RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-elite-revolt-against-democracy

In his New York Times opinion piece titled “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun,” Thomas Friedman wrote that he likes to say of his job that he is “a translator from English to English”: He takes complex things and renders them understandable. Israel, he explained, is turning its back on the shared values which have underpinned the friendship between the American superpower and the Jewish state. As Friedman explains it, the judicial reform proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition poses a grave threat to democracy because it would “change the long-established balance of power between the government and the Supreme Court, the only independent check on political power.”

It turns out that translating from English to English may not be the most useful skill when you need to understand something that is happening in Hebrew. Friedman is right that Israel’s democracy is in danger, but Netanyahu’s government is not the source of peril. The real danger comes from the court itself, which is now asserting a made-up “right” to remove a sitting prime minister—that is, to nullify the results of a legal election and eclipse Israel’s democratic politics and institutions through its own self-perpetuating fiat. The protest movement that arose to defend the court’s power (and its backers among the country’s economic and military elite) are together attempting to block the redemocratization of Israeli politics, as the reforms intended to do.

This is not some innovative hypothesis. If you read Hebrew, you can hear some protesters and their backers in the country’s establishments announcing their intentions more or less explicitly: Democracy is the very thing they are out to prevent. The movement’s ideologues are longtime staunch opponents of the democratic form of government who have devoted whole academic careers to opposing it; their political leaders in parliament and outside it use the term “democracy” in a deliberately deceptive way, as they sometimes admit; and their street-level ringleaders more or less openly confess disdain for the mass of enfranchised citizens. Most poignantly, when it comes to the rebelling IDF reservists—virtually all of them from elite unites, mostly in the air force—they don’t even bother with lip service to the idea of majoritarian decision-making. Rather, they express open contempt for the majority of Israel’s citizens, peppered with thinly veiled references to ethnicity, religiosity, and class.

https://www.jns.org/israel-news/idf/23/8/14/310395/

An interview with Israel Defense and Security Forum CEO IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

The issue of Israel Defense Force reservists refusing to serve for political reasons again made headlines on Sunday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoning for an “urgent” meeting the heads of Israel’s security establishment for an overview of the military’s operational readiness.

The meeting was sparked by an earlier one on Friday led by Israeli Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, who told a group of pilots and officers that the damage the country’s political turmoil is doing to military preparedness will grow “deeper and deeper as time goes by.”

Those refusing to serve are protesting against the government’s judicial reform effort. They say the plan will turn Israel into a dictatorship and that they are therefore justified in taking extreme measures, including breaking a long held, unspoken rule that politics and the military don’t mix.

Opponents say the current political situation is no excuse for overturning that understanding and that doing so undermines military cohesiveness. Once politics enters the army, they warn, there will be constant friction as there always will be some group unhappy about one or another government policy.

Some say the IDF has treated the refusal phenomenon with kid gloves and have allowed it to gain momentum by not speaking loudly enough against it.

The Israel Defense and Security Forum, a group comprising thousands of former security officers, has pulled together former chiefs-of-staff from both sides of the political spectrum to condemn refusals.

IDSF’s CEO and founder Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi recently spoke with JNS.

Q: What is your message to the IDF?

A: We have been talking extensively to the army and the chief of staff. Everybody agrees: This phenomenon in which people don’t volunteer, carry out insubordination, even to a certain extent mutiny—at the end of the day, it endangers Israel. It endangers our deterrence. It endangers our readiness.

We asked a simple question. These people who are doing all of this: Who are they? Are they tragic heroes? Or are they people who’ve lost sight of basic values and are undermining the army? And we’re saying to the army: The way you’re handling this, it seems that these people are being portrayed as tragic heroes.

We think that the army should have been crystal clear: Somebody who undermines the army’s deterrence, the cohesiveness of the army—a hero he is not.

I would have expected the chief of staff from day one to say this is something we’re not willing to accept. It’s politicizing the army. Anyone who politicizes the army is doing harm. It goes completely against our values. It’s terrible and it’s hurting us.

Q: Why does the army seem to have such a hard time saying that?

A: Take a real-world example. There’s an Air Force guy who’s 61 years old. He’s been volunteering for two decades at Air Force headquarters. He’s extremely experienced. He’s somebody who has been there since the age of 18. He announces he won’t volunteer anymore. What do you say to him? The army can’t say ‘you have no values.’”

Q: Couldn’t the army show compassion one-on-one and still condemn the phenomenon in public?

A: When I was a young platoon commander taking my first steps as a leader, the first thing I learned is the difference between what happens when you stand in front of the whole platoon and what happens when you stand before one soldier. Before the group, you have to be strong and tough and clear. Before an individual, you really need to be able to speak heart-to-heart and connect. So what you’re saying is true. You can do both. You can be empathetic and show appreciation on a personal level. But you must be emphatic in front of the whole unit, or the public. You must be very clear about values.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wests-long-demonization-of-israel/

Joe Biden recently spoke out on the terrorist violence afflicting Israel, particularly in the refugee camp in Jenin, currently controlled by Iranian surrogates. Sourcing the violence to vague “extremists”––the West’s go-to euphemism for hiding the widespread popularity of such attacks among Palestinian Arabs––our titular president then pulled out another duplicitous evasion by blaming Israel’s political “extremists” on the right. At the same time, he refused to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington until he was pressured to do so. These are just a small sampling of Biden’s hostility to Israel.

The implied moral equivalence between murderers and their victims has for decades been a sign of the West’s shameful moral idiocy and cowardice when it comes to Israel. Biden’s latest commentary follows his school-marmish scolding of Israel for its ruling party’s attempts to reform the overpowerful judiciary. This sort of intrusion into an ally’s domestic politics is common when it comes to Israel, but seldom expressed by the administration with the same rudeness when it comes to calling out our sworn enemies like Iran and China.

Once again, we see the wages of decades of a fossilized foreign policy with its stale narratives and serial failures. Only now the stakes for Israel and the region are much higher: Iran, an enemy sworn to “wiping Israel off the map,” is dangerously close to possessing nuclear weapons. In addition, they continue to transfer missiles and drones to Israel’s enemies like Hezbollah, hosted by hostile neighboring Lebanon.

Indeed, just a few days ago, Israel’s IDF estimated that Hezbollah could fire 6000 missiles in the first few days of a conflict, and even after Israel’s retaliation, could still rain down 1500 a day––existential risks facilitated by the Democrats’ feckless obsession with returning to Obama’s disastrous “nuclear deal” with the mullahs, and its danegeld they’ve used to finance these weapons.

But the failures of our foreign policy in the region go back to Israel’s violent birth in 1948, when Harry Truman had to override the foreign policy establishment–– “those stripe-pants boys, the boys with the Ha-vud accents,” as he sneered at the time–– in order to recognize the new state.

One of the biggest failed solutions, and the most thoroughly repudiated by history, has been the “two states living side-by-side in peace” diplomatic magical thinking.

Just give the Palestinians their own state, we’ve been told decade after decade, which would require removing the Israeli “settlers” (a sly slur evoking the Boers of apartheid South Africa) from historically Jewish Judea and Samaria, now camouflaged as the West Bank, and peace will bloom throughout the region. But extremists on both sides, the narrative goes, and especially Israeli policies are preventing this solution from being implemented.

This clichéd interpretation of the conflict and its solution is dangerously deluded. It assumes that a majority of the Palestinian Arabs really want a Palestinian state––something that could have been created before 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan, or with the five subsequent offers of a state, all summarily rejected. And don’t forget, Israel evacuated Gaza and turned it over to the genocidal Hamas in 2005. Instead of peace, Israel reaped thousands of missiles attacking its civilians.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19888/palestinian-prime-minister-shtayyeh-lies

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has shown that he can include two lies in one short sentence.

During the meeting [with a US Democratic delegation], Shtayyeh blamed Israel for the fact that the Palestinians have not held general elections for nearly two decades. He also accused Israel of “attempting to combat the Palestinian democracy.” Shtayyeh’s remarks, reported by the Palestinians’ official news agency Wafa, show that Palestinian leaders apparently think that many foreigners, especially Americans, are stupid enough to believe anything that comes out of their mouths.

Shtayyeh lied both when he claimed that Israel was responsible for obstructing Palestinian elections and that Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy democracy.

“The truth is Abbas canceled the elections because all credible public opinion polls showed that this month’s legislative vote would have decimated the ruling clique of his Fatah party and ushered in a whole new politician configuration. This would have seen Abbas’s rivals Marwan Barghouti and Nasser Al-Qidwah emerge as the new leaders of Fatah. If this scenario were to occur, a whole class of millionaires who turned the Palestinian struggle into a lucrative industry, generously funded by ‘donor countries,’ was at risk of losing everything. …. There is nothing that Abbas can say or do at this point to restore the people’s confidence in his authority. Arguably, he never had their confidence in the first place. By canceling the elections, he has crossed a red line, thus placing himself and a few others around him as enemies of the Palestinian people, their democratic aspirations, and their hope for a better future.” — Ramzy Baroud, editor of The Palestine Chronicle and author of five books,, arabnews.com, May 3, 2021.

So, evidently Abbas’s decision to call off the elections really did have nothing to do with Israel. It was mainly the result of Abbas’s totally justified fear that his divided Fatah faction would once again be trounced by Hamas.

Yet, Shtayyeh seems unwilling to allow the facts to get in the way of his straight-faced lies. In the past two years, Shtayyeh has been repeating his lie, that the elections were canceled because of Israel, on almost a weekly basis. He has repeated this lie to virtually every foreign dignitary or delegation he meets with, including, recently, the US Democratic Congressional delegation.

About Shtayyeh’s other lie that he keeps repeating, that Palestinians have democracy, one does not need to be an expert on Palestinian affairs to know that unfortunately the Palestinians are actually controlled by two undemocratic, repressive regimes: the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Shtayyeh, it seems, also forgot to tell the Congressional members who came to see him… that the Palestinians do not have either a free and independent media or a functioning parliament.

Shtayyeh further forgot to tell his visitors that his own Palestinian Authority government was viciously cracking down on Palestinian journalists, human rights activists, political opponents and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the West Bank. The same holds true for the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has also been targeting human rights workers, peaceful protesters, journalists and political activists.

In the past few years, Palestinians have taken to the streets to protest Palestinian corruption and repression.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19872/biden-abandoning-israel-for-iran

“For the last year and a half, Iran stated clearly that its main strategy is to make the Samaria region [of Israel] another Gaza.” The Iranians… are “pouring money and smuggling weapons into the region. They are supporting Hamas and the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] and other factions within the Palestinian Authority.” — Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division, Fox News, July 24, 2023.

More than 19 Iranian regime-backed groups that are targeting Israel and US interests in the region meet the U.S. “terror designation criteria, ” according to Joe Truzman, in the report, “Iran and its Network of Nineteen Terrorist Organizations on Israel’s Borders”. The Biden Administration, however, has not added them to the list of foreign terror groups.

“Over the last four decades, the Iranian regime has built a network of armed groups on Israel’s borders to create instability and foment terrorism. Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and a mosaic of other terrorist organizations receive funding, training and weapons from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – Quds Force (IRGC-QF).” — Joe Truzman, “Iran and its Network of Nineteen Terrorist Organizations,” fdd.org, 2023.

“Long War Journal has monitored the buildup of Iran-backed terrorist organizations on key fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. Israel has worked to limit the growth of these terrorist organizations, but they remain a significant threat on multiple fronts.” — Joe Truzman, “Iran and its Network of Nineteen Terrorist Organizations.”

What is mind-boggling is that the Biden Administration criticizes Israel but then turns a blind eye to Iran’s military buildup near Israel’s borders — all while Iran fires missiles into Israel from Syria, ships ballistic missiles to Israel’s self-declared enemy, Hezbollah, and continues to threaten exterminating Israel down the pike.

The Biden administration’s appeasement policies towards the ruling mullahs of Iran are empowering their Islamist and radical regime in the region, all while undermining America’s democratic ally in the Middle East, Israel.

As the Iranian regime continues to sponsor, fund and arm terror groups on the borders of Israel, the Biden Administration is carefully looking the other way.

https://www.jns.org/israel-news/channel-14/23/8/10/309634/

The Israel Competition Authority confirmed to JNS that it received a request from Channel 14, Israel’s only conservative television station with a news department, to investigate possible illegal coordination by major Israeli businesses to drop the station from their advertising budgets in an effort to shutter it.

Several companies have banded together to “break the channel financially” because they disapprove of its political positions, the station’s owners said, calling it an assault on free speech.

In a letter to the station’s employees this week, Netanel Siman Tov, a representative of the station’s owners, wrote: “A phenomenon in which capitalists use economic terror to limit freedom of expression and impose a political agenda on journalists belongs to dark regimes. It has no place in a democracy, of which a free press is its lifeblood.”

“It’s our intention to use all the legal tools at our disposal to bring justice to everyone who was involved in the attempted cancellation of the channel,” Siman Tov added.

The catalyst for the boycott was controversial remarks made on July 30 by guest panelist Ari Shamai on the channel’s popular “The Patriots” program. Shamai said that the assassin who murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 should be freed from prison.

Although the station swiftly banned Shamai, announcing 45 minutes after the program aired that “in light of the seriousness of the matter, Mr. Shamai will no longer be invited to appear on the channel’s programs,” Israeli food and beverage company Strauss Group announced the next day it was pulling its ads from the station.

In justifying its decision, Strauss said that the pundit’s statement was one of “various offensive statements, repeated over and over again, recently in the programs broadcast on the channel.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19873/palestinians-free-media

This fierce crackdown on Palestinian journalists, however, is ignored by the mainstream media in the West. When Palestinian journalists are brutally attacked, where is the outrage of foreign journalists? Their outrage seems reserved only for stories that reflect negatively on Israel.

All three media outlets [The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN] were obsessed with the case of Abu Akleh because they were trying to implicate Israel, even though there was no conclusive evidence that she had been hit by an Israeli bullet.

On August 3, a video posted on social media featured Palestinian Authority officers in plainclothes severely beating Palestinian journalist Nidal Al-Natsheh…. His crime: he tried to report about a protest by university students against human rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority.

On July 31, Palestinian Authority security officers arrested journalist Sami Al-Sa’i… Al-Sa’i has been arrested a number of times for allegedly criticizing the Palestinian Authority on social media. Because of his repeated incarcerations, he has been unable to find work…. Recently, to support his family, he has been selling juice on the streets of Tulkarem.

On July 17, Palestinian Authority security forces arrested journalist Akil Awawdeh… Hours before his arrest, Awawdeh had ridiculed the Palestinian security forces’ spokesperson for stating the Palestinian Authority does not arrest people because of their political affiliation.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate named a number of other journalists also detained and threatened by Hamas security forces and militiamen: Ehab Fasfous, Fouad Jaradah, Mohammed Abu Awn, and Mohammed Haddad.

Many in the international community who pretend to be “pro-Palestinian” do not really care about the Palestinians at all, or about the too-many-to-count vicious human rights violations committed against them every day. They only care about one thing: bash Israel.

These journalists appear so obsessed with reporting on Israel’s “crimes” – real or imagined – that, presumably to avoid casting the Palestinians in a bad light, they painstakingly avoid any story that might reflect negatively on the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. By doing that, however, the international community and media are, in reality, doing incalculable harm to the Palestinian people, who are then forced to continue suffering, without a murmur of help from anyone, under the repressive and undemocratic regimes of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ignore-president-biden-heres-whats-really-happening-in-israel/

President Joe Biden has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop pushing through a “divisive” judicial overhaul bill amid protests.

This is the same Biden, incidentally, who crammed through a massive, highly “divisive,” generational spending bill with zero votes from the opposition; the same guy who regularly rules by unconstitutional executive diktats; and the same guy who has done more to delegitimize the Supreme Court than any president in modern history.

In any event, the president is concerned. As is The New York Times, which reports, “The Israeli Parliament passed a deeply contentious law limiting the Supreme Court’s ability to overturn decisions made by government ministers.” What the Times means is that there is a new law limiting the judiciary’s ability to unilaterally declare legislation “unconstitutional” without using any legal justification whatsoever.

Because as it stands, Israel has a robust anti-democratic system overseen by a high court that is probably the most powerful judiciary in the free world. Netanyahu’s judicial reforms — only a tiny piece has passed — would bring Israel back all the way to 1995 when the “judiciary revolution” imbued the court with supreme power over legislation. The alleged authoritarian “backsliding” by Israel’s “far-right” government would likely create a far more “democratic” system.

The judiciary primacy might work if the Israeli court’s decisions were grounded in some kind of statutory authority, traditional legal framework, or even existing regulation and law. But there is no Israeli constitution. The court’s decisions are often arbitrary, politically expedient, constantly evolving, and sometimes contradictory. The court regularly blocks laws passed by center-right governments simply because judges claim policy is unreasonable.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19865/palestinians-cry-for-help

The two events — in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon — received little attention from the international community and media, most likely because Israel was not involved. Needless to say, the United Nations Security Council was not asked to hold an emergency session to discuss the crimes committed by Palestinians against Palestinians.

A statement issued by a group, the Unified Command of the Intifada in the Gaza Strip, noted in response to the protests that “the time of silence over oppression and the exploitation of religion to kill has ended.” The group was referring to Hamas’s continued repressive measures against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including a crackdown on journalists, political rivals, and human rights activists. It was also referring to Hamas’s use of Islam to justify its policies and measures against the residents of the Gaza Strip.

Among those arrested by Hamas security officers was Batoul Abu Salimeh, a 14-year-old girl from Jabalya. A 15-year-old boy from Rafah, who asked not to be identified, said Hamas thugs beat him in the leg and that he is afraid to go to hospital for treatment.

The protests in the Gaza Strip were organized by local Palestinian youth movements to put pressure on Hamas to solve the problems of poverty and unemployment. The protesters also demanded an end to the shortage of electricity and gas supplies.

It is no secret that Hamas has been investing millions of dollars in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons to attack Israel, while ignoring the dire economic crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Reports from the Gaza Strip — almost completely ignored by the international media — said that Hamas security officers stormed the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah and abducted three Palestinian men who were wounded during the protests: Midhat Daoud, Nizar al-Liddawi, and Wissam Rasras.

Hamas officers also physically assaulted Palestinian journalist Walid Abdel Rahman, a correspondent for the Palestinian Authority’s Palestine TV, while he was covering the demonstrations in Jabalya.

Rami Farajallah, member of the International Federation of Journalists, criticized Hamas for cracking down on Palestinian journalists who were reporting about the peaceful protests in the Gaza Strip.

A Ramallah-based Palestinian NGO, the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) called on Hamas to release all those who were arrested during the protests… Hamas security services detained 43 Palestinians from all areas of the Gaza Strip… at least 15 Palestinians were wounded, with injuries including bruises, cuts, abrasions and fractures, as a result of being assaulted with kicks, punches, knives, clubs and iron bars.

ICHR called on Hamas to respect and promote the right to freedom of opinion, expression and peaceful assembly….

“We, the people of Gaza, ask you to look into the crimes of the Hamas organization… and mention those crimes. We call on you to protect us from this organization that does not stop kidnapping and torturing citizens inside Gaza…. We call upon you once gain to protect us and rescue us from the Hamas organization as soon as possible. ” — Hamzeh al-Masri Palestinian political activist, in an appeal to human rights organizations, August 1, 2023.

Meanwhile, in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, at least 11 Palestinians were killed and 40 wounded in armed clashes between rival gangs, and at least 2,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes during the three days of fighting.

The voices of the anti-Israel activists around the world who regularly rush to condemn Israel for seeking to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism have gone silent when it really comes to protecting Palestinians. The activists, who describe themselves as “pro-Palestinian,” do not actually care about Palestinians, especially those living in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon’s refugee camps.

The alleged distress of “pro-Palestinian” individuals and pressure groups has nothing to do with a genuine concern for the Palestinians — and everything to do with a racist hatred of Jews.