#the matter with Gaza right now is not the same old Palestinian and Israeli conflict. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sylvielauffeydottir · 3 years

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Hello, it is I, your friendly neighborhood historian. I am ready to lose followers for this post, but I have two masters degrees in history and one of my focuses has been middle eastern area studies. Furthermore, I’ve been tired of watching the world be reduced to pithy little infographics, and I believe there is no point to my education if I don’t put it to good use. Finally, I am ethnically Asheknazi Jewish. This does not color my opinion in this post — I am in support of either a one or two state solution for Israel and Palestine, depending on the factors determined by the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli Government does not speak for me. I hate Netanyahu. A lot. With that said, my family was slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have stood in front of that memorial wall at the Holocaust memorial in DC for my great uncle Simon and my great uncle Louis and cried as I lit a candle. Louis was a rabbi, and he preached mitzvot and tolerance. He died anyway.

There’s a great many things I want to say about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but let’s start with some facts.

In early May, there were talks of a coalition government that might have put together (among other parties, the Knesset is absolutely gigantic and usually has about 11-13 political parties at once) the Yesh Atid, a center-left party, and the United Arab List, a Palestinian party. For the first time, Palestinians would have been members of the Israeli government in their own right. And what happened, all of the sudden? A war broke out. A war that, amazingly, seemed to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal prosecution, despite the fact that he has been under investigation for corruption for some time now and the only thing that is stopping a real investigation is the fact that he is Prime Minister.

Funny how that happened.

There’s a second thing people ought to know, and it is about Hamas. I’ve found it really disturbing to see people defending Hamas on a world stage because, whether or not people want to believe it, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I’m sorry, but it is. Those are the facts. I’m not being a right wing extremist or even a Republican or whatever else or want to lob at me here. I’m a liberal historian with some facts. They are a terrorist organization, and they don’t care if their people die.

Here’s what you need to know:

There are two governments for the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In April 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed planned elections. He said it was because of a dispute amid Israeli-annexed East Jerusalum. He is 85 years old, and his Fatah Party is losing power to Hamas. Everyone knows that. Palestinians know that.

Here’s the thing about Hamas: they might be terrorists, but aren’t idiots. They understand that they have a frustrated population filled with people who have been brutalized by their neighbors. And they also understand that Israel has something called the iron dome defense system, which means that if you throw a rocket at it, it probably won’t kill anyone (though there have been people in Israel who died, including Holocaust survivors). Israel will, however, retaliate, and when they do, they will kill Palestinian civilians. On a world stage, this looks horrible. The death toll, because Palestinians don’t have the same defense system, is always skewed. Should the Israeli government do that? No. It’s morally repugnant. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. It’s hurting people without the capability to defend themselves. But is Hamas counting on them to for the propaganda? Yeah. Absolutely. They’re literally willing to kill their other people for it.

You know why this works for Hamas? They know that Israel will respond anyway, despite the moral concerns. And if you’re curious why, you can read some books on the matter (Six Days of War by Michael Oren; The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich; Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergmen; Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt; and Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis). The TL;DR, if you aren’t interested in homework, is that Israel believes they have no choice but to defend themselves against what they consider ‘hostile powers.’ And it’s almost entirely to do with the Holocaust. It’s a little David v Goliath. It is, dare I say, complicated.

I’m barely scratching the surface here.

(We won’t get into this in this post, though if you want to DM me for details, it might be worth knowing that Iran funds Hamas and basically supplies them with all of their weapons, and part of the reason the United States has been so reluctant to engage with this conflict is that Iran is currently in Vienna trying to restore its nuclear deal with western powers. The USA cannot afford to piss off Iran right now, and therefore cannot afford to aggravative Hamas and also needs to rely on Israel to destroy Irani nuclear facilities if the deal goes south. So, you know, there is that).

There are some people who will tell you that criticism of the Israel government is antisemitic. They are almost entirely members of the right wing, evangelical community, and they don’t speak for the Jewish community. The majority of Jewish people and Jewish Americans in particular are criticizing the Israeli government right now. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel support Palestinian rights and are speaking out about it. And actually, when they talk about it, they are putting themselves in great danger to do so. Because it really isn’t safe to be visibly Jewish right now. People may not want to listen to Jews when they speak about antisemitism or may want to believe that antisemitism ‘isn’t real’ because ‘the Holocaust is over’ but that is absolutely untrue. In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States reached a high we have never seen before. I remember that, because I was living in London, and I was super scared for my family at the time. Since then, that number has increased by nearly 400% in the last ten days. If you don’t believe me, have some articles about it (one, two, three, four, and five, to name a few).

I live in New York City, where a man was beaten in Time Square while attending a Free Palestine rally and wearing a kippah. I’m sorry, but being visibly Jewish near a pro-Palestine rally? That was enough to have a bunch of people just start beating on him? I made a previous post detailing how there are Jews being attacked all over the world, and there is a very good timeline of recent hate crimes against Jews that you can find right here. These are Jews, by the way, who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. They are Americans or Europeans or Canadians who are living their lives. In some cases, they are at pro-Palestine rallies and they are trying to help, but they just look visibly Jewish. God Forbid we are the wrong ethnicity for your rally, even if we agree.

This is really serious. There are people calling for the death of all Jews. There are people calling for another Holocaust.

There are 14 million Jews in the world. 14 million. Of 7.6 billion. And you think it isn’t a problem the way people treat us?

Anyway (aside from, you know, compassion), why does this matter? This matters because stuff like this deters Jews who want to be part of the pro-Palestine movement because they are literally scared for their safety. I said this before, and I will say it again: Zionism was, historically speaking, a very unpopular opinion. It was only widespread antisemitic violence (you know, the Holocaust) that made Jews believe there was a necessity for a Jewish state. Honestly, it wasn’t until the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that I supported it the abstract idea too.

I grew up in New York City, I am a liberal Jew, and I believe in the rights of marginalized and oppressed people to self-determine worldwide. Growing up, I also fit the profile of what many scholars describe as the self hating Jew, because I believed that, in order to justify myself in American liberal society, I had to hate Israel, and I had to be anti-Zionist by default, even if I didn’t always understand what ‘Zionism’ meant in abstract. Well, I am 27 years old now with two masters degrees in history, and here is what Zionism means to me: I hate the Israeli government. They do not speak for me. But I am not anti-Zionist. I believe in the necessity for a Jewish state — a state where all Jews are welcome, regardless of their background, regardless of their nationality.

There needs to be a place where Jews, an ethnic minority who are unwelcome in nearly every state in the world, have a place where they are free from persecution — a place where they feel protected. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that place being the place where Jews are ethnically indigenous to. Because believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. I’ve addressed this in this post.

With that said, that doesn’t mean you can kick the Palestinian people out. They are also indigenous to that land, which is addressed in the same post, if you don’t trust me.

What is incredible to me is that Zionism is defined, by the Oxford English Dixtionary, as “A movement [that called originally for] the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and [since 1948] the development of the State of Israel.” Whether we agree with this or not, there were early disagreements about the location of a ‘Jewish state,’ and some, like Maurice de Hirsch, believed it ought to be located in South America, for example. Others believed it should be located in Africa. The point is that the original plans for the Jewish state were about safety. The plan changed because Jews wanted to return to their homeland, the largest project of decolonization and indigenous reclamation ever to be undertaken by an indigenous group. Whether you want to hear that or not, it is true. Read a book or two. Then you might know what I mean.

When people say this is a complicated issue, they aren’t being facetious. They aren’t trying to obfuscate the point. They often aren’t even trying to defend the Israeli government, because I certainly am not — I think they are abhorrent. But there is no future in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians don’t form a state that has an equal right of return and recognizes both of their indigenousness, and that will never happen if people can’t stop throwing vitriolic rhetoric around. Is the Israeli Government bad? Yes. Are Israeli citizens bad? Largely, no. They want to defend their families, and they want to defend their people. This is basically the same as the fact that Palestinian people aren’t bad, though Hamas often is. And for the love of god, stop defending terrorist organizations. Just stop. They kill their own people for their own power and for their own benefit.

And yes, one more time, the Israeli government is so, so, so wrong. But god, think about your words, and think about how you are enabling Nazis. The rhetoric the left is using is hurting Jews. I am afraid to leave my house. I’m afraid to identify as Jewish on tumblr. I’m afraid for my family, afraid for my friends. People I know are afraid for me.

It’s 2021. I am not my great uncle. I cried for him, but I shouldn’t have to die like him.

Words have consequences. Language has consequences. And genuinely, I do not think everyone is a bad person, so think about what you are putting into the world, because you’d be surprised how often you are doing a Nazi a favor or two.

Is that really what you want? To do a Nazi a favor or two? I don’t think that you do. I hope you don’t, at least.

That’s all. You know, five thousand words later. But uh, think a little. Please.

#jumblr #free palestine #zionism #gaza #signal boost #antisemitism #jew tag

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nickyhemmick · 3 years

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A Very Stressed American Jew here again,

Hi! Thank you for taking the time to respond to my ask and yes, I’m someone who loves hearing as many perspectives as possible so I’d love some sources from you. I also very much appreciate the fact you are being very careful to only reblog posts that are anti Israel, not antisemetic (which is frankly a breath of fresh air, the internet has been a bit exhaustingly full of both antisemitic & Islamaphobic content these past feel days as I bet you’ve seen)

I’ve also been to Israel on a Birthright trip. We met people who ( both Palestinian and Israeli) on various sides of the conflict and learned a ton about it, from both perspectives which I was lucky to have the opportunity to do. We even went a little into the Gaza Strip to talk to these people running a pro Palestine peace movement and it was so important to me hearing those stories.

I never said they were on equal footing militarily, they definitely are not, Israel definitely has that advantage. But you are incorrect about Israel always being the aggressor since 1948,they’ve defended themselves about as often as they’ve attacked. Isreal is a small country comparatively to the ones surrounding it, so it makes sense it defends itself heavily in case of an attack.

I 100% agree that there are too many people who are compliant with the mistreatment of many Palestinians! I’m not anti #freepalestine at all! I get why that is a thing. But I also stand with Israel( but that does not mean I condone every action they take. ) Overall I think the situation is extremely complicated and some sort of compromise should be reached.

It’s just been very frustrating to see so many people reblog things on a situation just bashing Israel because so many others are doing it. Especially when then don’t know what they are talking about or using big buzz words that they don’t know what they mean, or spreading misinformation. It’s been on both sides and has been very very draining. I just want peace and some sort of solution. It makes me extremely happy you know what you are talking about and can debate politely yet happily about it. The internet has been so ‘ either agree with me 100% or you a bad person’ about this so it’s refreshing to see you are not like that.

I’ve done a lot of research into it from as many perspectives as I can get my hands on.

Some extremest Israelis are hurting Palestinians

Some extremest Palestinians are hurting Israelis

Both sides are throwing rockets at each other and it’s terrifying.

Both sides claim the other side is brainwashed

There is so much biased propaganda out there on both ends it’s hard to know what is truly happening.

I know people living in Israel who have sent me videos they’ve taken of rockets flying over there heads and I’m so scared for them. I’m so scared for all the innocent people caught in the crossfire on both sides.

Thank you for a more nuanced response and I’d love some of your sources,

A Very Stressed American Jew

Hi anon,

I wasn’t going to respond to this until after my math final tomorrow but I’ve spent the past two days thinking of your ask and the things I wish to articulate in my answer.

I am going to start here: how can you say you support Israel but say you are also pro-free Palestine (as in, you said you are not anti free Palestine). In my opinion, these two ideas cannot coexist. Simply because, the entire establishment of Israel has been on violent, racist, colonial grounds.

(Super long post under here guys)

You said you don’t support all Israel’s actions, and definitely, just because you support something doesn’t mean you can’t criticize it. However, in my opinion, if you do not support Israel’s actions against Palestinians there’s not much left to support? I admit this is a very biased view as I am Palestinian, but many things that people support about Israel have existed before its creation: as in, these are things and qualities that have existed in Judaism and are not due to “Israeli culture.” There is no Israeli culture. There’s Jewish culture--100%. But there is no Israeli culture, because Israel does not only steal Palestinian land, but Palestinian culture, too. Such as claiming Levant food is Israeli; hummus, ful, falafel, shawarma. I mentioned food from this article I know is culturally and traditionally of the Levant, and has been for centuries, it is not something that has come to culinary creation in the past 73 years.

I do not think this is a complicated issue. I said that in the previous ask and I’ll say that again. Saying it is a complicated issue is trivializing the deaths of innocent Palestinians, the violent dispossession our ancestors endured, and the apartheid they live under. I hope if anything comes from this discussion it is you removing the “it’s a complicated issue” phrase from your vernacular.

This is not complicated. A journalist reporting the death of martyrs only to discover that of them include two of his brothers is not complicated. The asymmetry of Israel vs Palestinian armed forces is not complicated, nor is the asymmetry in Israeli vs Palestinian suffering (which I will get to later). It is not complicated. Destroying the graves of martyred Palestinians (or just in general, the graves of the dead) is not complicated. Little children being pulled from the rubble, children being forced to comfort one another as they are covered in the ashes of their decimated homes, attacking unarmed citizens in peaceful demonstrations (you can find videos before this attack where they were playing with kites and balloons), destroying an international media office and refusing to allow journalists to retrieve the work they are spending every waking hour documenting but claiming it was because it was a hide out for a “Hamas base,” fathers who are trying to cheer their frightened children up only to end up dead the next day, while many Israeli have the privilege and the option to go to hotel-like bomb shelters is not complicated.

This brings me to my next point: the suffering of Palestinians cannot be compared to the inconvenience of Israeli’s. On one side, you have children who are happy to have saved their fish in the face of their homes and lives being decimated behind them to Israeli’s in Tel Aviv having to cut their beach day short to get to bomb shelters. You have mothers and fathers ready to set their lives down for their children to save them from bombs to Israeli’s enjoying their brunch only after making sure there are bomb shelters there. You have Palestinian children being murdered to blocking out the sound of sirens in the safety of your bomb shelters. (The first picture of the Palestinian child is not from footage of the recent problems). You have the baby lone survivor of a whole family recovered from rubble. His whole family, gone, before he ever had the chance to realize that he even exists, while Israeli’s decide to flee out of the country,(Translate the caption from Twitter, it checks out), or have to leave the shower due to sirens. Who is really suffering?

I won’t sit here and pretend like the thought of rockets flying over my head, no matter which side I am on, is not terrifying. It is. It’s scary to just think about. But Israeli’s have protection beyond Palestinian’s, they have sirens to warn them (Israel does not always warn Palestinian building members that it is about to be bombed), they have the Iron Dome, they have simply the threat of nuclear power (which I am not saying Israel would use, but the simple fact they have it would make me feel a lot better if I were an Israeli citizen) and they have bomb shelters. What do Palestinians have? Hamas? That smuggles its weapons through the ocean? That only ever reacts to the action Israel instigates? And yet Gazans are branded terrorists and that it is their fault that they “elected” a terrorist organization that only was ever created due to no protection from any armed country? (There are so many links I want to add in this paragraph but it is simply impossible for me to add everything I want, a lot of what I’m referring to can either be found through a Google search, or you can stalk my Twitter account, all that I am posting now is about Palestine, and will include sources of things I cannot add in just this one post.)

Look, I see myself in the genocide happening in Palestine right now. I see myself in this ten year-old girl. In this three year old girl. I see me and my family in videos of cars being attacked in Ramallah and Sheikh Jarrah (I cannot find the Ramallah video, should be somewhere on my Twitter), I see my father in the countless videos of fathers crying out for their children, of kissing the corpse of their loved ones (again, translate the Tweet, the man holding the body is saying “just one kiss”). I see my grandfather in videos like this (old footage). I see my younger brother, I see my grandmother, my mother, my aunts and uncles and cousins. I see myself and my life and my family were my father not lucky enough to get a scholarship to the UK and out of Palestine, were my maternal grandfather not been lucky enough to make it to a refugee camp and build a life in Jordan. I have an unbelievable amount of privilege to be born into the life I was born in to, in terms of I do not have the threat of bombs and violent dispossession around me, and I do not even live in the US. I have privilege and sheer luck that my parents were able to go to the US so that me and my brothers can be born, because now I have both the protection of the most powerful country in the world while at the same time being part of a people to have suffered so generously the past seventy-three years.

On the other hand, you saying that Israel has “defended themselves about as often as they’ve attacked. Israel is a small country comparatively to the ones surrounding it, so it makes sense it defends itself heavily in case of an attack,” I offer you this question: why are they using military grade guns and stun grenades in mosques to “defend” themselves from rocks? And before you mention that Hamas hit Tel Aviv, I remind you that Hamas did that due to the violence in the Al-Aqsa mosque square and the attempted ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah. The violence didn’t begin with us; the violence was brought out of Palestinians in resistance to the generations of oppression we have endured and the attack on Palestinian Muslims during the holiest night of Ramadan. Hamas has since asked for a ceasefire multiple times and Israel is refusing. New reports say there is a possibility of a ceasefire in the coming days, but Israel could have decided this a long time ago and spared many lives. (Remember, no matter what resistance we make, Israel is the one in power).

Israel has been the aggressor since 1948. Just read up about the Nakba! 700k Palestinian families were dispossessed violently. The only reason Israel was established at all was because it simply declared it was now a country and the US and many other countries recognized it as such. (Of course, there are many other historical details here, like the British Mandate of Palestine, the Balfour Declaration, the Oslo Accords and many others. I am aware of them but these are for a different post all together). My paternal grandfather was a little younger than me when Israel as a state was created. The hostility that followed was due to this independent declaration being listened to over Palestinian voices.

Here is a very, very simplified analogy, one that can also answer some people’s questions as to why Palestinians (not Arabs, we are Palestinian before we are Arab) did not like what happened in 1948 and why they refused a two-state solution (that Israel was never going to go through with anyway). (I am also aware other Arab nations got involved, and that is perhaps what you mean when you said they had to defend themselves, but my response to that would still be we didn't start it, that we only responded to it).

Let’s say you are a farmer. You have many fields of trees, ones you have taken shelter under from the sun since you were a child, or hid behind when you wanted to avoid your parents when you misbehaved. You have seen your trees grow from a seed, to a sprout, to a flower, to a large, beautiful tree with fruits the size of a fist. You pluck the fruits from one tree, and make a jam from it. I don’t know how to make jam but I know it takes a lot of energy. So, you make this jam and from it, produce a lovely, mouth-watering pie. Once it has cooled from the oven, you take it with you outside your balcony just so that you can admire the years, months, weeks and hours this one pie has taken to be created. Suddenly, a stranger walks past and yells to you, “That pie looks delicious, I want it!” And you, shocked at their boldness but ready to share, say, “I will give you a bite.” But the stranger says, “No! I do not want a bite or a slice or whatever you want to offer me, I want the pie!” And they grab it from you. You and the stranger start screaming at one another about who the pie is for, who is allowed to decide what happens to it, and who you can share it with. Then, another stranger comes by and says, “Why all the problems? Let’s cut the pie in half and the both of you can share it!” But why should you, who has spent years cultivating the fruit and grain inside this pie, share it? Why should you give up half of the 100% that you already owned? Of what you already had? So you disagree, and now a crowd has formed around you. “What’s the problem?” someone in the crowd calls. “They don’t want to share their pie!” another voice says. Then you become branded a selfish, mean bastard. Again, this is a super simplified analogy, so don’t take it too seriously, but I am trying to show you why Israel is the aggressor.

In addition, I do not know too much about the Birthright program, just that American Jewish people are sent to Israel, all expenses paid. I tried my best to find the Twitter thread but I read it so long ago, about an American Jewish person who went on their trip and they talked about the propaganda that they were exposed to on that trip. I can’t say for sure that it is true, because I haven’t been on it and never will, but that is the first thing I thought of when you mentioned your Birthright trip. Either way, I think it is still great you went and saw the country. However, I must ask you this: are the people you met ones you, yourself, sought out, or ones you were organized to meet?

Now, I haven’t been to Gaza, so I don’t know what you really saw or didn’t, but did you speak to Palestinians who lost their homes to airstrikes? Did you speak to siblings, parents or children of loved ones who had been lost beneath the rubble of buildings and towers? Outside of Gaza, did you speak to Palestinians that live in poor quarters? Ones who have been victims of an IDF soldier shooting them, or who have family members who have died from such attacks? Did they take you guys to Ramallah, to Nablus, to Beit-Imreen, to Jenin, to small villages in the West Bank, far away from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? Did you speak to people there? Ask them their stories? Because if you did I have a very hard time believing you still think Israel is “defending” itself.

I’ve been to Jerusalem, many times, even Tel Aviv and Jaffa and Haifa. All the times I visited Dome of the Rock there were IDF soldiers with huge guns strapped to their person, standing menacingly outside the courtyard. For what? Genuinely, genuinely for what? It is nothing but an intimidation tactic. The same way we are not allowed in through the airport. If you could see the struggle some Palestinians actually go through just to get into Palestine, through the land border, you would be disgusted. I love Palestine, it is my ancestry land, it is my culture and tradition. But I always hated going to visit because I knew the way to getting there would be hell.

My father worked in Tel Aviv through the first Intifada. My maternal grandfather was forced out of his home in the Nakba and was forced to leave behind his belongings and the orange trees that have been in his family for generations. Hell, the town they lived in was destroyed! It doesn’t exist anymore except in the memories of my aunts and uncles, who never even saw it, but just heard of it from their father!

I’m not saying there aren’t Palestinians who are racist and anti-Semitic (though, tbh, I will direct you here for that) and who support Hamas in killing Israeli’s, but talking about how there are many “extremist” Palestinians who are hurting Israeli’s and in the next line say there are extremist Israeli’s who are hurting Palestinians is not correct. There are extremist Israeli’s killing, lynching, stealing the houses of Palestinians, and there are Palestinians who are fed up and fighting back. (I am not talking about Hamas vs the IDF here, I am talking about the citizens). I have not seen one reported death of an Israeli due to Palestinian violence (if you have, from a trusted source, send it to me), but I have seen countless of the other way around. I have seen images of charred little bodies, of a baby being dug out of the rubble, of a child’s body that had been so mutilated that you can literally see the insides of their body coming out. (I don’t know if it’s on my Twitter, I didn’t want to save that shit). If this was my country I would be absolutely ashamed of myself and my people and what they are doing in the name of my protection. So you have to forgive me, and forgive other Palestinians, who don’t give a fuck about Israeli’s having anxiety over rockets flying over their heads when we see these images. Where is the protection of our kids? Why does no one seem to mention them except when mentioning the poor, innocent ones in Israel? At least more than the majority of them have their parents to comfort and rock them. At least many of them will probably be saved of ever having to be beneath the rubble of a destroyed building, or digging in it, to hope to find the parts of their parents or siblings just so that they can bury them. Just the links from the start of my answer is enough to support what I am saying.

I have soooo much more I can say, like how Israel uses religion to distort the image of what’s going on (tbh, just check my Twitter for that: language is EVERYTHING), but you didn’t mention religion in any of this and so I won’t either. The only reason I decided to respond to you in such length was because you have been one of the few respectful anons in my inbox in the past few years of me being on here talking about Israel, so I appreciate that from you.

As promised, some more sources: decolonizepalestine is a good place to start if you haven’t used it already, it has reading materials, myth busting, and more. Here is a map list of destroyed localities from pre-1948 until 2017, run by two anti-Zionist Israelis. Here and here are the articles I promised of a former IDF soldier-turned Palestinian activist, I read these two last year in June and remember coming out much more informed than before I read them. I suggest looking into the writer and his organization, which, if I remember correctly, collects accounts from previous IDF soldiers. I would suggest not to follow Israel and the IDF accounts on any platform, or any Israel times newspaper, simply because they will not tell you the truth. In fairness, you do not have to follow any Palestinian Authority accounts (which I am not even sure there are), but to follow on-ground Palestinians like Mohammed El-Kurd, who has been speaking out since he was 12 (he is now 22) and he is part of the families in Sheikh Jarrah. I have noticed that this and this account have been translating Arabic headlines and tweets for non-Arabic speakers, I have just started following this person but their bio says they are a Palestinian Jewish person so I am interested in their view of things. You can also follow Israeli’s on-ground and see their perspective on things, but I would also advise to compare the Palestinian and Israeli side of things from the people, and critically analyze the language used in each case. Also, this article references Jewish scholars opposed to the occupation (I have not looked into them myself but I plan to after my exams), and Norman Finklestein is another great Jewish scholar to look into if you haven’t. Twitter is better than Instagram and Facebook, so I would stick to getting live-info from there, Twitter does not censor Palestinian content as much as Insta and Facebook so you’re more likely to see things there.

I will end this by saying I personally do not see any other option for peace than to give Palestinians our land back. Whether we may be Muslim, Jewish or Christian, it has always been and will always be our land. I only hope to see it free in my lifetime.

Free Palestine.

#palestine #israel #west bank #tala gets asks #anon #whew this ask took me like 2-3 hours to respond to #pls read it even if ure not the anon #lots of good links and info #palestine tag #anon there are more reading lists in my #to read #and palestine tag tags #check my likes on twitter too if u decide btw not just what i retweet #like also: imagine palestinians around palestine and the world who are simply waiting to hear if their relatives are dead or alive or #have been striked from a rocket. like i can see my father worried abt his friend in gaza rn like any day #now he can just never hear back from him and have to guess hes dead somewhere beneath the rubble #and israelis are anxious at the rocket sounds? good for them but again that shows the asymmetry in #palestinian vs israeli suffering #and by ‘good for them’ i mean good that thats what theyre worried abt compared to palestinians #my aunt is in sheikh jarrah #my cousin lives right by the al aqsa square #again theres so much more i couldve mentioned and talked abt but theres just so much #theres so many LAYERS i wld say but not that its complicated #and definitely theres more i need to learn and read and watch dont get me wrong! i am not a fountain of knowledge by all means!!!!

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girlactionfigure · 3 years

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· The world, as we know it, has officially lost it.

Hillel Fuld

Black is white, white is black. Right is wrong, wrong is right. Day is night, night is day.

It is truly unreal to see all the hate for Israel on the internet. It’s not unreal that so many people hate Jews. We’re used to that. It’s also not unreal that so many people side with the Arabs who don’t have to stick to the truth, and therefore have much better PR than us, since our side doesn’t lie.

What is unreal is the amount of misinformation and straight up lies that are circulating on the internet. I’m not only talking about this latest “Round” of fighting. I’m talking in general.

The first and most obvious lie being spread by people who are critical of Israel is that it’s not a fair fight. I’m talking about major celebrities and talk show hosts who are spreading this poison to their audience of millions.

“There are many more casualties on the ‘Palestinian’ side. Israel is much stronger so it has to show restraint”

So let me get this straight. If there were more dead Jews, then you’d be ok with Israel defending herself but since we developed incredible technology to detonate rockets in mid air, since only a few Jews have been killed, we aren’t allowed to defend ourselves? Do you even hear what you’re saying?! You need more dead Jews first before you grant us the right to self defense?!

Furthermore, show me one other war/conflict in which the number of casualties determines the validity of the war. Was WWII justified? Did Germany not lose many many more lives than those who attacked them in order to uproot the evil of the Nazi regime? I’ll go one step further. Do you have any idea how many innocent Germans were killed in WWII? Does that make the war unjustified?

“No, they weren’t innocent. They elected Hitler to lead them. They deserved to suffer the consequences.”

So if a nation elects a psychopathic regime to lead them, attacking them to uproot the evil is justified? See where I’m going with this?

The Arabs in Gaza democratically elected Hamas, a terror organization to lead them. Need I say more?

Ok, next lie. “The Palestinians deserve the right to self determination. They deserve a state. Until they have one, they won’t stop.”

Ok, let’s dissect. Can you guess how many times the Arabs had a chance to have a state? One? No. Two? Nope. Three? Negative. Four?! Keep going. Five? That is correct. They had five chances and they rejected them all. Why, you ask?

How about because they don’t want a state?! Have you ever reviewed the charter of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)?

“Article 2 of the Charter states that ″Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit″, meaning that there is no place for a Jewish state.”

They don’t want a state. They say it loud and clear. They want no Israel. It’s time we took their word.

The irony here is actually humorous. The very same people who support the Arab’s cause are the very same people who treat the Arabs like little children who can’t think for themselves. “They say from the river to the sea? Na, they don’t mean it!” They are embracing terror as their primary vehicle to advance their cause? Well, they’re suffering so what choice do they have? How can you blame them?”

Um, how about act like an adult and stop stoning your feet and crying like a little toddler? I mean there are many under privileged people out there. There are many poor people, sick people, sad people. Do any of them blow themselves up or shoot rockets at women and children? Somehow with these Arabs it’s ok, because they’re “Suffering”.

Of course the fact that their suffering has anything to do with their terror is another lie. Ari’s 17 year old murderer came from an affluent and finally stable family.

The next lie being spread is that Israel is indiscriminately killing women and children. See, when you are blinded by hatred, facts don’t matter.

Israel is doing significantly more than ANY other army in the world to minimize innocent Arab deaths. The issue is that our enemies are literally setting up their terror headquarters in hospitals! They are literally making women and children stand next to them as they fire rockets into Israel. So yes, there are many innocent casualties on their side. Whose fault is that? Exhibit A: Hamas.

Let’s just address one more lie, even though there are about 20 more lies being told right now on the internet. If you have another historical fabrication that you want addressed, feel free to comment below and I’ll try to address it.

So one more lie. “Israel stole land from the Palestinians. They have to give back those stolen homes.”

Words matter and calling them Palestinians when that term was literally made up by the terrorist, Yasser Arafat, is inaccurate and not helpful. They are Arabs.

So about that lie. We occupied the Palestinian state, stole their homes, and killed their children.

When? Serious question. When? In my history book, the UN gave us and them a state in 1948. They didn’t accept and attacked us. We whipped their tuchuses.

So when did we occupy the so-called Arab Palestinian state?

Don’t bother Googling because it’s a huge global lie. There never was an Arab Palestinian state. Ever. Those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians? Please go ahead and ask them when their Palestinian state was established. Please ask them to tell you ANYTHING about this so-called state we occupied.

News flash: You can’t occupy your own land.

I feel like I just scratched the surface here and there are so many more lies being circulated right now on the internet.

I guess I’ll just say one more thing. Jews value life. We believe all humans were created in the image of GD. We sanctify life and do everything we can to defend and preserve it. Do you have any idea how much every iron dome missile costs us?

Each battery of the Iron Dome costs about $100 million. And each individual missile? $50,000. But for us, Human life > All the money in the world!

Our enemies? They glorify death. While we build highly advanced technology to deflect rockets in real time, they use the billions they got from the US, the EU, and yes, even from Israel (Because we are idiots and compassionate to those who deserve no compassion!) to build highly advanced attack tunnels that start in Gaza and end in Jewish towns. They don’t plan on using these tunnels to deliver candy to Israeli kids. And of course, much of that foreign aid money goes to building those tens of thousands of rockets raining down on our heads.

Golda Meir famously said “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

Truer words have never been spoken.

What other lies are there?

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anjaniedringhaus · 3 years

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Fatima Shbair wins the Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award

Brazilian and Iranian-Canadian women photographers also recognized

[September 29, 2021 – WASHINGTON, DC] – Today, the International Women’s Media Foundation presented Palestinian freelance photojournalist Fatima Shbair with the seventh annual Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award. Since 2015, the international award has honored women photojournalists who take risks to capture humanity in dire circumstances, illuminating underreported and sometimes silenced stories. The prestigious award was created in honor of German Associated Press photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2014.

Shbair’s portfolio rose above more than 100 applications that represented women photojournalists from more than 40 countries. At 24 years old, Shbair is the youngest winner of the ‘Anja Award’ to-date and is a self-taught, freelance photojournalist. Her portfolio, “11 Days of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” includes unique moments of tension, violence, devastation, and hope all captured from Gaza City in May 2021.

“Life here is different, and I had to find a way to [show] what was happening,” says Shbair from Gaza. “Despite successive wars and tragedies, people here dig deep in search of hope, and their lives matter – it’s my responsibility to convey their voices to the world.” Shbair continued: “Anja’s work gives us the determination to continue on the path despite the difficulties. I can’t find the words to describe how honored I feel to receive this award.”

The IWMF also recognized two other women photojournalists with honorable mentions in the competition: Brazilian photojournalist Adriana Zehbrauskas, currently working in Phoenix, Arizona, and Iranian-Canadian photographer Kiana Hayeri, who is based in Kabul, Afghanistan. Zehbrauskas’ portfolio included energetic yet sensitive portrayals of migration and the toll of COVID-19 in Latin America, while Hayeri’s work spotlighted the rising conflict and looming crisis in Afghanistan from an alternative perspective.

“Within the past two years so many communities worldwide have been pushed to the brink in order to survive,” says the IWMF’s Executive Director Elisa Lees Muñoz. “Anja’s focus on resilience, hope and the intimate struggles people face in times of crisis is a legacy we turn to now more than ever. The IWMF is thrilled to recognize this year’s winner, Fatima Shbair, as well as Kiana Hayeri and Adriana Zehbrauskas in Anja’s name.”

This year’s jury included Corinne Dufka, Jacqueline Larma, Robert Nickelsberg, Tara Pixley, and Bernadette Tuazon. Together, the committee issued the following statement on this year’s Anja Award selection: “The portfolios from this year’s winner and honorees draw in the viewer and continue to grow with impact and intimacy. Each photojournalist demonstrated remarkable tenacity and developed clear and close bonds with her subject, accessing what few photographers can convey. We congratulate Fatima, Adriana and Kiana on their remarkable work; Anja would be proud to recognize each of you.”

Anja Niedringhaus was a recipient of the IWMF Courage in Journalism Award in 2005. The winner’s $20,000 prize is made possible by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Honorees’ images and captions, biographies and headshots are available for media use with proper attribution; to inquire further, please contact Charlotte Fox ([email protected]).

Courage in Photojournalism Award Winner

This year’s winner, Fatima Shbair, is a Palestinian freelance photojournalist from Gaza City.

After studying business administration for three years at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, Shbair switched to study journalism and began concentrating on photojournalism in 2019 through independent study and working in the field.

In 2020, Shbair began to receive assignments from several international agencies, including Getty Images and The New York Times, to cover her hometown as tensions continued between Israel and Palestine. Her assignments increased in 2021 but came with the challenge of working during a global pandemic, which also strained and ravaged her own community. Shbair is currently a contributor to Everyday Middle East and continues her work with Getty Images. Her work has been exhibited in Palestine, the UAE, London, and Paris.

As a women photojournalist, Shbair’s gender and line of work are challenged daily, due to the conservative nature of society in Gaza, and the prevenance of male photojournalists in the industry.

Juror Dufka noted, “Fatima’s stunning photo essay is one of the strongest entries the jury had the pleasure of reviewing these past several years. Her work with light, angles, and composition is remarkable as she weaves through a forest of destruction in her own backyard.”

Juror Larma continued, “She clearly spent a great deal of time with her subjects and pursued what’s beyond obvious for most photojournalists. Within these 11 days, Fatima took the time to pursue intimate storytelling, showing us both the physical and emotional toll on her subjects while operating in extreme danger.”

From Gaza, Shbair further remarked: “Courage is not just about taking risks; being human first is the true courage of a photojournalist. It is a great honor to receive this award, especially in Anja’s image, as we are all still learning from her creativity, journey, and pursuit of the truth.”

Twitter: @FatimaMshbair, Instagram: @fatimashbair

Courage in Photojournalism Honorees

Honoree Kiana Hayeri was born and partially raised in Iran and was first introduced to photography in high school after her family moved to Canada. Hayeri left Toronto during her final year of university and traveled to Afghanistan on assignment in 2013, where she’s remained.

In 2021, Hayeri received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her photographic series, “Where Prison is Kind of a Freedom,” documenting the lives of Afghan women in Herat Prison. In 2020, she received the Tim Hetherington Visionary award and was named as the 6th recipient of the James Foley Award for Conflict Reporting.

Hayeri was an IAAB fellow in 2011 and completed a CIS artist residency at MIT University in 2012. In 2014, she was named as one of the emerging photographers by PDN 30 Under 30. In 2016, she was selected for the IWMF’s cross-border reporting fellowship to work on her proposed story in Rwanda and DRC and was selected as the recipient of Chris Hondros Fund Award as an emerging photographer. In 2017, Hayeri received a grant from European Journalism Center to do a series of reporting on gender equality out of Afghanistan and received Stern Grant in 2018 to continue her work on the state of mental health among Afghan women.

Hayeri is a Senior TED fellow, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Harper’s Magazine, Washington Post, NPR, Monocle Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Marie Clare, Glamour, The Globe and Mail, Al Jazeera America, and CBC, among others.

When reviewing Hayeri’s portfolio, Tuazon noted that, “These images can only be captured by a woman with her specific access and lens. Every single day in this portfolio demonstrates unbelievable courage as the women and children she illuminates convey a harrowing narrative.”

Twitter: @kianahayeri, Instagram: @kianahayeri

Adriana Zehbrauskas is a Brazilian documentary photographer based in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work is largely focused on issues related to migration, religion, human rights, underrepresented communities, and the violence resulting from the drug trade in Mexico, Central and South America.

Zehbrauskas contributes regularly to The New York Times, UNICEF and BuzzFeed News and her work has been widely published in outlets such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Stern, Le Monde and El País, among others.

She is the recipient of a 2021 Maria Moors Cabot Prize, a New York Press Club Award in Feature-Science Medicine and Technology in the Newspaper category for the article “Zika’s Legacy: Catastrophic Consequences of a Continuing Crisis (NY-2018) and a POY International (2019). She was a finalist for the Premio Gabo (2018) and received two Honorable Mentions at the Julia Margaret Cameron Award (2018).

Zehbrauskas is one of the three photographers profiled in the documentary “Beyond Assignment” (USA, 2011, produced by The Knight Center for International Media and the University of Miami. She’s a recipient of the first Getty Images Instagram Grant and was awarded Best Female Photojournalist -Troféu Mulher Imprensa (Brazil). Her mobile photography work was selected by Time Magazine for the “29 Instagrams That Defined the World in 2014″ and her project on Faith in Brazil and Mexico was awarded an Art & Worship World Prize by the Niavaran Artistic Creation Foundation.

She’s an instructor with the International Center of Photography (ICP- NY), the World Press Photo Foundation, Gabriel García Márquez’s Fundación Gabo, the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop and serves as a jury member to dozens of grants and awards worldwide.

Commenting on Zehbrauskas’ portfolio, juror Pixley said, “The strength of her images is indicative of a lengthy time occupying difficult spaces despite both health and safety concerns. Her consistency across countries, issues and movements reveals the same, unique human connection.”

Twitter: @AZehbrauskas, Instagram: @adrianazehbrauskas

#awardwinner #iwmf #anjascourage

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jewish-privilege · 4 years

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set Wednesday [July 1, 2020] as the date when he might begin a process of unilaterally annexing sections of the West Bank — land that Palestinians see as illegally occupied and the heart of their future state.

It is more than 2,100 square miles that has been fiercely disputed through decades of failed diplomacy, and many international experts see the potential annexation as a death knell to the two-state solution. Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan after it came under attack during the 1967 war, and has since blanketed parts of it with settlements housing nearly 500,00 Israeli Jews. But under the Oslo Agreements of the mid-1990s, Israel and the Palestinian Authority divide governance in the area.

Netanyahu’s announced plan to formally exert Israeli sovereignty over the territory came after President Donald Trump in January unveiled his peace plan, including permission for Israel to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank. More recently, the White House has been sending mixed signals about its support for any such unilateral moves, nearly 200 pro-Israel members of Congress have signed a letter urging the Israeli government to reconsider.

...It remains unclear whether Netanyahu’s coalition will actually move forward, as defense and economic officials have been warning against annexation, citing the mayhem that could follow. The Palestinian leadership has promised to respond to even partial annexation by abandoning Oslo, forcing Israel to take direct responsibility for 2.7 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

...During this time of extreme uncertainty and anxiety, we asked six Palestinians to share their perspectives on this phase of the long-running conflict.

Mahmoud Hmedat, a civil engineer in the West Bank city of Jericho, does not like the term annexation. “It’s re-occupation, not annexation,” he said.

For Hmedat, who is 26, the uncertainty of the moment is hard to bear: “It’s like something totally unknown hurtling towards us.”

Most of all he’s worried. Worried about the economic fallout – will farmers around Jericho be able to get enough water? Worried about confiscation of Palestinian land.

Until Trump entered the White House, Hmedat said, he had held out hope that a two-state solution might being in reach. Now it seems like an impossible dream.

Whether a resolution comes in one-state or two-state form matters ultimately matters less to him at this point, he said, than what he calls “freedom for all people.”

“We want justice for everyone and by that I mean the Palestinians, the Israelis,” he said. “We need to offer everyone the same rules, the same services, the same conditions – that’s the only way peace will ever be possible.”

...Hamada Jaber, 37, who lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah and is the co-founder of the One State Foundation, sees opportunity in this moment. He is hoping the Palestinian leadership will adopt a new strategy and abandon the two-state solution in favor of one-state for two peoples, with equal rights for all.

...“Israel and now Trump is essentially telling everyone, there is no two-state solution,” he said.

“Netanyahu said even if he annexes areas where there are Palestinian inhabitants, we will not have any rights or citizenship in Israel. In my opinion this will create an officially kind of an apartheid state of Israel – an official one recognized by law as it exists as it is already.”

This is where the opportunity comes in, he argued, saying what should come next is that the Palestinian Authority dissolve. Jaber believes this would force Israel into an unflattering international spotlight of controlling Palestinians it does not enfranchise and force the hand of the only solution he sees as viable: one state for Jews and Palestinians.

“We live in it already — this one state reality, what we need to do is give equal rights to everyone,” he said. “That means the end of the Jewish state and the start of one democratic state with equal rights for all.”

How to make this palatable to Jewish Israelis? His answer: a strategy of non-violence in which the Palestinian Authority would not only stop governing parts of the West Bank but would also turn in all Palestinian weapons and send the message that Palestinians don’t want to fight or kill anyone, but do demand their rights.

...Husam Jaber works as a tour guide in the West Bank city of Bethlehem — or he did until the coronavirus hit. After months being out of work because tourism has vanish, Jaber, 49, sees annexation only adding to the economic hardship of the moment.

“People’s main concern is the economy, they want to live in peace and have money,” he said.

“I don’t think there is much I can do,” Jaber added, “and I feel sad, helpless that on both sides people are suffering. If there is violence, more people will suffer.”

Jaber is also angry with the Americans: “Americans OK’ing it does not make it legal,” he said of annexation. “What Israel is doing is illegal by all standards.”

He’s agnostic on the form a future solution should take.

“Identity is something constructed – I don’t think of nationality, I am more focused on whether or not my kids will have equal rights,” said Jaber, a father of four. “That’s better than having a nationality.”

...Ashraf al-Masri is a 45-year-old taxi driver in the Beit Hanoun neighborhood of the Gaza Strip whose three-story home was flattened during Israeli bombing raids in 2013. He said that he is still trying to hold onto the idea the Palestinians might have their own state alongside Israel, but that the increasingly real prospect of annexation is testing his resolve.

...“Palestinian land is the West Bank and Gaza, so if Israel takes the land of the West Bank, where does that leave us?” Al-Masri asked. “If Netanyahu does this, I only see war next, both in the West Bank and Gaza. From here in Gaza, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad will not let Israel steal the land for nothing.”

Palestinians like himself, in Gaza, will pay an economic price as well, Al-Masri fears. If the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, dissolves itself the aftermath of annexation as President Mahmoud Abbas has promised, that would mean halting payments to workers and institutions in Gaza. If that happens, he worries that Hamas, the Islamist faction that rules Gaza, would be unable to pay thousands of people’s salaries and the economy, which is already in dire straits, could completely crash.

..As mayor of al Aqaba, a town in the Jordan Valley, Sami Sadiq, 63, has a lot to lose if Netanyahu pushes ahead with annexation: his part of the West Bank is among the most likely to be annexed at some point.

“If Netanyahu wants peace – why is he doing this? Where are the Palestinian people supposed to go?” asked Sadiq, 63, whose family has lived in the small village for generations. “We want peace.”

He said he has been in a wheelchair since 1971 when, as a 16-year-old, he was struck by three bullets shot by Israeli soldiers training nearby.

“I don’t know what the future will be if Netanyahu constantly refuses to go towards peace,” he added, pointing to the guest house in his village, and explaining that he is always urging Israelis to visit — usually without luck.

“They say they are afraid,” he said. “But you can’t have peace if you don’t know each other.”

#ip conflict #anti palestinian racism #jewish self determination #palestinian self determination #long post

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weyassinebentalb · 3 years

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Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country.

Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.

Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.

In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.

Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.

“It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.”

Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic.

The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.”

“I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said.

Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance.

She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.”

In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.”

But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.

At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.”

“The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.”

Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.

“They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”

In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts.

“The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”

Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox.

Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said.

Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.”

Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.

And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%.

In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians.

“That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said.

The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly.

Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening.

“I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”

Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home.

She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”

Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.techno-90.com/2021/05/gaza-conflict-stokes-identity-crisis.html

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Fire Season Comes Early To California (CNN) Fire weather is coming early to California this year. For the first time since 2014, parts of Northern California are seeing a May “red flag” fire warning due to dry and windy conditions. The warning coverage area extends from Redding in the north to Modesto in the south, and includes portions of the Central Valley and the state capital of Sacramento. The warning also extends to the eastern edges of the Bay Area. A brush fire that started Friday in Pacific Palisades flared up Saturday due to gusty winds, burning more than 1,300 acres and threatening homes in Topanga Canyon. Topanga State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains is about 20 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The Palisades fire caused about 1,000 people to be evacuated from their homes early Sunday, with other residents on standby to leave.

Pandemic Refugees at the Border (NYT) The Biden administration continues to grapple with swelling numbers of migrants along the southwestern border. Most of them are from Central America, fleeing gang violence and natural disasters. But the past few months have also brought a much different wave of migration that the Biden administration was not prepared to address: pandemic refugees. They are people arriving in ever greater numbers from far-flung countries where the coronavirus has caused unimaginable levels of illness and death and decimated economies and livelihoods. If eking out an existence was challenging in such countries before, in many of them it has now become almost impossible. According to official data released this week, 30 percent of all families encountered along the border in April hailed from countries other than Mexico and the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared to just 7.5 percent in April 2019, during the last border surge. The coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, erasing hundreds of millions of jobs. And it has disproportionately affected developing countries, where it could set back decades of progress, according to economists. About 13,000 migrants have landed in Italy, the gateway to Europe, so far this year, three times as many as in the same period last year. At the U.S.-Mexico border in recent months, agents have stopped people from more than 160 countries, and the geography coincides with the path of the virus’s worst devastation.

The U.S. conversation on Israel is changing, no matter Biden’s stance (Washington Post) In Washington, support for the Palestinian plight is getting louder in Congress. On Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed pulling the spotlight away from Hamas’s provocations to the deeper reality of life for millions of Palestinians living under blockade and occupation. He pointed to the havoc unleashed in recent weeks by rampaging mobs of Jewish extremists in Jerusalem, as well as the questionable Israeli legal attempts to forcibly evict the Palestinian residents of a neighborhood in the contested holy city. “None of this excuses the attacks by Hamas, which were an attempt to exploit the unrest in Jerusalem, or the failures of the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, which recently postponed long-overdue elections,” Sanders wrote. “But the fact of the matter is that Israel remains the one sovereign authority in the land of Israel and Palestine, and rather than preparing for peace and justice, it has been entrenching its unequal and undemocratic control.” In another era, Sanders would have cut a lonely figure among his colleagues. But he is not alone. A number of Democratic lawmakers, including solidly pro-Israel politicians, issued statements indicating their displeasure with the casualties caused by Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Others were more vocal, accusing Israel of “apartheid.” Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) tweeted: “This is happening with the support of the United States....the US vetoed the UN call for a ceasefire. If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?” Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a center-left pro-Israel advocacy organization that increasingly reflects the mainstream position of American liberals, said in a briefing with reporters last week that the “diplomatic blank check to the state of Israel” given out by successive U.S. administrations has meant that “Israel has no incentive to end occupation and find a solution to the conflict.”

Mexico City is sinking (Wired) When Darío Solano‐Rojas moved from his hometown of Cuernavaca to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the layout of the metropolis confused him. “What surprised me was that everything was kind of twisted and tilted,” says Solano‐Rojas. “At that time, I didn't know what it was about. I just thought, ‘Oh, well, the city is so much different than my hometown.’” Different, it turned out, in a bad way. Picking up the study of geology at the university, Solano‐Rojas met geophysicist Enrique Cabral-Cano, who was actually researching the surprising reason for that infrastructural chaos: The city was sinking—big time. It’s the result of a geological phenomenon called subsidence, which usually happens when too much water is drawn from underground, and the land above begins to compact. According to new modeling by the two researchers and their colleagues, parts of the city are sinking as much as 20 inches a year. In the next century and a half, they calculate, areas could drop by as much as 65 feet. Spots just outside Mexico City proper could sink 100 feet. That twisting and tilting Solano‐Rojas noticed was just the start of a slow-motion crisis for 9.2 million people in the fastest-sinking city on Earth. And because some parts are slumping dramatically and others aren’t, the infrastructure that spans the two zones is sinking in some areas but staying at the same elevation in others. And that threatens to break roads, metro networks, and sewer systems. “Subsistence by itself may not be a terrible issue,” says Cabral-Cano. “But it's the difference in this subsistence velocity that really puts all civil structures under different stresses.”

Today’s the day: British holidaymakers return to Portugal as travel ban ends (Reuters) Sun-hungry British visitors descended on Portuguese beaches once again on Monday as a four-month long ban on travel between the two countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic ended, in a much-needed boost for the struggling tourism sector. Twenty-two flights from Britain are due to land in Portugal on Monday, with most heading to the southern Algarve region, famous for its beaches and golf courses but nearly deserted as the pandemic kept tourists away. Visitors from Britain must present evidence of a negative coronavirus test taken 72 hours before boarding their flights to Portugal and there is no need to quarantine for COVID-19 when returning home. Back at home, most British people will be free once again to hug, albeit cautiously, drink a pint in their pub, sit down to an indoor meal or visit the cinema after the ending of a series of lockdowns that imposed the strictest ever restrictions in peacetime.

Afghans who helped the US now fear being left behind (AP) He served as an interpreter alongside U.S. soldiers on hundreds of patrols and dozens of firefights in eastern Afghanistan, earning a glowing letter of recommendation from an American platoon commander and a medal of commendation. Still, Ayazudin Hilal was turned down when he applied for one of the scarce special visas that would allow him to relocate to the U.S. with his family. Now, as American and NATO forces prepare to leave the country, he and thousands of others who aided the war effort fear they will be left stranded, facing the prospect of Taliban reprisals. “We are not safe,” the 41-year-old father of six said of Afghan civilians who worked for the U.S. or NATO. “The Taliban is calling us and telling us, ‘Your stepbrother is leaving the country soon, and we will kill all of you guys.’” At least 300 interpreters have been killed in Afghanistan since 2016, and the Taliban have made it clear they will continue to be targeted, said Matt Zeller, a co-founder of No One Left Behind, an organization that advocates on their behalf. He also served in the country as an Army officer. “The Taliban considers them to be literally enemies of Islam,” said Zeller, now a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. “There’s no mercy for them.”

A Desperate India Falls Prey to Covid Scammers (NYT) Within the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak, few treasures are more coveted than an empty oxygen canister. India’s hospitals desperately need the metal cylinders to store and transport the lifesaving gas as patients across the country gasp for breath. So a local charity reacted with outrage when one supplier more than doubled the price, to nearly $200 each. The charity called the police, who discovered what could be one of the most brazen, dangerous scams in a country awash with coronavirus-related fraud and black-market profiteering. The police say the supplier—a business called Varsha Engineering, essentially a scrapyard—had been repainting fire extinguishers and selling them as oxygen canisters. The consequences could be deadly: The less-sturdy fire extinguishers might explode if filled with high-pressure oxygen. A coronavirus second wave has devastated India’s medical system. Hospitals are full. Drugs, vaccines, oxygen and other supplies are running out. Pandemic profiteers are filling the gap. In many cases, the sellers prey on the desperation and grief of families.

Full-blown boycott pushed for Beijing Olympics (AP) Groups alleging human-rights abuses against minorities in China are calling for a full-blown boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a move likely to ratchet up pressure on the International Olympic Committee, athletes, sponsors and sports federations. A coalition representing Uyghurs, Tibetans, residents of Hong Kong and others issued a statement Monday calling for the boycott, eschewing lesser measures that had been floated like “diplomatic boycotts” and further negotiations with the IOC or China. “The time for talking with the IOC is over,” Lhadon Tethong of the Tibet Action Institute said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “This cannot be games as usual or business as usual; not for the IOC and not for the international community.” The push for a boycott comes a day before a joint hearing in the U.S. Congress focusing on the Beijing Olympics and China’s human-rights record, and just days after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said boycotts are ineffective and only hurt athletes.

Grief Mounts as Efforts to Ease Israel-Hamas Fight Falter (NYT) Diplomats and international leaders were unable Sunday to mediate a cease-fire in the latest conflict between Israel and Hamas, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed to continue the fight and the United Nations Security Council failed to agree on a joint response to the worsening bloodshed. The diplomatic wrangling occurred after the fighting, the most intense seen in Gaza and Israel for seven years, entered its deadliest phase yet. At least 42 Palestinians were killed early Sunday morning in an airstrike on several apartments in Gaza City, Palestinian officials said, the conflict’s most lethal episode so far. The number of people in killed in Gaza rose to 197 over the seven days of the conflict, according to Palestinian officials, while the number of Israeli residents killed by Palestinian militants climbed to 11, including one soldier, the Israeli government said.

Israel, Hamas trade fire in Gaza as war rages on (AP) Israel carried out a wave of airstrikes on what it said were militant targets in Gaza, leveling a six-story building, and militants fired dozens of rockets into Israel on Tuesday. Palestinians across the region observed a general strike as the war, now in its second week, showed no signs of abating. The strikes toppled a building that housed libraries and educational centers belonging to the Islamic University. Residents sifted through the rubble, searching for their belongings.

Israel’s aftermath (Foreign Policy) In Israel, the aftermath of days of violence in mixed Arab-Israeli towns has led to a one-sided reaction from state prosecutors: Of the 116 indictments served so far against those arrested last week, all have been against Arab-Israeli citizens, Haaretz reports. Meanwhile, Yair Lapid, whose centrist Yesh Atid party’s chances of forming a coalition government has crumbled since the violence broke out, placed the blame on Netanyahu. If he was in charge, Lapid said on Sunday, no one would have to question “why the fire always breaks out precisely when it’s most convenient for the prime minister.”

Long working hours can be a killer, WHO study shows (Reuters) Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year in a worsening trend that may accelerate further due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization said on Monday. In the first global study of the loss of life associated with longer working hours, the paper in the journal Environment International showed that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease associated with long working hours in 2016. That was an increase of nearly 30% from 2000. “Working 55 hours or more per week is a serious health hazard,” said Maria Neira, director of the WHO’s Department of Environment, Climate Change and Health. The joint study, produced by the WHO and the International Labour Organization, showed that most victims (72%) were men and were middle-aged or older. Often, the deaths occurred much later in life, sometimes decades later, than the shifts worked. It also showed that people living in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region were the most affected.

#headlines #news

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berniesrevolution · 5 years

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In the early summer of 2017, a little less than a year after his Presidential campaign had ended, Bernie Sanders spent a few days on a speaking tour in England, to promote the European version of his book “Our Revolution.” The Brexit resolution had passed twelve months earlier, a general election looked likely to consolidate the conservative hold on the country, and Sanders’s audiences—in the hundreds, though not the thousands—were anxious and alert. I was at those events, talking with the people who had come—skinny, older leftists and louche, cynical younger ones—and they were anticipating not just the old campaign hits but a broader explanation of why the world had suddenly gone so crazy and what could be done. Sanders had scarcely talked about foreign affairs in his 2016 campaign, but his framework had a natural extensibility. Under way in the world was a simple fight, Sanders said. On one side were oligarchs and the right-wing parties they had managed to corrupt. On the other were the people.

In the thirty months since Sanders’s 2016 campaign ended, in the petulance and ideological strife of the Democratic National Convention, he has become a more reliable partisan, just as progressivism has moved his way. He begins the 2020 Presidential campaign not as a gadfly but as a favorite, which requires a comprehensive vision among voters of how he would lead the free world. In 2017, Sanders hired his first Senate foreign-policy adviser, a progressive think-tank veteran named Matt Duss. Sanders gave major speeches—at Westminster College, in the United Kingdom, and at Johns Hopkins—warning that “what we are seeing is the rise of a new authoritarian axis” and urging liberals not just to defend the post-Cold War status quo but also to “reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity.” In 2016, he had asked voters to imagine how the principles of democratic socialism could transform the Democratic Party. Now he was suggesting that they could also transform how America aligns itself in the world.

In early April, I met with Sanders at his Senate offices, in Washington. Spring was already in effect—the cherry blossoms along the tidal basin were still in bloom but had begun to crinkle and fade—and talk among the young staffers milling around his offices was of the intensity of Sanders’s early campaign, of who would be travelling how many days over the next month and who would have to miss Easter. It was my first encounter with Sanders during this campaign. Basic impression: same guy. He shook my hand with a grimace, and interrupted my first question when he recognized the possibility for a riff, on the significance of a Senate vote on Yemen. His essential view of foreign policy seemed to be that the American people did not really understand how dark and cynical it has been—“how many governments we have overthrown,” as Sanders told me. “How many people in the United States understand that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran to put in the Shah? Which then led to the Revolution. How many people in this country do you think know that? So we’re going to have to do a little bit of educating on that.”

One condition that Americans had not digested was the bottomlessness of inequality. “I got the latest numbers here,” Sanders said. He motioned, and Duss, who was sitting beside him, slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Twenty-six (Continue Reading)of the wealthiest people on earth own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. Did you know that? So you look at it, you say”—here he motioned as if each of his hands were one side of a scale—“twenty-six people, 3.6 billion people. How grotesque is that?”

He went on, “When I talk about income inequality and talk about right-wing authoritarianism, you can’t separate the two.” No one knew how rich Putin was, Sanders said, but some people said he was the wealthiest man in the world. The repressive Saudi monarchs were also billionaire Silicon Valley investors, and “their brothers in the Emirates” have “enormous influence not only in that region but in the world, with their control over oil. A billionaire President here in the United States. You’re talking about the power of Wall Street and multinational corporations.” Simple, really: his thesis had always been that money corrupted politics, and now he was tracing the money back overseas. His phlegmy baritone acquired a sarcastic lilt. “It’s a global economy, Ben, in case you didn’t know that!”

When Sanders’s aides sent me a list of a half-dozen foreign-policy experts, assembled by Duss, who talk regularly with the senator about foreign policy, I was surprised by how mainstream they seemed. Joe Cirincione, the antinuclear advocate, might have featured in a Sanders Presidential campaign ten or twenty years ago. But Sanders is also being advised by Robert Malley, who coördinated Middle East policy in Obama’s National Security Council and is now the president of the International Crisis Group; Suzanne DiMaggio, a specialist in negotiations with adversaries at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Vali Nasr, the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in the Shia-Sunni divide.

Few of these advisers were part of Sanders’s notionally isolationist 2016 campaign. But, as emergencies in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have deepened, the reputation of Obama’s foreign policy, and of the foreign-policy establishment more broadly, has diminished. Malley told me, “Out of frustration with some aspects of Obama’s foreign policy and anger with most aspects of Trump’s, many leaders in the Party have concluded that the challenge was not to build bridges between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans but, rather, between centrist and progressive Democrats. That means breaking away from the so-called Blob”—a term for the foreign-policy establishment, from the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes. DiMaggio said, “The case for restraint seems to be gaining ground, particularly in its rejection of preventive wars and efforts to change the regimes of countries that do not directly threaten the United States.” She and others now see in Sanders something that they didn’t in 2016: a clear progressive theory of what the U.S. is after in the world. “I think he’s bringing those views on the importance of tackling economic inequality into foreign policy,” DiMaggio said.

Since the 2016 campaign, Sanders’s major foreign-policy initiative has been a Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act of 1973 in order to suspend the Trump Administration’s support of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen. Mike Lee, a libertarian Republican from Utah, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, co-sponsored the resolution; on April 4th, it passed in the House and the Senate. It was the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Act since the law’s creation, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. When we met, Sanders said that he thought the Republican support for the resolution was significant, in part because it reflected the strain of conservatism that is skeptical of military interventions. It also demonstrated, he believed, “a significant mind-set change in the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—with regard to Saudi Arabia.” He added, “I don’t see why we’d be following the lead or seen as a very, very close ally of a despotic, un-democratic regime.”

Sanders was warming to a broader theme. Our position in the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran should be rebalanced, he said. There has been, he went on, “a bipartisan assumption that we’re supposed to love Saudi Arabia and hate Iran. And yet, if you look at young people in Iran, they are probably a lot more pro-American than Saudis. Iran is a very flawed society, no debate about it. Involved in terrorism, doing a lot of bad things. But they also have more democracy, as a matter of fact, more women’s rights, than does Saudi Arabia.” As President, Sanders said, he imagined the U.S. taking a more neutral role in the countries’ rivalry. “To say, you know what? We’re not going to be spending trillions of dollars and losing American lives because of your long-standing hostilities.”

Sanders turned to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which he described in similar terms; he wanted to orient American policy toward the decent people on both sides, and not to their two awful governments. “While I am very critical of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, I am not impressed by what I am seeing from Palestinian leadership, as well,” he said. “It’s corrupt in many cases, and certainly not effective.” He mentioned the United States’s leverage in Israeli politics, because of its alliance and economic support. (“$3.8 billion is a lot of money!”) I asked if he would make that aid contingent, as some Palestinian advocates have suggested, on fuller political rights for Palestinians. Sanders grew more cautious here. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” he said. He was worried about the situation in Gaza, where youth unemployment is greater than sixty per cent, and yet the borders are closed. (“If you have sixty per cent of the kids who don’t have jobs, and they can’t leave the country, what do you think is going to happen next year and the year after that?”) But he also said that he wanted to “pick up from where Jimmy Carter was, what Clinton tried to do, and, with the financial resources that we have of helping or withdrawing support, say, ‘You know what? Let’s sit down and do our best to figure it out.’ ” He seemed to want to strike an earnest, non-revolutionary note. “I’m not proposing anything particularly radical,” he said. “And that is that the United States should have an even-handed approach both to Israel and the Palestinians.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #bernie sanders #foreign policy #New Yorker #2020 election

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the-record-columns · 5 years

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Feb. 5, 2020: Columns

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same...

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

This is an election year (like somehow you didn't know that), and I happened to run across an election story in a copy of The Wilkes Patriot from Nov. 7, 1918, just before World War I ended.

I was actually looking for stories about the Flu Pandemic, my curiosity piqued by a full page ad in the Oct. 31, 1918 edition of The Patriot from Brame Drug Company touting their Vapo-Mentha Salve as a preventive measure for the flu. It included a signed endorsement of the product from C.C. Wright, the Superintendent of Schools in Wilkes County.

But enough about that for now, back to politics.

In 1918, The Wilkes Patriot was owned and operated, according to the masthead, by one Chas. H. Cowles, “Editor and Proprietor,” and a couple of stories on the page with the masthead caught my eye. One was entitled, "Wilkes Still Solid," and began with "The Republicans of Wilkes County have again been weighed in the balance and found not wanting in party loyalty and fidelity, the entire county ticket having been elected in spite of one of the hardest fights both within and without the party that has been waged in many a year, bogus tickets, absentee voters' law, et cetera."

Then, one column over, was another story entitled "We Didn't Do It," involving ballots and ballot tampering. Excerpts from that story follow:

"The official ballots for both the Republican and Democrat candidates were printed by the job department of The Wilkes Patriot for the county Board of Elections, but the Republican ticket that contained then name of the Democrat candidate for sheriff was not printed in The Patriot shop, neither was the Republican ticket that contained fine hair-line marks on the names of the Republican candidate for clerk and sheriff printed by The Patriot job department.”

This statement is made for the purpose of contradicting the statement made by a leading Democrat that The Patriot printed the ticket referred to. We now call upon The Wilkes Journal and The North Wilkesboro Hustler to show that their hand are clean. The Patriot will support tis statement by affidavit, if necessary. Will the two newspapers named do likewise if asked to do so?"

Mr. W.A. Bullis, Chairman of the Wilkes County Board of Elections, might also be able to throw some interesting light on the subject by explaining, if he can, how it came about that tickets other than the official ballots were mixed in with the official tickets at several townships, namely Reddies River, Mulberry, Elk, and Beaver Creek. If Mr. Bullis cannot explain how it came about, and we are loath to believe that he can, then the registrars and judges of the precincts where the tickets were found might be able to enlighten the public.

Let the public know the truth, gentlemen. This is neither Germany or Russia, but free America--the greatest democracy on earth. Where right and justice should prevail and where the rights of all out citizens, even the absent soldiers, should and must be respected. If the tickets were tampered with, Mr. Bullis, we feel sure, will be anxious to bring the guilty parties to justice and we now call upon him to give his version of the matter to the public."

Whew.

Charles H. Cowles doesn't mince words, does he? I am actively looking over other the older copies of The Wilkes Patriot to try and find a follow up.

Can't wait.

With the Deal of the Century revealed, what’s on Israel’s mind?

By AMBASSADOR EARL COX and KATHLEEN COX

Special to The Record

Acting independently of any diplomatic pressure, U.S. President Donald Trump finally released his “Deal of the Century,” or D.O.C. For all its faults, certain provisions in the D.O.C. underscore that there is no moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian interests. President Trump seems to understand that the Palestinian issue is not the cause of violence in the Middle East nor is the plight of the Palestinians and the so-called refugees the catalyst for the turbulence and instability in the Middle East, nor is it the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Tried and true, Israel is America’s only friend and ally in the Middle East. Israel is the only democracy and the only country in the region where people of all faiths enjoy freedom and justice for all whether Jew, Christian, Muslim or other. Israel’s friendship, backed by her formidable military and skilled intelligence services, serves to strengthen the United States in that region and is the only country that can be counted on to do so.

What does the “Deal of the Century” look like from a Middle Eastern perspective? The wordsmiths who crafted the plan formed it from a Western perspective and based the plan on Western values such as democracy, fair and honest negotiations, adherence and peace. The Arab-Muslim Middle East is playing from a completely different rule book. These concepts either do not exist, or they have very different meanings. For instance, in the Muslim world, there is no equivalent to the Western concept of “peace,” or “peaceful coexistence.” To those who embrace Islam, peace simply means the “absence of conflict.” An absence of conflict can happen when one party ruthlessly rules over the other and keeps it subdued. In no way does this reflect the Western concept of “peace” or “peaceful coexistence.”

Islam forbids the acceptance of any infidel. Violent intolerance, or terrorism, of non-Muslims is basic Islamic policy. Adherence to plans, treaties, agreements, ceasefires and so on, made with infidels, are non-binding. Muslims enter into such agreements only to buy time until the Muslim can overcome. Lying, misleading and deception are the terms of engagement in the Islamic world. This is what makes Israel’s position so difficult. Upholding traditional Judeo-Christian values where honesty and truth matter, while at the same time operating in a world where deception is the rule, is mission impossible. Israel must not only know her enemy; she must know the plans of her enemy before they become actions. Israel must always be several steps ahead and the United States must trust her to know the best course as she navigates her tough environment. Knowing that words, plans and treaties are meaningless to her neighbors, Israel must always plan for the worst because the smiles and handshakes of her Arab-Muslim neighbors are mere eye-candy for the media and the rest of the world, and the signatory ink quickly disappears.

Unlike Israel, most of the Middle East is not driven by a desire to improve and make positive contributions to the world but rather by religious ideologies whereby all must worship Allah. The Arab world understands only strength. Appeasement shows weakness and only serves to intensify acts of aggression and terrorism. A case in point is the Gaza Disengagement of 2005. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza turning it over to the Palestinians. In return, Israel was to have peace, but it never came. In fact, the terrorism escalated and became deadlier as the Palestinians were now closer to Israeli population centers. The whole of Gaza was turned into a giant launching pad for rockets and incendiary kites, drones and balloons.

The Palestinians are not bothered by the size of the Jewish state. What incites them to violence is the fact that Israel exists at all as a Jewish state. Israel knows she can depend on no one for her national security outside of her own home team. The West simply does not understand but for our own best interests, we must stand true to Israel.

The Don Gibson with Spiders and Snakes

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

Not so long ago, we were in production at the Don Gibson Theatre in Shelby, for one of our Carolina Theater Trail broadcast segments. The general idea of these segments is to highlight theaters in the Carolinas that have historical significance and are producing shows regularly.

The Don Gibson Theatre certainly meets our requirements. The Art Deco style building initially opened as the State Theater on October 27th, 1939. That was the same year that now-iconic movies such as The Yellow Brick Road, Gone with The Wind, Mr. Smith goes to Washington, The Hunch Back of Notre Dame, It’s a Wonderful Life and Stagecoach hit the big screen.

This was also a time when you had the opportunity to meet one of the stars at the theater possibly; It was great promotion for the theater and the movie. Just imagine going to the movies and meeting one of your favorite cowboy actors. It was quite the show for sure.

Things do change over the years, and so it was with the State Theater which would become The Flick theater in the mid-late 70’s. The building would also have other lives before setting empty with an uncertain fate. That is until a group of concerned citizens came together to create a plan that would help revitalize the area and celebrate two of the area’s musical legends, Don Gibson and Earl Scruggs.

In time, the old courthouse on Shelby's town square would become the now-celebrated Earl Scruggs Center and the State Theater, with its Art Deco style, would become The Don Gibson Theatre that now hosts approximately 100 shows and events per year.

Stan Lowery, General Manager of the Don Gibson Theatre, shared that while there have been challenges, the victories have been far more significant. Stan recalled that the first movie he saw at the State Theater was the Jungle Book, which came out in 1967. Now that he books around 30 national acts a year for the Don Gibson Theatre, he sees firsthand the value of providing well know entertainment for the community.

As it turns out, during the day of our production at the Don Gibson the evening’s entertainment was a Song Writer’s in the Round program featuring Jim Stafford, Walt Aldridge, and Lenny LeBlanc.

The three of them have written many well-known songs; however, it would be Jim Stafford that we would spend time with on camera.

While Jim is an excellent songwriter, he is also a great entertainer with dynamic timing. Our interview with Jim was a heartfelt and laughter filled walk down memory lane.

It’s hard to watch one of his television appearances and not smile or laugh when he sings one of his hits like Spiders and Snakes, Wildwood Weed or The Swamp Witch.

Regarding writing, he said he did not have a specific method or muse, it was “Butt powered; Sitting on your butt and just doing it.” The Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson MO has been going for over 30 years. Now in his mid-70’s, he still loves the music and putting on the show. He shared many great stories in our interview.

With all his years of writing and entertainment, I found it interesting that his appearance at the Don Gibson Theater was his first participation in a Song Writers in the Round performance. I ask him why he did it. He said, “Someone called, and it sounded like a good idea. So, I said yes, and here I am.”

As I watched the show at the Don Gibson, the three songwriters shared their stories and talents for an admiring audience, and I thought about all the people who have laughed, cried and set on the edge of their seats in anticipation as they watched the entertainment in front of them.

From the State Theater to the Don Gibson Theatre, you could not count the emotions and memories if you tried but we can count ticket sales, and that’s a good thing.

Carl White is the Executive Producer and Host of the award-winning syndicated TV show Carl White’s Life In The Carolinas. The weekly show is now in its 11th year of syndication and can be seen in the Charlotte market on WJZY Fox 46 Saturday’s at noon and My 12. The show also streams on Amazon Prime. For more information visit www.lifeinthecarolinas.com. You can email Carl at [email protected].

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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OPINION | Netanyahu’s Exit Won’t Jump-Start a Peace Deal

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/opinion-netanyahus-exit-wont-jump-start-a-peace-deal/

OPINION | Netanyahu’s Exit Won’t Jump-Start a Peace Deal

This is true no matter if the election’s outcome is a National Unity Government composed of Likud (minus Netanyahu) and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party, or a narrower coalition formed by Gantz. There could be ameliorations, of course. A Gantz-led government in particular might seek to improve living conditions in the West Bank, slow down the pace of settlement construction outside of the major settlement blocs and avoid some of its predecessor’s most provocative desires such as formal annexation of the Jordan Valley. The Palestinian leadership, under virtually no international pressure to restart negotiations with Israel as long as Netanyahu is in power, might feel compelled to do so with a more acceptable prime minister in his place. And the U.S. administration might finally unveil its peace plan, long-awaited and long-forgotten in equal measure.

Yet none of this would add up to measurable progress on the way to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. History has long taught that economic betterment of the Palestinians is no substitute for steps that address their political aspirations. Prospects for successful peace negotiations on core final status issues—such as borders and Jerusalem—seem equally dubious. Gantz would be greeted with high expectations; he is, after all, a former Israeli general and chief of staff cut in the mold of Yitzhak Rabin: strong, pragmatic and potentially flexible.

But Gantz is no man of the left. He is, if anything, a representative of the old right—a tough, militant patriot whose primary focus isn’t on ending conflict with the Palestinians but ending incivility, divisiveness and polarization among Israelis. Gantz was virtually silent on the Palestinian issue during his two electoral campaigns, preferring, like Netanyahu, to focus on the threat from Iran. He has taken the current government to task for being too soft in its policies toward Gaza. He supports permanent Israeli control over the Jordan Valley. He has welcomed all of President Donald Trump’s most controversial steps, including his administration’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and announce that settlements do not contravene international law. He may have done some of this chiefly for electoral purposes, to avoid being painted as too far to the left. But Gantz is hardly a free agent. He will be constrained by his party’s leadership, including the hawkish Moshe Ya’alon and more than a few of its members who might feel just as comfortable among the ranks of the Bibi-less Likud.

Not that the Israeli government’s makeup would be the only obstacle to meaningful peacemaking. The Palestinian side presents its own considerable challenges. Divided and dysfunctional, its leadership has lacked a coherent military or diplomatic strategy to end the occupation or negotiate a two-state solution. The split between Fatah and Hamas, the principal branches of the national movement, has meant that there are now two of everything—two statelets, two security services and at least two visions of what and even where a future Palestine should be. President Mahmoud Abbas, whose mandate expired years ago, lacks the authority and legitimacy to make consequential decisions on behalf of his people, let alone decisions pertaining to a final status deal—and so, he has systematically preferred to avoid rather than make them, his presidency becoming an exercise in inertness.

Then there is the matter of the U.S. administration’s peace plan. With a new government in place and Trump apparently seeking to draw attention away from the impeachment hearings by more actively engaging on the foreign policy front, the odds of it putting out the plan will rise. Much of what has been written about the proposal and its purportedly pro-Israeli bias has been speculation—albeit speculation based on the track record of an administration that has shown little compunction in moving unashamedly toward right-wing Israeli positions, breaking from well-established bipartisan stances and jettisoning U.S. relations with the Palestinians.

Yet even assuming the conjecture has been wrong and that the plan includes such heresies as acceptance of a Palestinian state or of a Palestinian capital in parts of Jerusalem, the idea that it can come remotely close to what Palestinians—from the most pragmatic to the most hard line— will accept is pure fantasy. There is not a chance the proposal will go as far toward addressing Palestinian requirements as did the parameters suggested by President Bill Clinton in 2000, the ideas put forward by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2007,or the plan presented to Abbas by President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014—all of which were rejected by the Palestinian leadership. There is not a chance that same leadership will accept less today than what it turned down when it had more confidence in the U.S.

Some wild cards could come into play. At 85, Abbas may leave the political scene in the near future, triggering a scramble for power and a new Palestinian leadership configuration. Palestinians in the West Bank could join their many brethren around the region and rise up—against the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority’s rule, or both. But it is hard to see either event triggering a short-term breakthrough in the peace process; in fact, both could push preoccupation with a negotiated settlement even further into the background. For now, the upshot is that neither the bottom-up approach of improvements on the ground nor the top-down approach of U.S. proposals will move the needle.

If anything, the more things change in Israel, the more Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking will remain the same. Therein lies the paradox: Perpetuating the status quo in Israeli politics— meaning Netanyahu’s continued premiership—arguably was the likeliest way to break the logjam and transform both Israeli-Palestinian and U.S.-Israeli dynamics. Netanyahu in power meant scant prospects of material betterment for the Palestinians, of revived negotiations, let alone of a two-state solution; it meant a greater potential for ever more provocative steps such as annexation of parts of the West Bank, thereby forcing a conversation about alternative ways of approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It also meant a downward spiral in relations between the Israeli government and important segments of the American public—especially among a younger generation of Democrats and American Jews, alienated by Netanyahu’s overt pro-Republican partisanship; his affinity for authoritarian and illiberal leaders worldwide and inflammatory anti-Arab rhetoric at home; and his kowtowing to his Orthodox coalition partners and ignoring the concerns of American Jews on any number of religious issues, such as a more egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall. All of whichmade it at least conceivable to start a more open and honest debate over how the U.S. should involve itself in the dispute.

There have been some incipient signs of late of such an evolution: in poll numbers that show a growing percentage of Americans, notably younger ones, supporting a more evenhanded U.S. approach and open to alternatives to a two-state solution; in the increasing number of Democratic officials prepared to criticize Israel; and in the willingness of several of the party’s presidential candidates to debate topics not long ago considered off-limits, such as linking the provision of military assistance to Israel with the uses to which it is put. In this sense, the principal asset of those hoping for a more radical break from the past was the person embodying all that they reject—Netanyahu.

His expected departure from the political scene suggests that this theory, interrupted midexperiment, is unlikely to be tested anytime soon. Instead, with a more broadly respectable Israeli prime minister, the pendulum could well swing back to where it had been from the early 1990s onward: resumption of a peace process that is mostly process and no peace; a focus on steps on the ground that improve the conditions of the occupation without ending it; and bipartisan support for a U.S. mediating role that tends to accommodate existing realities rather than challenge them.

A happier face will be put on negotiations, on the occupation, and on Israeli-U.S. relations. Netanyahu’s exit, ironically, could be his final, unwitting gift to the goal he pursued and that his prolonged tenure would have endangered: ensuring—at least in American eyes— that the unsustainable status quo is still sustainable.

Aaron David Miller is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and a former State Department Middle East analyst and negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations.

#Foreign #Jump-Start #Peace #Politics

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courtneytincher · 5 years

Text

Lebanon Prepares for War While Israel Is at War with Itself

On Sunday, Lebanon was rattled by two air raids. As the dust settles, the small Mediterranean republic is now waiting anxiously to see if simmering Iranian-Israeli tensions will evaporate—or boil over into a full-scale war on Lebanese soil.“There is a scenario of continuing with this ongoing pattern of limited, calibrated tit-for-tat escalation, or things can get out of control, and we are suddenly facing a regional war,” said former Beirut resident Randa Slim, after two Israeli drones exploded over the Lebanese capital in an alleged kamikaze attack against the pro-Iran guerrilla group cum political party Hezbollah.With elections in Israel set for September, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to cultivate his strongman image with an aggressive military posture. Iran, meanwhile, has to balance its delicate efforts to win new friends in Europe and America with defending its old allies in the Middle East. And neither side is sure where the United States will throw its weight.Last weekend, the result of this rivalry was Israeli strikes on three different countries: Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.On Saturday, Israeli warplanes had killed two Hezbollah members in Syria. Israel claimed that the militants were planning a drone attack “under Iran's command” on the Golan Heights, a disputed territory controlled by Israel.Then, on Sunday, the Israeli drones exploded over Beirut. A few hours later, Israeli drones attempted to attack a Palestinian communist group in eastern Lebanon, attracting anti-aircraft fire in the Bekaa Valley.Sunday’s incidents were the first air combat deep within Lebanon since the July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah.Hezbollah’s General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel of violating the “rules of engagement” since the 2006 war, calling the drone incident “the first attack since August 14, 2006.” However, Israel did strike Lebanese territory in a 2014 incident along the Syrian-Lebanese border.“I think what Nasrallah meant is that the old rules of the game that were established in 2006 between Nasrallah and Israel and Hezbollah, have been changed, and this is the first attack under the new rules of the game,” said Slim, founding director of the Initiative for Track II Dialogues at the Middle East Institute. “If that’s the case, how will Hezbollah’s retaliation be different from previous retaliation, and then second, how will Israel’s reaction to Hezbollah attacks be different?”On the same day, an airstrike killed a Popular Mobilization commander along the Iraq-Syria border. The Popular Mobilization, created to help the collapsing Iraqi Army fend off the Islamic State (ISIS) in 2014, has become an avenue for Iranian weapons and advisors to enter Iraq.A bloc of political parties allied with the Popular Mobilization accused Israel of the attack. Both the Iraqi parliament bloc and Lebanese president Michel Aoun, whose Catholic-majority Free Patriotic Movement is in a parliamentary coalition with Hezbollah, called the weekend’s incidents an “act of war.”Last Thursday, Netanyahu told a television station that “I don’t give Iran immunity anywhere,” naming both Iraq and Syria. Over the weekend, unnamed U.S. officials began to tell the media that Israel had been behind a deadly July 12 attack on an Iraqi weapons depot where Iranian military advisors had been staying.“We defer to the government of Iraq which is conducting investigations,” a U.S. State Department official told the National Interest. As of press time, the Iraqi embassy in Washington has not responded to a request for comment.“The escalation conducted by Israel in Syria, Iraq, and potentially Lebanon is part of a broader messaging campaign that is being done by the IDF and by Prime Minister Netanyahu to send the message that Israel has the ability to take the conflict against Iran anywhere it so chooses in the Middle East,” said Nicholas Heras, a security fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “There is also a domestic political component to this, as Prime Minister Netanyahu is locked in a deathmatch for his political future,” Heras told the National Interest. “Netanyahu’s signature issue has always been national security, and this public messaging, including a series of tweets by the Prime Minister himself, is meant to demonstrate to the Israeli people that Prime Minister Netanyahu is the only shield that can protect them from Iran.”Netanyahu is currently facing corruption charges, and parliamentary immunity—which he stands to lose in the upcoming election—may be his last chance to avoid jail.“Netanyahu is under fire due to cross-border attacks from Gaza and attacks on Israelis in the West Bank,” said Aluf Gann, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. “Shifting attention to the northern front, where the public trusts his judgment and leadership, could also help his re-election campaign.”Over the weekend, a bomb killed an Israeli teenager hiking in the Palestinian territories, and Israeli forces traded fire with Palestinian militants in the unrecognized statelet of Gaza. The cross-border fighting in Gaza did not cause any casualties on either side, but sparked mass panic when a volley of Palestinian rockets forced Israeli concertgoers into bomb shelters.“It seems that Netanyahu who has enjoyed the image of being Mr. Security, and counter terrorism expert feels it is time to refresh this image which has deteriorated over time,” said Mohammad Darawshe, former director of the United Arab List, a party representing Arab citizens of Israel, and executive director of the Center for Shared Society at the Givat Haviva Institute. “And what better time can you have other than three weeks before elections, so that this can . . . give you more air time?”But Israeli and U.S. messaging policy may not be coordinated. Ha’aretz speculated that U.S. officials had leaked Israeli involvement in Iraq out of anger at Israel, for damaging America’s delicate relationship with Iraq.After the clashes, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended “Israel’s right to defend itself,” according to a State Department summary of a Sunday phone call between Pompeo and Netanyahu. At the same time, Iraqi political factions across the political spectrum lined up to defend the Popular Mobilization.“It does put the U.S. in an awkward position, because Iraq is supposed to be a U.S. ally that it's supposed to protect, instead of protecting the country that is bombing Iraq,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute.The annoyance may be mutual. Center-right journalist Barack Ravid reported on Thursday that Israeli officials are worried that Trump is replacing his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran with highly-publicized “summit diplomacy,” as he has with North Korea.On the sidelines of the international Group of Seven meeting this week, French president Emmanuel Macron met with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, a surprise guest at the summit. At the conference, Macron and Trump discussed the possibility of renewed diplomacy with Iran.According to Ravid, Netanyahu and his staff were desperately trying to contact Trump, in order to dissuade the U.S. president from meeting Zarif.Trump and Zarif will most likely both be at next month’s United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, which takes place only ten days after Israel’s elections.“Netanyahu is worried about signs of U.S.-Iranian detente and would like to keep the current American pressure on Tehran, or even see it strengthened,” Gann told the National Interest. “At the same time, Trump’s opening to Iran gives Israel an opportunity to hit Iran’s proxies in the region, believing that Tehran would be reluctant to risk its channels to Washington in order to retaliate to low-level, pinpointed Israeli attacks.”Ultimately, however, the strikes may have as much to do with the Middle Eastern balance of power as either highbrow summits in New York or lowbrow electioneering in Tel Aviv. “The election campaign affects how the military strikes are discussed publicly, but it likely does not determine the decision to actually conduct the strikes,” said Henry Rome, an analyst of both Iranian and Israeli politics at the Eurasia Group. “Netanyahu is often portrayed as a reckless, militaristic prime minister, but the opposite is the case: he’s a cautious leader on military matters and is acutely aware of the risks of military operations.” “Israel has been escalating its attacks against Iran and Iranian-backed groups in Syria consistently for a year and a half now,” Heras told the National Interest. “Israel has identified, correctly, that much of the strength in manpower for Iran’s Hezbollah proxy network comes from Iraqi Shi’a militias.”The ruling Assad family in Syria, an ally of Iran since the 1970s, nearly lost power in a civil war beginning in 2011. President Bashar al-Assad’s government survived with heavy backing from Iran, Hezbollah, and an alliance of Iranian-backed paramilitaries recruited from Iraq and Afghanistan.Anxiety over Hezbollah’s growing stockpile of missiles, which killed dozens of Israeli civilians during the 2006 war, has driven Israel to target the Lebanese group inside Syria. Israel has supported the Syrian rebellion with weapons shipments, medical support, and hundreds of airstrikes.“Israel’s policy has been pretty clear from the get-go, which is to prevent Iranian entrenchment in its backyard,” Slim told the National Interest. “There has been an understanding between Russia and Israel, specifically between [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin and Netanyahu, of giving Israel free rein to target Iranian offensive capacities inside Syria as long as they do not harm Russian interests and Russian personnel in Syria.”“Under the old rules of the game, which were pretty much respected by both parties, whenever there was a violation of these new rules, it was a limited, calibrated, tit-for-tat escalation, usually followed by messaging by the top leadership on both sides that no further escalation is desired by either side,” she continued. “Even when attacking targets in Syria, Israel has worked hard not to target Hezbollah personnel operating in Syria. So the number of Hezbollah personnel who died in Syria because of Israeli targeting is quite limited.”Slim said that Hezbollah has similarly restrained its responses to the Shebaa Farms, a strip of territory claimed by Lebanon but administered by Israel.But Nasrallah’s speech hinted that Hezbollah could attack targets inside Israel this time, even beyond military targets. “The time has ended when Israeli planes bomb a target in Lebanon while the Usurper Entity in Palestine is safe,” he said in his Sunday speech, using an epithet for Israel. “Today I say to the inhabitants of the north [of Israel] and all the inhabitants of Occupied Palestine, do not rest and do not believe that Hezbollah will allow this sort of aggression.”“Be careful about your words, and even more cautious about your actions,” Netanyahu responded on Tuesday.“Right now, every side is testing the other side. Hence this period of instability. Nasrallah was clear that the old rules no longer hold,” Slim said. “This kind of testing is subject to a lot of miscalculation as well as misunderstanding of each other’s intentions.”Israel calculates that “the Iranians are not in a position to respond right now, not that they can't militarily, but because they have to balance so many different other concerns,” Parsi said. “As a result, it’s relatively cost-free for the Israelis to do this right now.”Iran’s response is also constrained by “a test of will between, on one hand, [Iraqi] state institutions, and on the other hand, the [Popular Mobilization] factions which are controlled and beholden to Iran, about who controls war and peace decisions of the country,” Slim claimed.Slim believes that Israel is similarly limited by internal politics, as it doesn’t want a costly “adventure” inside of Lebanon during an election season. But it’s always possible that Netanyahu will turn an uncontrollable escalation to his advantage.“People unite after their leaders during time[s] of crisis,” Darawshe told the National Interest in a text message. “[I]f you are a conflict management specialist as Mr. Netanyahu, you would exploit the situation to its utmost, by dragging the country into a sensitive low level intensity conflict.”Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest and a former Foreign Language Area Studies fellow at Columbia University. His work has been published in Reason and America Magazine.Image: Reuters

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tendance-news · 7 years

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2:59

President Trump's speech on Jerusalem as Israel's capital, in 3 minutes

President Trump said Dec. 6 that the U.S. would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and move the U.S. Embassy there. Here are key moments from that speech. (The Washington Post)

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli soldiers broke out Thursday in Ramallah and other places in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, one day after President Trump announced that his administration would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The Palestinian Authority called for a general strike in Palestinian cities and, in Gaza, the Islamist Hamas movement urged its followers to ignite a third intifada, or uprising, against Israel.

At a checkpoint near Ramallah, Israeli forces fired dozens of rounds of tear gas and stun grenades at hundreds of Palestinian protesters gathering to air their anger over Trump’s statement.

They burned tires and pelted the soldiers with rocks.

“This will be bad,” said an ambulance driver.

Clashes also erupted in East Jerusalem and at the border fence between Israel and Gaza. There were early reports of injuries on both sides.

Trump’s announcement Wednesday that he would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and his declaration that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital reversed a decades-old U.S. policy. Many fear that the step could spark another bloody conflict in the region.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called for a new uprising in the Palestinian territories and declared Friday a day of rage.

“Tomorrow should be a day of rage and the beginning of a broad movement for an uprising that I call the intifada of freedom of Jerusalem,” he said.

He called on the Palestinian Authority to stop security coordination with Israel and “enable the resistance in the occupied West Bank to respond to this blatant aggression.”

“Our people and factions of the resistance are in a permanent meeting to follow developments to confront this strategic threat that threatens the city of Jerusalem,” he added.

[For Trump, Jerusalem is an extension of a global culture war]

2:34

What you need to know about Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem

The Post's Ishaan Tharoor explains the significance of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and what it means for the prospect of peace in the Middle East. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)

Israel’s army said it was preparing for an increase in violence in the coming days and that it has beefed up its troops in the West Bank, adding reinforcements to its combat intelligence and territorial defense units.

U.S. institutions in the region were also readying themselves for possible violent fallout. Reuters reported that a State Department communique has been sent to diplomats at the embassy in Tel Aviv with talking points to convey to Israeli officials.

“While I recognize that you will publicly welcome this news, I ask that you restrain your official response,” Reuters quoted the document dated Dec. 6 as saying. “We expect there to be resistance to this news in the Middle East and around the world. We are still judging the impact this decision will have on U.S. facilities and personnel overseas.”

In his televised speech Wednesday, Trump said that presidents before him had signed a waiver delaying the recognition of Jerusalem under the belief that it might advance the cause of peace. But, he said, “after more than two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It would be folly to assume that repeating the exact same formula would now produce a different or better result.”

“Therefore, I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” he said.

Successive U.S. administrations have held off moving the embassy from Tel Aviv since the mid-1990s, in line with an international consensus that Jerusalem’s status should be decided in a final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Israelis see Jerusalem as their eternal and undivided capital, while Palestinians envision the predominantly Arab eastern part of the city as the future capital of a Palestinian state. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the U.S. move would galvanize the Palestinian struggle for independence.

[Where would a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem actually go?]

Following Trump’s announcement, Abbas said the United States could no longer be a fair mediator in the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority called for three days of rage and ordered all Palestinians national institutions in the West Bank and Gaza to observe a general strike on Thursday. Schools and government offices from Ramallah to Hebron were shuttered.

With backing from Turkey, the Palestinians said that recognizing Jerusalem was in breach of both international law and U.N. resolutions. Eight countries on the 15-member U.N. Security Council called for an emergency meeting to discuss the matter. It is scheduled for Friday.

Despite the note of caution from the State Department, the mood in Israel was buoyant, with government ministers and commentators declaring a diplomatic victory for the Jewish state and for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking at a Foreign Ministry conference in Jerusalem on Thursday, Netanyahu heralded Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as a “historic statement.”

“President Trump has always linked himself to the history of our capital,” he said. “His name will now float along with other names in the context of the glorious history of Jerusalem and our people.”

[U.S. allies reject Trump’s move as “dangerous” and “catastrophic”]

The prime minister also said he had already been in contact with other countries that were also ready to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“I have no doubt that as soon as the American Embassy moves to Jerusalem, and even before that, many embassies will move to Jerusalem. It’s about time.”

In columns published in Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, commentators Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer also commended Trump for what they called his bravery in making a move that Israelis see as righting a 70-year-old wrong.

“Those opposed to the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital are wrong. Trump is right. He is right about the issue itself: The 70-year-old refusal by the world to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a foolish mistake, which was the result of diplomatic cowardice and neglect by Israeli governments,” wrote Barnea.

“Moreover, no agreement appears to be anywhere on the horizon. The argument as if the speech would damage the peace process is ridiculous since there is no peace process,” he said.

In his piece, Shiffer compared the U.S. president to the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

“He saw reality for what it is and spoke it out loud.”

Eglash reported from Jerusalem. Hazem Balousha in Gaza contributed to this report.

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news

#IFTTT #Blogger

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tortuga-aak · 7 years

Text

A 30-year-old law that Ronald Reagan hated could end Trump's Middle East peace push before it starts

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The State Department may close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission in Washington, DC.

In response, the Palestinians threatened to suspend relations with the US.

The State Department says it’s just following the law — and it is.

Three decades after US president Ronald Reagan criticized an anti-Palestinian law as an overreach by Congress into the executive branch’s ability to conduct diplomacy, the same legislation now imperils yet-unborn peace talks under the Trump administration.

On Friday the State Department informed the Palestinian Authority it may close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission in Washington, DC, because Ramallah is pursuing the prosecution of Israelis at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In response, the Palestinians threatened to suspend relations with the US should their office in the capital be closed. Their DC office has acted as the unofficial Palestinian embassy in the US, and has been an important symbol of evolving US-Palestinian relations.

The State Department says it’s just following the law — and it is.

In December 2015, Congress passed a provision (Page 540) that called for the PLO mission in Washington to be shut if the Palestinians initiate or support an ICC investigation against Israelis.

And in his 2017 address to the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas clearly violated this clause:

“We have also called on the International Criminal Court, as is our right, to open an investigation and to prosecute Israeli officials” over Israeli settlement activity, he said.

So now the Trump administration is a bind. Either it follows the letter of the law, which could harm the declared interests of US foreign policy to support peace in the Middle East, and may foil the president’s desire to strike “the ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians, or the right-wing White House will have to infuriate its base and go to the Palestinians’ defense.

How did this pickle come to be? And more importantly, is there a way out?

Trump versus Reagan

In 1987, Congress sought to rid US soil of any PLO institutions, which included a United Nations mission located in New York City and a Palestinian information bureau in DC. At the time, the PLO was a US-designated terror organization, backing attacks against Israelis.

Though Congress’s move against the PLO was a just a small clause wedged into a massive bill, Reagan specifically called out the anti-PLO provision, arguing it was unconstitutional because it limited the president’s diplomatic powers.

“The right to decide the kind of foreign relations, if any, the United States will maintain is encompassed by the President’s authority under the Constitution,” Reagan wrote.

Reagan would have had to veto the entire bill in order to squash the anti-PLO provision. Instead, he sufficed with saying that at the time he had “no intention of establishing diplomatic relations with the PLO,” and therefore no “constitutional conflict is created by this provision.”

Despite the bill becoming law, ultimately the US couldn’t close the Palestinian mission to the UN because this would have violated international law. The DC information office, however, was closed.

Handout / Getty Images

Fast-forward to 1993. Israel and the PLO have just signed the Oslo Peace Accords. The Palestinians have sworn to end decades of terror attacks against Israel and are slated to receive their own state in the coming years. At this historic occasion, the US Congress allowed the president to suspend all sanctions against the PLO as long as the Palestinians stay faithful to commitments made in the accords. The suspension would have to be renewed every six months. This act by Congress allowed the PLO to open up a diplomatic mission in DC.

In 1997, Congress made it easier for the president to waive the sanctions against the PLO: The president would now just have to say the waiver was in the US’s national security interest with no explanation needed. Again, a waiver would have to be signed every six months.

This was the case until 2011, when the Palestinians joined UNESCO and declared they wanted full-membership status in the UN.

In response, Congress slipped in a new provision into the annual State and Foreign Operations Bill, a massive piece of legislation in which Congress sets aside money for a large portion of the government’s operations.

Again, the anti-PLO provision was just a small droplet in an ocean of laws, this time approved by former president Barack Obama.

Now, if the Palestinians obtained full membership status in the United Nations outside of an agreement with Israel, the president would be unable to waive sanctions against the PLO, unless “the Palestinians have entered into direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.”

The “it’s in the national security interest” excuse would no longer suffice.

After the Palestinians joined the ICC in 2015, Congress, without any public debate or headlines, slipped in a similar provision into the December 2015 foreign ops bill, which was over 800 pages long.

The provision calls for the waiver to be revoked should the Palestinians “initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation” against Israel.

This quiet evolution of a law that was controversially passed in 1987, before the Palestinians and Israelis had ever officially negotiated over peace, now threatens to abort a yet-unborn round of talks.

Cat out of the bag

Lara Friedman, an expert in US law regarding Israelis and Palestinians and the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said that when she heard Abbas’s speech at the UN this year, she immediately understood it might have repercussions.

Friedman has for years followed closely all news and legislation on Capitol Hill that relates to Israeli-Palestinian issues. While reading the December 2015 foreign ops bill that added the ICC provision, she recalled thinking, “Holy crap, where did this come from?”

She wasn’t sure if anyone else had noticed the ticking time bomb planted silently into the bill.

Should the PLO mission in DC be closed, she said, it would take the US relationship with the Palestinians back 30 years.

Friedman surmised that may be what the provision’s authors intended: moving the clock back to the pre-Oslo era, when the idea of a Palestinian state was more or less unthinkable in Washington.

Friedman can’t say for sure who was responsible for the ICC provision placed into the 2015 foreign ops bill. She called it a “black box process.”

Around that time, three Republican lawmakers introduced bills attacking the Palestinians’ connection to the ICC.

First was Trent Franks (Arizona), who in a May 2015 bill, said the Palestinians joining the ICC “profoundly undermines prospects for mutual recognition, dialogue, and reconciliation” with Israelis, and “hinders the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and thus represents a threat to the regional interests of the United States and the security of its allies.”

Then in 2016, after the passing of the December 2015 foreign ops bill, Ted Cruz (Texas) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Florida) introduced two identical bills, calling on the US to shut the Palestinians’ mission in DC should they join the ICC.

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

They argued that the Palestinian mission should be closed not in order to roll the clock back to the pre-Oslo era, but rather because the Palestinians will have violated the Oslo accords, which were the reason sanctions against the PLO were waived in the first place.

“The Palestinian initiation of an International Criminal Court investigation, or active support for such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians, would violate the Palestinians’ commitment to not change the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” the lawmakers wrote in their separate bills.

At the same time, however, both also argued the PLO office in DC should be closed regardless of the ICC matter, because it “is in the national security interests of the United States.” This is so, they argued, because the PLO is “allegedly used by Abbas to fund everything from his international campaign against Israel to compensation to the families of Palestinian terrorists.”

At the end of 2015, the Obama State Department rebuffed demands by some in Congress to close the PLO office over a wave of Palestinian attacks against Israelis allegedly encouraged by the Palestinian leadership. (Abbas at the time bragged that his security services were preventing the some of the stabbing, shooting and car ramming attacks.)

The Obama administration argued at the time that closing the PLO office was not in the US’s best interests.

“We believe that closing the PLO office would be detrimental to our ongoing efforts to calm tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, advance a two-state solution and strengthen the US-Palestinian partnership,” then-State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said.

Perhaps Trump’s team could have tried to interpret Abbas’s UNGA statements in a way that wouldn’t violate the 2015 ICC provision, said Friedman. But now that the cat is out of the bag, she said, there would no simple solution that would put it back in.

There is currently no avenue for the Palestinians to enter into “direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” The US, by its own admission, is still working on a way to bring the two sides back to the table for the first time since peace talks fell apart in 2014, and there is no timeline yet for the process to bear fruit, the State Department has said.

Friedman suggested the president could challenge the anti-PLO law’s constitutionality, as Reagan did. She thinks, however, that this is unlikely given the ideology of the President’s advisers, such as US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who is openly against the establishment of a Palestinian state.

And if the Trump administration now tried to walk back its statement that Ramallah was violating the ICC provision, she said, “there would be tremendous backlash from people trying to turn the clock back to pre-Oslo.”

The real issue she said, however, is not the executive branch, but Congress, which is fine with passing anti-PLO laws, but doesn’t want “to spend the political capital to repeal laws” for the Palestinians.

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thisdaynews · 6 years

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Breaking News: The Gazan leading a popular uprising against Israel

New Post has been published on https://www.thisdaynews.net/2018/05/16/breaking-news-the-gazan-leading-a-popular-uprising-against-israel/

Breaking News: The Gazan leading a popular uprising against Israel

Gazan leads uprising against Israel 03:07

Gaza (CNN) “I looked up at the birds in the sky, flying through the trees on both sides of the barbed wire fence without being stopped. What is simpler than this? The birds decide to fly so they fly.”

On a dirt berm overlooking the Gaza-Israel border, Ahmad Abu Artema reads a poem he penned and used to inspire a popular uprising. “Why do we complicate simple matters?” reads Abu Artema.

A rattle of Israeli gunfire in the distance punctuates his verses.

“Is it not the right of people to move freely like birds as they wish?”

The 33-year-old writer, activist and self-described dreamer has mobilized tens of thousands of Gazans with a simple idea for this region — nonviolent resistance.

“I refuse outright the principle that walls and fences should separate people from each other. I believe people of different cultures and backgrounds should live together peacefully, without borders,” he said.

Abu Artema is the organizer of the “Great March of Return” movement, whose declared aim is to highlight the Palestinian right to return to homes and villages lost by their ancestors in the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war.

Every Friday since March 30, Palestinians have amassed at the Gaza border fence to demonstrate. At least 100 have died during the protests, according to a CNN count based on Palestinian Health Ministry figures.

Dozens of Palestinian were killed in Gaza on Mondayduring protests called to mark the official unveiling Monday of the new US Embassy in Jerusalem.

President Donald Trump’s decision to relocate the embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested city has upended decades of US foreign policy in the region, enraging the Palestinians and many Arab countries.

Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, and other Islamist factions have backed the movement. Hamas leader Yahya al-Sinwar has spoken at one of the protests, applauding protesters who have faced “the enemy who besieges us.”

Abu Artema says he holds no political affiliations and denies the movement has any ties to Hamas, a group considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, and the European Union.

Israel insists this protest movement is orchestrated by Hamas. It has described the attacks on the fence as terrorism, and says children are deliberately being placed in harm’s way.

“They (protests) are designed to bring about the destruction of Israel,” Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, told CNN. “They are designed to break through the fence and kill Israelis and we have to proceed with that assumption. Our soldiers have prevented it, so [in] that way it’s a success.”

US opens new Embassy in Jerusalem as dozens die in Gaza clashes

The weekly march to the border culminates on Tuesday — Palestinian Nakba Day, or “Day of Catastrophe,” which commemorates the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were either were expelled from or fled their homes during Israel’s creation. Thousands are expected to attend Tuesday’s demonstration.

“I have always believed in non-violence, and I am happy to see this change, to see people in Gaza accepting this more than before,” Abu Artema said. “Many here now believe that their goals can be fulfilled by this method more than by violent resistance,” he adds.

A more than decade-long air, land, and sea blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt has deteriorated basic services, contributed to high unemployment, and placed huge restrictions on Gazans’ freedom to leave the small coastal enclave.

Israel says the blockade is needed to pressure Hamas into stopping rocket attacks into Israel.

A demonstrator uses a racket to return a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops during clashes at the Gaza border on Friday, May 11.

The United Nations has said the narrow coastal strip will be “unlivable” by 2020 if conditions continue to decline at the current rate.

“Our hardships induced this scream for life. The March of Return is a scream for life so that we may leave the walls of our prison,” Abu Artema said. “Why would we die here in silence? We want our message to reach the world. We want to say to the world ‘here there is a people. A people searching for a life of dignity, human rights and freedom.'”

On March 30, Abu Artema saw his dreams realized, as thousands of Palestinians staged a sit-in along the border barrier, the largest such gathering in years. Organizers wanted to create a festival-like atmosphere setting up canopies, portable bathrooms and free-wifi to attract families.

But promises of pacifism quickly deteriorated into a familiar pattern of violence: Israeli troops traded live fire and rubber bullets with Molotov cocktails and stones, leaving 17 Palestinians dead and 1,400 wounded that day, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

There has been strong international condemnation of Israel’s use of live ammunition, but the Israeli army insists it is firing in accordance with the rules of engagement.

The bloodshed has not deterred participation in the now seven-week long demonstration that has seen dozens of Palestinians lose their lives to Israeli gunfire. No Israelis have been killed or injured in the confrontations.

Ahmad Abu Artema says he is inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

“These borders for us here in Gaza symbolize chokehold and oppression,” Abu Artema said. “Youth in Gaza are saying enough to this slow death and they want to break downs these walls and barriers. I hope Israel and the world will consider our call with an open mind.”

At a protest camp near the border, where teenagers practiced slingshot and prepared tires to burn as smoke screens on Sunday, the unlikely leader seemed out of place. Abu Artema says he has never thrown a rock at an Israeli soldier, and still feels more comfortable in a library than in a crowd.

Still many gather around the soft-spoken, bespectacled intellectual and update him on their plans to challenge Israeli border security, which varies from small barbed wire fences to 20-foot concrete walls along the 32-mile frontier.

“How is your morale?” he asked a man in crutches who was wounded during the first March of Return protest.

“It is good, I thank God,” the protester responded. “Tomorrow I will break the barbed wire fence and cross. Nothing will stop me. Not even an F-16.”

Abu Artema’s disdain for borders began in childhood after his parents separated and his mother was forced to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing.

“I was on the Palestinian side of Rafah and even though my mom’s house was just 150 meters away I couldn’t cross to her,” he recalled. “It bore in me the question: why these fences that keep people from normal human connections? Today in Gaza it is the same problem, the fence represents oppression.”

Israeli forces fire teargas canisters toward Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza border on Friday, May 11.

Abu Artema says he spent his youth studying the principles of nonviolent resistance to draw parallels between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the civil rights movement in America, apartheid in South Africa and the fight against British rule in India.

“I was inspired by Gandhi. He was a main educator for me. I like the way he fought by peace. I think what is right is stronger than weapons, so I like the method of Gandhi, I like the method of Martin Luther King,” Abu Artema said.

Like his idol, Martin Luther King Jr., Abu Artema has a dream. He hopes that one day Israelis and Palestinians can live in one nation where they will not be judged by their background or faith.

“I think we can live together,” Abu Artema said. “We have the seeds to live together but without occupation, without apartheid, with equality, with human rights, in one democratic state.”

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