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ISRAEL

Jews are safer in Israel’s bunkers than in French ghettos France is losing its Jews, who prefer a place where their children are free to live normal lives, where they are defended and can defend themselves. Giulio Meotti,

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.
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Abdelghani Merah, the brother of the terrorist who, five years ago, killed a little girl, a rabbi and two of his children in front of Toulouse’s Jewish school Ozar Hatorah, is busy these days with a kind of “journey” of tolerance to preach against his brother’s deeds. That massacre was the first of a long series of anti-Semitic attacks, culminating in the attack at the supermarket Hyper Kasher in Paris.

But Merah’s victims, the Jewish community, is busy with another kind of “trip”. Le Figaro newspaper reported the data on the situation in the French city. 300 Jewish families have packed and left Toulouse since the killing spree. The French newspaper speaks openly of “exile”.

300 Jewish families have packed and left Toulouse since the killing spree. The French newspaper speaks openly of “exile”.
Jean-Michel Cohen was among the first to rush to the site of the massacre, where the Muslim extremist killed Jonathan Sandler, his two sons Gabriel and Arieh, and Myriam Monsonego. “The situation has become unbearable and I was afraid for my family”, he says today from Israel. “Toulouse is the French city most affected by departures”, says Marc Fridman, vice president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in the Midi-Pyrenees. “It is a paradise for us”, says Cohen from Tel Aviv. “Here we are safe. My children walk to school. We have no concern for them. They are freer than in France”. His wife now works as educator in the city of Netanya, the “French Riviera” as it is called for its high number of immigrants from France.

Marc Fridman speaks of “a terrible sense of isolation and frustration after 2012. Only ten thousand people participated in the march for the Ozar HaTorah” school. The Jewish community of Toulouse then consisted of up to 20,000 people. Today only 10,000 Jews remain. Another bombing could be the end for one of the cradles of French Judaism.

South Tel Aviv Overtaken by Illegal Immigrants South Tel Aviv citizens afraid to leave their homes after dark. Gilad Zwick

Reprinted En.mida.org.il.

Last week, a 29 year old illegal immigrant from Eritrea was charged with the attempted rape of an 80 year old woman in South Tel Aviv. The victim, in describing the attack, said “he beat me and dragged me across the floor.” Later in the week, a 40 year old woman was brutally raped near the Old Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. The perpetrator is still on the loose.

Over the past few years, urban neighborhoods throughout Europe have been overtaken by refugees and illegal immigrant populations. Crime has risen, local populations have lost their sense of security, and areas have become no-go zones for police. South Tel Aviv is on the precipice of becoming like these European cities. Yet the media remains silent, and the ruling class are oblivious to the situation.

Last week’s violent acts in South Tel Aviv are not sporadic instances, but tragically have become the norm. Last week, during a protest involving illegal immigrant groups, residents of South Tel Aviv and local police were ridiculed and berated by illegal immigrants who screamed ‘the police are ISIS’, ‘this is not your country’, ‘your country is sh-t’, ‘you are not a Jew’. Many police were needed to quell the demonstrations, which turned violent towards the end, as illegal immigrants began attacking residents filming the protest. In previous documented cases, illegal immigrants are seen hitting an elderly Israeli with a wood plank, while in other instances saying “the Nazis should be thanked” and showing admiration for Hitler.

Sheffi Paz, a resident of South Tel Aviv and a leading activist against illegal immigration, has received death threats on her Facebook account on more than one occasion.

The rapes, violence, intimidation, and the lost sense of security, intensify the feeling that South Tel Aviv is losing its Israeli character. This feeling is backed by a report published by the Knesset Research and Information Center (KRIC) last June which estimated that the illegal immigrant population in South Tel Aviv is greater than the Israeli population. This assessment was based on information received from different branches in the Tel Aviv municipality. It estimated that at the beginning of 2016, the illegal immigrant population in South Tel Aviv numbered between 48,000-60,000 people, whereas the Israeli population in that area is 39,150 according to 2014 statistics, with those numbers declining annually.

Yet, it is possible that the gap is even greater.

In response to KRIC’s request for additional information, the Tel Aviv municipality admitted that it lacks statistics regarding births and deaths among the illegal immigrant population as well as a realistic count of the children. In an effort to reach an accurate number of illegal immigrant children, KRIC crosschecked information from the Tel Aviv municipality and statistics from the Ministry of Health, and concluded that there were an estimate of 3,600 illegal immigrant children below age six, as opposed to Israeli children in that same age group numbering 2,960.

Amona and Israel’s hobbled sovereignty: Moshe Dann

The destruction of fifty-one Jewish homes in Ofra and Amona in February by order of the High Court raises questions about Israel’s claim to be “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The evictions made no sense, and, although Prime Minister Netanyahu signed an agreement on behalf of the government with the residents of Amona to provide alternative housing in a new community, he has failed to honor his commitment. The families remain in distress, helpless and homeless.

Absurdly, this destruction and others served no one. Jews were traumatized; Arabs can’t use the land for security reasons and because they cannot prove ownership; most Israelis perceived it as a national disgrace; it alienated many and undermined trust in the High Court and the government; and it wasted money and resources. No one benefited!

Although Jews were accused of building on “private Palestinian land,” the question of who owned the land was never heard by an Israeli civilian court. No valid proof of ownership was presented. The destruction, moreover, violated the law in Israel and all other democratic countries: someone who has built in good faith on land which he/she later discovers belongs to someone else is entitled to pay compensation to the legal owner when the value of the building is worth more than the land.

Touted as “the rule of law,” the destruction was intended to demonstrate the power of the High Court regardless of any government decision, or legal issue. The High Court’s decision was meant as a clear political message to the government: it, not the government, would decide the fate of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, “the settlements.” The High Court’s assertion, therefore, challenges the basis of Israeli democracy, the role of its judiciary, and its definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The struggle over that definition arose in 2011, when MK Avi Dichter proposed a Basic Law: “Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The purpose of his bill was to codify the nature and values of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to prevent Israel from becoming a binational state. Although supported by the government coalition, including PM Netanyahu and opposition MKs, it did not pass a preliminary reading.

The Hawk Dressed as a Dove Why, given Yitzhak Rabin’s decades of staunch defense of Israeli security, did he agree to the Oslo Accords? Elliott Abrams reviews “Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, Leader, Statesman” by Itamar Rabinovich. see note

Sorry folks, Rabin who should have lived to see the disastrous legacy of his handshake with vermin Arafat…was neither dove nor hawk….he was a rat who dressed as a mouse. He was callous to the terror that followed the infamous Oslo surrender and abandoned the settlers that he encourage in 1967 stating, after a series of terrorist incidents….”let them spin like propellers in the wind” and he called the victims of the unprecedented terrorist incidents which followed Oslo- children in mangled strollers, women in markets, passengers on buses, soldiers at stations, diners at cafes- the “casualties of peace,”rsk

More than two decades have passed since Yitzhak Rabin was shot to death by a right-wing extremist in November 1995, and in the years since his assassination he has become a potent icon for the Israeli peace movement. Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization and his famous handshake with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 have made him, as Itamar Rabinovich writes in analogizing Rabin to John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln in the first chapter of his biography, “the subject of a new mythology.”

But the truth, as Mr. Rabinovich convincingly argues, is that “it is wrong to remember and commemorate Rabin as a dovish leader.” Rabin’s primary concern throughout his life was Israeli security—and throughout his long career in the military he proved himself capable of carrying out extremely tough action.
Yitzhak Rabin

By Itamar Rabinovich

Yale, 272 pages, $25

Born in Jerusalem in 1922 to parents who had emigrated from the Russian empire, Rabin joined the pre-independence Jewish security forces in 1941 after an interview with a young officer named Moshe Dayan. During the years until Israel’s independence in 1948, Rabin rose through the ranks, working first with, and then against, the British who ruled Mandatory Palestine; he was even jailed by them for five months in 1946.

It was Rabin who, as a senior officer in the new Israeli Defense Forces in 1948, gave the order (under instructions from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion) to fire on the Altalena, a ship carrying arms to the rival militia led by Menachem Begin, in what remains one of the most hotly contested incidents in Israeli history. It was Rabin who signed an order to expel Arab residents from Lydda in what has become a deeply controversial episode in Israel’s war of independence. Later, it was Rabin who, as minister of defense, put down the First Intifada—the violent Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule in the West Bank—with considerable force.

Zion’s Mother TongueVisions of a Promised Land The Language Of Survival By Benjamin Balint See note please

The remarkable rebirth of Hebrew is a tale worth revisiting in modern Israel. In 1948, besides the scholars and Jewish Palestinians probably more people spoke Kalmyc Mongolian than Hebrew. With the independence of Israel hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived from the graveyards of Europe, North and South Africa, the Arab countries, South and Central America, Australia, and Asia. They spoke and read different languages with different alphabets. Israel beset with the problems of surrounding enemies, lack of water and food, and lack of proper housing, undertook an epic ingathering of so many people from every corner of the world. They established a system of learning centers called “ulpans” where Hebrew was taught in intensive total immersion classes. Within one decade Hebrew was a language in which people joked, bickered, became leftists, were derided by rightists, and cursed and loved. Today, it is spoken by 8.59 million people. Incredible and commendable….rsk

The other day, I took some American visitors to the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem to see the Dead Sea Scrolls. My guests were struck not so much by the parchments themselves as by the sight of a group of Israeli fourth-graders, their noses pressed to the display cases, reading aloud from texts that were two millennia old.

In “The Story of Hebrew,” Lewis Glinert, a professor at Dartmouth College, aims to track the fate of the Hebrew language “from the Israelites to the ancient Rabbis and across two thousand years of nurture, abandonment, and renewal.” The most ambitious attempt since William Chomsky’s groundbreaking 1957 study, “Hebrew: The Eternal Language,” Mr. Glinert’s biography of Hebrew succeeds in representing the language not just as a vehicle of communication but as a crucible of national cohesion.

Mr. Glinert’s narrative, related with impressive sweep, begins with the classical Hebrew of biblical literature. The Bible’s sublime idiom is marked by stylistic suppleness and breadth, he says, that could encompass “narrative, prophecy, law, proverbs, philosophy, elegy, romance” and much else. The era of biblical Hebrew reaches as far back as the second millennium before the Christian era, and Mr. Glinert suggests that the spoken language survived the Jews’ exile to Babylon, their return and their struggles under Roman rule.

Spoken Hebrew seems to have died with little fanfare around A.D. 200, more than a century after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. But throughout the diaspora, Jews used written Hebrew to scaffold elaborate edifices of religious and legal interpretation. Though stateless, Hebrew would flourish as a written medium of cultural continuity. If the Jews safeguarded Hebrew, it was said, the holy tongue safeguarded “the people of the Book.”

The first of these edifices, the Mishnah, was compiled in the second and third centuries. This record of religious teachings and laws “created a rich lexical heritage that could be passed on to future generations,” Mr. Glinert writes, “and that Hebrew poetry and prose would draw upon long after Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language.” The Babylonian Talmud—another great edifice of interpretation, setting out the authoritative commentary on rabbinic law—expanded Hebrew’s expressive possibilities by inflecting Hebrew with Aramaic, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East.

In the ensuing centuries those who standardized Hebrew’s grammatical architecture and honed its philological precision saw the language not just as a precious possession in itself but also as a fulcrum of Jewish life. “It must constantly be on our lips,” the Egyptian-born linguist and sage Saadiah Gaon wrote in the year 902, “for it affords us an understanding of the Divine Law.”CONTINUE AT SITE

With Help from the EU, the Palestinian Authority Builds Illegal Settlements in the West Bank

According to the Oslo Accords, the portion of the West Bank designated as Area C—which includes all of the Israeli settlements—is to remain under the control of Israel’s government until the parties reach a final agreement. Yet the Palestinian Authority (PA), backed by EU funds, has been systematically constructing illegal settlements there—mostly small Bedouin outposts—in an attempt to interfere with Israeli claims to the territory. Josh Hasten https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2017/03/with-help-from-the-eu-the-palestinian-authority-builds-illegal-settlements-in-the-west-bank/

Blueprints for the establishment of a legal town to be called Ramat Nueimah near Jericho were drawn up, but that plan has been shelved for the time being. Now, I don’t want to ruin anyone’s vacation, but the next time you are heading for some R&R at the Dead Sea via Jerusalem, pay close attention to the scenery on the sides of the road.

Over the past decade there has been a huge upsurge in the number of structures going up in illegal Beduin villages and encampments on both sides of Highway 1, from the entrance to the city through what is known as the “E1” area between Jerusalem and the “Adumims” all the way down the mountain toward the Dead Sea.So why should some illegal Beduin structures spoil your trip? Because these aren’t just small herding communities as they would appear, but strategically placed mini-towns set up by the Palestinian Authority and financed by the European Union to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros, with the explicit goal of taking over strategic lands in Area C with the aim of creating a de facto Palestinian state.

This plot is clearly outlined in a lengthy 2009 policy paper by then Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad. Known as the Fayyad Plan, the logic was that by creating substantial facts on the ground, the PA with the support of the international community would lay claim to those areas, and demand that they be part of “Palestine” in any future negotiations with Israel.

And that’s where the EU comes in – to serve as the key financier of the project. Over 1,000 illegal structures – including houses, bathrooms, storage spaces, etc., with more being erected nearly daily throughout Judea and Samaria, now proudly bear the EU flag. The EU’s false claim is that it is involved in these building endeavors for “humanitarian purposes” to provide for the Beduin in these areas.

Ironic though, that the EU symbol can only be seen on structures in Area C; none can be found in areas A or B, nor can they be found in Beduin communities throughout the rest of the Middle East. It makes you wonder.

Therefore in 2009 Regavim filed the initial petition against the community with the High Court of Justice. But eight years later it remains standing. Just this past summer rumors circulated that the Civil Administration was preparing to take action, starting with the dismantling of the school. But once the first of day of classes began, it was clear it wasn’t going to happen.

Know Thine Enemy Israel gets back on the phony peace process train. March 17, 2017 Caroline Glick

There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him.

This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week we have been beset by the bizarre and sudden appearance of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s negotiations chief.

Greenblatt’s mission is apparently to reinstate the mordant peace process between Israel and the PLO.

The peace process that Greenblatt is here to reincarnate died 17 years ago.

In 2000, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat killed the peace process when he initiated a massive terrorist war against Israel, right after he rejected peace and Palestinian statehood at the Camp David peace conference.

In rejecting peace, the architect of modern terrorism made clear that his claim seven years earlier that he was willing to reach a compromise with Israel, based on partition of the Land of Israel between a Jewish and an Arab state, was a lie. As the nationalist camp had warned at the time and since, the PLO was not remotely interested either in statehood or in peace. Arafat’s willingness to engage Israel in negotiations that led to its transfer of security and civil control over Gaza and the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria to the PLO was simply another means to the only end the PLO ever contemplated. It was a means of weakening Israel as a step toward achieving the PLO’s ultimate goal of destroying the Jewish state.

In 1993, when then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin agreed to recognize the PLO, his implicit assumption was that if Arafat was lying, Israel would walk away from the peace process. It would retake control over the areas it had ceded to PLO control and things would go back to the way they were before he made the gamble, indeed they would be better. Whereas for years Israel had been under pressure from the Europeans and the Americans to recognize the PLO, if Israel recognized the terrorist group and the PLO responded by showing that it remained dedicated to Israel’s destruction, the world that had been pressuring Israel would end its pressure.

The Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side against the PLO.

In 2000, after Arafat blew up the negotiations table with his suicide bombers, then-prime minister Ehud Barak announced triumphantly that he had ripped the mask off of Arafat’s face.

Now everyone would recognize the truth about the PLO. Now the Europeans and the Americans would rally to Israel’s side.

Of course, things didn’t work out that way.

US ‘Outraged’ by UN Report That Accuses Israel of Establishing ‘Apartheid Regime’ That ‘Dominates the Palestinian People’ avatar by Barney Breen-Portnoy

The United States expressed outrage on Wednesday over a report published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) that accused Israel of establishing an “apartheid regime” that “dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/03/15/us-outraged-by-un-report-that-accuses-israel-of-establishing-apartheid-regime-that-dominates-the-palestinian-people/

“That such anti-Israel propaganda would come from a body whose membership nearly universally does not recognize Israel is unsurprising,” American UN Envoy Nikki Haley said in a statement. “That it was drafted by Richard Falk, a man who has repeatedly made biased and deeply offensive comments about Israel and espoused ridiculous conspiracy theories, including about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is equally unsurprising.”

“The United Nations Secretariat was right to distance itself from this report, but it must go further and withdraw the report altogether,” Haley went on to say. “The United States stands with our ally Israel and will continue to oppose biased and anti-Israel actions across the UN system and around the world.”

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon stated, “The attempt to smear and falsely label the only true democracy in the Middle East by creating a false analogy is despicable and constitutes a blatant lie.”

Emmanuel Nahshon — spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry — compared the ESCWA report to Nazi propaganda.

“Friendly advice — don’t read it without anti-nausea pills,” he tweeted.

Reuters quoted UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric as saying that the publication of the report was not coordinated with the UN Secretariat.

“The report as it stands does not reflect the views of the secretary-general (Antonio Guterres),” Dujarric clarified.

The ESCWA is headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon and is comprised of 18 member states from the Middle East and North Africa.

Last month, Haley drew warm praise from the pro-Israel community in both the US and abroad after taking the UN Security Council to task for its double standards when it comes to its treatment of the Jewish state.

“I am here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel,” Haley told reporters after taking part for the first time in a monthly Security Council meeting on Middle East issues. “I’m here to emphasize the United States is determined to stand up to the UN’s anti-Israel bias. We will never repeat the terrible mistake of Resolution 2334 and allow one-sided Security Council resolutions to condemn Israel. Instead, we will push for action on the real threats we face in the Middle East.”

Trump Embraces The PLO Fantasy The new president is gearing up to make the same mistake as his predecessor. Caroline Glick

US President Donald Trump is losing his focus. If he doesn’t get it back soon, he will fail to make America great again or safe again in the Middle East.

After holding out for a month, last week Trump indicated he is adopting his predecessors’ obsession with empowering the PLO.

This is a strategic error.

There are many actors and conflicts in the Middle East that challenge and threaten US national interests and US national security. Iran’s rise as a nuclear power and regional hegemon; the war in Syria; Turkey’s abandonment of the West; and Russia’s regional power play all pose major threats to US power, security and interests. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, Hamas and other Sunni jihadist movements all threaten the US, Europe and the US’s Sunni allies in the region in a manner that is strategically significant to America.

None of these issues, none of these actors and none of these threats are in any way related to or caused by the PLO and its interminable, European-supported hybrid terror and political war against Israel. None of these pressing concerns will be advanced by a US embrace of the PLO or a renewed obsession with empowering the PLO and its mafia-terrorist bosses.

To the contrary, all of these pressing concerns will be sidelined – and so made more pressing and dangerous – by a US reengagement with the PLO .

And yet, over the past week, Trump has indicated that the PLO is now his focus.

Last Friday, Trump spoke on the telephone with Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas is head of the PLO and the unelected dictator of the corrupt, terrorism-sponsoring, PLO -controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria.

According to media reports, Trump told Abbas – whose legal term in office ended eight years ago – that he views him as a legitimate leader. According to the official White House report of the conversation, Trump also reportedly told Abbas that he supports reaching a deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Such a deal, to the extent it is ever reached, involves expanding PLO control over Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem at Israel’s expense.

Trump also invited Abbas for an official visit to Washington. And the day after they spoke, the Trump administration moved $250 million in US taxpayer dollars to Abbas’s police state where for the past 25 years, Abbas and his cronies have enriched themselves while feeding a steady diet of antisemitic, anti-American jihadist bile to their impoverished subjects.

To build up his credibility with the PLO , Trump put his electoral pledge to move the US embassy to Jerusalem on ice. The real estate mogul ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to deny Jews the right to their property and their legal right to use state lands in Judea and Samaria.

And swift on the heels of that conversation with Abbas, Trump’s chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was dispatched to Jerusalem to begin empowering the PLO at Israel’s expense.

The Real Hamas: Sorry, Folks! by Bassam Tawil

What Hamas says, day and night, in Arabic, tells the real story. In fact, Hamas officials are very clear and straightforward when they address their people in Arabic. Yet some Western and Israeli analysts do not want to be bothered by the facts.

Some reports have suggested that Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh are the ones pushing for the changes in the movement’s charter. However, even if Mashaal and Haniyeh succeed in their mission, there is no guarantee that Hamas’s military wing would comply.

Hamas has also denied its intention to cut off its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. “The reports are aimed at tarnishing the image of Hamas in the eyes of the world,” explained a top Hamas official. He also denied that Hamas was planning to abandon the armed struggle against Israel in favor of a peaceful popular “resistance.”

What does Hamas mean when it says that it “accepts” an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem without recognizing Israel’s right to exist?

Is this a sign of moderation and pragmatism on the part of the extremist Islamic terror movement? Or is it just another ploy intended to deceive everyone, especially gullible Westerners, into believing that Hamas has abandoned its strategy of destroying Israel in favor of a two-state solution?

Recent reports have suggested that Hamas is moving towards “declaring a Palestinian state over the 1967 borders.”

According to the reports, Hamas is also contemplating changing its charter so that it would no longer include anti-Semitic references. The charter, which was drafted in August 1988, contains anti-Semitic passages and characterizations of Israeli society as Nazi-like in its cruelty. The same reports also claimed that Hamas’s revised charter will also state that the terror movement is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some analysts in Israel and the West have interpreted these reports as a sign that Hamas is finally endorsing a policy of pragmatism toward Israel and Jews. They are particularly excited about Hamas’s purported intention to declare (in its revised charter) that its conflict is “only with Zionism and the occupation, and not with Jews around the world.”

Judging from the analyses published by some commentators and Palestinian affairs “experts” in the past few days, one might conclude that Hamas is on its way to making a dramatic change in its vicious ideology. Unfortunately, however, the facts suggest otherwise.