Israel, Middle East Conflict and the Four Powers

...When you consider the alternatives, the region’s architecture could be much worse for Israel than it is currently. Long an anomaly as the only open society in the region, the target of Arab military and economic warfare throughout the latter half of the last century, Israel in this century is now a partner in a regional bloc. To be sure, this is a bloc based upon interests, not common values, and is therefore necessarily limited in scope. But in the present storm, and amidst the appalling human suffering generated by the clash of these rival interests in Syria, it’s the closest thing we have to progress.

Ben Cohen..
The Algemeiner..
08 January '16..

JNS.org – The rulers of the Arab Gulf states are, it seems, increasingly attentive to what Israel has to say about the balance of power in the region. As a rising Shi’a Iran faces off against a Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia, the core shared interest between Israel’s democracy and these conservative theocracies — countering Iran’s bid to become the dominant power and influence in the Islamic world — has rarely been as apparent.

Hence the interview given by a senior IDF officer to a Saudi weekly, Elaph, which laid out how Israel analyzes the present wretched state of the Middle East. In the Israeli view, there are, the officer said, four powers that have coalesced in the region. The first power centers on Iran and its allies and proxies, such as the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship in Syria, Shi’a rebels in Yemen and Iraq, and most pertinently for Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon. The second power contains what the officer called “moderate” states with whom Israel has “a common language” — Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf countries. The third power, one that is obviously waning, is represented in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, now vanquished in its Egyptian heartland but still reigning in Hamas-controlled Gaza. Finally, the fourth power is another non-state actor, the combined forces of jihadi barbarism like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

Israel’s goal in this situation is a modest one. As the IDF officer put it, “There is a danger that the strife will reach us as well if the instability in the region continues for a long time. Therefore, we need to take advantage of the opportunity and work together with the moderate states to renew quiet in the region.”

The key phrase here, it seems to me, is “renew quiet.” Foremost for the Israelis, that means counteracting Iran and especially its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, and then minimizing the potential for jihadi terrorists to operate on or near Israeli-controlled territory. A broader strategic vision can also be detected here: Ultimately, both Israel and the conservative Arab states share the common interests of neutralizing Iran and eliminating the jihadi groups.

The partnership between Israel and these states is already in operation, at the levels of intelligence sharing and — not for the first time — cautious exploration of trade relations. That there is a strong military dimension as well to all this is entirely conceivable. And for the time being, it seems that neither side wants to expand or contract on their public ties with each other; Israel has long had embassies in Cairo and Amman, but that doesn’t mean there’ll be an Israeli ambassador in Riyadh anytime soon, much less a film festival or trade expo.

There’s another factor that has accelerated the formation of this undeclared, look-the-other-way alliance: the shift in American Middle East policy under President Barack Obama. Some readers will remember that back in 1991, the first Bush administration pointedly left Israel out of the coalition to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, so as not to antagonize the Gulf states. Now, frustration with Obama has compelled these very same states to recognize that they have an existential interest in cooperating with Israel.

When moral bankruptcy leads to having Palestinians tortured and executed

...Nawi might look at himself as a left-wing human rights activist, but if the report outlined by Ha’aretz is true, he is no different than the terrorist or death squad commander torturing an unarmed farmer or pulling the trigger to murder him in front of his family.

Michael Rubin..
Commentary Magazine..
08 January '16..

Many who dedicate their lives to the resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict or fighting the injustice or terrorism that can arise from the conflict sincerely seek to bring peace and security and resolve a conflict which has been ongoing for more than a century, before both even Israel’s birth as a nation and the notion of the Palestinians as a distinct national identity separate from Syrians. That holds true for activists on the left and right who might have honest disagreement as to ultimate blame and the question of specific grievance — such as land dispute — versus ideology and religious intolerance and who also might disagree with the other’s cynical read of the ultimate goal of the other.

Haaretz, a left-of-center Israeli daily widely-read among the elite in Israel and among Arab-Israeli conflict activists in Europe and the United States, today covers a distressing TV report about what happens when activists of either side — in this particular the left — lose their moral grounding. Ezra Nawi, a self-described human rights and anti-settlement activist, was taped collaborating with Palestinian security services to have Palestinians selling land to Israelis tortured and executed:

Footage aired on Channel 2 on Thursday shows a prominent Israeli leftist activist describing how he led to the death of Palestinians who sought to sell West Bank land to Jews. The activist, Ezra Nawi, of the Israeli-Palestinian Taayush group, was secretly recorded saying that he had turned in the land brokers to Palestinian security services, who would then kill them.

The report by the program Uvda looked into left-wing groups which operate in the West Bank. The footage was obtained by right-wing activists who infiltrated these groups in attempt to discredit them. The footage of Nawi was captured by a right-wing activist who reportedly became his close acquaintance. In the footage, Nawi, who is unaware of being recorded, is heard telling of four Palestinian landowners who contacted him, thinking he was also involved in the land trade.

“I give their photos and their phone numbers immediately to the [Palestinian] Preventive Security Force,” Nawi says in the recording. “The Authority catches them and kills them. But before they kill them they beat them up.” In another recording, Nawi is heard telling about a Palestinian who “made deals with the settlers.” The Palestinian, Nawi says, let the settlers till his uncles’ lands in return for farming other lands. Nawi goes on to say that he handed the Palestinian’s name over to the Palestinian security services, and that the Palestinian later “suffered a stroke.”

There’s more, and the scandal also allegedly involved B’Tselem, a frequent interlocutor for the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem and a favorite resource of groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Frequent American commentators like Peter Beinart have also served on the B’Tselem advisory board.

The Age of the Terror Selfie - by Matti Friedman

...Just as the Hezbollah fighters knew they wouldn’t take the outpost that day, the suicide stabbers on Israel’s streets right now know they won’t make a dent in Israeli control, create an independent state for Palestinians, or change anyone’s life for the better. Like the shooters in Paris or San Bernadino, they move in a world beyond such mundane goals. They aren’t soldiers but storytellers. Along with many others across this region, they have escaped despair into a fevered movie set where they are the directors and stars and everyone else is a disposable prop. We all need to understand this movie, because we’re all in it.

Matti Friedman..
Tabletmag.com..
05 January '16..

This fall and winter have seen many of us here in Israel consuming a miserable kind of reality TV: blurry clips of young Palestinian Muslims with knives seeking release in murder and martyrdom, lunging, stabbing, falling stricken to the ground, the action captured by cellphones or security cameras; an imam in Gaza waving a knife and calling on the faithful to render us into “body parts”; a fighter from the Islamic State, our new neighbor, warning us of the violence he and his comrades will inflict when they arrive. The effect was so disturbing that it triggered psychological stress akin to that of a real war, though the fatalities barely added up to a skirmish. No land was conquered or lost, no concessions demanded. With our computers and cellphones, as the director of military intelligence put it, “We’re all brainwashing ourselves.” The battlefield had moved almost entirely inside our own minds.

In the past month or two it has been more apparent than ever that the confluence of unfiltered information, dramatic images of bloodshed, and fanatical interpretations of Islam have converged to become one of the key forces shaping our lives. That makes it worth looking for the moment this force began to make itself felt in earnest. My selection, a subjective one based on my personal experience, can be found on the front page of the Israeli daily Maariv of Oct. 31, 1994.

Two possible futures appear on this page in the form of two stories. The day’s main headline tells us that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is in Morocco, where he met with King Hassan. Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan is a few days old. The photo shows a warm handshake between the prime minister and the king, two men of similar age, and the headline quotes the Israeli leader: “Peace is a house, and the economy will furnish it.” This was what was known at the time as the “new Middle East,” the title of an optimistic book published by Shimon Peres a year earlier, which envisioned a peaceful region where new highways moved citizens of Palestine to shop in Israel and Israeli tourists to the souks of Damascus, past old tanks rusting at the side of the road. Next to the photo of the handshake is an analysis piece titled, “A Bank, Not a Tank.”

Below the fold is a smaller headline. It reads, “Shock in the army: Soldiers flee at outpost during Hezbollah attack.” The story appears on page 2 with a blurred frame from a video in which an armed man is seen driving a flag into the ground.

***

The latter story, obscure at the time and forgotten now, bears some explanation.

Two days earlier, a Saturday, at an Israeli army position on a hilltop in southern Lebanon, shelling commenced just after 8:30 a.m. This base, Outpost Pumpkin, was part of a string of grim Israeli army positions with trenches, machine guns, and bed-and-breakfast names; nearby were Outposts Cypress, Citrus, Red Pepper, and Basil. In those days the army controlled a buffer zone inside Lebanon to protect Israel’s northern border, waging a guerrilla war in this zone throughout the 1990s with the Shia fighters of Hezbollah, the Party of God. Hezbollah wasn’t the powerful force we now see dominating Lebanon and fighting in Syria, with 150,000 missiles pointed at Israel. At the time the group wasn’t taken particularly seriously. Yet this little war, about which nearly nothing has been written, is key to understanding the present-day Middle East.

Happy New Year and a belated Merry Christmas from Palestinian Jew-haters - Petra Marquadt-Bigman

...Based on the stories associated with the annunciation of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, Christians everywhere view Christmas as the season of peace and goodwill to all. Unfortunately, in the environs of what the Gospel of Luke describes as “the town of David” – i.e. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus – Palestinians have long been trying to establish a very different tradition.

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
05 January '16..

For several years, I have documented how Palestinians exploit Christmas as yet another occasion to deny the historic Jewish connection to the ancient Land of Israel and to present Israel as illegitimate and evil. The installment of this past Christmas is cross-posted below from my Times of Israel (TOI) blog; Legal Insurrection has a much more comprehensive post aptly titled “Guide to How Anti-Israel Activists Hijack Christmas.”

But in the meantime, there was also a noteworthy New Year’s greeting of sorts posted on January 1st by Radio Bethlehem on their Facebook page, where the post has garnered more than 1400 “Likes”. The page is very popular and has been “liked” by more than 2,3 million people; I scrolled through several dozens of posts and saw that, while there are some viral posts “liked” by thousands, most posts get several hundred “Likes” – so this one was fairly popular.

Based on the stories associated with the annunciation of the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, Christians everywhere view Christmas as the season of peace and goodwill to all. Unfortunately, in the environs of what the Gospel of Luke describes as “the town of David” – i.e. Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus – Palestinians have long been trying to establish a very different tradition. This Palestinian Christmas tradition exploits Christianity’s most popular holiday as yet another occasion to deny the historic Jewish connection to the land where Jesus was born and to fan the flames of hatred against Israel.

(Go to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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PBS at War with Netanyahu and Israel - by Alex Safian

...The fundamental problem with Netanyahu at War, is that a war by definition requires at least two participants, and focusing only on Netanyahu, and not also on those who were making war against Israel, makes it impossible to really understand why Netanyahu and Israel took the actions that they did.

Alex Safian, PhD..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
07 January '16..

One thing that can be said about the PBS Frontline documentary Netanyahu at War is that despite many serious shortcomings, there are some positive aspects that make it not as bad as previous PBS and Frontline documentaries on Israel.

If it's not obvious, that's somewhat faint praise.

The fundamental problem with Netanyahu at War, is that a war by definition requires at least two participants, and focusing only on Netanyahu, and not also on those who were making war against Israel, makes it impossible to really understand why Netanyahu and Israel took the actions that they did.

It would be like focusing on US attacks on Japan in World War 2, and the undeniable suffering of Japanese civilians, without mentioning Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, Japan's alliance with Hitler, etc.

Great emphasis is given to Netanyahu's actions regarding the Palestinians and their leader Yasir Arafat, but there is hardly a word concerning Arafat's history or actions.

Thus, viewers are told that as a young soldier Benjamin Netanyahu was accepted into the top unit in the Israeli army, the then-secret Sayeret Matkal, and that he took part in a successful rescue mission after "militants" had hijacked a Sabena airliner headed for Israel with many Israeli passengers on board.

It's certainly appropriate for viewers to learn of Netanyahu's sterling military record, and how this might have helped to shape his character.

But the "militants" he battled against in the hijacked plane were described only as being from "Black September," and viewers were given no hint that Black September was just a cover name for a Fatah terrorist group – ultimately under the command of Fatah's leader, Yasir Arafat.

So wouldn't it have been equally appropriate for viewers to learn about Arafat's notorious record of terrorism, the very thing that the young Benjamin Netanyahu went to war against?

Yet viewers were given no hint of Arafat's key role in the Sabena hijacking.

Viewers are also not told that Black September, a few months later and again under Arafat's command carried out the Munich Massacre, the bloody assault on the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics in 1972, in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed.

Again, wouldn't viewers have benefited from knowing these facts about Arafat and the Palestinian movement that he led? For what possible reason were they omitted?

Can the Palestinian Authority become a good neighbor? - Vic Rosenthal

It’s rare that one gets the opportunity to unmake a historic mistake. Perhaps the collapse of the PA will be such an opportunity.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
08 January '16..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2016/01/can-the-palestinian-authority-become-a-good-neighbor/

Last Friday saw a spate of rumors that Mahmoud Abbas had suffered a stroke or other serious health crisis. On Tuesday it was announced that he would make a “major speech” Wednesday. There was speculation that he would say that he plans to step down, which would immediately set off a possibly violent struggle to be his successor. He finally made the speech, and said nothing interesting.

There are warnings of serious instability in the PA. What about the possibility, raised by PM Netanyahu on Monday, that the Palestinian Authority might “collapse?” What should Israel do if Abbas were really to die or become incapacitated?

Netanyahu and IDF officials seem to think a PA collapse would be bad for Israel. Suddenly, Israel would be responsible for seeing to it that Arabs living in Areas A and B – populous urban areas in Judea and Samaria – continue to receive services like health care and garbage collection, that they don’t engage in riot and insurrection, and that Hamas or even the Islamic State don’t take over. The US and the EU together fund most of the PA budget. Would they be prepared to continue to do so if Israel were running it? The PA’s massive ‘security’ establishment would have to be disarmed or somehow controlled. If the PA falls, there will be an immediate struggle for power between the various factions.

Netanyahu understands that there will be no two-state solution because a sovereign Arab state in Judea and Samaria would render Israel impossible to defend. He also understands that raising the percentage of Arab citizens of Israel by simply annexing the territories would be destabilizing for an Israel that already has a population that is 21% Arab. And he is not prepared to annex the territories and encourage (coercively or not) most of the Arabs to leave, in some ways the best solution of all.

It appears that they are taking another approach: to somehow turn the PA into a good neighbor. What’s needed is something less than a sovereign state which could maintain an army or invite neighboring armies into it. The ideal PA would be as Rabin envisaged it in his last Knesset speech, an entity that could police its citizens, manage its economy and build infrastructure, without being a threat to the Jewish state. Thus we would try to keep the PA alive and encourage it to evolve into such an autonomous entity.

For this reason, Israel’s moderate leaders support the PA and advise Western allies to continue to fund it, despite the fact that huge amounts of money are stolen or diverted to terrorism against Israel, and despite the PA’s refusal to stop the vicious incitement that has led directly to the present situation in which Israeli Jews (and some Arabs) are stabbed, shot and run over in the streets.

This strategy cannot work as long as the PA is the PLO. The PA as it is constituted will never be the good neighbor Bibi would like to have. Its ideology has not changed significantly since it was formed in 1964, and that ideology calls for the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement by an Arab state. Despite pressure from the US and Israel and repeated promises, the offensive parts of the PLO charter were never removed. The comprehensive system of education for hate and violence established by Arafat, which the PLO also promised to change, has remained. And the incitement in PA media, schools, mosques, and more continues as well.

(Video) Fatah leader: Terrorists, murderers are “heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian”

...Yesterday in Hebron, they escorted 17 Martyrs to burial. This is of course a source of pride for all of us. I say that whoever carried out individual acts of heroism, we in the Fatah movement bless and encourage them.

Palwatch..
07 January '16..

Views expressed in this video do not represent those of PMW. We expose hate speech so that it will be eliminated. For more info visit: http://palwatch.org.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Deputy Secretary of the Fatah Central Committee Jibril Rajoub: “Yesterday in Hebron, they escorted 17 Martyrs to burial. This is of course a source of pride for all of us. I say that whoever carried out individual acts of heroism, we in the Fatah movement bless and encourage them. We consider them heroes and a crown on the head of every Palestinian. At this point, when there is weakening and frustration, there is a group of people, beginning with our brother Muhannad Halabi (i.e., murdered 2) and ending with the last Martyr... There is a competition between individuals. This is one of the issues we need to address – are we for or against it? I say that we in the [Fatah] Central Committee have discussed this matter, and we are in favor."
[Official PA TV, Jan. 2, 2016]



Muhannad Halabi - 19-year-old Palestinian terrorist who killed 2 Israelis, Rabbi Nehemiah Lavi and Aharon Bennett, and injured Bennett’s wife, Adele, and their 2-year-old son in a stabbing attack in the Old City of Jerusalem on Oct. 3, 2015. Following the attack, he was shot and killed by Israeli security forces. Prior to his attack, in a post to his private Facebook page, the terrorist referred to recent terror attacks as part of a "third Intifada,” and said that it was a response to Israel’s actions at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and that the Palestinian people would not “succumb to humiliation.” This is a reference to the PA libel that Israel is plotting to take over and destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and to the PA's portrayal of Jews praying on the Temple Mount as "an invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque."

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT-3ikNikQc

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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Drawing a line in the Mideast sand - by Daniel Tauber

...We in Israel were not impressed by the leader of ISIS’s threat to turn Palestine into our graveyard. (Where else should we die but in our homeland?) But in the era of the radical Islamic states, all of which seek to turn Palestine into a graveyard, we cannot give them the chance by withdrawing from the West Bank as we did in Gaza to create a Palestinian state that would fast become the world’s next radical Islamic state, in the heart of Judea. As for the rest of the world, instead of deriding Netanyahu and the Israeli government for resisting international pressure to establish such a state, they ought to be thanking Netanyahu and Israel, for being the line in the Middle East sand that the Islamic states cannot cross.

Daniel Tauber..
For Zion's Sake/JPost..
06 January '16..

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that territory Israel might withdraw from would be taken over by militant Islam and assured Israeli voters in early 2015 that a Palestinian state would not be established under his leadership, the Obama administration responded, as expected, with another barrage of verbal assaults on Israel for undermining the “two-state solution.”

Those attacks included a threat to “reassess” US “options.” That vague statement was actually a reference to the crisis in US-Israel relations three decades ago when president Gerald Ford said there would be a “reassessment” of the US relationship with Israel.

A massacre in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger jet in the Sinai later, Netanyahu’s warnings about militant Islam in early 2015 and over the years might be haunting the US president who dedicated so much energy to pressuring Israel on Palestinian statehood while doing little to prevent that “J.V. team” now known as Islamic State (ISIS) from becoming one of the greatest threats to Middle East stability and to civilization at large.

Islamic State rose in the power vacuum created by the smashing of Saddam Hussein’s regime, the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. According to one estimate, it has up to 200,000 fighters and is said to earn millions of dollars a week from oil, ransoms, taxes and other means. Its arsenal includes helicopters, MiG jets, tanks, APCs, military trucks and Humvees, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers, machine guns and more.

Even Israel, said to have the only military force ISIS fears, has come under threat from ISIS.

The shooting on New Year’s Eve in Tel Aviv by an Israeli Arab seems to have been as much an ISIS-inspired attack as those in San Bernardino or Paris.

On the same day as the shooting in Tel Aviv, an ISIS-affiliated group also fired rockets into Israel from Gaza, which was not a first for that group. The ISIS-affiliate “Sinai Province” has also fired rockets at Israel from Egyptian territory.

Earlier in December, the Shin Bet (Israeli Security Agency) revealed that it had arrested five Israeli Arabs in Nazareth on charges of setting up an ISIS cell.

The group allegedly swore allegiance to ISIS, met and watched ISIS videos and obtained weapons to use in attacks.

At the start of 2015, Israel arrested seven Israeli-Arab suspects for setting up an ISIS cell in Israel and said the group was communicating with ISIS in Syria and was planning attacks in Israel.

Other Arab Israelis have been arrested and charged with attempting to join ISIS in Syria.

In 2014, Channel 10 reported that ISIS’s black flags were spotted in Arab-Israeli towns, including in Nazareth and Acre, that Israeli Arab youths were posting pictures of themselves with IS flags on Facebook, and that an ISIS-supporting group rallied at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with ISIS flags.

Even the ongoing wave of stabbings – one of the most primitive but perhaps most consciously vicious forms of Palestinian terrorism – and the Palestinian propaganda behind them, have no doubt drawn some inspiration from ISIS, if only because it has set a new bar for horror.

Why is Israeli Democracy an Issue? - by Jonathan Tobin

...Friends of Israel should ignore the huffing and puffing about Shaked’s plan whether it comes from liberal editorial pages or the intemperate rants to be found at Haaretz. Those NGO’s are free to continue their activities, and nothing in the legislation will prevent them from doing so. But the key point to remember here is that the Israeli people have repeatedly rejected the left at the ballot box. What the left is trying to do with their current campaign is to undermine Israeli democracy, not save it.

Image by © GALI TIBBON / POOL/epa/Corbis

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary magazine..
06 January '16..

What explains the growing distress in the United States about a bill being debated in the Israeli Knesset? The controversial measure aims at forcing left-wing non-governmental agencies that get a majority of their funds from foreign governments and related agencies to essentially be labeled as foreign agents. The merits of the bill are, as I’ve written before, debatable, but the terms of that debate are predictably partisan as the country’s left-wing minority reflexively oppose any measure promulgated by the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government. But as seems to happen with just about everything in Israel, minor kerfuffles are not only inflated into major issues out of all proportion to their actual importance. They also become excuses for foreign critics of the Jewish state to opine about its decline and eventual fall. No better example of this type of commentary can be found than a Washington Post editorial that ran last weekend about the NGO bill under the headline, “A danger to Israeli democracy.”

The piece follows the playbook being used by Netanyahu’s critics in which the bill is seen as not merely wrongheaded but an example of how the country’s center-right majority is eroding Israel’s democratic values. That’s become a staple of critiques of the Jewish state in recent years and has been sounded by left-wing groups like J Street and its cheerleaders in the press that believe Israel must be saved from itself. Such voices believe Zionism can only be rescued by foreign pressure that will force Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians. More territorial withdrawals and the uprooting of West Bank settlements will, they think, magically create the peace the country needs. The fact that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected offers of withdrawals and statehood in exchange for peace and that they used the Gaza withdrawal to create an independent state in all but name that is terrorist launching pad are treated as irrelevant. For the left, ideology trumps all, including such inconvenient facts that have led Israeli voters to elect Benjamin Netanyahu and his party in three consecutive elections with no end to their dominance of the country’s government in the foreseeable future.

Faced with a political position that seems to have made them a permanent minority since the collapse of Oslo, the left looks to its foreign cheerleaders to help them get their way. Part of that is in the form of pressure from the Obama administration that tried and failed to persuade the Palestinians to make peace with Israel. Part of it is the function of foreign governments that help fund left-wing groups including NGOs, whose primary purpose is to act as critics of the Israel Defense Forces as they seek to defend the country from yet another Palestinian terrorist offensive.

Squinting at Israeli Democracy, Washington Post Editorial Misses Target - by Eric Rozenman

Draconian, in light of some Israel-based NGOs' recurrent function as accomplices to anti-Israeli foreign funders? Or necessary, especially for a democracy under siege? Post readers deserved, but did not get, both sides of the story.

Eric Rozenman..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
05 January '16..

Israeli democracy—self-sabotaging or self-protecting? Those who read The Washington Post's editorial “A danger to Israeli democracy; Legislation on nongovernmental organizations should be shelved” (Jan. 3, 2016) might have been misled into believing the former.

According to The Post, legislation introduced by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked would punish NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that receive more than half their funding from “foreign government entities.” The bill would require them to report the sources of their money, identify themselves publicly as primarily foreign-supported and wear identification as to name and organization when present in the Knesset. Lobbyists already must comply with the latter, the newspaper concedes.

In The Post's opinion, approval of the legislation would parallel harsh restrictions on NGOs in Russia and China. “There, “dissent is being purposefully silenced….” The editorial writers assert that the Israeli bill “is aimed at delegitimizing progressive groups in Israel that have long been advocates for human rights and opposed to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, such as Peace Now, B'Tselem, the New Israel Fund and others.”

A week and a-half before The Post implicitly equated democratic Israel with dictatorial China and Russia, The Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed headlined, “An Irresponsible Civil Society Harms Israel; Foreign influences push the Jewish state further toward pariah status” (Dec. 23, 2015). Written by Gerald M. Steinberg, president of Israel's NGO-Monitor and professor of international politics at Bar Ilan University, it provided information denied readers of “A danger to Israeli democracy”.

Steinberg argued that Shaked's bill “highlights some symbolic aspects” of the foreign-funded NGOs that essentially work to thwart policies of Israel's democratically-elected government. It “targets their legitimacy” since their major foreign support “is seen as an attack on Israel's national sovereignty….”

Unlike more restrictive proposals that may have prodded The Post, the justice minister's legislation “doesn't seek to limit the internal debate,” Steinberg wrote. “It only seeks to address the threat from the outside, via NGO campaigns of demonization and boycotts.”

Promoting democracy or undermining Israeli voters?

In an earlier commentary criticizing a different, more severe anti-NGO proposal, Steinberg wrote, “[L]arge-scale and unprecedented NGO funding from foreign governments to manipulate Israeli politics is a serious issue. When countries like Holland, Denmark or Germany use NGO funding instead of the accepted diplomatic channels for relations between states, they contribute to internal conflict, and undermine Israeli sovereignty.”
Asserting an “absence of transparency and independent evaluation in the transfer of European taxpayer budgets to such organizations,” Steinberg charged that “funds for NGOs operating under the façade of human rights are used to oppose peace efforts through such initiatives as the pro-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaigns, and in some cases, endorse and promote antisemitic themes” (“The proposed ‘Agent Provocateur' law: Unjust and unjustified,” Times of Israel, December 16)

Doctors Without Borders’ Anti-Israel Crusade - by Yona Schiffmiller

...This bastardization of humanitarian aid to spew hate is detrimental to all involved. The demonization of Israel exacerbates tensions and deepens mistrust between Israelis and foreign NGOs, as well as between them and their Palestinians neighbors. As such, these actions do not contribute to the advancing of a peaceful solution to the conflict. By politicizing medical relief, MSF endangers the life-saving mission it was created to carry out. Universal treatment of patients and helping affected populations are MSF’s raison d’être, and there is much to be done in this field of work.

Yona Schiffmiller..
thetower.org..
04 January '16..

The international medical organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF-Doctors Without Borders) prides itself on its neutrality, claiming to provide emergency assistance to people around the world regardless of their “race, religion, gender or political affiliation.” In practice, however, MSF consistently abuses its status as a humanitarian organization to launch venomous anti-Israel political campaigns. These attacks are entirely divorced from medical and health related issues, raising questions as to what its priorities and goals are.

The most recent manifestation of this phenomenon can be credited to MSF-France. The French branch of the organization recently launched an exhibition titled “In Between Wars,” serving as a mouthpiece for Palestinian propaganda. In it, MSF parrots the “Nakba” narrative that views the founding of the State of Israel as a catastrophe, thus delegitimizing the very existence of the Jewish state. Moreover, MSF romanticizes Palestinian violence by referring to images of “armed soldiers face[ing] young stone throwers or Molotov cocktails” as “icons symbolizing the struggle of the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation.”

Similarly, the exhibition portrays the living room of Palestinian homes as a place to pay tribute to “martyrs”—a term that whitewashes the murderous terror attacks many carried out against innocent civilians.

In response, Roger Cukierman, head of the Council of Jewish Institutions in France, condemned the display as “an apology for terrorism…that could inflame antisemitic violence.”

The organization’s flirtation with Palestinian violence was also on display in September 2015, when MSF-Spain published a short video glorifying 14-year old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi. The video claims disingenuously that “every Friday the village [of Nabi Saleh] demonstrates peacefully” against Israeli policy. This represents a blatant omission of the numerous planned, directed and premeditated violent incidents instigated by the villagers, which include the use of slings and the throwing of rocks at Israeli security forces. Tamimi herself has posted pictures on Facebook of her stone throwing, and she was repeatedly documented while provoking IDF soldiers.

BBC News double standards on use of the word terror - by Hadar Sela

...In our view, the BBC’s inconsistent application of those editorial guidelines and the resulting two-tier system of reporting is evidence of precisely the type of “value judgement” it supposedly seeks to avoid and indicates that the choice of language when reporting acts of terror is subject to political considerations which undermine the BBC’s claim of impartiality. If further evidence of those double standards were needed, it could be found in an article published on the BBC News website on January 3rd under the title “Israelis charged over fatal West Bank family arson attack“.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
06 January '16..

BBC coverage of the ongoing wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis which began in mid-September has been hallmarked by blanket avoidance of the use of the word terror to describe the attacks or of the term terrorist to describe the perpetrators.

Experienced observers of BBC content will not have been surprised by that: the relevant BBC editorial guidelines state:

“There is no agreed consensus on what constitutes a terrorist or terrorist act. The use of the word will frequently involve a value judgement.

As such, we should not change the word “terrorist” when quoting someone else, but we should avoid using it ourselves.” [emphasis added]

Whilst those guidelines are controversial and considered by many to be unfit for purpose, they are ostensibly the basis for all BBC reporting on the subject of terror attacks. Nevertheless, we have often documented the BBC’s inconsistency in adhering to those guidelines on these pages, pointing out that they are applied in some geographical locations but not in others. We have also criticized the corporation’s use of coy euphemisms such as ‘militants’ or ‘radicals’ to describe members of recognized terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hizballah and its serial avoidance of use of the word terror in reports on violent attacks against Israelis.

In our view, the BBC’s inconsistent application of those editorial guidelines and the resulting two-tier system of reporting is evidence of precisely the type of “value judgement” it supposedly seeks to avoid and indicates that the choice of language when reporting acts of terror is subject to political considerations which undermine the BBC’s claim of impartiality.

If further evidence of those double standards were needed, it could be found in an article published on the BBC News website on January 3rd under the title “Israelis charged over fatal West Bank family arson attack“.Duma attack indictments

There, not for the first time, readers found the words “Jewish terrorists” used not in a quote, but by the BBC itself.

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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How Israel Passed the Justice Test - by Jonathan Tobin

...Israel neither seeks nor deserves any special honors for enforcing the law. But there is nothing ordinary about this case. By putting the full resources of the state behind an effort to punish a Jew for killing Arabs in the midst of a bloody national conflict testifies to the resilience and the integrity of Israeli democracy and the rule of law. This is important not because those points are really in question but because the ongoing ideological war to destroy Israel is, at least in part, predicated on the notion that it does not seek to extend the protection of the rule to those who are not Jews or even citizens.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
05 January '16..

The announcement by the Israeli government of indictments in the shocking arson murder of an Arab family in a West Bank village last summer is, in a very real sense, not a big deal. In decent nations, those who commit murder shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it no matter what the circumstances. That it took several months of investigations and interrogations of suspects was regrettable but, assuming that the case has been solved, the final result in which the guilty are punished is the main thing. Israel neither seeks nor deserves any special honors for enforcing the law. But there is nothing ordinary about this case. By putting the full resources of the state behind an effort to punish a Jew for killing Arabs in the midst of a bloody national conflict testifies to the resilience and the integrity of Israeli democracy and the rule of law.

This is important not because those points are really in question but because the ongoing ideological war to destroy Israel is, at least in part, predicated on the notion that it does not seek to extend the protection of the rule to those who are not Jews or even citizens. Moreover, by having a so-called right-wing government take the threat of Jewish terrorism seriously, the country has once again reaffirmed its commitment to principle against pressure from those of its citizens who would have it descend to the level of its enemies.

It is unfortunate that a few Israelis and Jews believe the mere fact that Israel’s enemies have seized on this case is reason enough to doubt the government’s position. Others have raised the issue of context in a manner so as to potentially justify or rationalize Jewish terrorism as an “understandable” response to the far more prevalent Palestinian terror attacks on Jews. Fortunately, the Israeli government has rejected such impulses. This was important not just because it is the right thing to do but because it makes a vital point about the conflict in which Israel still finds itself mired.

Surprise! Palestinian Officials Continue to Promote Antisemitic Blood Libel - by Sean Durns

When it comes to antisemitism, what’s old is new or newly used again—from leaders of the Third Reich to leaders of the Palestinian Authority.

Riyad Mansour

Sean Durns..
CAMERA Snapshots..
05 January '16..

Officials of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its ruling Fatah party are falsely claiming that Israel steals body parts from dead terrorists.

According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab media in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), Gaza and eastern Jerusalem, several PA officials and Fatah movement members have recently put forward the modern-day incarnation of an age-old libel. Fatah is the major component of the authority.

The blood libel was the medieval-era false accusation that Jews murdered Gentile children to use their blood for religious purposes. This slander has taken many forms and its dissemination has historically been followed by murders of Jews, sometimes in large numbers.

CAMERA has noted (“Palestinian T.V. Favorite Accuses Israel of ‘Harvesting’ Terrorists’ Organs,” Nov. 11, 2015) that PA officials have been promoting the libel. These have included Riyad Mansour, the PA’s Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations. Mansour is frequently treated by news media as a reliable source. He sent a letter to the president of the U.N. Security Council, claiming that bodies of Palestinian terrorists killed “were returned without corneas and other organs.”

More recently, other Palestinian Arab officials have joined Mansour to claim that Israel harvests organs.

On Nov. 17, 2015, the PA ambassador to Bahrain, Khaled Aref, claimed in Al-Hayat Al-Hadid (the PA’s official daily newspaper) that Israel “steals the Marytrs’ organs, and sells them.”

According to PMW, on December 24, members of the dormant Palestinian Legislative Council further disseminated the blood libel by calling for autopsies on terrorists killed “in order to know if the Martyrs’ organs have been stolen [by Israel] and to legally prosecute the occupation.”

A telling testimony which speaks volumes about the two societies - by Michael Freund

...When was the last time you heard about Palestinian relief groups offering to help Israeli victims of terrorism? When have Palestinian human rights organizations pressed Palestinian officials to make concessions to Israel? How many Palestinian clerics have issued rulings forbidding suicide bombing attacks? We all know the answer to these questions. The popular support for violence among Palestinians, and the absence of a similar trend in Israel, is not a coincidence.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/JPost..
05 January '16..

Every once in a while, a news item comes along that captures the essence of an issue, encapsulating a point so crucial and fundamental that it manages to convey just about all one needs to know about a given subject. Such was the case with a press release issued last month by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research regarding the findings of a poll conducted among Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The document, which should be required reading by anyone who professes to offer an informed opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, underlines the profound moral chasm that exists between the two sides. Indeed, it serves as a potent reminder that the clash in which Israel finds itself is nothing less than a showdown between good and evil.

The survey, which was carried out by Dr. Khalil Shikaki among a random sampling of some 1,270 Palestinians adults, firmly puts to rest the assertion that only a small fraction of our foes support violence and terrorism against innocent civilians.

The numbers speak for themselves: A whopping 67 percent of Palestinians – two out of every three! – support stabbing attacks against Israelis.

Think about that for a moment. It means that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians see absolutely nothing wrong with the act of picking up a knife and plunging it into another human being simply because he or she is an Israeli Jew.

This is not a matter of moral cowardice, it is a collective descent into depravity.

The NGO law protects Israel from existential threats by Ayelet Shaked

...Like the United States, we have discovered in recent years the danger posed by the existence of forces financed by foreign money. We have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars are sent to NGOs in Israel from countries that seek to decide the existing dispute between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Often, those countries are not at all aware of the fact that the money they are sending is used by the bodies it is sent to for the purpose of weakening Israel’s moral claim and presenting it as a country that is prima facie committing a breach of international law.

Ayelet Shaked..
Times of Israel..
04 January '16..

JERUSALEM (JTA) — In 1914, Robert Frost published his poem “Mending Wall,” where he coined the maxim, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Those were the days of World War I, and it was perceived at that time that the best way to safeguard international relations and world peace was to clearly demarcate the physical borders between countries.

Two decades later, around the time of World War II, the concept of sovereignty had changed to include more than merely defending a country’s territory. The understanding that foreign governments were able to have a serious effect on a country’s internal decision-making led the United States to enact the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1938, which requires non-diplomats representing foreign interests to register with the U.S. Department of Justice.

The act underwent a series of amendments during the 1960s, but the foundations upon which it was based and the justifications that formed its basis have not changed. A strong democracy cannot suffice itself with defending its physical borders alone, since threats to sovereignty are not always confined solely to tanks invading fields and cities. Sometimes the real threat lies in the interference in another country’s internal affairs. This is precisely the sort of interference that the 1945 U.N. Charter sought to confront.

A hundred years after Frost published his poem, there are about 2,000 lobbyists registered in the United States who represent the interests of “foreign political entities” and receive funding from them. The United States understood in time the importance of this identification of the foreign interests on behalf of whom the various organizations operate.

The Government Transparency Law that I am currently promoting is as its name says. It seeks to create transparency and clarity in relation to the parties financing Israeli NGOs who receive more than half of their annual budget directly from a foreign government. In no way does it prevent the activity of those NGOs, nor does it impose any restriction on their activities or forms of expression. In fact, the requirements it stipulates are much less stringent than those imposed by the United States upon similar types of activity under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Israel, which has been subject to an unending struggle for survival for almost 70 years, and where the state of emergency has not ceased for a single day since its establishment, deals with threats from near and far via the Israel Defense Forces. The security forces in Israel protect citizens night and day against the threats posed by enemy countries and the danger of terrorism. However, these dangers are not the only dangers that Israel has to deal with.

Currently, Israel is also fighting repeated attempts to undermine its very legitimacy. The BDS movement that is spreading all over the world presents itself as working against Israeli government policy, yet the official anti-Israeli sentiment it presents serves solely as a cover for the classic anti-Semitism that is only too well known. The same forces that in the Europe of the 1930s and ’40s cried “Jews – go to Palestine,” are now calling out to Israeli citizens: “Jews – go back to Europe.”

Palestinian leaders' self interest militates against peace - Dexter Van Zile

The unspoken reality is that Palestinian elites dare not forge real peace with Israel because it will expose them as having wasted the lives of their people for decades to acquire something Israel was always ready to offer anyway

Dexter Van Zile..
The Commentator..
03 January '16..

A few weeks ago, the Huffington Post published an article by Omar Alnatour, a pro-Palestinian activist who describes himself as a humanitarian. In the piece, Alnatour rehearses the familiar tropes about the suffering of young children in Gaza during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas.

The conflict is not a religious one, Alnatour reports, but is really a “secular humanitarian crisis.” In this crisis, Palestinian suffering is all Israel’s fault, Hamas did nothing wrong, and the world really needs to do something to help the Palestinian people.

“Justice” is the way to peace, Alnatour opines.

But when Alnatour talks of “justice” he doesn’t mean the arrest, prosecution and punishment of Hamas leaders who have committed war crimes by targeting civilians with rocket fire or by using hospitals and schools to store their weapons and in so doing putting Palestinian children in harm’s way. For Alnatour, “justice” means the continued demonization of the Jewish state and its leaders.

This is a pretty dishonest view of the conflict. It is Hamas that causes the suffering of the people in Gaza. In its effort to exercise a veto over Jewish self-determination, Hamas starts wars it cannot win with a more powerful state that cannot afford to lose, and in the course of these wars, it attacks Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians.

Hamas then uses the inevitable suffering of the Palestinians that results to score propaganda points against Israel. Alnatour, like a lot of so-called humanitarians, cooperates with this strategy.

For Alnatour, normalization and interfaith dialogue, organized by the Muslim Leadership Initiative is the enemy of justice. “The issue is that when these interfaith discussions are normalized it leads to religion being used as a tool to whitewash Israel's crimes,” he writes.

Alnatour’s hostility toward normalization is the most troublesome aspect of his article. If there is to be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it will not be through the demonization of Israel that Alnatour engages in, but in the normalization he abhors.

By opposing normalization, the establishment of a modus vivendi between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Alnatour is helping to consign yet another generation of Palestinian young people to a lifetime of suffering and isolation.

Normalization is desperately needed if the Palestinians are to have a future, but the problem is this: If Palestinian leaders accept a deal with Israel, it won't be much better than what was offered to the Arabs and Palestinians over the past several decades. It might even be worse.

Once such a deal is achieved, the question that the Palestnians will ask is a simply one: “Why did we send all our children off to die in fruitless wars and terror attacks that gave us nothing more than what was offered to us previously?”

The return of the rule of law - by Caroline Glick

...By demanding loyalty and pledging to apply the law equally to Arabs and Jews alike, Netanyahu put Odeh and his international supporters on notice. Israel will not allow radical Arab politicians and their radical supporters in Washington to continue to intimidate the government out of enforcing the laws of the state to all of Israel’s citizens equally. With the support of the vast majority of Israeli Arabs, who realize that Odeh and his colleagues are endangering their future, the government will root out and destroy the jihadists and their supporters, and so ensure that Israeli remains the Jewish democracy that extends full rights to its Arab citizens it has always been.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
04 January '16..

Last October, as the Palestinians began their latest round of terrorist war against Israel, lawmakers from the Joint Arab List participated in mass anti-Israel rallies in major Arab towns. One such rally in Nazareth in mid-October attracted some 2,500 participants. After it ended, some demonstrators started throwing rocks at Jews.

The next day, MK Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint Arab List stood on a street in Nazareth and gave a live interview to Channel 2 news.

Just as the camera began filming, Nazareth Mayor Ali Salam drove down the street. Seeing Odeh, Salam stopped his car and began bellowing, “Get out of here! Enough of your interviews. Go ruin things somewhere else!” Odeh tried lamely to get the camera to stop filming. But Salam continued shouting.

“You guys ruined the city. I’m the mayor… there wasn’t even one Jew here today. Not even one! What are you being interviewed about? What are you doing to us?... You had a march, you guys torched the world. Shut up! Leave! Move it!” Salam’s outburst did not come out of nowhere. He was voicing the frustration that most Israeli Arabs feel towards their Knesset representatives who spend far more time demonizing Israel than advancing the interests of Arab Israelis inside of Israel.

According to the latest detailed survey of Arab Israelis published in November by Prof. Sami Smooha, 60 percent of Israeli Arabs do not trust their representatives in the Knesset. Two thirds of Israeli Arabs say that their Knesset representatives are not advancing their interests.

A full 80% of Israeli Arabs believe that it is the job of the Arab members of Knesset to advance their communal interests rather than concentrate on political war against Israel.

Most Israeli Arabs would probably agree that they are hurt by the political war against Israel. After all, 77% of Israeli Arabs define themselves as Israelis, 60% accept Israel as a Jewish state, and 54% believe Israeli democracy extends to them.

While Odeh’s constituents feel betrayed by him, the Obama administration apparently can’t get enough of him and his anti-Israel message.

Palestinian Leaders Promise a New Year of Violence and Death - Khaled Abu Toameh

...Instead of wishing Palestinians a happy and prosperous New Year, both Fatah and Hamas are asking their people to prepare for increased violence and "resistance," including suicide bombings, against Israelis.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
04 January '16..

After failing to offer their people any hope for the future, Fatah and Hamas are now telling Palestinians that they should expect more violence and bloodshed during in 2016.

In separate messages to the Palestinians on New Year's Eve, the two rival Palestinian parties pledged to pursue, and even step up, "resistance" attacks against Israel. Needless to say, the messages did not make any reference to peace, coexistence or tolerance.

Instead of wishing Palestinians a happy and prosperous New Year, both Fatah and Hamas are asking their people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank to prepare for increased violence and "resistance" attacks against Israel. The two parties have nothing to offer the Palestinians besides more bloodshed and despair.

Hamas, which has been in power in the Gaza Strip for almost 10 years, is even reported to be preparing for a new wave of suicide bombings against Israelis. The last time Hamas launched suicide attacks in Israel was during the second intifada, 2000-2005, which wrought havoc and destruction to Palestinians.

Various reports have suggested that Hamas was now considering activating its West Bank "sleeper cells," in preparation for resuming suicide bombings against Israelis. Hamas, according to the reports, is also planning to target Israeli security and political figures.

Hussam Badran, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, painted a grim picture of what awaits Palestinians during 2016. In a message to Palestinians, Badran announced that the current wave of terrorism, which he referred to as the "Al-Quds Intifada," would escalate during the coming year. He also hinted that Hamas was indeed considering resuming suicide attacks against Israelis: "The year 2016 will witness a development and escalation of the intifada and all forms of resistance operations."

His message, like those of many Hamas officials, did not contain any reference to the harsh living conditions of Palestinians under the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. When Badran and other Hamas officials talk about waging "all forms of resistance" against Israel, they are actually referring to plans to launch suicide bombings and other terror attacks against Israelis.

The Hamas New Year's messages do not offer Palestinians in the Gaza Strip any hope that their leaders are working towards ending their misery and state of despair. There is no promise to help solve the problem of unemployment or poverty in the Gaza Strip. Nor is there any promise to help solve the crisis with Egypt, one which has resulted in the closure of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt for most of 2015.

The New NGO Law and Why the Israeli Left Fears It - by Matan Peleg

...Simply stated, democracies have the right, indeed the obligation, to protect themselves. The proposed Israeli law is just such a protection....The law applies to any NGO that receives foreign government funding. (The fact that the only NGOs receiving such funding are left-wing ones bears out the fear of why that money is being given in the first place. No money is being given to groups that support the state, only those that stand in active opposition to it.)

Matan Peleg..
The Algemeiner..
03 January '15..

The shrill reaction to the proposed NGO law in Israel is hardly unexpected. It is consistent with the reflexive reaction to any perceived incursion on the monopoly that the Israeli Left believes itself entitled to.

Whether it is holding themselves out as the only guardians of human rights, or the truest patriots because of their self-conceived courage in confronting the institutions of the state, the Left has long believed that it should be accorded great respect and unencumbered flexibility in how it conducts itself.

For a long time, the citizens of Israel fell into line and acted accordingly. But something tectonic has taken place in Israel, and the Left ignores this at its peril. What has changed is that there has been an awakening to the relationship that Left-wing NGOs, whose mission is to demean and de-legitimize the state of Israel, have with foreign governments — mostly in Europe.

That relationship is based on financing. Lots of it.

Israelis intuitively know that this threatens our self-determination and even sovereignty. Why? Because foreign governments are players seeking to change Israeli policy concerning the Palestinians, as they seek to further the Palestinian agenda.

Foreign governments can influence world bodies, other governments, trade relationships and a whole host of geopolitical issues that private donors to NGOs — no matter how wealthy or influential — cannot hope to match.

So when a law is proposed that would require an NGO receiving significant foreign funding to identify itself as working on behalf of that government, most Israelis believe this to be reasonable, justified and not an incursion on the operational freedom of NGOs.

Rather, the opinion of most Israelis matches that of the US Supreme Court, which has opined that “democracy is not a suicide pact.” Simply stated, democracies have the right, indeed the obligation, to protect themselves. The proposed Israeli law is just such a protection.

There is no 'State of Tel Aviv.' There is the State of Israel - by MK Ofir Akunis

...In our enemies' eyes, there are no secular Tel Avivians or ultra-Orthodox from Jerusalem. There is no periphery and no center, no Right or Left. Israel is a single enemy. That is how we should treat the waves of terrorism that have afflicted us since the first days of the Zionist movement, over 100 years ago -- as a single people, united.

MK Ofir Akunis..
Israel Hayom..
03 January '15..

There is no "State of Tel Aviv." There is the State of Israel -- and the first Hebrew city is an inseparable part of it.

How sad that we tend to remember that, and stress it, only after it is struck by a terrorist attack. Only when a loathsome murderer starts shooting there and murders two beautiful young people who were just starting their lives, who like many of their Tel Avivian neighbors came there from cities in the periphery: Shimon Ruimi from Ofakim and Alon Bakal from Carmiel.

It's easy to portray the Tel Aviv "detachment." Some call it a "bubble." The fact that the two people murdered came from the south and the north of the country tells us all: This is Israel. This is our story.

I grew up in Tel Aviv and on the family stories that Arab gangs would shoot at the family home in the Shapira neighborhood from orchards in Abu Kabir and Salameh, south of the city, before the state was even founded. We experienced the bombing at the Savoy Hotel and later the mega-attack on the bus at the northern entrance to the city, an incident that led to the first curfew since World War I.

It was Tel Aviv that was the first city in Israel to come under fire by long-range missiles, in the Persian Gulf War, when we were instructed to sit in sealed rooms. This is the city that three years later was shocked by the intensity of the No. 5 bus bombing near Dizengoff Square. The Simta Bar, the scene of Friday's shooting, is only a few yards away.

It was during Purim festivities in Tel Aviv that a suicide bomber slaughtered costumed, laughing families at a crosswalk in the middle of town. Yes, on Dizengoff Street again. Tel Aviv saw the terrible terrorist bombings at the Dolphinarium, at Mike's Place on the waterfront, and at the Rosh Ha'ir shawarma stand, and the entrance to the old central bus station at the beginning of the wave of terrorism at the beginning of the last decade. Tel Aviv, too, came under rocket fire from the Gaza Strip during Operations Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge, when residents headed down to the shelters.

Because Tel Aviv is Israel, and Israel is Tel Aviv. There is no artificial distinction and there shouldn't be one -- because what our brutal enemies prove to us time after time is that their fight against us isn't territorial. It isn't about one "territory" or another. It isn't about "the territories" or about "the occupation." It isn't a struggle over "the settlements" or about the 1967 borders.

Dani Dayan and the challenge to Israeli democracy - by Caroline Glick

...Dani Dayan’s appointment is a test case. Shaked’s bill is also a test case. If the government stands its ground on Dayan’s stationing to Brasilia, and if the Knesset passes Shaked’s bill as written or a stronger version of it, then Israel will have taken its first steps towards ensuring that it will not be undermined by fringe elements of its society funded by hostile foreign governments. If the government fails in either of these undertakings, then it can expect acts of diplomatic, political and legal subversion to proliferate and will see its ability to advance the policies it was elected to implement disappear.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
28 December '15..

Today Israel's bilateral relations with Brazil are moving toward a full-blown crisis. If the government doesn’t address the causes of the crisis, going forward it will find itself unable to competently advance Israel’s interests in the international community.

Brazil has the ninth largest economy in the world and is a rapidly growing market for Israeli exports.

Israel’s bilateral trade with Brazil expanded nearly 60 percent between 2009 and 2013. Israeli exports comprise two-thirds of the overall trade.

Economics isn’t the only reason that Brazil and Israel have important joint interests. According to Alberto Nisman, the slain Argentinean prosecutor who investigated the Iranian bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, Brazil serves as a major hub for Iranian and Hezbollah activities in Latin America.

Given Brazil’s importance as a market and as a defense partner, Israel needs a serious ambassador posted to Brasilia capable of advancing relations. In Dani Dayan, Israel has such a representative.

Dayan is a native of Argentina. He knows Latin America better than career diplomats.

Dayan was an early hi-tech entrepreneur. He led his company, Elad Systems for 23 years, building it from a small information technology firm into a 500-employee company with an annual revenue stream of NIS100 million. Given his business background, Dayan’s ability to promote Israeli-Brazilian trade is self-evident.

Dayan is a political pragmatist. When he served as the leader of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, he made it his goal to demonstrate to the wider public that the communities are an integral part of Israel. As the council’s representative to the international community, Dayan worked tirelessly to combat the delegitimization of Israel as a whole and of the Israeli communities in the areas. In a sphere where Israel has precious little to show for its efforts, Dayan’s public diplomacy efforts stood out.

In light of this, when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed Dayan to serve as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil in August, the appointment was not seen as controversial. Rather it was widely viewed as a sign that Netanyahu is keen to expand Israel’s bilateral ties with Brazil and more generally, that Israel is interested in seriously advancing its ties to Latin America.

This apparently was bad news for the EU- and US-financed radical Left. For many years radical leftists have made no effort to hide their interest in maintaining and expanding Israel’s international and economic weakness. As they see it, the stronger Israel is, the less vulnerable it will be to foreign pressure to make further concessions to the PLO.

And so, after the government approved Dayan’s appointment, fringe leftists associated with EU- and US-funded political NGOs set out to scuttle the appointment.

The 2015 Dishonest Reporter of the Year: Why the BBC Won - by Simon Plosker

As one of the world’s most influential broadcasters, the BBC has the responsibility to get the story right. On Israel, it has failed abysmally.

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
28 December '15..

When we looked back over our 2015 archives, it was clear which media outlet deserved this year’s Dishonest Reporter Award. The honor goes to perennial contender, BBC News.

At any given time, the insidious nature of the BBC’s anti-Israel bias is its constant drip, drip effect. But this year, the pipes burst with some genuinely shocking moments of coverage that generated a huge amount of anger and offense.

Here are nine of the ‘highlights’ that secured the BBC’s position as the worst news service of 2015.

(Continue to Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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