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ISRAEL

Is Israel a Military Superpower? By: Yaakov Katz (Video)

Israel is an exceptional nation, and this is certainly true when it comes to the Israeli military. Tested by war, heroic in its self-defense, Israel is leading the way in developing the most advanced weapons technologies and re-imagining the new realities of the modern battlefield in an ever-changing Middle East. In an important new book—The Weapon Wizards: How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower— Jerusalem Post Editor Yaakov Katz tells this story from the front lines of Israeli military innovation and with the analytical eye of a master journalist. He brings us into the fascinating world of Israeli weapons development—from drones to satellites, missile defense systems to cyber warfare—and he looks beyond the technology to consider what Israel’s edge means for its larger geopolitical strategy.

On February 6, 2017, Mr. Katz joined an exclusive audience at the Tikvah Fund for a fascinating exploration of how Israel became a military superpower, and what this means for the future of the Jewish state. He also discussed some of the major developments in current Israeli politics and world affairs, offering his insight as one of Israel’s veteran journalists and keenest analysts.

Press play below to listen to the talk, which can also be downloaded in the iTunes Store or streamed via Stitcher.

No Obama ‘Legacy’ on Israel By Dan Calic

Donald Trump has been president for just over five weeks. Yet on many fronts there is little doubt a new era has been birthed. One of the most obvious is relations with Israel compared to the previous eight years under Barack Obama.

From the beginning of the Obama administration he was determined to put the U.S. on a different path with regard to the Muslim world. Indeed, the first foreign leader he called was Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. Obama even made a point of telling Abbas his was the first call to a foreign leader, emphasizing his intent to signal a new direction for the U.S.

Obama furthered his effort at a new direction by making his first international speech in Cairo. During his speech he lamented about how the Palestinians suffer “humiliation under occupation,” and criticized Israel for building “settlements.”

Plus, throughout his two terms, it was clear Obama did not like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Right up to the bitter end, the Obama administration went out much as it began, with a slap at Israel. The final kick in the stomach was UN resolution 2334, which singled out Israel’s construction of settlements as the main obstacle to peace. Not a word was mentioned about ongoing Palestinian terrorism and murder of innocent Israeli civilians. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the U.S. has veto power and could have killed the resolution. However, knowing this would be his last opportunity to make a statement against Israel, Obama directed the U.S. to abstain from the voting, thus allowing it to pass.

Contrast this against the early stages of the Trump administration. Throughout his campaign he made it clear that the U.S. had treated its closest Middle East ally terribly. Since Trump has taken office, the difference can only be described as startling.

For example, he has called the Iran nuclear deal “the worst deal ever negotiated,” and has already imposed new sanctions on Iran.

His Secretary of State Rex Tillerson criticized former Secretary of State John Kerry for how he handled Israeli-Palestinian issues. “Israel is, always has been, and remains our most important ally in the region” according to Tillerson. He characterized UN resolution 2334 as an effort to “coerce” Israel to change course, further stating, “that will not bring a solution.”

Not “Your” City—”Everyone’s” City How the Met, in its exhibition Jerusalem 1000-1400 and in its defense against critics of that exhibition, exploits the vocabulary of openness. Edward Rothstein

Last fall, the art historian Victoria C. Gardner Coates published an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that the utopian multicultural paradise imagined by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heavenwas being used to promote a particular political position concerning the status of today’s Jerusalem. The exhibition functioned, in her words, “as a highbrow gloss on the movement to define Jerusalem as anything but Jewish, and so to undermine Israel’s sovereignty.”https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/03/not-your-city-everyones-city/

Coates’s article provoked a letter to the editor from Thomas P. Campbell, the Metropolitan’s director and chief executive officer (until his sudden resignation in late February). Objecting to Coates’s “extraordinarily narrow perspective,” Campbell assured readers of the Journal that, far from engaging in an anti-Israel “conspiracy”—his word, not hers—the museum’s purpose in mounting this “unprecedented gathering of masterpieces from the three Abrahamic faiths” was simply to “reveal the richly intertwined nature of these various aesthetic traditions at a fascinating moment in Jerusalem’s history.”

“If anyone has chosen to politicize the exhibition,” Campbell concluded, “it is Ms. Coates.”

I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Campbell’s belief in the innocence of his museum’s exhibition, a belief shared by almost all reviewers. On certain subjects, when historical facts and their implications threaten to disrupt one’s more heavenly and comforting visions, the tendentious aspects of such visions simply become invisible: beyond notice, and certainly beyond argument. All the more reason, then, for me to thank the three respondents to my essay—Robert Irwin, Steven Fine, and Maureen Mullarkey—for making even more palpable the weighty historical facts that prove the illusion, or delusion, in Thomas Campbell’s blithe conception of that “fascinating moment in Jerusalem’s history.”

The Met was intent on showing medieval Jerusalem to be, in Irwin’s words, “the capital of a culturally vibrant La La Land,” and no counter-evidence—abundant examples of which are provided by Irwin in his learned and lively response—was permitted to get in the way. Moreover, just as the show’s positive vision of a medieval paradise was open to serious question, so too was its vision of the age’s stock villains; Mullarkey’s acute points about the show’s notion of the singular evil of the Crusades and of Christian rule in the Holy Land provide fodder for a much more extended inquiry.

Perhaps most surprising is how thoroughly the Met ended up distorting not just a proper historical perspective but a proper aesthetic perspective as well. Given how few artifacts in the show were actually from Jerusalem, and given that fewer still could even remotely be considered “masterpieces” (Campbell’s inflated term), the Met cannot be said to have demonstrated, on its own terms, how great cultural glories arose out of this presumed multi-faith experiment in convivencia.

Political Operatives Pose as Journalists, Human Rights Groups by Bassam Tawil

The same activists and organizations were silent when the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces arrested al-Qiq and harassed his family. Amnesty International neglected to mention that al-Qiq has also been targeted by PA security forces and that, in addition to his work as a newsman, he is also affiliated with Hamas. This detail, according to Amnesty, is evidently not significant.

When arrested, such political operatives posing as journalists — and so-called human rights groups, and the mainstream media in the West — get to scream about Israel assaulting freedom of the media. This dirty little game has been played by Palestinian and Western journalists and highly politicized, biased human rights groups for years.

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), which is headed by Nasser Abu Baker, did not come out in support of journalist, Sami al-Sai when he was arrested (and tortured) for 20 days in the PA’s notorious Jericho Central Prison. Nor did Amnesty or most human rights organizations come out in defense of al-Sai.

Instead of calling on the PA leadership to release their detained colleague, Abu Baker and the PJS heads issued a statement in which they justified his arrest and defended the PA against charges of torturing him.

Nasser Abu Baker himself is affiliated with the PA’s ruling Fatah faction. Recently, the AFP correspondent even ran (and lost) in the election for Fatah’s Revolutionary Council.

While AFP has been reporting about the detention by Israel of al-Qiq, it has conspicuously failed to report about the plight of al-Sai and his serious charges of torture in PA prison. So a journalist arrested by the PA is not worth a story in an international media outlet, while anyone arrested by Israel gets wide coverage.

Now it is official: double standards, racism, and political activism are an integral part of the modern media.

Two Palestinian journalists are arrested — one by Israel and the other by the Palestinian Authority (PA). The name of the one arrested by Israel is Muhammad al-Qiq. The name of the one arrested by the PA security forces is Sami al-Sai.

Although he is registered as a journalist, al-Qiq was arrested for security-related offenses completely unrelated to his profession. Israel did not arrest him because of his reporting or his writing, but because of his activities on behalf of Hamas. As a student at Bir Zeit University in 2006, al-Qiq was already known to be affiliated with Hamas. He was a member of the Islamic Bloc — a student list belonging to Hamas.

Al-Qiq’s affiliation with Hamas even got him into trouble with the Palestinian Authority; its forces arrested and interrogated him several times in the past few years. The last time his family received a visit from PA security officers was in 2014. Then, officers in plainclothes seized al-Qiq’s laptop and personal documents.

Now, al-Qiq is in Israeli detention, where he has gone on hunger strike in protest against his arrest.

Guess who is campaigning on his behalf and demanding that Israel immediately and unconditionally release him from detention? The same PA that repeatedly arrested and harassed al-Qiq over the past few years.

In addition, human rights organizations and activists have endorsed the case and are now using it to attack Israel. These are the same activists and organizations that were silent when the PA security forces arrested al-Qiq and harassed his family.

One of these organizations is Amnesty International, which issued a statement last week calling on Israel to release the detained “journalist.” Amnesty neglected to mention that al-Qiq has also been targeted by the PA security forces and that, in addition to his work as a newsman, he is also affiliated with Hamas. This detail, according to Amnesty, is evidently not significant.

End the UNRWA Farce As president, Trump should defund the agency perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem. Sol Stern

After President Obama greased the wheels for the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlements policy, President-elect Trump tweeted that “things will be different after January 20th.” I didn’t vote for Trump, but for the sake of restoring some sanity to America’s Middle East policies, I fervently hope he fulfills that promise.

To make a real difference, our next president needs to understand how the United Nations’ hostility to the Jewish state is rooted in perverse institutions that have been abetted by previous U.S. administrations. The most glaring example of this is the inaptly named United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). With its $1.3 billion budget (30 percent of which comes from U.S. taxpayers), this agency actually perpetuates the refugee problem it was created to solve, while promoting Palestinian rejectionism and Jew hatred. Trump will soon have the means to drain the UNRWA swamp. If he does so, he would increase the chances of peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

The United Nations created UNRWA with the noblest of intentions. By the time an armistice agreement ended the first Arab-Israeli war in 1949, roughly 700, 000 Palestinians had fled (or were driven) from the territories governed by the new state of Israel. The prevailing view at the time was that refugee problems produced by war were best solved through resettlement in the countries to which the refugees had fled. In the aftermath of World War II, 7 million ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe were the victims of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns approved by the victorious allied powers. On the Indian subcontinent another 3 million people were uprooted in the violent creation of India and Pakistan. These destitute refugees had to make do in their new host countries with virtually no outside aid. Yet, within a decade, there was no longer a refugee problem in Europe or Asia to trouble the international community.

Unfortunately, the surrounding Arab countries that launched a war of conquest against the Jewish State—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq—refused to accept any responsibility for the welfare of their Palestinian brothers who were the big losers in the conflict. That’s when the U.N.—led by the United States—generously stepped in. The 1949 General Assembly resolution establishing UNRWA called for “the alleviation of the conditions of starvation and distress among the Palestine refugees.” Yet the resolution also stated that “constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief.” In other words, the new refugee agency’s mission was to be temporary, pending a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict.

Flash forward 66 years. The original 700,000 Palestinians leaving Israel have now been magically transformed into a mini-state of 5.6 million “refugees” registered with UNRWA, about half of all the Palestinians living in the world today. The “temporary” U.N. agency has been transformed into a bloated international bureaucracy with a staff of 30,000, almost all of whom are Palestinian refugees themselves (many are activists of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist group).

Less than 5 percent of UNRWA’s clients ever lived in Israel, but the agency’s regulations state that all patrilineal descendants of the original displaced persons shall retain their refugee rights in perpetuity. Nor does UNRWA seem to be troubled by the fact that 40 percent of its camp residents are citizens of Jordan and Lebanon, and shouldn’t even be considered refugees under accepted international law and practice.

The unchecked growth of UNRWA is a classic case in international politics of the economic principle of “moral hazard.” By providing a social welfare safety net, the U.N. enables the Palestinian leadership to undermine efforts to solve the underlying conditions that created the refugee problem in the first place. Palestinian rejectionism is thus rendered risk-free. In turn, UNRWA nurtures Palestinian extremism, yet never is held accountable by the agency’s donor nations, including the United States.

Rewriting History at the Met The Metropolitan Museum’s Jerusalem 1000-1400 masked centuries of struggle for power and survival in the Holy Land—and effaced both the presence and the subjugation of its Jews.

Edward Rothstein’s incisive discussion of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven confirms my own impressions of the show, about which I wrote in a piece for the Federalist. Here I want to make even more emphatic Rothstein’s grasp of the issue at stake in an exhibition whose overall tendentiousness began at the starting gate.https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/02/rewriting-history-at-the-met/

An outsized projection of the Dome of the Rock commanded the exhibit’s entrance hall, eclipsing an ensemble of smaller images of other sites. Built at the end of the 7th century in the appropriated style of a Byzantine martyrium, the Dome, then as now, stood as an architectural symbol of Islamic ascendancy.

Starting from that point, and threaded throughout the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, was further evidence of this assertion of privilege. The museum’s pageant of artifacts, undeniably beautiful, no doubt accounted for the rapturous and almost universal applause that greeted the exhibition. But the Met, after all, has been in show business since its former director Thomas Hoving made the mummies dance 40 years ago, and spectacles are its meat and potatoes. In this case, the aesthetic dimension was in the service of a tutorial.

In the Metropolitan Museum’s telling, medieval Jerusalem was a light to the nations, a showcase of interfaith comity and a multicultural Arcadia that flourished under the open-minded tolerance of Islamic domination. (And by the way, the cuisine was first-rate.) Here was Islamic rule selectively cleansed of its imperialism, brutality, absolutism, and institutionalized subjection of non-Muslims. Shariah with its barbaric punishments disappeared. Gone were the humiliations and burdens of dhimmitude. Gone, too, the debased status of women and the slave market extant in every city of the medieval Islamic world.

To squeeze this dormouse into a teapot, the show’s curators, Barbara Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, separated “culture” from its wellsprings in politics. As they write in the catalogue:

Suppose we set aside political history as a means to define cultural history so that we could better explore the variety, richness, interconnectivity of the city, its people, and its arts?

The word interconnectivity signals the curatorial effort to mask what were centuries of struggle for power and civilizational survival—by persecuted Christians under Islam, and by perennially endangered Jews under both Christians and Muslims. All of this was subordinated to a softened, idealized, and anachronistic picture of Islamic order. Catalogue entries recount the past in terms of modern sensibilities, with a narrative that cherry-picks vignettes of atypical elites—poets and scholars on “the flourishing academic scene”—to portray the Holy City as a shrine to interethnic inclusion and “fluid religious identity.” Muslim rulers are depicted as pluralists, and Islamic Jerusalem as offering a striking contrast to “Venice, Rome, Paris—none of [which] tolerated the same degree of religious diversity.” Playing underneath is a revisionist historical subtext: Christians and, especially, Jews hold no greater historical claim to Jerusalem than do Muslims, and may hold a weaker one.

Crucial factual omissions presume an historically insensitive audience. The wall blurbs opened with this: “Beginning about the year 1000, Jerusalem captivated the world’s attention as never before.” True, but omitted was the reason: in 1009-10, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the demolition of all synagogues and churches in Palestine, Egypt, and Syria, including Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Decades later, following centuries of Islamic assault on what was then Christian territory, the city’s tattered condition supplied one of the final triggers leading to the Crusades.

The show’s continuing tutorial portrayed Christian Crusaders as unprovoked aggressors who conquered and claimed, while Muslims would later reclaim and retake. That reversal conforms to the tropes of our culture, eliciting assent from the many who identify the totality of the Crusades with unsanctioned—and often anti-Semitic—excesses in a cruel and bloody age. In fact, however, the Crusades, like the reconquista in Spain, began in response to Muslim invasion and subjugation.

The exhibition’s drumbeat of phrases like “Christian warriors” and “Crusader occupation” also played on ignorance of the fact that the Crusades, among the most misunderstood events in Western history, were unsuccessful—and thus, consequently, irrelevant to Muslims until the collapse of the Ottoman empire. As the historian Thomas Madden has written:

[T]he Crusades were virtually unknown in the Muslim world even a century ago. The term for the Crusades, harb al-salib, was only introduced into the Arab language in the mid-19th century. The first Arabic history of the Crusades was not written until 1899. . . . In the grand sweep of Islamic history, the Crusades simply did not matter.

They did not matter, that is, until they became useful to 20th-century Islamists and Arab nationalists who shared a desire to rid the Middle East of “colonialist” European powers. But whatever else they might have been, the Crusader kingdoms themselves were not colonial ventures. Unconnected to any foreign state, they were embattled enclaves within the Muslim world. Today they have been resurrected as weapons with which to bludgeon Israel and the West.

Hamas Terror Double Game Backfires as Fighters Defect to Islamic State in Sinai By Patrick Poole

The Hamas terrorists in control of the Gaza Strip now find themselves between a rock and a hard place, as the double game that they’ve played with the Islamic State affiliate in the Sinai has backfired.

Hundreds of Hamas’ trained Qassam Brigade fighters have reportedly defected to ISIS in the Sinai. Meanwhile, an attempted rapprochement with Egypt in recent weeks also appears to be breaking down, as the Islamic State is reportedly setting Hamas up for a war with Israel that Hamas is most likely not prepared to fight.

As I reported here at PJ Media back in June, Hamas — fashioned by some in the Washington, D.C. foreign policy “smart set” as supposedly “moderate” compared to ISIS — had in fact been actively cooperating with the Islamic State:Among the Hamas/ISIS points of cooperation: smuggling arms through the tunnels controlled by Hamas from Gaza into the Sinai; assistance in weapons and explosives training; and treating injured Islamic State fighters:

Remembering “Operation Wedding,” the Event That Kick-Started the Movement to Free Soviet Jewry Dore Feith

In June 1970, fourteen Soviet Jews tried to steal an airplane to fly themselves to freedom. A new documentary marks their story—and Natan Sharansky reminisces.

In June 1970, fourteen Soviet Jews who had been refused permission to emigrate tried to steal an airplane to fly themselves to freedom in the West. Led by Edouard Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits, the group had spent months plotting their move.

The hijackers, claiming to be traveling together to a wedding—hence “Operation Wedding,” the name of their scheme—had bought all the seats on the small aircraft to ensure there would be no one but themselves on board. They intended to subdue the pilots non-lethally and leave them on the side of the runway, having provided sleeping bags to keep them warm until rescued. Dymshits, a former Red Army pilot, would fly the plane.

When they arrived at the small airstrip outside of Leningrad, KGB agents were waiting to arrest them.

The sensational news spread throughout the Soviet Union, reported first by Voice of America and then by Pravda. Some Soviet Jews reacted with dread; others felt proud and emboldened. At the time, Jews in the Soviet Union numbered approximately 2.5 million. Religious practice was restricted, the teaching of Hebrew was banned, and Zionism was branded a subversive ideology. Small groups of Jews were meeting in secret to preserve what remained of their religious and national identity. Although many had begun to apply for exit visas—at risk of losing their jobs or even their friends—most were denied. The Soviet government strictly curtailed emigration in general, and by 1970 had barred Jews altogether from leaving for Israel.

The trials of the would-be hijackers were closed, although activists did what they could to follow the proceedings. Dymshits and Kuznetsov, the ringleaders, were sentenced to death. But the international outcry—protest marches were held in Paris, London, and New York, and other forms of pressure were brought to bear as well—the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev commuted their sentences to fifteen years apiece.

Yesterday,Operation Wedding, a documentary about the hijacking directed by Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov (the daughter of Kuznetsov and Sylva Zalmanson, another participant in the plot) received its New York premiere at Columbia University. In anticipation of the screening, which was arranged by my student organization, I recently interviewed Natan Sharansky, who at the time of the hijacking had been a twenty-two-year-old mathematics student in Moscow. I was curious about his recollections of this incident, which would launch his own career as the world’s most famous Soviet Jewish dissident and later “prisoner of Zion.” We spoke in Jerusalem, where since 2009 he has served as chairman of the Jewish Agency.

The thwarted hijacking, Sharansky tells me, influenced him more profoundly than any other event apart from the Six-Day War of 1967. He had been unaware of the underground Zionist movement that developed in Riga and Leningrad in the 1960s, so the deeds of Kuznetsov and his co-conspirators were his first indication that some Jews were actually fighting for any opportunity to leave for Israel and willing to take extreme risks in the attempt. His reaction, he says, was typical of countless other Soviet Jews dreaming of emigration and afraid of saying so. In a society where anyone could be a KGB informant, no reasonable person could be expected to take a chance of speaking out.

How Flower Songs Help Fight The Grief Of War By Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman, a Canadian author and journalist, was raised in Toronto and now lives and writes in Jerusalem.

Have you seen the red, shouting for miles around?
Once there was a field of blood here, and now a field of poppies. …
Have you seen the white? Child, it’s a field of weeping
The tears have turned to stones, the stones have cried flowers

That fragment comes from a Hebrew song that became famous in 1971. It’s part of the secular canon of works known here in Israel as “memorial songs,” sung at military funerals and played on the radio on the country’s Remembrance Day.

I learned the song “There Are Flowers” not long after I arrived at a kibbutz in northern Israel from Toronto at age 17. The kibbutz kids discovered I could play guitar, and I was pressed into service to accompany a group of them in a rendition of “There Are Flowers” at a memorial ceremony.

I didn’t think much about it at the time, but later I became a soldier myself, and then a writer, and I’ve spent the past few years writing a book about war and pondering the way we talk about it. People engaged in conflict need to develop a language of grief.

People engaged in conflict need to develop a language of grief.

Religion has traditionally offered one, but in Israel’s early years people weren’t looking for the old mourning rituals that Judaism had to offer. Neither were they particularly interested in warlike language — “warriors,” “glory,” and so forth.

They turned instead to the natural world.

In “There Are Flowers,” the narrator admonishes a child not to pluck the flowers, whose lives are so brief to begin with. In Hebrew, “plucked flowers” is a term sometimes used for fallen soldiers, cut down before their time.

The song was written by the Israeli poet Natan Yonatan. Two years after it became popular, his own son, Lior, died in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Palestinians: Why a “Regional Peace Process” Will Fail by Khaled Abu Toameh

Many Palestinians sometimes refer to Arab leaders and regimes as the “real enemies” of the Palestinians. They would rather have France, Sweden, Norway and Belgium oversee a peace process with Israel than any of the Arab countries.

Hani al-Masr, a prominent Palestinian political analyst, echoed this skepticism. He, in fact, believes the Arabs want to help Israel “liquidate” the Palestinian cause.

The Jordanians are worried that a “regional solution” would promote the idea of replacing the Hashemite kingdom with a Palestinian state. Former Jordanian Minister of Information Saleh al-Qallab denounced the talk of a “regional conference” as a “poisonous gift and conspiracy” against Jordan and the Palestinians.

The Lebanese have for decades dreamed of the day they could rid themselves of the Palestinian refugee camps and their inhabitants, who have long been subjected to apartheid and discriminatory laws.

Israel as a Jewish state is anathema to Palestinian aspirations. Any Arab or Palestinian leader who promotes such compromise is taking his life in his hands. And Palestinian history will record him as a “traitor” who sold out to the Jews and surrendered to American and Israeli pressure.

Abbas and his Ramallah cohorts are already up at night worrying about the talking between Israel and some Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Such “normalization”, in the view of the PA, is to be reserved for after Israel submits to its demands.

Any “regional solution” involving Arab countries would be doomed to fail because the Palestinians and their Arab brethren hate each other. Any solution offered by the Arab governments will always be regarded as an “American-Zionist dictate.”