RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/135976/on-friday-they-buried-rina-opinion/

If ever there was a week that illustrated the dramatic difference between the lives of Israeli Jews and American Jews, this was it.

Over the course of the past week, Palestinian Arab terrorists stabbed and wounded an Israeli in the Old City of Jerusalem, drove a car into Israelis standing at a bus stop near Elazar, fired rockets into Sderot, set fields on fire in the western Negev, threw hand grenades at Israeli soldiers near the Gaza fence, and tried to stone Jews to death at the Tomb of Joseph.

And on Friday, they murdered 17 year-old Rina Shenrav, for the crime of hiking while Jewish. She had  just celebrated her 17th birthday the week before her murder.

That’s the reality for Israeli Jews. Surrounded by people who will use literally any weapon to try to murder them—a knife, a rock, a grenade, an incendiary balloon, a car.

It was a very different week for American Jews. It began with a lively debate over whether Israel should permit the entry of two indisputably anti-Semitic members of Congress.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/hebron-riots-1929-consequences-lessons/

Arab anti-Zionism runs deeper than disputes over borders, water, and settlements.

In 1929, Arab clerics and politicians provoked riots across Palestine by accusing Jews of plotting to take control of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. This month marks the 90th anniversary of those riots — but they are not a bygone. Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders incite violence today using similar falsehoods and ideology.

The 1929 riots destroyed the Jewish community in Hebron. They persuaded Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion that socialist fraternity among Jewish and Arab workers and peasants would not ensure peace. They impelled Palestine’s Jews to bolster the Haganah, their underground self-defense group. And they vindicated Zionist warnings against relying on foreigners for security.

To investigate the riots, the British government, which controlled Palestine at the time, appointed an inquiry board known as the Shaw Commission.

The commission noted that Arab objections to Zionism were ideological, comprehensive, intense, and inflexible. In its report, it nonetheless devoted thousands of words to minute details of specific Arab grievances. It plumbed complaints that Jews, on one occasion, brought a chair to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and, on another, set up a screen there to divide male and female worshipers.

All this brings to mind the story of a man who thoroughly detests his wife but makes his case for divorce on the grounds that she doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste tube. Obviously, what he gripes about is not what accounts for his detestation. Confusion on this score was characteristic of Middle East policy officials in 1929, and it still is.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israel-iran-and-trump-behind-the-rhetoric/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had faith that Washington would be his key ally in any confrontation with the Islamic Republic. It was Trump, after all, who withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

Referring to a Talmudic dictum relating to self-defense, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu released a video clip on Sunday morning, explaining the preemptive strike launched by the Israel Defense Forces in Syria on Saturday night.

“If someone rises up to kill you, kill him first,” he began, before uncharacteristically acknowledging that the IDF was behind the airstrikes, which were carried out after the Israeli defense establishment discovered that a special Quds Force unit was dispatched by Iran to Syria to murder Israelis on the Golan Heights with explosives-laded drones.

Standing next to a somber-looking IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Yaakov Dori, Netanyahu stressed that the “complex” military operation was undertaken to thwart a “very imminent” Iranian threat, and declared that Israel would continue to uncover and prevent further such plans by the regime in Tehran.

In a veiled reference to Lebanon—home base of the Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah—Netanyahu then warned, “Any country that enables the use of its territory for attacks on Israel will suffer the consequences.”

The significance of this remark, which was also aimed at the powers-that-be in Damascus and Baghdad, cannot be understated. During the 2006 Second War in Lebanon, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated, reiterated and kept his word that only Hezbollah was the IDF’s target. Of course, since Hezbollah, like all terrorist groups, used innocent civilians and facilities as shields, this made Israel’s mission nearly impossible.

freebeacon.com

Never has a U.S. administration been so favorable to Israel. And Israeli Jews are full of gratitude—anything good earns a Trump comparison: “It’s No. 1, like Trump,” an Israeli grocer told me the other day, pointing to an especially well-regarded mango.

Yet the Trump administration, like those before it, either doesn’t grasp, or won’t face, the truth about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Today, perhaps, the individual most voluble in telling the truth about the conflict is Prof. Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University.

His message is straightforward: Islam cannot accept a Jewish state in the Middle East, “not even a tiny one on the Tel Aviv coast.” It’s a theological threat. Jews and Christians do have a protected status under Muslim rule “by becoming subservient to Islam in what is known as dhimmi status, which means they are legally deprived of many rights including the right to own land and bear arms,” he writes.

Although this has been said many times, many ways, over the years, it fails to find an ear in America’s halls of power, partly because it’s foreign to modern Western ideas, partly because of well-oiled Arab propaganda and partly because it’s resisted by the conflict resolution industry (intractable religious problems leave it no part to play). And, partly, because Israel can’t face it either.