Every year for the past 22 years, even before I started this blog, I've written an essay for Yom HaAtzmaut entitled "Proud to Be a Zionist." Here is the latest edition for 5783.

____________________

There are two Israels.

No, I'm not talking about the religious vs. secular, or the right vs. left, or those who hate Bibi and those who love him.

I am talking about the real Israel and the fictional one that the world sees.

The world sees an Israel filtered through the eyes of the media, so-called "human rights" NGOs, Palestinian and other Arab antisemites, and "progressive" anti-Israel organizations on college campuses.

The real Israel has no resemblance to that other Israel.

The real Israel is messy and beautiful. It has diametrically opposed viewpoints and surprising amounts of consensus. It has passion and cynicism, the heights of joy and the depths of sadness, incredibly serious decisions that affect people's lives and black humor.

I am a proud Zionist and I embrace all of these.

I have infinite respect for those Zionists who live in Israel - secular and haredi, Jew and Arab, Christian and Druze, college professor and bus driver, every shade of skin color, speaking every language under the sun. Their opinions on the important issues of the day are much more important than mine, because they are directly affected by those decisions.

While Israel must never discriminate against its non-Jewish minorities, it is and must remain a Jewish state. That is what makes it special. It is the only place in the world where a Jew can be him or herself without apologetics, without explanation, without fear. I am still tickled when I visit and see so many tiny examples of living in a Jewish state - Talmudic expressions in graffiti, quotes from Tanach on the side of a delivery truck, buses whose electronic signs with everyone a happy holiday in Hebrew, the automatic "Shabbat Shalom" said by cashiers and in emails on Fridays and "Shavua Tov" Israelis say on Saturday night.

There is a reason that the expression "Shver tsu zayn a yid" (It is hard to be a Jew) is in Yiddish and not Hebrew. Because for all the problems in Israel, it is much easier to be a Jew in Hebrew-speaking Israel than it ever was anywhere in the Diaspora.

After a pause of a few decades, antisemitism is becoming mainstream again,, often disguised as "progressivism" or "human rights" or whatever else is trendy. And I am glad to know that no matter what, Israel is there and will welcome me.

Israel is wonderful. Israel is maddening. Israel is glorious. Israel is frustrating. The real Israel is filled with Jews who want to do the right thing, and disagree strongly and passionately on what that is. The reason they can be so earnest, so loud and so argumentative is because they are all family - and people are more comfortable raising their voices at their own family members than at strangers.

There are deep divisions in Israeli society. But there always have been. Debates about the wisdom of "land for peace," about "who is a Jew," socialism vs. capitalism, frictions between Likud and Labor, and between Ashkenaz and Mizrahi, have been no less passionate.

The real Israel is a balagan, but without that constant chaos it wouldn't be Israel.

75 years is an incredible accomplishment. Mazal tov, Israel!

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

04/25 Links Pt2: Israel is Fighting the World’s War; Your Tax Dollars Are Being Used to Teach Hate; Brendan O'Neill: Diane Abbott and the deranged left

From Ian:

Daniel Greenfield: Israel is Fighting the World’s War

The Muslim world convinced the international community to pressure Israel by promising that the Jihad would stop there. “Give us Israel and it will end,” they urged. Despite all those promises, the Islamic war against civilization has spread across the world. Most of the world’s major nations and some of the minor ones have their own Islamic insurgency that plays by the same rules: alternating political demands with brutal massacres in the name of Islamic rule.

Generations of Israelis have gone to an endless war, sacrificed sons and daughters, to hold back the tide. They did it in defiance of the ignorance, hostility and pressures of the world.

They did it because they believed, they did it because they refused to die and they did it because surrendering to an enemy that gleefully butchers children was unthinkable.

Despite everything that has happened in the last generation, the world has learned little. But the Israelis have learned that peace is an illusion and that all they can do is hold the line.

When the torches are lit and loved ones weep, when the ‘blood of the maccabees’ blooms, a nation reckons again with the price that it pays for survival. Whatever myths pacifists may harbor and anti-war activists preach, there is no escape for any nation from paying that price.

Some nations have it paid by others, as the United States of America has done for so much of the globe, but in a world where evil is a reality writ in the black ink of the Koran, there can only be temporary refuges from the reckoning.

Israel still relies on a draft army. The price paid for war is a shared burden, but so is the price paid for appeasement. The fallen and their families come from all walks of life. These men and women, grandmothers, sisters, sons and nephews, have paid the world’s price in tears. They did not do it for the world, but their nation’s memorial day is nonetheless a lesson for the world.

Paying the price for freedom has long since become a cliche. Israelis do not pay the price for freedom. They pay it so that their children, their loved ones and their people are not eradicated from the earth by a brutal enemy that has no concept of mercy and worships barbarism.

The Israelis have come up against a choice that we will all have to make sooner or later. They chose not to die. The day will come when we may face that choice as starkly as they do.

Let us hope and pray that we choose well.

UN Watch: Your Tax Dollars Are Being Used to Teach Hate

UNRWA knows it has a problem, and its method of dealing with the problem not only doesn't solve it, but it reveals how deep the rot is. In response to a previous report in 2022, UNRWA's response was a brief suspension of six teachers and no subsequent action.

In 2018, following an earlier report on the violent and bigoted online activity of UNRWA's teachers, the organization put out a fact sheet, "UNRWA and Neutrality," touting its new social media policies and training. But as our new report shows, that training focused on encouraging staff to "limit online exposure" by "taking advantage of privacy and other settings."

In other words, antisemitism and support for terrorism don't disqualify a teacher from working at an UNRWA school, but teachers are taught how to avoid getting caught for it.

And not even taught well. From what we were able to turn up for our report, the picture is dire indeed.

Among UNRWA teachers we can find Riad Nimer in Lebanon liking a post praising a gruesome mass murder in a synagogue and Arwa al-Najjar Umm Islam, a math teacher at a West Bank UNRWA school praising a teenager who, with his brother, went on a stabbing rampage in Jerusalem. Another West Bank UNRWA teacher, Nizar Khalil Abu Shaheen, shares a complex antisemitic conspiracy theory about wealthy Jews controlling the United Arab Emirates. An UNRWA employee in Syria, Labibeh Iskandarani, calls on Hitler to "wake up" because "there are still some people you need to burn."

Though UNRWA angrily dismissed the latest report as "an attempt to sensationalize" and "overstate" the problem, the organization did suspend Nimer—only to then quickly reinstate him after news of the suspension led to a teacher walkout in its Lebanese facilities. There were no confirmed reports of any other actions against other teachers mentioned in the report. Iskandarani deleted pictures of Hitler from her Facebook profile and one other teacher adjusted his privacy settings to hide his inflammatory posts.

But the problem isn't just online. UNRWA routinely deflects criticism of antisemitism in its educational materials with the excuse that it is only using material from its "host countries," specifically the approved textbooks of Jordan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority. It's a wholly inadequate excuse for an organization that derives all its funding from donor countries like the United States, Canada, and the European Commission, and it's not even true.

A 2021 study showed that UNRWA's own material used during the coronavirus pandemic was rife with bigotry and glorification of terrorists, including the infamous Dalal Mughrabi who carried out the Coastal Road Massacre in 1978 that killed 38 Israelis. UNRWA's response then was typical: denial followed by verifiably false claims that the problem had been rectified, peppered throughout with criticism for those organizations doing the hard work they refused to do and uncovering the problems in their curriculum and hiring practices.

Other UNRWA-created materials promote "armed struggle" against Israel and encourage "martyrdom." Textbooks routinely demonize Israelis and Jews, and one even describes the firebombing of an Israeli bus as a "barbecue party."

A separate discussion is needed about UNRWA's mandate and its mission and whether so many Western governments should be funneling so much money into an organization with the sole purpose perpetuating, rather than mitigating the conflict in the Middle East.

In the meantime, as long as governments are funding UNRWA to the tune of over $1 billion a year, they should be demanding both accountability in its hiring and an educational curriculum that lives up to their promised neutrality.

Bassam Tawil: Palestinians: The Real Human Rights Violations

When Palestinians commit human rights violations against Palestinians, the European Union and the UN are beyond indifferent. It is only when Israel takes a decision to defend itself against terrorism that we hear their supposedly righteous cries.

The Europeans and the UN seem to be more concerned about the rights of organizations that are affiliated with terrorism than the rights of organizations that speak out against human rights violations perpetrated by Palestinians.

The PFLP, in fact, has long been a headache for Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA). That is why the closure of PFLP-affiliated organizations in the West Bank actually serves the interests of the PA: it weakens its political rivals.

Recently, even Abbas himself decided to punish the PFLP, which is part of his own Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). He cut off all funds to the organization.

While he has been accusing Israel of targeting Palestinian NGOs, he has ordered his security forces to crack down on Lawyers for Justice, an independent Palestinian group of lawyers based in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians.

Lawyers for Justice works to support Palestinian human rights activists and political prisoners detained by the Palestinian Authority. It also monitors and documents human rights violations committed by the PA security forces.

In one of its recent reports, Lawyers for Justice revealed that the number of Palestinian political activists arrested by the PA has significantly increased, while peaceful demonstrations and assemblies were being suppressed.

It is no wonder, then, that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are trying to get rid of Lawyers for Justice.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The controversy surrounding the Bab al-Rahma (Gate of Mercy or Golden Gate) prayer hall, located east of al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, resurfaced on Saturday after the Wakf claimed that Israel Police officers halted renovation work at the site.

The site was closed by court order in 2003 after the police discovered that members of the Islamic Movement in the Israel-Northern Branch were using it for political activities. Despite the closure, Palestinian activists have made repeated attempts to reopen it.

In 2019, activists reopened the entrance to the prayer hall, allowing hundreds of Muslim worshipers to pray. When the police tried to close the area again, they were met with protests by Muslim worshipers, the Jordanian-controlled Wakf Islamic religious trust and the Palestinian Authority.

In the aftermath of the 2019 protests, Israel reportedly reached an agreement with the Wakf to keep the site closed, while allowing Muslim worshipers to pray near it.

There are no photos or video of the Israeli police doing anything at the prayer hall on Saturday, so this may be an excuse to start something up again. There have been condemnations across the Arab world for this event that may have never happened. (As is too often the case, I don't see any official statements from the Israeli authorities.)

Predictably, the rumors are starting. Palestinian news agency Safa says that Israel plans to turn the building into a synagogue:

The ambitions of the Israeli occupation did not stop the chapel of Bab al-Rahma, east of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. Rather, it is actively seeking to re-close it again, and empty it of worshipers and stationed, in a dangerous attempt to convert it into a Jewish synagogue, and impose spatial division in the mosque.

The building is built into the wall surrounding the Temple Mount. It would actually make a wonderful synagogue (Yisrael Medad joked to me when he gave me a tour of the Temple Mount that it already has separate entrances for men and women). But the chances that the Israeli government is planning to do such a thing is exactly zero.

Palestinians made the same accusations in 2020. I noted then:

In a fair world, though, the Bab al Rahma prayer room would be an excellent place for a synagogue on the Temple Mount.

I have been interested in the site for a while. To the immediate left of the structure are some old beams of wood, barely covered in canvas. (Here is a screenshot from a video I made in 2019.)

There is serious evidence that some of these beams could be from the First and Second Temple periods, and conceivably from the Temples themselves.

Matti Friedman wrote a fascinating article about them in 2013.

Which is as good a reason as any to keep people away from the site until the beams could be properly secured.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Something happened this week that completely contradicts everything you've been reading about the current Israeli government - and the High Court.

From Haaretz

:The Supreme Court should reject a petition demanding the eviction of residents of the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, because the eviction involves “diplomatic and security considerations” that should be made by the Israeli government, according to a brief filed on Monday by Israel.

The government explained that it does eventually plan to carry out the demolition orders issued against the village, but wants to decide for itself when and how to do so.

Hold on. Isn't this the "most right wing government in Israeli history"? Isn't the Supreme Court the last liberal holdout against total right-wing dictatorship?

As far as I can tell, over the years the Supreme Court has upheld the legality and importance of evacuating the illegal squatters on Area C land that was part of a military firing zone. And the governments of Israel have been trying to avoid that evacuation.

In other words, the exact opposite of what the narrative is. Not once since this whole thing went to court over the past ten years has the Supreme Court ruled that the residents have the legal right to remain there or that the State of Israel does not have the right to evict them from their illegally built homes.

And the State of Israel has always petitioned to delay the demolition, at least until a plan is agreed to for the residents to move - knowing quite well that the illegal squatters will never agree to move anywhere.

Meaning that Netanyahu is more left wing than the Supreme Court, and those who support the Supreme Court's independence should be supporting the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar - if they are being consistent, that it.

Reality is a lot different from the simplistic narratives in the media. And politics beats out supposed "principles" every time.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

04/25 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: The price Israel pays for its existence; Netanyahu calls on all Israelis to unite; Tali Dee: I never thought it would be my family

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The price Israel pays for its existence

Today is Israel’s Remembrance Day. This is when the nation commemorates all those who have fallen in battle defending it against its attackers, and remembers also all those Israeli civilians who have been murdered by Arab terrorism.

Since the State of Israel was established in 1948, 24,213 men and women have been killed in military service and 4,255 men, women and children have been murdered in terror attacks. To put these losses in proportion, in 1948 Israel had 806,000 people; today, its population is approaching 10 million. In America, the population during that period has risen from around 130 million to 336 million, and in the UK from 50 million to 67 million.

Today is an emotional day for Israel. This morning, when the siren sounded at 1100, traffic in the streets came to a halt and people stood and bowed their heads. Thousands of Israelis have visited the cemeteries to remember slain family members, recite prayers and join in the nation’s collective mourning and respect.

This annual demonstration of solidarity in grief over the dreadful price paid by Israel’s never-ending struggle to survive always generates high emotion. Today, this has been heightened still further by the terrible divisions laid bare during the last four months of uproar over the government’s judicial reform programme — which today also produced a few protests at these most solemn events.

This evening, Israel will pass seamlessly from a day of extreme sadness to the start of Independence Day, when it celebrates the rebirth of the Jewish national home in Israel. For Israelis, rejoicing over that astonishing achievement is necessarily anchored in the awareness that is never far from the surface — that the price they have paid to be citizens of their own country has been agonisingly steep.

That price is still being paid, as Israelis continue to be regularly attacked and murdered and their young conscript soldiers continue to be sent into harm’s way to defend their country against enemies bent upon its extermination.

Far too many in the west, however, get Israel’s unique predicament precisely the wrong way round. Swallowing wholesale the Palestinian Arabs’ propaganda, these westerners fail to acknowledge the Palestinian Arabs’ medieval and Nazi-style Jew-hatred and their true agenda of exterminating Israel. Regarding them ignorantly and wrongly as the displaced rightful inheritors of the land, the west supports and funds them while demonising and delegitimising Israel, whose unique claim to the land is based firmly on historical fact and international law.

Gil Troy: Israel Independence Day: The Phoenix Nation survives, inspires

It’s become fashionable again to question whether Israeli democracy will survive or even whether Israel will survive. Actually, Israel’s 75th-anniversary celebration marks 75 years of pessimists, inside and out, predicting Israel’s demise. Once the ever-dying people, Jews founded an oft-written-off country that keeps defying death and emerging stronger. Our Phoenix Nation often gets knocked down but it comes up again.

Consider Israel’s rise from the ashes of Auschwitz in the 1940s. Zionism, the Jewish national movement to establish a Jewish state and now perfect it, preceded Hitler by decades. Remarkably, in 1945, as World War II ended and Jews realized the Nazis had murdered six million of our people, Zionists refused to despair. Three years later, in 1948, they established a democratic Jewish state, ending centuries of homelessness and persecution.

Canadian human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler recalls learning in the 1940s as a kid that in Jewish history, there are horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened. With Israel’s founding, the inconceivable became possible in good ways too.

How Israel rose from the ashes and became a regional superpower
Before Israel’s declaration of its independence on May 14, 1948 (which falls on April 26 this year by the Hebrew lunar calendar), then-secretary of state George C. Marshall was sure Israel would not last. Marshall threatened to resign if President Harry Truman undertook the grave risk of infuriating the Arab world by backing the Zionists. When Israel’s founding premier, David Ben-Gurion, himself flouting the experts, confidently proclaimed independence and Truman followed, recognizing the state 11 minutes later. Marshall didn’t resign.

The new state had no money, weapons, bullets or oil, only, as Ben-Gurion supposedly retorted, “Hativkah” (hope), the Jewish national anthem. Six Arab armies attacked, triggering Israel’s War of Independence. Ultimately, 6,000 of 600,000 Israelis were killed before the 1949 armistice.

Israel survived and started absorbing the world’s unwanted Jews, including Holocaust survivors and refugees from Arab and Muslim lands. The population doubled within two years, then again by 1963. Ironically, Arab anti-Zionism, which expelled 850,000 Jews from Muslim countries, helped save Israel.

During Israel’s first 25 years, the young nation kept defeating Arab armies and defying the doubters. Especially before Israel’s Six Day victory in 1967, with Egyptians and Syrians vowing to push the Jews into the sea, Israelis specialized in gallows humor: the last Israeli leaving should shut the lights out at the airport, or particularly relevant today, that if the Arabs made peace with us, then they would win because we would kill each other.

Netanyahu calls on all Israelis to unite

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Tuesday for all citizens to “unite and stand as brothers,” speaking in an address at the main state ceremony marking Memorial Day.

“This year, more than ever, on the Memorial Day for the brave of our nation, we will remember that we are brothers: Jews, Druze, Muslims, Bedouin, Christians and Circassians,” said Netanyahu at Memorial Hall atop Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.

“Brothers in service, brothers in arms, brothers in blood. This is the true spirit of our people. Together, we will stand as brothers and guarantee our independence from generation to generation. Together we will stand as brothers, and we will bow our heads in endless tribute to the heroism of the fallen,” added the premier.

Netanyahu noted the imperative of retrieving Hamas captives Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, who crossed into the Gaza Strip of their own volition in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Both Mengistu and al-Sayed suffer from mental illness.

The prime minister also called to recover the bodies being held by Hamas of two IDF soldiers, Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, who were killed in action during “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014.

Memorial Day began on Monday night as a one-minute siren sounded across the country. Commemorations are taking place at 52 military cemeteries and memorial sites on Tuesday.

“The siren that pierced the silence right now, making its way from one end of the land to the next, rattles our souls and makes way for remembrance, which overwhelms us with silence,” said President Isaac Herzog in his speech at the Western Wall memorial ceremony.

“I ask myself, I ask us: What other country in the world has such a special sound? It is the sound of pain and of hope, of grief and of pride. It is the sound of the State of Israel. A sound that calls on us to pause for a moment, to lock in the sanctity, to remember and to connect—together,” the president continued.

'We are motivated by life. And this mission requires us to fight back, and that is the great change that has come upon our nation, we are no longer helpless victims... We can overcome,'

Says PM @netanyahu at the state ceremony honoring victims of terrorism in Israel and abroad pic.twitter.com/0sXXNKszsp
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) April 25, 2023

Last week I noted that Palestinian militants seem to have a mass histrionic personality disorder, where they revel in getting attention and feeling relevant at any expense.

Palestinian media exaggerates the effects of relatively minor incidents to feel more important and relevant. And we see it again today.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

An Israeli man in his 20s was moderately injured in a shooting attack near Wadi al-Haramiya, between Shilo and Ofra, in the West Bank, on Tuesday morning as Israel marked Remembrance Day.

The man is conscious and was injured on his hand. He was part of a group of runners running in memory of fallen soldiers and was shot by a terrorist firing from a passing car.

Hamas reports this drive-by shooting as a major operation and the injury and Israeli response as a major military victory:

Operation "Eyes of the Thieves" is a natural outgrowth of anger over the crime of the Bab al-Rahma chapel
Hamas spokesman for the city of Jerusalem, Muhammad Hamadeh, blessed the shooting operation this morning towards a gathering of settlers near the "Oyoun al-Haramiya" junction, north of Ramallah.

Hamada said that it was a heroic operation at an exceptional time, carried out while the settlers were celebrating their dead, who were killed during the resistance operations.

He stressed that the heroic operation is a natural result of the Palestinian state of anger towards the crimes of the occupation, the latest of which was the crime of storming the Bab al-Rahma chapel, desecrating it and confiscating its contents, as part of a malicious plan targeting the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.

And he stressed that "Operation "Eyes of the Thieves" will not be the last, and the occupation soldiers and settlers will remain a legitimate target for the bullets of our resistance fighters and their heroic operations, and the occupation will see from our people great harm as long as they remain in our land."

On Tuesday morning, a settler was wounded in a heroic shooting near the Oyoun al-Haramiyya junction, north of Ramallah, in the West Bank. Resistance fighters fired from a speeding vehicle in the Oyoun al-Haramiyeh area, moderately wounding a 28-year-old settler.

The occupation forces mobilized around the location of the shooting, set up a number of roadblocks, and closed the Atara checkpoint, north of Ramallah, and the Jalazoun gate, which connects with the city of Al-Bireh.

This is more coverage than Israeli media is giving it.

I've been going through the Palestine Post archives of 75 years ago, and there were Jews being killed pretty much every day at the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948. Not to minimize the terror threat nowadays, but Israelis are much safer nowadays than they were before Israel was reborn.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan's bizarre apologia for Iranian militarism

Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC tweeted:

I bet most Americans don’t have a clue that Iran spends a third of what Israel spends on the military and less than a *tenth* of what Saudi Arabia spends. And yet the Iranians are continually presented as an scary military threat to both their neighbors and to us - to justify even more military spending. 🤦🏽‍♂️

He then links to a list of military spending for various countries based on SIPRI's database:

Middle East largest Military Spenders:
1- Saudi Arabia, $75 billion (5th globally)
2- Israel, $23.4 billion
3- Qatar, $15.4 billion
4- Turkey, $10.6 billion
5- Algeria, $9.1 billion
6- Kuwait, $8.2 billion
7- Iran, $6.8 billion
8- Oman, $5.8 billion

First of all, there is a seeming contradiction between the SIPRI figures listed here and on their website with how the World Bank interprets the SIPRI numbers. I cannot explain it, but according to the World Bank, Iran spends slightly more than Israel on the military this year:

Clearly, there is a lot of information missing here. The World Bank is not making up numbers out of thin air.

But that is a minor issue. SIPRI necessarily uses different methods to estimate its figures, and it says explicitly on its website:

In practice it is not possible to apply this definition for all countries, and in many cases SIPRI is confined to using the national data provided. Priority is then given to the choice of a uniform definition over time for each country in order to achieve consistency over time, rather than to adjusting the figures for single years according to a common definition. In the light of these difficulties, military expenditure data is most appropriately used for comparisons over time, and may be less suitable for close comparison between individual countries.

Even that misses the point, though.

Military spending has no relationship with how much of a threat a country is to the world.

North Korea's military budget is much smaller than Portugal's, according to another analysis of these databases. Does that make it less dangerous?

Developing nuclear weapons and their delivery systems is much, much less expensive than building a robust missile defense system that can shoot those nuclear-tipped missiles down.

Iran directly funds international terror groups. I don't know whether those expenditures are considered "military" by SIPRI but they exist - both Iran and the recipients of their cash brag about this support.

Iran directly pays for military installations in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. Isn't that a better definition of being a threat than military expense statistics that get filtered through an opaque process dependent on Iran telling the truth to begin with.

Iran is actively working on a military nuclear weapons program, and also on building missiles that could carry those bombs to not only Israel but much of Europe.

And Iran directly threatens its opponents, literally every day. It threatens to flatten Tel Aviv. Its Hezbollah proxy threatens to attack Israeli chemical plants to poison millions. If a nation publicly threatens to destroy another nation militarily and to kill its civilians, that makes it a military threat by definition.

Looking at contradictory military budget numbers is a bizarre metric to use when the nation itself makes direct threats.

Which brings up the question of why Hasan Mehdi feels that he has to write apologetics for the would be genocidal leaders of Iran?

Probably because he shares their desires.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

75 years ago, Arabs used the "sacred" Mamilla Cemetery as a base to fire at Jews

Back in 2010, Palestinians were screaming that Israel planned to build the Museum of Tolerance on top of graves at the Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. How dare Israel disrespect this holy site, with ancient Muslim figures?

They were lying - there were no graves being disturbed;; they had been moved years beforehand.

At the time, I discovered that the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem had deconsecrated the cemetery in 1945 and planned to build a business park there. So it wasn't sacred in 1945 either.

Afterwards, I found out that in the 1930s the Mufti of Jerusalem had once directed sewage pipes from a hotel he owned into this supposedly "sacred" cemetery.

If you need even more evidence that Palestinian Arabs claim sites that they disrespect themselves become :"sacred" when Jews step foot on them, 75 years ago the Arab fighters in Jerusalem used the cemetery as a base of operations numerous times.

February 8, 1948:

April 22, 1948:

April 24, 1948:

April 25, 1948:

When Gaza terrorists shoot rockets from cemeteries, they are following in the noble traditions of their forefathers in 1948 Jerusalem.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

04/24 Links Pt2: Itamar Marcus explains how PA terror is enabled by the West; If Americans for Peace Now had its way, Israel would be punished for arresting murderers; Which Israel are you celebrating on its 75th birthday?

From Ian:

PMW: Itamar Marcus explains how PA terror is enabled by the West, in interview in Hungarian magazine

Earlier this month, Palestinian Media Watch Director Itamar Marcus was interviewed to The Hungarian Conservative by Sáron Sugár, a research fellow at the Budapest-based think tank, the Danube Institute. The interview highlights and brings focus on the critical challenges Israel faces today, targeted by a Palestinian Authority that openly promotes and rewards terror, yet is financially supported by the world’s Western democracies:
- The PA’s indoctrination of Palestinian children to hate Israel, carry out terror attacks, and seek death as “Martyrs”
- How the EU and US’s financial aid enables Palestinian terror
- Hungarian government’s efforts to cut EU aid because of PA terror support
- Christian life in Israel and Judea-Samaria/West Bank
- Why the media is not reporting the true story
- Will a third Intifada break out?

Read the interview here:
‘Hungary is a Beacon of Goodness in a World of Intense Hatred Towards the State of Israel’ – An Interview with Itamar Marcus

[Question]: Could you tell us about how and why Palestinian Media Watch was founded?

[Itamar Marcus]: Palestinian Media Watch was founded soon after the signing of the Oslo Accords to find out what the Palestinian Authority was teaching its people, especially its children, about Jews, Israel, and peace. We very quickly discovered that there were two distinct worlds: the English language world for foreign consumption and the Arabic language world for its own people, and there was no resemblance between the two. Whereas in English and in foreign capitals, the PA presented itself as peace-loving, to its people all the statements in Arabic and the actual activities of the PA pointed to a strategy of hate and terror that aims to continuously weaken Israel, eventually leading to Israel’s destruction.

[Question]: At the end of 2022, you published a report titled ‘Teaching Terror to Tots’. The report is dedicated to the memory of Dalya Lemkus, a 26-year-old Israeli woman who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in 2014. The Palestinian Authority-issued children’s magazine, WAED, teaches Palestinian children that her murder was ‘a heroic car ramming’ and that the terrorist who murdered her ‘has the most beautiful smile’. What were some of the most disturbing examples of how WAED indoctrinates children to the hatred of Israeli Jewish people, and what impact do you believe this kind of education has on the attitudes and behaviour of young children exposed to it?

[Itamar Marcus]: The fundamental purpose of WAED magazine is to raise a generation of children who hate Israelis and Jews, feel obligated to fight and kill Israelis and Jews, and will be willing to kill themselves in the process. WAED’s fundamental messages are that Israelis are foreign colonialist invaders, and therefore, Israel has no right to exist. Israel is coined as the ‘thieving entity’, and Israelis are demonised as the ‘Jewish invaders.’ Fatah proclaims it will destroy Israel by ‘liberating Palestine from the thieving Zionist entity’. Israel’s destruction is packaged in various euphemisms such as: ‘the period of Zionism will eventually pass’ and ‘The Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history,’ after which the Jews will all be expelled. Fatah presents Algeria as the historical precedent: ‘Algeria’s experience assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end.’ The Palestinian ‘absolute right’ to destroy Israel creates the ‘right’ to use terror, which they call the ‘…right to wage an armed struggle to take back its stolen homeland’ This PA/Fatah education will be the driving force for Palestinian hate and terror for another generation.

If Americans for Peace Now had its way, Israel would be punished for arresting murderers - opinion

According to Israeli Army statistics for the period 2000-2003, there were 29 suicide attacks carried out by Palestinian Arabs under the age of 18 – not to mention 40 attempted suicide bombings and 22 shooting attacks by teenagers under 18.

If McCollum and Americans for Peace Now had their way, Israel would have been penalized if its security forces arrested any of those murderers or would-be murderers, including this 15-year-old terrorist.

In the American judicial system, juveniles who commit certain heinous crimes are tried as adults. Terrorism surely qualifies as a heinous crime and its perpetrators deserve appropriate punishment, whether they happen to be younger than 18 or older. Israel should not be punished by the media, members of Congress or the Jewish Left for following this sound American principle.

I can’t say I’m surprised that openly extremist groups, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), have endorsed the McCollum bill.

But Americans for Peace Now is in a different category because it is a member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The Conference represents the mainstream of American Jewry. Groups that gain admission do not have to agree with every position taken by the conference, but they do have an obligation to stay within the parameters of the broad pro-Israel, anti-terrorist consensus that the Conference of Presidents represents.

So, I ask: How can penalizing Israel for arresting young terrorists possibly be considered to be within the pro-Israel, anti-terrorist consensus of the American Jewish community?

The writer is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack, in 1995. He is the author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror and is an oleh hadash (new immigrant).

Johnathan Tobin: Which Israel are you celebrating on its 75th birthday?

The Jewish state that was reborn in 1948 didn’t exactly conform to Herzl’s personal vision. Nor was it quite the socialist paradigm to which the country’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion subscribed. From its start, it was a confounding mix of different peoples, cultures and ideas. Its first 75 years have been an unprecedented experiment in which Jews from throughout the world gathered in one tiny country and attempted—in a process strewn with trial-and-error tests of governance—to live together, and to build and secure a country. It hasn’t been easy for disparate and often warring tribes of Jews to coexist, let alone pull together towards the accomplishment of national goals.

Yet that is what they have done, and the result is that an impoverished and beleaguered small nation survived repeated efforts by the Arab and Islamist world to destroy it, creating a country with a First World economy and a military that has made it a regional superpower.

The experiment, however, continues, and the process remains as bruising and divisive as it has always been, despite the positive spin its advocates have put on everything it does. And if there is anything everyone should have learned by now it’s that a country that seeks to be a home for all of the Jewish people must acknowledge and respect all Jews, even those whose ideology and practices are not akin to everyone’s individual tastes. That is an observation that cuts both ways as both the secular liberal sector and their nationalist/religious counterparts find it increasingly difficult to respect or even tolerate one another.

If Israel is to survive to see future Independence Day celebrations with special numbers, both sides and those who sympathize with them from abroad must remember that if you love Israel, it can’t only be the Israel of your political allies but one that encompasses all Jewish people.

The blessing of living in a time when there is a Jewish state is such that historian Gil Troy’s suggestion that we all eat ice-cream for breakfast on Yom Ha’atzmaut to celebrate it is quite apt. Yet that happiness at this great wonder must be tempered by the knowledge that the formidable forces still bent on the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet have not given up and are only encouraged by the current domestic strife.

Yet many on the left seem to be saying that Israel won’t be a legitimate state if its democratic system continues to produce majorities for the right. That reflects a failure to understand that Israel’s enemies don’t care who runs the Jewish state. Israel exists to protect the Jewish people against those who would victimize and subjugate them anew. We may not always like who wins elections, but the notion that Israel doesn’t deserve our devotion and support if its leaders pursue policies or ideas we don’t like is the sort of short-sighted partisanship that has unknowable and possibly disastrous consequences.

Israel’s 75th birthday is an occasion that ought to transcend the tribal culture wars that are dividing the Jewish people. Both sides must remember that and re-learn the difficult yet inescapable imperative to love and respect our fellow Jews despite our differences. The alternative is as unpalatable as it is unthinkable.

The demographics of Palestinians killed is nowhere close to those of Palestinians altogether

This morning there was a terror attack near Jerusalem's famed Mahane Yehuda market, where a car rammed into a crowd. An elderly man and a woman were among the injured.

For most terror attacks, the Israeli victims roughly match the demographics of Israeli society - children, women, the elderly are all represented in about the same proportions that one would find them walking around on the street.

Things are a lot different with Palestinians killed.

Here is the population pyramid of the Palestinian territories as of 2019.

About 40% of the population is under 15 years old, and (as one would expect) about half are male and half female.

Now, here is the population pyramid of the people Israeli forces killed in the West Bank in 2022:

Well over 90% of those killed were men of fighting age. (And at least one of the women were involved in attacks when they were neutralized.)

Unlike Israeli victims of directed attacks, there were no Palestinians killed under 10. No one over 60.

Clearly the IDF is not engaged in indiscriminate firing, which is the entire point of Palestinian terror attacks.

There is no comparison between those killed because they are Israeli to those killed to save Israeli lives.

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04/24 Links Pt1: Ruthie Blum: Tears of heartbreak and joy; Danny Danon: Grieving together for our fallen heroes; Jerusalem terror attack: Seven wounded in car ramming, terrorist killed

From Ian:

Danny Danon: Grieving together for our fallen heroes

This year, Israel’s annual Remembrance Day for the Fallen Soldiers of the Wars of Israel will have a special meaning.

At the height of a polarizing political storm, we will all pause for a day and recognize that our enemies do not differentiate between left and right, between supporters or opponents of judicial reform or between civilians and soldiers. To our enemies, we are one target, no matter our religious practices or political leanings. Today, we recall that only together, united, will we be able to face down those who threaten us and wish to destroy us.

Today, as on every Remembrance Day, the entire nation of Israel feels the deep pain that Israel’s bereaved families experience all year round. This year especially, against the backdrop of current events, our coming together will take on a unique significance. When we stand together in the military cemeteries where the fallen among our family and friends are buried, we will know without a doubt that we are all one people, a nation united.

Alongside the bereaved families, there are thousands of us who are named after a father, an uncle, a brother or a friend we will never have the opportunity to meet. I was privileged to be named after one of these thousands of heroes, the late Danny Verdon, and thus join those who have become living monuments to fallen heroes.

Danny Verdon was my father’s commander in a special reconnaissance unit of the Negev Brigade. As a child, I tried to gather as much information as possible about this man and legend. I had many questions, and no matter how much I was told, and how many facts I gathered, I always wanted to know more.

Danny Verdon was a member of Kibbutz Givat Brenner. He loved our country and knew it inside out. During his service, he was twice awarded Medals of Honor and the Medal of Valor for the attempted rescue of one of his soldiers who was wounded by sniper fire. Despite the danger, he tried to save his comrade, but it was not to be.

This final heroic action took place during Danny Verdon’s last rescue mission. He was sadly trapped in an alley in the town of El Arish at the end of the Six-Day War, where an Egyptian sniper ended his life abruptly. His sudden and unexpected death left his unit and friends stunned and distressed. Danny Verdon left behind his young family—a widow and two children. At that very moment in that alley in El Arish, my father vowed to name his own child after his revered commander whom he greatly admired.

Memorial to Independence Day: How Does Israel Move from Mourning to Joy?

i24NEWS interviewed Dr. Michaël Larrar, a psychiatrist and author of the book “The Secrets of our Unconscious,” to try to understand how the mind can, in such a short time, adapt and fully experience these diametrically opposite emotions.

“We must clearly distinguish between personal mourning and the mourning of a nation, they are not at all the same elements of temporality. Personal mourning is something that will touch us in the intimate, and the time of this mourning is several months, usually a year. The mourning of a nation is much more symbolic, to evoke the memory of the people who sacrificed for a country,” Dr. Larrar told i24NEWS.

“This association between Memorial Day and Independence Day is singular and interesting, it reminds us that just before celebrating the independence of a living country, we must never forget the people who gave their lives for it, it is a symbolic message of remembrance. Otherwise, of course, we cannot be in deep and sincere mourning and celebrate the same evening. We are clearly in the register of the symbol and not of reality,” he continued.

According to him, “The celebration of Independence Day is all the more powerful because it is linked immediately and chronologically to Memorial Day, it gives deep meaning to the celebration. It is also a holiday of thanks for those who have sacrificed themselves, and it shows the importance of national unity. The link between Memorial Day and Independence Day is very special and thus gives a certain depth to the Independence Day.”

Tonight, the Israeli nation will remember the 24,213 soldiers killed in the war since 1860 and the 4,255 people murdered in attacks. Ceremonies will be organized throughout the country in their memory and a siren will sound to mark a minute of silence.

In 2022, 28 Israeli citizens lost their lives in terrorist attacks, compared to 23 in 2021. Since the beginning of 2023, 19 people have been killed in terrorist attacks, a heavy toll while the country is experiencing a wave of attacks and particularly heightened tensions.

Rabbi Leo Dee ‘If we can come together in tragedy, we can come together anytime’ - interview

He added that he sees himself as “an educator, I have a lot of interests. And I read a lot. That’s where I come from.”

He also criticized CNN, calling it “a partner in international terror. I think that the perception of Israel in the world press is very negative. I’m not sure why that is. But one of the things that I hoped to achieve was to equate Israel and the Israeli flag with good, because in this situation, it was very clear where the good lied and where the evil lied,” Dee explained.

Dee had recently interviewed on CNN, and called it a “pleasant,” that he talked about “the cycle of violence,” which he said “was caused by the world media, because when a terrorist attack happens and the world media is not out there to condemn it absolutely – that creates an opening for the next terror attack, which then you know, not responding to appropriately and that causes the next one. So that’s the cycle of violence.”

What is the way to stop it?
“For the media to stop praising the terrorists or giving them any credibility,” Dee continued, saying that during the interview, the CNN anchor was listening to him and “nodding her head,” but at the end of the interview, she said something around the lines of, “‘After this, we’ll be turning to Palestinians who had a very similar situation.’”

Dee said: “If I’d had the opportunity to respond to that, I would have said, ‘Excuse me, how many Palestinians have been attacked by Israeli terrorists this week and killed in cold blood on the way up to holiday, intentionally.’ Or maybe these Palestinians that you’re talking about were actually terrorist suspects who the Israeli police or army were interrogating? Perhaps they are, in fact, the very people who killed my wife and daughters. But to equate them to my wife and daughters is exactly the problem.

That is why he considers the network a “partner in international terror. Through the interview, they demonstrated that very obviously, I think, to anyone intelligent.”

In a story that was originally censored by the Israeli media, a Jordanian MP was arrested in Israel after being caught smuggling a large cache of weapons to the West Bank.

Imad Al-Adwan was caught smuggling 160 handguns and 17 M16 rifles at the Allenby Crossing on the Jordan River on Saturday night.

Adwan's tribe in Jordan issued a statement casting doubt on the charges, but saying that they are proud of his actions.

The statement said that Adwan "has a patriotic and national spirit" who exhibits a "desperate defense of the Palestinian cause." It stressed "our lack of confidence in the Zionist side and its narrative," and yet says "we are all proud of our son and his actions."

The Adwan tribe also called on the Jordanian government to make every possible effort to "restore the member of the Jordanian legislative authority from the hands of the Zionists, as soon as possible," considering that their son "is not a representative of his constituency, but of all Jordanians."

Other Jordanian groups likewise tried to simultaneously call Israeli officials liars while admitting that this kind of action was exactly what Adwan would do.

The National Forum to Support the Resistance and Protect the Homeland in Jordan called for Adwan's immediate release, saying that "despite the lack of information received, which comes from the Zionist occupier only, every Jordanian knows is that Representative Imad Al-Adwan breathes Palestinian concern and identifies with the heroics of the revolutionary Palestinian youth."

For its part, the Jordanian Workers Party is incensed at Israel's breach of protocol for not honoring Adwan's parliamentary immunity. "This procedure should not have taken place in the first place, given that the representative holds a diplomatic passport, and international norms require that his car not be searched, and his arrest is contrary to international norms."

From what I can tell, Adwan does not benefit from diplomatic immunity for any actions done in a private capacity - and presumably the government of Jordan did not want him to smuggle weapons.

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How many could have been saved if Israel was reborn in 1938 instead of 1948? (posters)

There are always discussions on how to teach the Holocaust in a way that young people can internalize the horror of what happened. These discussions become more prominent around Yom Hashoah.

At the same time, with the upcoming Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel haters try to frame Israel as pure evil whose existence is itself a human rights crime and which reduces the security of Jews, not enhances.it.

Last week, pseudo rabbi Brant Rosen said this on Al Jazeera:

I responded with a tweet that received hundreds of Likes:

Here, "Rabbi" Brant Rosen argues on @AJEnglish to @marclamonthill that a military cannot protect Jews, and if Jews want to be safe they should just work in solidarity with other minorities to protect themselves in the Diaspora.

Six million Jews were unavailable for comment.

On Sunday night, I decided to combine these two themes.

I took actual photos of victims of the Holocaust, but I specifically chose photos that non-Jews could identify with. Except for the first, which as taken in the Birkenau camp before that family was murdered, I chose photos without the yellow star, without the emaciated victims. And I colorized them so they would look recent and not like they came from a long ago era.

I then wrote fairly angry posters noting that no one tried to save these Jews from being murdered - but if Israel existed, things might have been different.

I admit, this exercise really affected me as I was doing it. I was too emotionally drained after four posters to continue.

I don't know if others would be as impacted, but perhaps this is a direction that might be useful for teaching both about the Holocaust and the importance of Israel. It won't help for the many real Jew-haters out there (there are plenty of people on Twitter responding that Israel's crimes are worse than Nazi Germany's) but there will always be Jew-haters - the point is to reach normal people.

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i24news reported Sunday:

Violence should be discarded and condemned “in all its manifestations” for Jews and Arabs to have a common future as neighbors, Mansour Abbas, arguably the most prominent Arab Israeli lawmaker of the day, told i24NEWS in an exclusive interview.

“We think that this demand is a compulsory for all of us, and we should push the violence in all of its manifestations aside, and we should engage in peace and in construction. We need to treat the wounds of both sides, to translate into the reality the goals of both sides, in order for us to reach a solution that would be acceptable for both sides,” Abbas, chair of the United Arab List faction, said.

Abbas stressed that he regards himself and fellow Arab citizens of Israel as Israelis, and rejected attempts by Palestinian leadership including the Hamas terrorist group to enlist Arab Israelis against Israel on the side of the Palestinians.

This is in response to Hamas trying to drag Israeli Arabs into becoming terrorists as a fifth column.

I agree with very little that Mansour says, but this is a sane statement that reflects reality and not the fantasy of wanting nothing less than the destruction of Israel.

Naturally, major Palestinian factions condemned his words.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - which has extensive ties with "human rights" NGOs - strongly condemned Abbas’s statements, and said they are "treacherous and do not represent our people from near or far, and reveal the suspicious role assigned to him as an obedient tool in the hands of the occupation...he is a traitor to the interests of our people and their national rights.”

Mahmoud Abbas' "moderate" Fatah said his words “essentially affect the historical national rights of our Palestinian people in Palestine,” and described them as “a cheap fit with the Zionist narrative that falsely monopolizes the history of Palestine.... Mansour Abbas crossed the red lines with his positions.”

As of this writing, I have not yet seen any reaction from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but since Abbas' comments were aimed squarely at them, one can assume that they would be at least as angry as their rival Fatah is.

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Contest: Come up with anti-Palestinian chants as offensive as their anti-Zionist/antisemitic chants

During anti-Israel rallies, one hears many quite offensive anti-Israel chants that are really calls to ethnically cleanse (or murder) Jews:

"Long live the intifada"

“From New York to Gaza! Globalize the intifada!”

"There is only one solution - intifada revolution"

"Hey hey, ho ho, Zionists have got to go"

“With fire and blood, we’ll liberate Palestine.” (Arabic)

"Itbach al-Yahud." - "Slaughter the Jews." (Arabic)

"Khaybar, Khaybar Al Yahud,"- “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning" (in Arabic)

"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"

“Resistance is justified! When people are occupied!”

“We don’t want two states! We want ’48!”

No one seems to get too excited about these, or they tend to justify them.

So this contest is to find chants that are equally offensive to Palestinians.

For example, "Nakba! Nakba! Long live the Nakba!" (and insisting that we mean the original meaning of the term, not how it is used today.)

The reason is to point out the double standard - genocidal slogans that are accepted as normal nowadays when used against Israel would be obviously offensive when used against those who want to destroy Israel. I am not calling for actually using these slogans in pro-Israel rallies!

I am looking for clever rhymed slogans that would be good for mindless chant-and-repeat purposes and that call for the humiliation or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. (Notice how even saying that out is obviously offensive, while the equivalent against Jews is shrugged off as culturally acceptable or reasonable slogans.)

Put your best chants in the comments. Bonus points for historic accuracy and catchy rhymes.

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