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ISRAEL

VICTOR SHARPE: PASSOVER’S GIFT TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE

Millions, perhaps billions, of the world’s population still do not know the meaning of the towering festival of freedom and liberty known as Passover; a festival recognizing an event that has blessed the world for some 3,300 years.

The festival begins at eventide on April 10th of this year and always on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan. Jews and Christians know from the Bible the story of the Exodus and of the salvation of the Jewish people from centuries of slavery under the Egyptian pharaohs: This was the creation and deliverance of an entire nation.

Such a seminal event in humanity’s history became the foundation for freedom and liberty – created many centuries before democracy was first enunciated by Greek philosophers who nevertheless lived within a polytheistic society.

Many people know in varying degrees the Passover story and the birth of the Jewish people and of their undying faith in the One and Only God; invisible and indivisible. Judaism has given the world monotheism in its purest and Editmost undiluted nature. The Unity of God is what Jews have defended against all who attempted to suggest a plurality: even to enduring martyrdom.

The long suffering Jews under Egyptian bondage were led to freedom by the Jewish prophet, Moses, who brought them to their own very special and promised Land of Israel. Moses spoke with God in Sinai and brought a wondrous divine gift to the Jewish people and through them to all humanity – the Decalogue; the Ten Commandments, and the basis of today’s laws of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization and jurisprudence. These ten brief commandments – a mere 120 Hebrew words – are written on the walls of synagogues and churches.

But, as in all Jewish practice, Moses was never deified. He was shown in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as a man; nothing else. Indeed in order not to deify him or exalt him over others he is shown in the Holy Bible with human failings and his burial place remains unknown.

He sought the mountain top and beheld the Promised Land of Israel, yet was never to enter. In fact, in the Torah Moses is described merely as “the humblest and meekest of all human beings.” For in Judaism, only God is divine and besides Him there are none other.

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is the first of the Jewish holidays and festivals, coinciding with the coming of the Spring in the Jewish people’s ancestral, biblical and native land: the land given by God in an everlasting Covenant to the Jewish people; a land extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and including Gilead (the possession of the tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben) east of the river, in the present day Arab state of Jordan.

The Passover festival precedes two other harvest festivals based upon the agricultural cycles of ancient and modern Israel. Next comes Shavuot, Pentecost, which records and commemorates the giving to Moses of the Ten Commandments followed by Succot, which is known as Tabernacles. Mankind was, and is, blessed through the Passover for it is a veritable gift to those who accept its divine message and perform the ritual meal, the Seder, recording the Exodus story.

But there is an evil in men’s hearts, and it is a profound evil, for those who hate and envy this Jewish gift to humanity and its message of freedom, liberty and foundational democracy. They have chosen since time immemorial to rise up to destroy all that it stands for and persecute those – the Jews – who received it from God and who have shared it with all humanity.

Let me recount what Mary Antin wrote in 1911 about the horrors inflicted upon the Jews in Russia as they celebrated the festival of liberty in the Exodus story during the festive Seder meal. Ms. Antin wrote of what routinely took place at Passover and of how Russian neighbors reminded the Jews that for them it was another Egypt:

“… in Russian cities and even more in country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered, the stupid peasants would hear lies about the Jews, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill their Jewish neighbors.

The Israel-Palestinian Peace Process Has Been a Massive Charade So long as Palestinian rejectionism runs rampant, debates about one-, two-, and three-state solutions are for naught. Daniel Pipes

Daniel Polisar of Shalem College in Jerusalem shook the debate over Palestinian-Israeli relations in November 2015 with his essay, “What Do Palestinians Want?” In it, having studied 330 polls to “understand the perspective of everyday Palestinians” toward Israel, Israelis, Jews, and the utility of violence against them, he found that Palestinian attackers are “venerated” by their society—with all that that implies. https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/04/the-israel-palestinian-peace-process-has-been-a-massive-charade/

He’s done it again with “Do Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution?” This time, he pored over some 400 opinion polls of Palestinian views to find consistency among seemingly contradictory evidence on the topic of ways to resolve the conflict with Israel. From this confusing bulk, Polisar convincingly establishes that Palestinians collectively hold three related views of Israel: it has no historical or moral claim to exist, it is inherently rapacious and expansionist, and it is doomed to extinction. In combination, these attitudes explain and justify the widespread Palestinian demand for a state from “the river to the sea,” the grand Palestine of their maps that erases Israel.

With this analysis, Polisar has elegantly dissected the phenomenon that I call Palestinian rejectionism. That’s the policy first implemented by the monstrous mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, in 1921 and consistently followed over the next near-century. Rejectionism demands that Palestinians (and beyond them, Arabs and Muslims) repudiate every aspect of Zionism: deny Jewish ties to the land of Israel, fight Jewish ownership of that land, refuse to recognize Jewish political power, refuse to trade with Zionists, murder Zionists where possible, and ally with any foreign power, including Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, to eradicate Zionism.

The continuities are striking. All major Palestinian leaders—Amin al-Husseini, Ahmad al-Shukeiri, Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Yahya Sinwar (the new leader of Hamas in Gaza)—have made eliminating the Zionist presence their only goal. Yes, for tactical reasons, they occasionally compromised, most notably in the Oslo Accords of 1993, but then they reversed these exceptions as soon as possible.

In other words, the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” that began in 1989 has been a massive charade. As Israelis earnestly debated making “painful concessions,” their Palestinian counterparts issued promises they had had no intention of fulfilling, something Arafathad the gall publicly to signal to his constituency even as he signed the Oslo Accords, and many times subsequently.

So longas rejectionism runs rampant, debates about one-, two-, and three-state solutions, about carving up the Temple Mount into dual sovereign areas, or about electricity grids and water supplies, are for naught. There can be no resolution so long as most Palestinians dream of obliterating the Jewish state. Indeed, this makes negotiations counterproductive. The Oslo Accords and other signed pieces of paper have made matters much worse. The farce of negotiations, therefore, needs urgently to end.

Palestinians Exploiting Children to Fight Israel Where is the international outrage? Noah Beck

Originally written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

The new Palestinian curriculum for grades 1 to 4 “is significantly more radical than previous curricula,” concludes a new study by Hebrew University’s Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se). It “teaches students to be martyrs, demonizes and denies the existence of Israel, and focuses on a ‘return’ to an exclusively Palestinian homeland.”

In response to pressure from President Trump, Israel reportedly is preparing a series of concessions to Palestinians in a bid to re-launch peace talks. Trump may want to consider pressuring the Palestinians for parallel gestures, including correcting educational policies that are antithetical to peace.

Indeed, the IMPACT-se study warns that the “educational system has created a Palestinian nationalism that absolutely rejects the Other and is therefore incompatible with Israel’s existence.” Even more alarming, the report notes that the “Struggle against Israel and its disappearance is the main theme,” and “The 1974 PLO’s Phased Plan for the conquest of the Land of Israel/Palestine is taught. The curriculum reflects a strategy of violence and pressure in place of peaceful negotiations.”

The “Palestinian school curricula are inspected by the international donors who finance the Palestinian Authority and, by extension, its public education system,” the Times of Israel reported.

That includes huge investment from Britain, the Daily Mail reported, money that goes “into Palestinian schools named after mass murderers and Islamist militants, which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models.”

Incredibly, European countries pressure Israel to freeze settlement growth and take other steps towards peace, while funding pro-war messages targeted at future generations of Palestinians.

Islam is not used as a radical political tool in grades 1–4, but the educational message “includes biases towards non-Muslims,” the IMPACT-se study says. And, in grades 11-12, “Religion is clearly abused…to foment hate amid calls for eternal war in the Levant.”

The Palestinian curriculum of violence and hate highlighted by the IMPACT-se study is just one of the many ways in which Palestinian leaders have forced their violent agendas onto children.

David Singer: European Union Declares Diplomatic War on Israel

Ambassadors to Israel representing 28 European Union States (EU) behaved most undiplomatically in ambushing the recently appointed Director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former Ambassador to Australia – Yuval Rotem – at a meet and greet function Rotem had organised at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv last week.

Instead of the pleasant banter over drinks and canapes usually associated with such events on the diplomatic cocktail circuit the function erupted into an explosive EU protest against Israel’s plans to evict Arab squatters from 42 structures that had been illegally erected between Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem at the strategically narrowest point in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) known as E1.

Lars Faarburg-Andersen – the EU Ambassador to Israel – took the opportunity to read out to Rotem the following one-page document which had been approved by the EU political-security committee – in which all 28 member states are represented.This gauche and uncivilised behaviour was certainly uncalled for and not conduct that one would ever expect to come from refined and cultured Europeans.

Reading this carefully-crafted statement at the function was a cavalier action aggravating the already strained relationship between the EU and Israel following the EU’s introduction on 11 November 2015 of labelling requirements for goods produced in Judea and Samaria entering Europe.

The statement revealingly exposes the hypocrisy of the EU for the following reasons:

1. It was presented as a “demarche” – a diplomatic or official initiative – a protest normally delivered through diplomatic channels – not at a cocktail function.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Told-You-So Moment The Israeli leader could be opportunistic and vulgar in pressing his case against the Iran deal. He was also right. By Sohrab Ahmari

Benjamin Netanyahu will never be popular in America’s major newsrooms. Or among most of the think-tankers who set the tone and parameters of foreign-policy debate. His name is a curse on college campuses. So it’s worth asking whose vision of the Middle East has held up better under the press of recent events.

His or theirs?

The question comes to mind as Western governments confront this week’s chemical atrocity in Syria, and as footage of children’s bodies convulsing in agony once more unsettles the world’s conscience. Even President Trump, who generally lacks a moral language, was moved, though whether he will act remains to be seen.

His predecessor had a rich moral vocabulary and a coterie of award-winning moralizers like Samantha Power on staff. But President Obama refused to act when Bashar Assad crossed his chemical red line. He wanted to extricate Washington from the region, and he saw a nuclear deal with Mr. Assad’s Iranian patrons as the exit ramp.

Such a deal came within grasp when Hassan Rouhani launched his presidential campaign in Iran four years ago this month. The smiling, self-proclaimed “moderate” was the Iranian interlocutor the Obamaians had been waiting for. Mr. Netanyahu posed the main obstacle.

The Israeli prime minister warned that Mr. Rouhani didn’t have the power to moderate the regime even if he had the will. He reminded the world of Mr. Rouhani’s role in Iran’s repressive apparatus and his history of anti-American rhetoric. He insisted that Iranian regional aggression wouldn’t relent if sanctions were removed. Iran, he predicted, would pocket the financial concessions, then press ahead in Syria and elsewhere.

The Israeli could be opportunistic, given to hyperbole and not a little vulgar in pressing his case. He was also right.

It’s instructive now to compare his account of the regime with the baseless euphoria in the Western media that greeted Mr. Rouhani’s election in June 2013 and marked coverage of the nuclear deal over the next four years.

Start with Iran’s role in Syria. Writing in September 2013, the New York Times editorial board suggested that Iran’s intentions “could be tested by inviting its new government to join the United States and Russia in carrying out the recent agreement to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons. It seems like a natural convergence: Iranians know well the scourge of poison gas.”

Well, apparently they didn’t know the scourge well enough to restrain their chief Arab client from systematically gassing his own people, even after the Russian-brokered chemical deal. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s Push for Mideast Deal Perplexes Israeli Right Many in ruling coalition, and West Bank settlers, are content with the way things are By Yaroslav Trofimov

BEIT EL, West Bank—President Donald Trump’s interest in solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem is running into a stubborn fact: Much of Israel’s governing coalition is pretty happy with the status quo.

The Israeli economy is booming. Jewish population growth has nearly caught up with Palestinian birthrates. And the level of violence remains at historic lows. The wars ravaging the wider Middle East, meanwhile, have distracted regional attention from the Palestinians’ predicament and have even pushed countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia toward more cooperation with Israel.

To many Israeli voters who have repeatedly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and particularly to the influential lobby representing more than 400,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, this means there is little reason to fix what they see as working just fine.
“There is nothing more sustainable than the current situation that has already existed for 50 years and that is getting better all the time,” said retired Brig. Gen. Effie Eitam, Israel’s former minister of national infrastructure and housing who now runs a private intelligence company in Jerusalem.

That’s why Mr. Trump’s ambition to resolve the intractable dispute—a solution that would likely require Israel to accept Palestinian statehood and give up most of the territory it has occupied since 1967—has confounded Israel’s right-wing coalition just months after it celebrated the U.S. election as divine deliverance from international pressure.

“They’ve been surprised. They’re a bit uneasy,” said Daniel Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel until January and is now a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Arab Boy on the Israeli Tennis Team Sports can change the world—as they did my life—by helping us see each other differently By Fahoum Fahoum see note please

Are there any Jewish players on teams in any Moslem/Arab nation ? Sounds nice and lofty but the only team sport Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIs know is team Jihad…..rsk
Mr. Fahoum is a graduate of Columbia University’s master’s program in negotiation and conflict resolution.

Tennis changed my life. Growing up as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, I struggled with an identity crisis, feeling caught between two worlds. But when I was 8, I started playing tennis in Haifa. Eventually I became the first Arab Muslim on the Israeli junior national team, representing the country in European and world championships.

This was a personal success. More important, though, it gave me a platform for building bonds with Jewish youth. The tennis court was an island where everyone felt like they belonged. My teammates and I embraced the same identity. I built trust with my doubles partner and the people on the other side of the net, too.

Once my parents realized the sport’s potential to bring people together, they established the Coexistence Program at the Israel Tennis Center in Haifa. It introduced young Arabs and Jews to the game, while transforming on-court partnerships into off-court friendships. The program, which began in 2001 with around 10 children, now operates nationwide with hundreds of participants.

When I was growing up, Israeli high schools and colleges did not have organized sports. But Americans know well the power of sports, as I learned when I came to Quinnipiac University in Connecticut on a tennis scholarship. Even though my teammates and I came from different corners of the world, we were all Bobcats. Social psychologists have a name for this phenomenon of a shared, complex identity. They call it a “superordinate identity.”

Playing sports can help reframe a conflict. It builds the groundwork for cooperation by putting teammates in the same boat. To paraphrase the late Morton Deutsch, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, this creates a positive interdependence: If you swim, I swim, and if you sink, I sink. It galvanizes people to do what is best for the team. If another player is in a better position to score than you are, you will pass the ball.

Sports recognizes no language barriers. Drop a soccer ball into a group of kids in Israel, South Africa or Ireland, and watch what happens. There will be no need for an introduction, let alone an explanation of the rules. Instead players communicate using their bodies within an established system of rules that makes them “speak” soccer fluently. Just as sports altered my path, it has the power to change the world.

That’s why the United Nations has declared April 6 the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. Athletics can provide entertainment and exercise, yes, but also so much more. It can be used as a tool for tackling social issues—fighting obesity, empowering women, integrating refugees or promoting peace. Sports are more than mere games. They’re essential to the healthy transformation of society.

Intellectual Whiplash on Israel By Lawrence J. Haas

The same administration that’s defending Israel in refreshingly bold fashion at the United Nations is discussing Israeli-Palestinian peace this week with a Palestinian leader who promotes the murder and kidnapping of Israelis and who spent 15 years in prison for throwing a grenade at an Israeli Army truck.

The invitation to Jibril Rajoub, secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, to speak with U.S. officials is just the latest reason why, with regard to the administration, Israel-backers are suffering from a kind of intellectual whiplash – with positive developments followed by distressing ones, fueling an anxious uncertainty.

The embrace of Rajoub raises profound questions as to whether President Donald Trump has a coherent policy toward Israel or, as seems more likely, disjointed policies are emerging from competing power centers across the administration that view Israel and the U.S.-Israeli alliance in profoundly different ways.

Israel backers were enthused by Trump’s vow to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and his appointment of hardliner David Friedman as his ambassador, and they were thrilled by the efforts of Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to challenge anti-Israel orthodoxy at Turtle Bay. Her recent full-throated challenge to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel left them overwhelmed.

At the same time, Israel backers were dismayed by Trump’s failure to mention Jews on International Holocaust Remembrance Day as well as his focus on Israeli settlements as a key obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Now, they’re undoubtedly outraged that he’s legitimizing Rajoub as a potential partner for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“The U.S. government does not endorse every statement Mr. Rajoub has made, but he has long been involved in Middle East peace efforts, and has publicly supported a peaceful, non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a State Department spokesman told The Washington Free Beacon. “We continue to press Fatah officials, including Rajoub himself, to refrain from any statements or actions that could be viewed as inciting or legitimizing others’ use of violence.”

That, to put it bluntly, is absurd. Rajoub is no peace activist who just needs to tone down his rhetoric. He’s a hardcore Israel rejectionist who honors “martyrs,” promotes murder and kidnapping, and envisions a Palestine that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing Israel in the process.

Rasmea’s exit, stage left by Ruthie Blum

Convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh received a standing ovation this weekend in Chicago from ‎an enthusiastic crowd at the national conference of the organization Jewish Voice for Peace.‎

Luckily for Odeh — who took part in the bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969, which killed ‎Hebrew University students Leon Kanner and Eddie Joffe — the Jewish state that she and her radical leftist ‎buddies in the U.S. Jewish community would see eradicated let her out of jail as part of a prisoner ‎exchange. Still, she has expressed no gratitude to the liberal society that set her free in 1980, or to the ‎one that has enabled her since then to roam around freely, spewing her vitriol and inciting violence. ‎On the contrary, the proud member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who feels no ‎remorse for the innocent boys she killed, also defied the country that took her in as in immigrant — ‎concealing her terrorist past in order to enter the United States.‎

Not only that. Last month, Odeh’s three-year battle with the U.S. government, which was sparked by ‎her being convicted of immigration fraud, came to a happy end with a plea bargain according to which ‎she would be stripped of her American citizenship and deported, but serve no jail time. ‎

The Rasmea Defense Committee, a vocal group of avid supporters, had the nerve to respond to this ‎piece of luck and ill-deserved generosity by saying that her decision to accept the deal was difficult, ‎but it was the best she could hope for under the “current racist political climate” of President Donald ‎Trump, in which her “prospects for a fair trial are slimmer than ever.”‎

It is bad enough that Odeh spent only 10 years in an Israeli prison. Worse still that she is getting off the ‎hook for her subsequent crime. But the fact that she has been elevated to some kind of sainthood, ‎lauded by feminist, black and other self-described human rights activists is as shocking as it is ‎shameful.‎

To add insult to injury, Jewish Voice for Peace pressured the management of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, ‎the venue rented for the hate-filled conference, not to allow a pro-Israel group to rent a separate ‎room in which to hold a memorial service for Odeh’s victims. This is a classic case of what renowned ‎law professor Alan Dershowitz calls “free speech for me and not for thee.”‎

Yes, as long as Jewish Voice for Peace and its non-Jewish counterparts — such as Students for Justice in ‎Palestine and Black Lives Matter, which use it as a cover for their anti-Semitism — have the microphone, ‎anything goes. Even glorifying cold-blooded murder. But when an organization like StandWithUs wants ‎to present an opposing viewpoint, any underhanded tactics to prevent it from doing so are kosher.‎

The Fight for Zion By Asaf Romirowsky

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Fifty years after the Six Day War, the American Jewish community is sharply fragmented, with many Jews grappling with where Zionism fits into their Jewish identity. As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement grows in popularity and attracts more Jewish advocates, the gap is growing even wider between American Jewry and Israel.

For American Jews, Zionism has become a source of debate, controversy, embarrassment, and guilt as they try to come to terms with the activities of the Jewish state and its elected officials. Consequently, many seek to detach themselves from what used to embody the core of Jewish identity. A case in point is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a pro-BDS Jewish group that uses its “Jewishness” to validate its cause.

While JVP’s desire to persuade the Israeli government to change its policies is legitimate, the growing strength of the BDS movement at large makes the demise of the two-state solution ever more likely. JVP’s executive director, Rebecca Vilkomerson, is notorious for her hard leftist views, as illustrated in her Washington Post op-ed entitled “I’m Jewish, and I want people to boycott Israel.” So strong is JVP’s antipathy to Israel that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called it “the largest and most influential Jewish anti-Zionist group” in the US.

Yet the true essence of Zionism lies in its ability to encapsulate both religious and secular Jewish identities. The current challenge is to identify the component of renewal. The Zionist enterprise did not end with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Each generation must redefine Zionism as it is relevant to them.

Theodor Herzl famously wrote in his diary, “Were I to sum up the [1897] Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly – it would be this: ‘At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.’”

The difference between Herzl’s generation and post-1948 generations was a first-hand understanding of what the absence of a Jewish state means for Jewish survival. The state represents the difference between autonomy and servility, indeed between life and death. But today’s millennial generation has no memory of a time when Israel did not exist or was ever on the “right side of history.”

Given the wedge that has been pushed between Zionism and Judaism, one might even suggest that were Herzl to raise the question of a Jewish homeland today, he might not receive support. The irony is that what initially led Zionist leaders to bond over the idea of a homeland was the growing threat of antisemitism. Today, even as antisemitism is on the rise around the world, anti-Zionism is often viewed as legitimate criticism.

Abba Eban dispelled this notion eloquently, stating, “There is no difference whatever between antisemitism and the denial of Israel’s statehood. Classical antisemitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination.”