Love of the Land: April 2018

Monday, April 30, 2018

Writers In Arab Press Discuss Why Israel Is Superior To Arab Countries - MEMRI

In recent months, several Arab writers have published articles in the Arab press discussing why Israel is superior to the weaker Arab states. The reasons, they said, lie in Israel's strong and effective judicial system that tackles corruption in the country, even investigating and prosecuting leaders and senior officials who have transgressed, while corruption is rampant in the Arab countries and the regimes silence all those who call for integrity. Other reasons they gave are that Israel is a democracy and respects the will of its citizens and voters, and that over the years it has invested a great deal in education, science, health, and technology.

MEMRI.org..
Special Dispatch No.7446..
27 April '18..

The writers went on to call on their countries to learn from Israel – to develop their judicial systems and a democratic form of government, to stop repressing citizens, and to invest in education. If they do not do so, they added, the Arab countries will be left even farther behind.

The following are translated excerpts from some of these articles:

Former Egyptian Official: Israel Has Advanced Because Of Its Investment In Education, Science, And Industry – And The Arabs Are Left Behind

Reda Abd Al-Salam, former governor of Egypt's Al-Sharqiya province who is today a lecturer at Mansoura University in Egypt, wrote that Israel surpasses the Arab countries in many ways because over the years it has invested in education, health, science, and technology, and in building a democracy, while the Arabs have remained behind, mired in primitiveness and tyranny. He called on Egypt not to blame the gap between them on the U.S. support for Israel, and not to expect supplications to Allah during Friday prayers to defeat Israel, but to invest in education and universities in order to bring the country out of ignorance and darkness into the light of science and industry. He wrote:

"'Allah, punish the sons of apes and pigs, so they will not escape you; Allah, expel them, Allah, show me the wonders of Your might by [punishing them]... 'Our forefathers were born, and we were born and grew up and become old and grey, and we still reiterate this supplication to Allah in Friday sermons, with flowing tears... But what have we accomplished [with this]? Has Allah answered our millions of supplications? Have we seen the wonders of Allah's capabilities in carrying out judgment against the sons of Zion and the sons of apes and pigs, as we plead again and again in our prayers? No, not at all – the result has been great disappointment and shame for the Arab leaders, since the opposite happened! Allah has done the complete opposite: It is the Arabs and Muslims who have been torn to shreds and expelled, and through whom Allah has revealed his signs.

"Yes, Israel is growing stronger, and it is becoming more and more advanced and cohesive, and wins more and more land every day – while it is surrounded by decrepit Bedouin who fight each other and feverishly race to the bottom and atrophy in every area; and [while it is surrounded by] peoples and regimes mired deeply in primitiveness, disease, and dictatorship...

"Why has Israel advanced and the Arabs and Muslims fallen behind? How long will we keep our heads in the sand or stop up our ears and listen only to sorcerers, to idiots in power, and to the mouthpieces [of the regimes] of hypocrisy [as we have been doing] for decades? How long?! To put it bluntly, let the numbers speak for themselves: since they are the best expression of progress and backwardness, and with them we will understand why Allah has not answered our supplications of millions of Arabs and Muslims for 60 years, but has instead done the complete opposite [of what we ask] – the Zionists have advanced and the Arabs and Muslims have been left behind...

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Fadi is Marching in Gaza for His Kids - by Sheri Oz

...I think Abu Shammalah would be more honest were he to tell his son that a far more dangerous but far more justifiable demonstration would be one protesting Hamas because Hamas is the one that has a stranglehold on Gaza. But they do not even whisper this out of fear of Hamas.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
29 April '18..

The New York Times gave space to Fadi Abu Shammalah. He wrote an opinion piece called, Why I March in Gaza. First of all, let us look at who Abu Shammalah is: executive director of the General Union of Cultural Centers in Gaza. I find it interesting that there is a General Union of Cultural Centers (GUUC) in Gaza. After all, Gaza is often called an open-air prison, and it is compared with Warsaw Ghetto. I doubt there were cultural centers in the Ghetto; you know, places where kids learn to dance and do art, for example. But in 1997, well before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the GUUC was established, apparently with 52 cultural centers currently in Gaza and Judea & Samaria. Funny how the Gazans try to have it both ways – to claim they are under horrific Israeli occupation and blockade while at the same time showcasing cultural centers, five-star hotels and more.

Let us see what Abu Shammalah wrote for naive readers of the NYT:

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Sunday, April 29, 2018

PLO "Palestinian National Council" to meet tomorrow, might call to sever ties with Israel - by Elder of Ziyon

...If the PLO decides to nullify its recognition of Israel, then shouldn't it be kicked out of the UN? The answer is, obviously it won't, because the second Intifada that the PLO wholeheartedly supported didn't even cause the slightest ripple in the world's support for the terror organization.

Elder of Ziyon..
29 April '18..

From Al Jazeera:

The legislative body of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) is set to discuss suspending the recognition of Israel, in addition to several other critical issues of Palestinian politics.

For the first time in nine years, the Palestinian National Council (PNC) is scheduled to convene in Ramallah on Monday, in a meeting that has Palestinians split between supporters and opponents of the gathering.

The PNC is expected to vote in a new 18-member Executive Committee of the PLO, the governing body of the organisation, and discuss transforming the Palestinian Authority, which governs parts of the occupied West Bank, into a state with its own institutions and monetary system.

Dominant Palestinian faction, Fatah decided to push ahead with convening the PNC, despite the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) boycotting the meeting.

Critics, however, argue that Abbas' insistence to convene the PNC is motivated by ensuring his legacy and preserving the interests of his Fatah faction.

They fear that once Abbas, 82, guarantees the formation of a loyalist PNC and PLO executive body, he would then work to guarantee the continuity of his vision after he leaves the scene.

Maher Obeid, a senior Hamas official, told Al Jazeera that Abbas did not want Hamas to participate unless it surrenders to its conditions and gives up its armed resistance to Israeli occupation.

"Abbas wants to exact revenge on Hamas for his own personal reasons," Obeid said.

Hamas issued a statement rejecting the "convening of the Council under the bayonets of the occupation".

In the end, this is all Abbas. Nothing will be agreed upon unless Abbas supports it. The meeting is a joke meant to make his dictatorship look slightly more democratic.

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In Israel, the equation is very clear, but if we must walk the tightrope, why not dance across it? - by Rain Forest

...We didn’t ask to live with the sharks swimming below us. Every time one of us falls, we all fall. The pain is devastating… there really are no words to describe it. At the same time, if we must walk the tightrope, why not dance across it? What could be more glorious?

Forest Rain..
Inspiration from Zion..
28 April '18..

I’ve heard that people who are bipolar often go off their medication because, although the lows of depression are difficult and sometimes even dangerous, the highs they experience are so thrilling, they don’t want to give them up for the sake of being normal. The highs open the door to genius, to creativity, to the sublime.

And it is impossible to attain the high, without also experiencing the low.

The Israeli experience is something like this. I hesitate to compare my beloved country to a disorder but like the bipolar person, our “normal” isn’t normal.

Everyday life in Israel is about as normal as casually making sandwiches for the kids while walking on a tightrope, with no safety net, over a sea of blood-thirsty sharks. We do make fabulous sandwiches – as well as self-driving cars, solutions for world water shortages and cures for cancers – with a smile and full of joy for life – on the tightrope, over the sharks.

Some days are more intense than others. Probably (unless there is a war), the most intense day of the year is the day of Yom Hazikaron, IDF Memorial Day, which at night becomes Israel’s Independence Day.

On Yom Hazikaron my family attends the ceremony held at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa. The children of the school attend as well as many of the school’s alumni. There is something special about generations of alumni coming together, on this important day.

The Reali was founded in 1913. The State of Israel had not yet been formally re-established but this did not stop the Jewish community in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael) from building institutions of education for the next generations, the new Jews who would be free in their homeland and be educated in Hebrew, the language of their ancestors.

The ceremony at the Reali is probably the most impressive and moving Yom Hazikaron ceremony in the country. Israelis are notoriously bad at ceremonies. Pomp and circumstance is a foreign concept, there is something about focusing on the way things look (rather than their content) that goes against Israeli nature.

The Reali ceremony is simple, yet profound.

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The PA does not care about Palestinians killed in Syria? Oh well. - by Sheri Oz

...why should they care about what happens to unrelated people in another Arab country? Let the Egyptian leadership worry about the Palestinians who are really Egyptian; let the Saudi Arabian leadership worry about the Palestinians who are really Saudis. And the Palestinians who are really Syrian? Caught in their own civil war. Oh well.

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
27 April '18..

If Jews are in trouble anywhere in the world, Israel will do what it can to save them. The Entebbe rescue is only one such example. When Americans were trapped in the embassy in Iran and their lives were threatened, the USA made attempts to rescue them. The PA has no power to do anything militarily, but we do not see their diplomats shouting out in pain or banging on tables in the UN, begging the “protector of world peace” to pull no stops in rescuing the Palestinians dying in Syria or running for their lives.

Yesterday (26 April 2018), renowned Israeli Arab writer, Khaled Abu Toameh, wrote a heartfelt piece on the atrocities committed against Palestinian refugees in Syria, describing a clear case of ethnic cleansing. He concluded with the claim that if Palestinians are not being killed by Jews they are of no interest to anyone, not the UN, not even their own leaders in the Palestinian Authority (PA):

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Saturday, April 28, 2018

Abandoning the Jewish state - by David M. Weinberg

An ideologically bankrupt A.B. Yehoshua wants to replace the Jewish state with an Israeli-Palestinian federation of some sort. This is the inevitable end result of a long process of loss of Jewish-Zionist identity and demoralization that began with the Oslo Accords and willy-nilly leads to Yehoshua’s Yom Haatzmaut funeral oration for the Jewish state. Having despaired of the “two-state solution,” Yehoshua is now dumping the idea of Israel all-together. Ugh!

Author A.B. Yehoshua

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
27 April '18..
Link: https://www.davidmweinberg.com/2018/04/27/abandoning-the-jewish-state/

While Israelis and Jews worldwide were celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Jewish state, author A.B. Yehoshua and Israeli newspaper Haaretz were busy burying it.

While sane people were recommitting themselves to Israel's bright future, extremists on the hard Left of the so-called "peace camp" – radically demoralized and ideologically impoverished – were pushing for Israel's demise.

I'm referring to an essay published last week, specifically on Israel's 70th Independence Day, by one of the progressive Left's deities – novelist, playwright, Israel Prize laureate and peace activist A.B. Yehoshua. His 7,000-word broadside, trumpeted on the front page of Haaretz, lays out a plan for the end of the Jewish state.

His plan is to replace Israel as we know it with a binational state, an Israeli-Palestinian federation of some sort.

The details of Yehoshua's plan – dark and unrealistic as it is – are not important. What is important and scary is that his motivation is not Jewish nationalism or identity but what he calls "humanity."

It goes like this: Yehoshua begins by admitting that the two-state solution is apparently and almost certainly dead. "It is time to say goodbye" to this dream, reads the headline of his article.

"It is no longer possible to divide the land of Israel into two separate sovereign states. Similarly, the possible partition of Jerusalem into two separate capitals with an international border between them is becoming increasingly untenable," he writes.

"The entire peace camp had hoped that the international community would exert economic and diplomatic pressure on both sides, to force them to find the way to a historic compromise."

"But that vision is no longer viable in practice," he admits. Which leaves him and his camp mired in what he describes as "weariness and fatalism."

He concludes that it is no longer possible to defend a Jewish state in the historic land of Israel. It can no longer be his paramount concern. "It is not [Israel's] Jewish and Zionist identity that I fear for but something more important: our humanity and the humanity of the Palestinians in our midst," he writes.

And this overriding concern for "humanity" requires abandonment of the dream of independent Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the underpinnings of the entire modern Zionist movement.

There is no choice but to "stop the apartheid process in principle" and to unilaterally decamp into some form of "de facto binational partnership."

I won't exhaust or disgust readers of this column with additional details of Yehoshua's defeatist manifesto, but what does require attention is the trajectory that led to this nadir – a path of deception and ideological bankruptcy running from the Oslo Accords to Yehoshua's Independence Day eulogy for the Jewish state.

Friday, April 27, 2018

Palestinian Nazi flags, kite bombs and Hamas talking points - by Sean Durns

...While many in the media have fixated on the “economic misery” of everyday Palestinians as a chief factor in the demonstrations, few have noted that a violent anti-Semitic terrorist group is clearly ill-suited to governing. To do so would require discussing Palestinian Nazi flags, kite bombs and human shields. And that would mean departing from the Hamas-approved scripts.

Sean Durns..
JNS.org..
26 April '18..

For several weeks now, Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, has been sending terrorists—interspersed with unarmed civilians serving as human shields—to try and infiltrate the Israel-Gaza border in a propaganda push that they call the “March of Return.” Hamas has been aided by a frequently uncritical press that, more often than not, serves the terrorist organization’s objectives, often by omitting crucial details.

No nation on earth would allow a terrorist group committed to its destruction to mass on its borders and violate its sovereignty. But no other country is held to the double standard that the Jewish state is. And no other nation is the victim of such pernicious—and unmistakable—media bias.

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Israel's pressing need to restore the balance between the Knesset and the Court - by Vic Rosenthal

...A balance between the powers of the various branches of government is important to protect minority and majority rights. A comparison with the Supreme Court in the US will be helpful in understanding just how unbalanced the situation in Israel is.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
27 April '18..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2018/04/restoring-the-balance-between-the-knesset-and-the-court/

A hot potato today in Israel’s Knesset is the so-called chok hahitgabrut (literally, “the overriding law”) which would provide a way for the Knesset to pass a law over the objections of the Supreme Court. Various versions of such a law have been considered, which require larger or smaller majorities in the Knesset to override a Court decision to throw out a law. Another approach would be to require more than a simple majority of justices of the Court in order to reject a law passed by the Knesset. The precise form the law might take is still up in the air.

The issue that is presently driving the controversy is a series of Court decisions that have made it impossible for the government to deport any of the 38,000 African migrants that entered the country illegally since the early 2000s. Those who want such a law say that the unelected Court rides roughshod over the views of the majority of the citizens, which are expressed by the votes of their representatives in the Knesset. That’s undemocratic, they say. Opponents argue that in a liberal democracy it is necessary to protect minority rights, which is what the Court has done.

Critics of the Court have been complaining for a long time that it is biased leftward, and that it sticks its nose where it shouldn’t, like the proposed deal regulating the concession for the natural gas recently discovered off Israel’s shores; or the ownership of property in Judea and Samaria, decisions that forced the demolition of communities and the removal of people from their homes.

But the intricacies of the gas deal were understood by only a small percentage of Israelis, and the inhabitants of the razed settlement of Amona did not find a lot of empathy in the general population, many of whom thought of them as extremists. The migrant question, on the other hand, resonates more broadly. It pits the residents of South Tel Aviv – who say that the migrants who are concentrated in their neighborhoods have brought crime, dirt and fear to them – against a coalition of organizations that claim to be defending the human rights of the migrants. In fact, many of these groups are funded by unfriendly foreign governments, or groups with a political motive to embarrass our government (e.g., the Israel Religious Action Center).

A balance between the powers of the various branches of government is important to protect minority and majority rights. A comparison with the Supreme Court in the US will be helpful in understanding just how unbalanced the situation in Israel is.

Associated Press Exposes Hamas Definition of ‘Non-Violence’ - by Simon Plosker

Why have the media given a free pass to Hamas and Palestinian rioters when it comes to defining what non-violence is? The Associated Press has written a decent article. It looks, however, that the wire service didn’t follow through and reach the obvious conclusions : Hamas and non-violence aren’t exactly a marriage made in heaven.

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
26 April '18..

The Associated Press may deserve credit for its story on Hamas’s apparent embrace of ‘non-violence’ but did the wire service even realize the alternate reality its journalists uncovered?

The story opens as follows:

In a sit-in tent camp near the Gaza border with Israel, a lecturer answered questions from activists grappling with the concept of non-violent protest.

They asked what’s allowed, listing different actions. Throwing stones and holding rallies is permitted, he said. Throwing firebombs is a “maybe” and using knives a definite “no.”

So it appears that anything that doesn’t involve suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings or stabbings is now classified as “non-violent” according to Hamas and Palestinian activists.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines violence as behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

It also defines it as the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.

In either of these definitions, throwing stones or firebombs would be considered to be an act of violence. In any civilized society, these actions would be both unacceptable and unlawful.

So why then has the media adopted the Hamas definition of non-violence, which simply allows Palestinians to carry out dictionary defined acts of violence as long as they happen to be carried out without the aid of a gun or knife?

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Thursday, April 26, 2018

The Last Remnant of Oslo Crumbles, the Palestinian Authority Loses Its Authority - by Seth Mandel

...The Jerusalem moves have been an unmitigated humiliation for the PA. They undid the damage to the U.S.–Israel relationship inflicted by Obama. Worse for the PA, Trump called the Palestinian bluff. Contrary to the fears of Western observers, and the ill-disguised morbid hopes of some in the media, the region did not go up in flames. The “terrorist’s veto” did. And the coordination that such a move required between the United States and its Arab allies made crystal clear just how isolated the Palestinian Authority has become—how vulnerable it is to the politics of the Arab world, and how impervious to Palestinian politics the Arab world has become. It took four decades, but the dog is once again wagging the tail.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
16 April '18..

Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton stood in the Map Room of the White House on September 13, 1993, making awkward conversation. Two days earlier, Clinton had Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist groups. The Map Room meeting came after the Palestinian leader’s famous handshake outside the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which inaugurated the “Oslo era.” The accords created the Palestinian Authority to serve as a sort of caretaker government tasked with making peace with Israel and building the institutions of a state, led by Arafat. Just like that, one of the most consequential terrorists of his generation became the equivalent of a head of state—before the state even existed.

The whirlwind changes left Clinton unprepared for the meeting. Perhaps that accounts for the momentous mistake he made that day. “Rabin can’t make further concessions until he can prove to his people that the agreement he just made with you can work,” he told Arafat. “So the more quickly we can move on your track, the more quickly we’ll be able to move on the Syrian track.” Clinton thus tipped his hand: The U.S. saw an Israeli–Syrian peace deal as the real goal, and the president needed Arafat to make it happen. “Now that Arafat had used that deal to open up a relationship with Washington, he did not want to let Clinton shift his attention back to Syria,” reports Clinton foreign-policy hand Martin Indyk in his memoir. “And the more he managed to involve us in the details of his agreement with the Israelis, the less we would be able to do that. In his good-hearted innocence, Clinton had revealed his preferences. Arafat would not forget them.”

Indeed he would not. No foreign official would be invited to the Clinton White House more than Arafat. The Israeli–Palestinian peace process would not be a mere sideshow to the wider Arab–Israeli conflict. It would be a tapeworm inside U.S. foreign policy, diverting and consuming resources. Arafat had made the Palestinian Authority the center of the world.

Twenty-five years of violence, corruption, and incompetence later, the PA lies in ruins, with the Palestinian national project right behind it. Arafat controlled the PLO for a half-century before assuming control of the new PA. Thus his death in 2004 was the first moment of serious potential change in the character of Palestinian institutions. Mahmoud Abbas, far less enamored of violence than the blood-soaked Arafat, was his successor. Rather than reform Palestinian institutions, Abbas has presided over their terminal decline. As Abbas’s own health fades and as the world again turns its attention to Gaza, the part of the Palestinian territories not controlled by him, it’s worth wondering if there is a future at all for the Palestinian Authority.

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Urging ‘Restraint’ and Other Anti-Israel Mischief - by Manfred Gerstenfeld

...These kinds of Western reactions will stimulate further Hamas-initiated violent demonstrations, as the organization hopes to solicit more anti-Israel reactions. Those Westerners who make these declarations may claim that incentivizing Hamas is not their intention — but that is immaterial. They should have learned from history that they contribute to causing more Palestinian violence and more Palestinian casualties.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld..
Algemeiner.com..
25 April '18..

There is a long history of anti-Israel bias among many in the Western world. This has led Palestinian leaders to conclude that provocations against Israel can be productive, because they have important public relations value. Such action often leads to condemnations from sources like the United Nations, Arab countries, the European Union, NGOs, as well as some Jewish organizations. These reactions then provide a further incentive for more Palestinian provocations.

The recent Hamas-conducted “March of Return” protests along the Gaza border were not peaceful. They included rock throwing, Molotov cocktails, and shooting at IDF soldiers. There were also repeated attempts by Palestinians to cross the Israeli border in order to launch violent attacks on Israelis. Eleven of the first Palestinian casualties in the protests were proven to be terrorists, including those from Hamas.

During the second march, there was new violence, including the burning of what may have been 10,000 tires. There were also further attempts to both attack IDF soldiers and infiltrate Israel under the resulting smokescreen. Since then, burning kites have been launched against the Jewish state. But these kites are far from innocent; at least one had a firebomb attached to it.

Many Western anti-Israel statements were issued after Israel responded to this rampant Palestinian violence. A number of these statements were of four types. On the surface, they seem reasonable. But even superficial analysis shows that all of these kinds of statements involve hypocrisy and bias. A few examples will illustrate this.

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‘No,’ Mr. Schindler, there is no ‘occupation’ - by Stephen M. Flatow

Educator Sam Schindler’s notions about Israel and the Palestinians seem to have been frozen in his adolescence. He’s so angry about having been “deprived” by his own teachers that he hasn’t noticed how much the Middle East has changed.

Mr. Schindler. It’s time you started
telling your students the truth about it.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
25 April '18..

A Pennsylvania high school teacher, who says he was deprived as a teenager, is now taking it out on his students—by lying to them about Israel.

Sam Schindler, co-founder and history teacher at the Stone Independent School, a private school in Lancaster, Pa., explains in The Forward this week how the “truth” about Israel was hidden from him. His teachers only taught him about the positive side Israel, he complains. “What was kept from me then were images of the occupation, of pulverized houses, of bloody civilians and of terrified children. … The occupation or lives of Palestinians never appeared.”

So now, Schindler is getting his revenge. He’s been teaching his students at Stone Independent all about “the occupation and oppression.”

And—big surprise—at the end of last semester’s course, Schindler is proud to laud their findings. He notes that “the class collectively reached a universal conclusion about Israel and Palestine: The oppression of Palestinians is not sustainable, nor is it justifiable.”

Dear Stone students, I’m sorry to tell you that Mr. Schindler has been lying to you.

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Wednesday, April 25, 2018

NY Times Issues ‘Correction of The Year’ on Pay-To-Slay - by Ira Stoll

...This correction is the latest in a long series of cases in which the Times has had to correct its coverage involving basic facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict or Judaism. Other frequent errors are left uncorrected.

Ira Stoll..
Algemeiner.com..
24 April '18..

The New York Times has issued what the Israeli consul general in New York, Dani Dayan, is calling the “correction of the year.”

In the correction, the Times backs down from its claim in a news article that reporting about Palestinian payments to families of terrorists is “far-right conspiracy programming.”

In the correction, the Times wrote:

An article on Sunday about Campbell Brown’s role as Facebook’s head of news partnerships erroneously included a reference to Palestinian actions as an example of the sort of far-right conspiracy stories that have plagued Facebook. In fact, Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.

The Times back-down attracted some public reaction in addition to Ambassador Dayan’s description of it as “correction of the year.” An editor at the New York Post, Seth Mandel, commented, “Amazing. Basically all NYT stories on Israel and Judaism are incomplete until the correction is posted.”

A former Israeli diplomat, Lenny Ben-David, noted that the correction “may be seen by 1% of those who read [the] original article.”

The Times original claim had provoked a furor, as The Algemeiner reported.

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Surprise? Mainstream, educated Palestinians still expect Jews to eventually flee - by Elder of Ziyon

...Yes, the fictional nation of Palestine was one of the most important Arab nations, contributing so much to culture and science and civilization, until Israel destroyed it. Perhaps the world should outlaw whatever medication he is taking.

Elder of Ziyon..
24 April '18..

The editor of Ma'an, Dr. Nasser al Laham, considered a moderate, independent publication, has gone completely off the rails in his editorial about Israel's 70th birthday.

Just the first paragraph could keep psychiatrists busy for months:

Thousands of statements made by the leaders of the Zionist movements these days can be summed up in one sentence: "Israel will not collapse and the Jews will not flee to Europe again)." In fact, this denial confirms to the world that Israel is still liable to collapse and that its Jews will flee to their hometowns in Europe again eventually.

Al-Laham is exposing his own wishful thinking, that the Jews will for some reason flee to Europe. (One wonders what will happen to all the Sephardic Jews, American Jews and Ethiopian Jews.)

The rest of the column is even more unhinged and reveals even more about where al-Laham's mind is:

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The EU and Hamas, Jointly Paving the Road to Hell - by Daniel Krygier

A new EU initiative illustrates once again the vast gulf between Europe’s declared noble goals and its actions that fundamentally undermine any hope of peace between Israel and its neighbors.

Daniel Krygier..
MiDA..
24 April '18..
Link: http://en.mida.org.il/2018/04/24/eu-hamas-paving-road-hell/

European groups have reportedly recently made a proposal to the terrorists of Hamas who rule Gaza. According to the proposal, Hamas would relinquish the “armed struggle” against Israel for at least five years. In exchange, an institution established by the EU would run and finance Gaza’s humanitarian affairs.

Does this ring any bells?

It should, because it is essentially a rehash of numerous Western failures to appease despotic regimes by rewarding them, instead of punishing their aggression. It did not work with Hitler in 1938 or with the disastrous 2015 deal with the Iranian ayatollah regime. It will not work with Hamas either.

Instead of “Peace in our time”, British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler paved the way to the Second World War. Obama’s Iran deal filled the Iranian regime’s coffers with billions of dollars for simply postponing its nuclear weapons. It has also emboldened Tehran to step up its imperialist ambitions, as is evident with its aggressive military buildup on Israel’s northern border.

Hamas’ “armed struggle” is a euphemism for Israel’s destruction as it is explicitly stated in Hamas’s genocidal charter. Instead of demanding that Hamas end its aggression against Israel, Europe offers significant financial rewards to Hamas for merely postponing it.

This initiative illustrates once again the vast gulf between Europe’s declared noble goals and its actions that fundamentally undermine any fragile hope of peace between Israel and its neighbors. The same EU that blames Israel for the lack of peace is bankrolling the very enemies of peace who are seeking Israel’s destruction.

The “moderate” Fatah leader Abbas has at least acted according to the European playbook through his doublespeak, which falsely enunciates “peace” in English, while attacking Israel’s existence in Arabic.

Unlike Fatah, Hamas has never hidden its goal of destroying Israel to the international community. The fact that the EU considers financing the Gaza-based terrorist group indicates that Brussels may no longer be interested in further attempts at hiding its anti-Israel bigotry.

While Hamas still has to respond to the European proposition, it appears to be a match made in heaven for the Islamist regime in Gaza. It is not lack of foreign financial aid, but lack of will by the Hamas rulers to shoulder their governing responsibilities that has led to the deteriorating living conditions in the Gaza Strip.

To put it bluntly, Hamas is far more interested in spreading death in Israel than building life in Gaza.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Con-artist meets J Street. What Husam Zomlot had to say (in English) - by Bassam Tawil

...Less than 24 hours after Zomlot offered his outright lie to J Street, yet another senior Palestinian official, Jibril Rajoub, unequivocally denied any Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

Bassam Tawil..
Gatestone Institute..
23 April '18..

Denial of Jewish history in Jerusalem and the existence of the Jewish Temple has always been a central component of the Palestinian narrative and ideology.

Palestinians, like members of all societies, disagree on many things. Nevertheless, when it comes to the historical connection between Jews and Jerusalem, Palestinians manage to unite in lies: Palestinian political leaders, academics and religious leaders have long promoted the false narrative that Jerusalem was, and remains, an Arab and Islamic city.

We are currently witnessing a new twist on this old lie.

It seems that some Palestinians are now trying to deceive the world into believing that they do, indeed, recognize the Jewish people's historic connection to Jerusalem.

The problem is that Palestinian officials tell their people one thing in Arabic and the rest of the world another thing in English.

One of these con artists is Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) diplomatic mission in Washington.

Zomlot appears to grasp that the Palestinian denial of the Jewish people's connection to Jerusalem is something that needs to be hidden from the international community, especially Jews living in the US, Canada and elsewhere around the world.

He understands that this Palestinian denial is problematic, especially for left-wing Jewish organizations such as J Street.

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Holocaust education and how it distances Jews from Israel - by Evelyn Gordon

...And that is the tragic irony of Holocaust education in America today: Young Jews are being taught that the only way to internalize the Holocaust’s lessons is by becoming indifferent to the possibility of a second one. For the destruction of Israel, with its 6.6 million Jews, would assuredly be nothing less.

Evelyn Gordon..
JNS.org..
23 April '18..

Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed in Israel just a week before Independence Day, and for Israelis, those days are thematically as well as temporally connected: One of many reasons why a Jewish state is needed is to save Jewish lives. Young American Jews also acknowledge a thematic connection. Shockingly, however, the connection many have been taught to see is the exact opposite: that the Holocaust is why a Jewish state shouldn’t exist—or at least, why they as Jews shouldn’t care about it.

Two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed this. But then I read the column Haaretz published on April 11, the eve of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In it, Steven Davidson described the standardized Holocaust-education curriculum he teaches his sixth-grade Hebrew-school class in Brooklyn, N.Y. As he noted, he is just “one of hundreds of Jewish educators across Canada and the U.S. to utilize the Holocaust curriculum developed by the nonprofit organization, Facing History & Ourselves.” Since 1976, this curriculum “has educated over half a million students in the U.S. and Canada about the Holocaust.”

So what does it teach Jewish students?

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Bret Stephens on Israel's robust willingness to defend itself - by Arnold Roth

Stephens then connects Israel and Europe: To be Jewish — at least visibly Jewish — in Europe is to live on borrowed time... There’s a limit to how many armed guards can be deployed indefinitely to protect synagogues or stop Holocaust memorials from being vandalized... There are many reasons to celebrate the date [of Israel's 70th anniversary a few days ago], many of them lofty: a renaissance for Jewish civilization; the creation of a feisty liberal democracy in a despotic neighborhood; the ecological rescue of a once-barren land; the end of 1,878 years of exile. But there’s a more basic reason. Jews cannot rely for their safety on the kindness of strangers...

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
23 April '18..

In a punchy New York Times column published this past Friday ["Jewish Power at 70 Years"], Bret Stephens starts out talking about a hate crime - with an intriguing twist - in today's Germany. But then he heads off in the direction of the Middle East and the challenges posed to Israelis by the people on the far side of our borders.

Here's a first extract:

On Friday, Palestinians in Gaza returned for the fourth time to the border fence with Israel, in protests promoted by Hamas. The explicit purpose of Hamas leaders is to breach the fence and march on Jerusalem. Israel cannot possibly allow this — doing so would create a precedent that would encourage similar protests, and more death, along all of Israel’s borders — and has repeatedly used deadly force to counter it. The armchair corporals of Western punditry think this is excessive. It would be helpful if they could suggest alternative military tactics to an Israeli government dealing with an urgent crisis against an adversary sworn to its destruction. They don’t. It would also be helpful if they could explain how they can insist on Israel’s retreat to the 1967 borders and then scold Israel when it defends those borders. They can’t.

He's right. We're old enough to remember the coordinated Arab assaults on multiple Israeli borders seven years ago in conjunction with Naqba Day - May 14 and 15, 2011 and around the same time as the ill-fated and unfortunately-named Arab Spring.

A BBC report at the time ["Palestinian protests: Arab spring or foreign manipulation?", BBC, May 15, 2011] said the not-so-peaceful "protestors"

undoubtedly embodied the same kind of risk-taking, confrontational people-power ethos that has fired the revolts in many parts of the Arab world.

How did that risk-taking confrontation play out?

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Monday, April 23, 2018

Gaza's "uniquely desperate despair": Not being able to attack Israelis directly - by Elder of Ziyon

...They cannot blame Israel for withholding fuel or electricity or medicines - that is the Palestinian Authority that does that. They cannot blame Israel for withholding salaries for workers - that is both Hamas and the PA, depending on the circumstances. But, dammit, they can blame Israel for withdrawing Jews from Gaza, which makes it so much harder for Palestinians to attack them! It is a truly awful feeling, not being able to attack Jews directly, and it causes a "uniquely desperate despair" that forces Hamas to allow women who are compelled to throw stones towards the border.

Elder of Ziyon..
23 September '18..

The Independent (UK) adds to the long list of deprivations that Gazans are forced to live through.

For thirteen long years, the desperate Gazans have been unable to directly attack Israeli soldiers.

Since Israel’s decision in 2005 to withdraw its troops from bases inside Gaza, redeploying to the perimeter with a blockade at sea and control of the skies, it has been even harder for ordinary Palestinians to resist in the way Ahed Tamimi did.

In the days of the old intifada any Palestinian could land a stone on a soldier with no trouble, as the soldiers were in amongst them. “Now we can’t be like Ahed because we can’t even see a soldier, never mind hit them with stones. We never get close enough to kick or punch. If only we could,” a young man complained.

For those in Gaza this inability to see or hit back at the enemy has created a uniquely desperate despair, which has spilled out into the buffer zone protests of recent weeks. Perhaps for this reason, Hamas understood it could not hold back any protester and allowed women to protest too.

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Extradite Ahlam Tamimi: An open letter to Jordan’s media minister from Arnold and Frimet Roth

...We still hope and expect to see Jordan comply with its international treaty obligations and hand Tamimi over to the US so she can be brought to justice. If Jordan’s leadership is sincere about suppressing radicalism, it will share that aspiration.

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com..
23 April '18..

His Excellency Dr Mohammad Momani,
State Minister for Media Affairs and Communications,
Amman, The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

Dear Dr Momani,

We know from very recent media reports that Jordan is currently navigating treacherous waters. Its economy is weak, prices are rising, incomes are not and government subsidies on bread and other essentials are being slashed or removed. Jordan’s GDP per capita is barely a quarter of the world’s average, roughly the same as Albania’s. In 1965 (according to the World Bank), Israel’s GDP was 2.7 times the size of Jordan’s. Today (IMF estimates for 2018) it’s almost 7 times as large. The two countries have roughly the same size population and roughly equivalent resources.

We’re hearing that the Jordanian populace are angry and the fury is growing. There have been riots over the prices of basic foods.

On top of all that, there’s been an upsurge in grand larceny as this report from yesterday shows:

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The NY Times’ Roger Cohen Laments Israeli Self-Defense - by Jerold Auerbach

...To be sure, Cohen is not alone at the Times, which has had a problem with Zionism ever since Adolph Ochs purchased the newspaper in 1896, several months after Herzl published The Jewish State. The very idea of Jewish statehood, to say nothing of its reality half a century later, provoked unrelenting consternation at the Times, which was determined to resist any intimation that it was a “Jewish” newspaper. It buried the Holocaust in its inside pages, declined to support the admission of desperate Jewish refugees to the United States, and warned that support for Zionism would ignite allegations of divided loyalty.

Jerold Auerbach..
Algemeiner.com..
22 April '18..

Among the court Jews, Roger Cohen of The New York Times leads the coterie identifiable as “ashamed Jews.” He laments Israel’s defense of its borders and by extension its citizens as the despicable and reckless exercise of power, periodically wringing his hands and twisting his mind in the attempt to find appropriate words of condemnation.

Back in December, he deplored President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Echoing left-wing historian Tom Segev, who assailed the “strong nationalism and strong religion” that has supposedly transformed the Jewish state into a “colonialist power,” Cohen labeled Israel an “ethno-religious Jewish state.”

One month later he reported on his visit to Hebron, where he ostensibly encountered “the biological metaphors of classic racism” driven by “a fanatical settler movement.” This in King David’s first capital, where the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are buried. His mentor, predictably, was a founder of the left-wing anti-settlement group Breaking the Silence. Seemingly oblivious to the place of Hebron in Jewish history, Cohen lacerated Hebron’s Jews without any indication that he conversed with a single one of them.

Cohen’s most recent lamentation, published April 20, focused on Israel’s alleged “insanity,” evidenced by its “stomach turning” reliance on “a disproportionate military response” to Gazans, mobilized by Hamas, who have been attempting to breach Israel’s border.

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Sunday, April 22, 2018

Haaretz’s publisher takes to Twitter to accuse a Mizrahi woman of swinging from trees - by Liel Leibovitz

...a startlingly clear expression of a systemically racist worldview that has been the lifeblood of the Israeli left for at least four decades now.

Liel Leibovitz..
Tabletmag.com..
16 April '18..

As Haaretz is fond of reminding its readers and its critics alike, the Israeli broadsheet is the voice of the nation’s embattled intelligentsia, an unabashedly progressive publication that spends much ink criticizing Israel’s faults, small or large, real or imagined. It’s why the paper’s long-time marketing slogan was “a newspaper for people who think”—the same distinction, presumably, did not apply to those who started their mornings with, say, Yediot Aharonot—and why it opted to celebrate Israel’s 70th Independence Day by asking its reporters to choose which classic Israeli song, the national anthem included, they despised the most. You could write all of that off as the same sort of hilariously unaware and irritating condescension you get every day in The New York Times or any other bastion of self-appointed elites anywhere; but this weekend, the paper’s publisher, Amos Schocken, crossed a line.

An active Twitter user, Schocken, the son of the newspaper’s original publisher, Gershom, got into an argument on the social media platform on Saturday after several readers tweeted at him that commemorating Israel’s Independence Day by mocking the anthem was, at best, in poor taste. Schocken held nothing back, and several of the exchanges grew heated. At some point, one woman, Ravit Dahan, tweeted at Schocken that it was security-minded people like her who kept Israel safe and allowed Schocken “to continue and live here like a king and publish your surreal newspaper without interruption.” At that, the publisher lost his cool.

“You insolent woman!” he tweeted back. “My family led the Zionist movement when you were still swinging from trees.”

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