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ISRAEL

Diaspora Follies When the likes of Sarah Silverman smear the IDF Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/diaspora-follies-bruce-bawer/

These days the shameless perfidy of the New York Times is palpable on the front page of every new issue, but it can take a big story like armed conflict between Israel and Hamas to ratchet up the paper’s bias and duplicity to Pulitzer Prize levels. You barely need to look beyond the headlines: “Gaza War Deepens a Long-Running Humanitarian Crisis” (May 18); “After the Cease-Fire, Gaza Awakens to a Sea of Rubble” (May 21); “Life under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict” (May 22). Such articles being tailor-made to manipulate readers who still get their news (to use the term loosely) from the mainstream media, and whose opinions on serious issues are easily influenced by shamelessly contrived propaganda, it was no surprise to find one Marisa Kabas opening her own recent piece for Rolling Stone with a reference to a May 13 Times article, headlined “In Gaza, an Ordinary Street, and Extraordinary Horror, as Missiles Thunder In,” about Palestinians killed by IDF rockets. Kabas’s take: as the “granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor,” she had been “raised to see Palestinians as the enemy” and never to question “Israel’s existence, actions, and connection to the United States”; but after reading this Times article, she confesses, “I mourn.”

In fact, Kabas (B.A. in journalism, George Washington University, 2009) more than mourns. She has now decided – and seems to be under the impression that this is a fresh thought – that Jews’ “history of oppression should make us even more empathetic to the displacement and killing of Palestinians.” And she tells us that when she posted this insight on social media, she “was surprised and humbled by the overwhelmingly affirmative response, with fellow American Jews publicly and privately agreeing they’re no longer able to accept the party line on Israel-U.S. relations” or to “square their love for their people and history with their commitment to racial and social justice.” One of the fellow American Jews who have evolved along with her, she is glad to inform us, is a certain Jeremy Slevin (B.A. in political science, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010), who, as it happens, works as “senior communications director for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar” – a job that over time has helped him, as Kabas puts it, “to separate his Jewish American identity from Israel.” Gee, I’ll bet it has. (Slevin, according to his LinkedIn page, has previously worked for Keith Ellison, MSNBC, and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.) Kabas concludes that “causing trauma to another group will never ease our own. Killing more than 200 Palestinians in two weeks won’t bring back our ancestors who perished in the Holocaust, and it certainly won’t bring us closer to a lasting peace. Until we recognize that no one is safe until we’re all safe, the cycle of oppression will play on.”

Rebuild What With Whom? Shoshana Bryen

https://www.newsweek.com/rebuild-what-whom-opinion-1594375?utm_term=Autofe

Video has emerged of Palestinians fighting on the grounds of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, also known as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. The AP reported that only hours after the ceasefire with Israel took effect, thousands of Hamas supporters demonstrated against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the rule of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, chanting, “Dogs of the Palestinian Authority, out, out. The people want the president to leave.” Violence quickly ensued.

This is a glimpse of Palestinian politics that President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken should take seriously as they discuss reconstruction in Gaza. The Hamas rocket war on Israel owed much to the Hamas-Fatah civil war that began in 2007 and has simmered since then, with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank. Each is a dictatorship. In the run-up to a planned 2021 Palestinian election, Abbas stoked violence against Israel, claiming that Al-Aqsa was under siege and Israel was committing “ethnic cleaning.” Abbas, apparently, feared he might lose the election to Hamas—so he canceled it and blamed Israel.

PA television was full of speeches and music videos promising glory for those who killed Jews. A music video was repeatedly broadcast in which Palestinians declared, “I fired my shots, I threw my bomb, I detonated, detonated, detonated my [explosive] belts. …My brother, throw my blood on the enemy like bullets.” Abbas’ religious affairs advisor told viewers, “Islam does not want you to be submissive to others,” and “if you die fighting, you go to paradise; if you kill the enemies, they go to hell.”

Arab states are ‘washing their hands’ of Palestinians Practical governments are seeking mutually beneficial relations with Israel. Andrew Harrod

https://www.jns.org/opinion/analysts-arab-states-are-washing-their-hands-of-palest

In what proved to be a snapshot of professional views of the Arab-Israeli conflict on the eve of war, Georgetown University adjunct professor and Middle East Institute (MEI) senior fellow Khaled Elgindy concluded that the “Arab world is sort of washing their hands” of the Palestinian cause during a May 3 MEI webinar. He agreed with his fellow panelists addressing “Arab-Israeli Normalization: A Viable Avenue Towards Peace?” that America and Arab states are prioritizing practical self-interests over an increasingly failed, violent Palestinian state project.

The panelists examined the implications of Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates establishing normal diplomatic relations with Israel during former President Donald Trump’s final months in office. These agreements initiated by Bahrain and UAE’s Abraham Accords have become only more remarkable in the days following the panel. The Iranian-supported Hamas terror group in Gaza renewed rocket attacks against Israel on May 10, firing thousands of rockets at Tel Aviv and other Israeli civilian population centers. Israel retaliated with airstrikes and artillery. UAE officials warned Hamas of sanctions if its campaign persists.

These Arab state recognitions of Israel “robbed the Palestinians of one of the very few points of leverage that they had vis-à-vis Israel,” noted Elgindy. Palestinians suffer “already pretty stark power asymmetry” with Israel. Given this “existential threat to the Palestinian national project,” he added, the “Palestinian response across the political spectrum was extremely negative.”

Richardson Center for Global Engagement vice president and executive director Mickey Bergman, Elgindy’s fellow Georgetown adjunct, argued that these Arab states had been “very opportunistic” in making deals with Israel. The panelists noted that Trump recognized Morocco’s claim to the disputed Western Sahara and delisted Sudan as a state sponsor of terror. Meanwhile, Bahrain and the UAE wanted closer ties with Israel and the United States, particularly given growing Iranian threats.

Why western mobs are now sticking it to the Jews The public has yet to grasp how “psy-ops” against Israel has messed with their minds Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/why-western-mobs-are-now-sticking?token

“Palestinianism and Black Lives Matter have not been hijacked by anti-Jewish and anti-white bigots. They are intrinsically anti-Jew and anti-white movements. Until and unless this is acknowledged, the horrendous madness through which we are now living will continue to worsen.”

Anyone who imagined that with the Gaza cease-fire the antisemitism that erupted around the west would correspondingly die down has been sorely mistaken.

It has not only continued to become ever more brazen and intimidatory but, astonishing this may seem, it has now morphed into something even more chilling. The toxic core of it, the Israel libel that fuels the onslaught, has become an axiomatic lie and a supposed marker of public conscience.

What some of us warned about the Labour party’s antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has now proved all too true.  This malignity was not confined to the hard-left. It reflected a terrible development that had poisoned the entire “progressive” world and was rippling out beyond even that.

What’s been happening over the past few days has been horrifying: not just the continued and ever more brazen Jew-baiting, but the relative indifference which greets it and which ensures it continues to accelerate, even though physical attackers may be arrested and prosecuted. 

In city after city, anti-Jewish onslaughts have been occurring camouflaged as pro-Palestinian demonstrations. While some useful idiots in attendance may have thought they were signalling their virtuous support for the oppressed, the language used and the targets of physical assaults committed under cover of these placards reveal the true agenda.

A look back at the first disastrous ‘two-state solution’ Victor Sharpe

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/210512

“It is not from 1947 or 1967 that the relentless aggression against Israel by the Arab and Muslim world and the so-called Palestinians began. To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.” Rashida Tlaib, Democrat Congresswoman                                                                                                

In the 11th hour and 59th minute of his last term in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama struck his knife deep into the heart of Israel. With the appalling anti-Israel passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, engineered by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry on December 23, 2016, the blame for the Israel-Palestinian conflict was falsely imparted upon the easy target: Israel.

In June, 1967 Six-Day War, the Jewish state survived yet another Arab war of genocide launched against it and freed the embattled nation from the existing 1947 nine – to – fifteen – mile – wide armistice lines, which Israel’s earlier minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, appropriately called the Auschwitz lines. Those were the lines that existed after the fledgling Israeli forces in 1948 had pushed back the invading Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese armies. Israel declared its independence in May, 1948 and immediately the Arabs launched a war of genocide.

But let us go back to 1920 when Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Palestine Mandate after the defeat of the 400 year old Ottoman Turkish Empire’s occupation of much of the Middle East. Britain was to uphold the League’s express intention of reconstituting within the Mandatory territory a reborn Jewish national home.

The League of Nations created a number of articles in line with the original intent of the Balfour Declaration of November 29, 1917. At the last minute, however, a new article was introduced by the British Colonial Office: Article 25.

It became apparent that its inclusion directly enabled Great Britain in 1921-22 to arbitrarily tear away all the vast Mandatory territory east of the River Jordan and give it to the Arab Hashemite tribe: The territory to become Trans-Jordan and led by the emir Abdullah.

British officials claimed that the gift of Mandatory Palestine east of the Jordan River was in gratitude to the Hashemites for their contribution in helping defeat the Turks. However, T.S. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) described in derisory terms the Hashemite role as “a side show of a side show.”

Ironically, Britain was aided far more by the Nili Jewish underground movement in defeating the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had ruled geographical Palestine from 1517 to 1917.

What is more sad than the occupation? The need for it. By Lev Tsitrin

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/what_is_more_sad_than_the_occupation_the_need_for_it.html

Not unnaturally, the latest flare-up between Hamas and Israel, and Arab-Jewish violence inside Israel, attracted much media attention. Day after day, pages of the New York Times were filled with reports and opinions from the region — often of very questionable quality. “Guest essays” from Palestinians in Gaza painted a picture of indiscriminate, brutal Israeli attacks on the innocent civilians huddled with their wives and children in helpless dread, not knowing what next to expect from the bare-fanged Israeli monsters.

Equally gruesome was an article showing the picture of wanton Jewish cruelty, that forgot to mention that the organized Jewish self-defense arose as a response to Arab attacks on Jewish Israelis inside Israel which inadequate policing failed to prevent. A gloomy New York Times story about Israel squashing ordinary Palestinians’ simple human happiness was also devoid of background and context.

This article provides the background and context that the New York Times ignored. Let’s fill in the gap by starting with an obvious question: Why is there an “occupation” in the first place? How did it come to be? Why hasn’t it ended long ago? I would argue that, ultimately, it is rooted in willful Palestinian ignorance of Arab history.

(Note: I am speaking here about title to the land, not the right to possession. For centuries, Muslims tolerated a handful of Jews on what was once malarial, swampy land. What they cannot tolerate is Jewish ownership of the land.)

It’s inconceivable that the Palestinians do not know the story of the Arab conquest that started immediately after Mohammed’s death. Within a few centuries, Muslim Arabs spread from what is today’s western Saudi Arabia to encompass half of the then-known world, from Spain in the west to the border of India in the east. The former Roman territory of Palestine (a name the Romans bestowed on the land) came under Arab dominance in about 636 AD. The Arab’s did not begin human settlement on that strip of land, of course. It had been populated since time immemorial, including the Jews who, by 636 had already lived there for close to 2,000 years.

As Biden “Rebuilds” Gaza Infrastructure, Hamas Brags It Turned Water Pipes Into Rockets Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/biden-rebuilds-gaza-infrastructure-hamas-brags-it-daniel-greenfield/

After the war comes the reconstruction.

That means pouring money into Gaza while insisting that none of the money will go to Hamas and that none of the humanitarian aid will be used for terrorist purposes. It’s just rebuilding infrastructure. Meanwhile, Hamas keeps boasting about how it turns infrastructure into terrorism.

Terrorists’ ability to turn seemingly innocent household commodities into the tools of terror has always created a challenge for peaceful states fighting terror. Fertilizer has been used to build lethal bombs and instead of using tons of cement that Israel permitted into the Gaza Strip for the building of homes, schools and factories, Hamas built 100 kilometers of terror tunnels that Israel destroyed in the recent war.

Now there is another seemingly innocuous construction material that has joined the arsenal of terror: water pipes. There were some reports that Israel was surprised by the high number of rockets – 4,300 – that Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists had in their arsenals to launch against civilians in Israeli cities in the recent 11-day Gaza war. Now the Secretary-General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad has explained this: He bragged that the “resistance engineers” have turned “water pipes… into the rockets that you see.”

Time to rebuild that “infrastructure”.

The United Nations said it had released $22.5 million, which would go towards rebuilding damaged water and electricity infrastructure and disposing of explosive ordnance.

The ordnance can go into the infrastructure. That’s how it works.

President Joe Biden told a White House briefing on Friday that a two-state solution was the only answer to resolving the deep-rooted conflict.

“I’m praying this cease-fire will hold,” he said, before pledging U.S. support to help rebuild Gaza, which is governed by the terrorist group Hamas 

It’ll hold until enough of Gaza is “rebuilt” for Hamas to rebuild more rockets. 

The West’s Diplomatic Song-and-Dance about Palestinian Arab Violence And as usual, it will be the Israelis who pay for that routine with their blood. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/wests-diplomatic-song-and-dance-about-palestinian-bruce-thornton/

For more than 70 years the West with some few exceptions has mischaracterized and mishandled the Arab world’s aggression against Israel. The latest barrage of riots and rockets is drawing the same old diplomatic song-and-dance routine that camouflages the Western nations’ despicable moral equivalence of aggressor and victim, and its callous concern for their own interests even if it means empowering terrorist murderers and endangering the only liberal-democratic state in the Middle East.

The latest example of Hamas’ indiscriminate terrorist violence, and Israel’s robust defense of its territory and citizens has elicited an encore of the same old song that the previous three conflicts started by Hamas did. A riot on the Temple Mount over specious claims of Israeli attacks on the al Aqsa Mosque, and a property dispute over Arab squatters on land owned by Jews since 1875 provided Hamas with the pretext for launching nearly 4000 rockets and missiles at Israeli civilians. Meanwhile Iran, smelling the stench of appeasement emanating from the White House, is egging on its clients whom it has supplied with weapons and technological know-how.

This sequence of reactions is familiar: the usual calls on Israel to make concessions for a cease-fire (one took effect May 21); the anti-Semitic slander from U.S. Congressmen, pundits, academics, entertainers, and Leftist outfits; the UN’s hypocritical condemnations from thug-states sitting on the Human Rights Council; and the craven bullying by some Arab states that don’t dare say a word about China’s concentration camps filled with a million Muslim Uighurs who are being deprogrammed from their Islamic faith. And of course, we hear the whole Orwellian vocabulary of “apartheid,” “racist,” “occupiers,” “settlements,” “disproportionate response,” “war crimes,” “cycle of violence,” “two-state solution,” and “peace process.”

The commentary, when it’s not writing what the “woke” call “dog-whistles” for post-Holocaust anti-Semitism, recycles all the assumptions of the “New World Order,” to use George H.W. Bush’s name for the “rules-based international order”: one “where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

The media must stop demonising Israel Hamas is a murderous, anti-Semitic organisation. But broadcasters barely ever mention this. Misha Mansoor

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/05/24/the-media-must-stop-demonising-israel/

On the BBC News at Six on Friday, Jeremy Bowen spoke to a Gazan man who, he said, is proudly ready to give not only his life for Jerusalem, but also those of his wife and child. We were left to wonder how on board with that his wife is. Certainly Bowen didn’t seem surprised by such an outrageous statement, or seem to want to question the sense and rationality of it. His report showed many hundreds of young Gazan men, parading along the streets and rubble, proudly claiming they have achieved victory over Israel – despite the considerable ruins of many buildings – and saying they will never give up until Jerusalem is theirs.

I switched over to Channel 4 News at 7pm and Matt Frei was also in Gaza. Presenter Fatima Manji told viewers that the ceasefire had been secured, despite ‘Israeli police firing teargas and stun grenades at demonstrators holding Palestinian flags at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’. To be fair, at least Bowen, who also reported this skirmish, mentioned that it was in response to the demonstrators throwing a petrol bomb at police. Matt Frei’s report was merely simplistic and childlike. This is the same Frei who, during an interview with a Palestinian woman on LBC recently, did not once question or challenge her claim that Israel was a colonial and apartheid state.

In his report from Gaza, Frei reminded us of how many Gazans have been killed in the most recent conflict compared with how few Israelis have been killed. ‘Of course the casualties on that side [Israel] were minimal compared with the casualties on this side – 250 dead, many of them women and children’, he said. The question we seem to be asked repeatedly in the media at the moment is: ‘How can Israel justify having so few casualties?’

Frei, like almost every reporter I see on the news at the moment, either brushes aside or says nothing about the avowed murderous intentions of Hamas and its supporters. That they want to kill Jews, to wipe all Jewish Israelis off the land of Israel, ‘from the river to the sea’, is barely ever mentioned on television. What we do see thrashed out time and again is the mismatch in military strength. Why is it, in effect, that so few Israelis die?

On social media the same comments are made over and over. Israel is behaving like the Nazis. Israel is an apartheid state. Israel (or the Jews) wants to grab all the land in the Middle East. Israel shouldn’t even exist. Delve a bit deeper and you’ll read about organ stealing and the drinking of the blood of Palestinian babies.

The Palestinian Voices Blinken Won’t Hear by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17401/blinken-palestinian-voices

The renewed talk about a “two-state solution” comes amid a significant increase in the popularity of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group whose charter openly calls for replacing Israel with an Islamic state. It also comes at a time when Abbas’s popularity is at its lowest ebb.

The Palestinians are telling Blinken that he is wasting his time if he thinks that they would accept “so-called peaceful solutions” or “renounce any part of Palestine.” They are also sending a warning to Abbas that recognition of Israel’s right to exist and acceptance of the “two-state solution” is tantamount to treason, a crime punishable by death.

Abbas is afraid that Hamas will try to stage a coup against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank…. Abbas, however, does not feel comfortable talking about the Palestinians’ two rival entities, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and prefers to continue pretending that the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is still a realistic option.

As long as Israel maintains overall security control over the West Bank, Abbas can feel safe sitting in his office or at home in Ramallah. It is only Israel’s presence in the West Bank that is keeping him in power and preventing Hamas from extending its control beyond the Gaza Strip.

A recent public opinion poll showed that 57% of the Palestinians are opposed to the two-state solution. Another 57% said they support the “armed struggle” and “popular resistance” against Israel. According to the poll, 68% of the Palestinians want Abbas to resign.

Blinken needs to go out and talk to ordinary Palestinians. There, he will get a good grasp of the Palestinians’ profound anti-Israel sentiments and their deep support for Iran’s proxies and others who wish to wipe Israel off the map.

On the eve of his first official visit to the Middle East, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed support for a two-state solution as the only way to provide hope to Israelis and Palestinians that they can live “with equal measures of security, of peace, and dignity.”

During his visit to Israel and the West Bank, Blinken is expected to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been urging the Biden administration to work toward “achieving a just and lasting peace that would ensure the Palestinian people’s right to freedom and independence” and the establishment of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.