RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel’s highest-ranking Muslim soldier has described how he endeavours to make his service a source of pride to his father, despite many treating him as a traitor.

Growing up in the village of Reineh in the Galilee – where many believe he has betrayed Arab-Israelis – Major Alaa Waheeb said he never imagined he would be part of the Israeli Defence Forces, let alone go on to become its most-decorated Muslim.

The major was speaking while in Britain for a tour of communities organised by the grassroots group Zionist Federation.

But the soldier, who has served as a platoon commander and was an operations officer in the Gaza brigade during the disengagement in 2005, could not even speak Hebrew until he was 18.

At his high school, he was told that “serving in the IDF is not the way of the Muslim religion”. He said it was only the intervention of his father which caused him to perform “a 180-degree change from where I was,” and join the army.

“If there’s one thing that I want to say, it’s that my dad was the one who wanted me to join the IDF. My dad always told me to be a soldier.

“He was born in Syria and brought to Israel as a small child. He and his family lived in Yavne’el, a small town with many religious Jews. That’s why he had so many Jewish friends, why he then joined the Israeli police, and why he told me to join the army.

“I was wondering, ‘what does he want from me?’ and I told him: ‘I have nothing to look for in the IDF’.”

But eventually, at the age of 18, Major Waheeb was convinced. Nearly two decades later, he said his decision was still unpopular with some.

‘No education toward 2 states in Palestinian textbooks,’ report finds

Israel is routinely left off maps, Israeli cities are said to be in Palestine, martyrdom is celebrated, and there is not a single mention of the Holocaust in more than 70 official Palestinian Authority textbooks, Israel Radio reported Tuesday.

The state radio’s Palestinian affairs correspondent, Gal Berger, said he looked over textbooks for grades 1-12 with a diverse range of subjects, including history, geography and Islamic studies, and found what he indicated was a systematic blurring out of Israel’s existence.

“In the textbooks of the Palestinian Authority,” he said, “there is no education towards two states or a Palestinian state [alongside Israel] within ’67 lines.”

In the Palestinian history books for grades 10-12, there are full chapters dedicated to World War II but no mention of the Holocaust, Berger reported. “For a student in this [Palestinian education] system,” said Berger, “it is as if the Holocaust never happened.”

In his examination of the Islamic studies textbooks, Berger found excerpts that celebrated martyrdom, including a fourth grade textbook that invites the children to write about a Palestinian martyr of their choice.

The messages from Washington ahead of Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel next week show President Barack Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel will maintained until he leaves office.

In recent weeks, the administration has warned various government ministers that any construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem will be viewed with hostility by the administration. In contrast, the administration is pressuring Israel to permit construction of homes for Arabs in its capital city and harshly opposes all moves by the government to destroy illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods and in Judea and Samaria.

In other words, it is the Obama administration’s policy to deny Jews our civil and property rights while it demands that Israel not assert its sovereignty over non-Jews.

Whether or not Obama’s anti-Israel policies will survive his tenure in office depends on who succeeds him. If Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is elected to serve as the next president, there is no question that they will survive him.

During her four years as Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton was a full partner in Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel. Moreover, as her internal emails have shown, all of Clinton’s close advisers are hostile to Israel. The good news for Israel is that Clinton’s chances of election are not as great as they seem from the polls.

First of all, there is every reason to believe that in the coming weeks, the Republicans will unite.

Either party leaders will back front-runner Donald Trump, or his main competitors, Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, will join forces and win the nomination.

The latter alternative, which is gaining traction among Republican leaders and political commentators, involves Cruz, who is more popular with the party’s rank in file than Rubio, and has secured primary victories in four states whereas Rubio finished first only in Minnesota, leading a joint ticket.

But even if the GOP remains fractured, Clinton may still be too weak to win the White House in November. This is first and foremost the case because of the FBI investigation of her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

U.S.-Israeli relations reached a low point one year ago yesterday as the White House scolded Congress over allowing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak directly to the American people through an address to a joint session. Nevertheless, from the well of the U.S. House of Representatives last March, the Prime Minister delivered his speech about the perils of the Iran nuclear deal, and now a recent poll suggests the message was received.

A Gallup poll released last month finds 30% of Americans approve, while 57% disapprove of the Iran nuclear deal. Along party lines, the difference is far more drastic, as a meager 9% of Republicans approve of the agreement compared to a slight majority of 51% of Democrats. Also telling is that only 30% of Independents support it. Gallup concludes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disapproval may have helped “shape the sour national mood on this issue.”

Yes it is sour; a word defined in this context as “harsh in spirit, or temper.” But it was not Mr. Netanyahu who was sour, because at the beginning of his remarks the Prime Minister recounted longstanding ties between the two countries, citing specific instances where President Obama assisted Israel in recent years. It was U.S. politicians who shaped the sour national mood.

President Obama, who refused to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu while he was in Washington at that crucial moment, also made sure the world knew he wasn’t planning on watching the speech, dismissing it altogether afterwards. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said she was “moved to tears” during Netanyahu’s address because the speech took place without the Obama Administration’s blessing, and nearly 60 Democrats in Congress refused to attend.

Group blames Israel for cave-in, the seventh in recent months, amid redoubled efforts to dig across the border.

A tunnel being dug in Gaza under the aegis of the ruling Hamas group collapsed on Thursday, killing a member of the organization’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas said.

The dead man was named as Muhammad Musa al Astal from Khan Younis.

The tunnel caved in near the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades confirmed. It was the latest in a spate of such collapses. Only five days ago, another tunnel caved in near the Zeitoun neighborhood in the eastern part of the Strip, injuring five members of Hamas’s military wing.

Members of Hamas accused Israel of collapsing the tunnel, saying they had seen soldiers on the Gaza border using liquid explosives and “causing small earthquakes” to bring down tunnels dug by the group.

The past two months have seen seven tunnels collapse, most of them in the Khan Younis area, and two in Zeitoun.

Around a month ago, the 23-year-old nephew of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar was killed in a tunnel accident.

Just before that, a tunnel collapsed in the area of Jabalia, in the north of the Palestinian enclave, after heavy rain and floods, killing seven excavators and injuring others.

So Osama bin Laden was an environmentalist. In between plotting the mass murder of kaffirs and the destruction of the West, he penned teary-eyed missives about the dangers of “catastrophic climate change.” Coming off like an earnest member of Greenpeace who had read one too many Naomi Klein tracts, he wrote a letter in 2009 calling on Americans to do everything within their power to “save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny.” Released by the Obama administration this week, the letter says mankind is living in “the shadow of catastrophic climate conditions” and we need a “revolution” to make the planet cleaner. If you read the letter out at the next IPCC gathering, you’d probably get a rousing round of applause.

Some people seem freaked out to discover that OBL had green tendencies. How is it possible that this finger-wagging lunatic could have been as one with the West’s own respectable chattering classes on the issue of climate change? One columnist seems perturbed that bin Laden had what he describes as a more “progressive” take on climate change than the current GOP presidential candidates. But why the surprise? It makes perfect sense that this anti-Western, anti-modern medieval throwback should have warmed to green thinking. After all, bin Laden’s biggest beef in life was that the modern West was an overly cocky, supremely destructive entity that needed to be taken down a peg or two — which is exactly what environmentalists think, too.

Bin Laden’s 2009 letter, written to coincide with the coming to power of Obama, is not the first time he got moist-eyed about man-made planetary doom. In 2002 he attacked the U.S. for pursuing progress at the expense of poor, sad Mother Earth. “You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history,” he hectored, like an agitated hippie. Hilariously, he lambasted President George W. Bush for “refus[ing] to sign the Kyoto agreement” on climate-reduction targets. There’s something deliciously surreal about a terrorist outlaw who was then running from hideout to hideout lecturing the president of the United States for failing to sign on the dotted line of global treaties.

In 2007 he lectured the foul, greedy West again, claiming that “all of mankind is in danger because of the global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations.” He beat Occupy Wall Street to the punch by four years, slamming the “greed and avarice of the major corporations and their representatives.” Then, in the 2009 letter released this week, he outlined his solution to all this Western wickedness: “The world should put its efforts into attempting to reduce the release of gases.” In a nutshell, join Greenpeace. Take eco-action. Put pressure on corporations. Bin Laden basically had two feelings about the American people: that they should die or, failing that, become dutiful warriors against climate change

Sabeel’s theology distorts the Old Testament by denying Jews any ongoing connection with the land of their origin, and treating them as a people abandoned by God. There is also repeated disparagement of Judaism as “tribal,” “primitive,” and “exclusionary.”

Where most modern churches have left the anti-Semitism of the past behind and recognize that the Romans, not the Jews, crucified Jesus, this cult of what has been called “Christian Palestinianism” denies any historical or theological connection between the biblical Israel, the Jewish people, and the State of Israel.

Perhaps the gravest error made by Kairos, Sabeel, and other Christian groups who pursue a one-sided campaign is that they take away from the Palestinians any form of agency or self-reliance. If the Israelis are to blame for all that is wrong and the Palestinians are only victims, then Palestinians must be treated as children, without the will and power to act on their own behalf. Or who can act only through violence and hate.

Are these campaigns, replete with fraudulent charges, as in the Inquisition, really not about Palestinians at all, but just the latest incarnation of the old racist and religious hatred of Jews, and a clear expression of the “New Anti-Semitism”?

House of Lords has been debating the Middle East, and some of the speeches have been notable for their resounding support for Israel.

Look, for example, at this offering, from Labour life peer Lord Livermore, a former party strategist and quite obviously not a Corbynista:

‘My Lords, I wish to use the short time available to argue for a better understanding of Israel. This task is urgent because we see now a disturbing resurgence of anti-Zionism that is bordering on the antisemitic, particularly, I regret to say, in sections of the left in British politics.

Israel is not of course above criticism. It is right that where necessary we should be critical of Israeli policy, conduct and behaviour. \

But too often this legitimate criticism of specific actions taken by Israel obscures the reality of Israel. When this reality is not heard, it creates a space for those with uglier motivations to build support for grotesque analogies between Israel and apartheid South Africa or even Nazi Germany.

I fear that on the left today what is in jeopardy is support not just for the conduct of Israel but for the concept of Israel. We see senior figures praising as friends those who are committed to the violent destruction of the Jewish homeland.

Indeed, we now have the perverse situation where people who consider themselves to be progressive oppose Israel in the belief that they are standing up for liberal values and human rights, but in doing so side with totalitarian Islamist regimes that abuse human rights and prohibit basic liberties.

I believe that it is the duty of progressives to stop the slide from opposition to specific policies of Israel towards opposition to the very existence of Israel. I want us to make the progressive case for a country where women have the right to vote, dress as they wish and say what they wish in a region where, too often, they are segregated and subjugated; for a country that is committed to the free practice of religion for all in a region where religious minorities are frequently suppressed and persecuted; for a country where gay people are not discriminated against, tortured, detained or executed, as they are almost everywhere else in the region; and for a country with a free press, freedom of expression, an independent judiciary and strong trade unions, all lacking in almost all neighbouring countries.

With more than three million Syrians fleeing war-torn Syria seeking safe havens in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Europe – scarce United Nations resources continue to be used supporting and maintaining about 760,000 Palestinian Arabs currently living in the West Bank and registered as “refugees” with the United Nations Relief And Works Agency (UNRWA).

Their refugee categorization and status was changed on 3 January 2013 when PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas replaced the “Palestinian Authority” with the “State of Palestine” by this decree:

“Official documents, seals, signs and letterheads of the Palestinian National Authority official and national institutions shall be amended by replacing the name ‘Palestinian National Authority’ whenever it appears by the name ‘State of Palestine’ and by adopting the emblem of the State of Palestine.”

John Whitbeck – a legal advisor to the Palestinian team in negotiations with Israel – has written on the significance of this name change:

“In his correspondence, Yasser Arafat used to list all three of his titles under his signature — President of the State of Palestine, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and President of the Palestinian Authority (in that order of precedence). It is both legally and politically noteworthy that, in signing this decree, Mahmoud Abbas has listed only the first two titles. The Trojan horse called the “Palestinian Authority” in accordance with the Oslo interim agreements and the “Palestinian National Authority” by Palestinians has served its purpose by introducing the institutions of the State of Palestine on the soil of Palestine and has now ceased to exist.”

Abbas’s semantic ploy had left Israel without its designated negotiating partner under the Oslo Accords and had effectively ended negotiations for the creation a Palestinian State under the Bush Roadmap.

France is proposing to lead the Middle East Quartet on a new foray into Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. This is understandable as a part of French politics. The Palestinians, however, are setting up to be at least as difficult a client for France as they have ever been for the U.S.

Of the members of the P5+1 negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran last summer, France was least happy with the result and said so publicly. Since President Obama needed all five other nations to sign onto the deal, he bowed to a previously expressed French interest in midwifing a Palestinian state in exchange for French acquiescence on Iran.

Aside from its traditional delusions of influence in the Middle East, France wanted to appease its large, unassimilated, unhappy, and increasingly violent Muslim population, which is predominantly Sunni with no love for Iran – and not much love for the French State. France is also part of the anti-Sunni ISIS coalition, which angers parts of the French Muslim population as well. President François Hollande perhaps thought he could buy time or space by inserting himself in the issue of Palestinian statehood – not resolving the problems that bedevil Israelis and Palestinians, but just producing a Palestinian state.

Hollande & Co. will run afoul of two trends: one French, one Palestinian. First, France’s Muslim population, while increasingly anti-Jewish, is not particularly interested in a Palestinian state. Watching Israel sold down the river by a Western country may have some visceral appeal, but it will not let Hollande off the hook for France’s perceived sins against its Muslim population or the Sunni Muslim cause. Second, France is offering the Palestinian Authority nothing the Palestinians have not previously rejected – and will reject this time as well for the same reasons.