Both sides shall respect and protect religious rights of Jews, Christians, Moslems and Samaritans to wit:
Protecting the holy sites.
Allowing free access to the holy sites.
Allowing freedom of worship and practice.

Hundreds of Israeli Jews held a rare prayers session by a mosque in a Palestinian village on the occupied West Bank early Sunday, an AFP photographer said.

The Israeli army accompanied busses carrying over 300 ultra-Orthodox men, mostly from the Breslov Hassidic sect, to Younis mosque in Halhul, north of Hebron, where according to Jewish tradition biblical prophets Gad and Nathan are buried.

One worshipper told AFP it was the first time in 18 years that Jews were allowed to pray at the site, deep in a Palestinian-controlled area.

A military spokeswoman said the army and police forces accompanying the worshippers were attacked by Palestinians hurling "rocks and firebombs", with the forces responding with riot dispersal means to "prevent further escalation".

According to tradition, the graves are located inside the mosque, but the Jewish worshippers did not enter the holy site, rather held an hour of pre-dawn prayers on the road outside before leaving, the photographer said.

For months now, the far-left anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has been targeting our exchange program with Israel with a campaign called “Deadly Exchange”. Now, ADL is a 104-year-old organization, and becoming targets of both fair criticism and inaccurate attacks from the right and the left of the political spectrum comes with the territory for an established institution like ours. But in my time at ADL, I’ve been especially surprised at JVP’s ignorance, dangerous dogmatism and blind efforts at intersectional cause-making.

In their campaign against our program — a program that is designed to save lives — JVP makes the case that American Jewish institutions are responsible for rising levels of police brutality and racism against minorities here in the United States, thanks to their support for these types of exchanges between American and Israeli law enforcement agencies.

In other words, JVP believes Jewish institutions control how the police racially profile people of color in the United States.

I was shocked by this attack. It hewed so closely to anti-Semitic canards about the Jews secretly controlling the levers of power. How could a Jewish organization make such a hateful claim?

This radical — and willful — misunderstanding of our program was compounded last week when JVP came to protest ADL at our New York headquarters.

As the head of communications for the organization, I went to greet them and to receive their petition. But I was only seconds into my conversation with a JVP spokesperson before she demanded to know: Why didn’t ADL send anyone to hear their stories?

“I’m right here,” I said, confused.

Then she asked me point blank how a woman of color could work for ADL. Hadn’t I personally experienced racial profiling?

Yes, she actually asked me that.

Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/national/387789/im-a-latina-who-works-for-the-adl-jvps-attacks-shocked-me/

All people born in British Mandatory Palestine between 1923-1948 (today's Israel) had "Palestine" stamped on their passports at the time. But when they were called Palestinians, the Arabs were offended. They complained: "We are not Palestinians, we are Arabs. The Palestinians are the Jews".

After invading Arab armies were routed and the Arabs who had fled the war wanted to return, they were considered a fifth column and not invited back. The Arabs who had loyally remained in Israel during the war, however, and their descendants, are still there and make up one fifth of the population. They are known as Israeli Arabs; they have the same rights as Christians and Jews, except they are not required to serve in the army unless they wish to.

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality, today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese."– PLO leader Zuheir Mohsen, interview in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, March 1977.

Israel's economic data came out. Guess what? The campaign to destroy Israel through economic boycotts is not only unfair, misleading and wrong, but it's also a failure. Again.

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the swirling rumours of a Trump administration proposal to end the Arab-Israel conflict, the gathering diplomatic storm between said Trump administration and the PLO, and the implications of the west’s current obsession with transgenderism.

Controversy erupted in a Facebook group of Upper East Side mothers this week after one member posted an advertisement for a reading of her new children’s book titled, P Is For Palestine.

The illustrated text, authored by Dr. Golbarg Bashi, includes a line that says, “I is for Intifada, Intifada is Arabic for rising up for what is right, if you are a kid or grownup!”

“Intifada” is an Arabic word meaning “tremor” that is most commonly associated around the world with two violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel in recent decades that included numerous bombing, shooting and stabbing attacks.

One responder to Bashi’s post in the “UES Mommas” group, Bryce Gruber-Hermon, wrote, “Hey everyone! Let’s talk about one of those intifadas! Real family members of mine were MURDERED. Innocent women who never carried a gun, knife, or anything more than a book. My husband has 2 bullets in his back from those intifadas you’re justifying. If you think these are okay or fair or reasonable or just part of politics, you’re flat out telling me my family deserves to be dead. You’re not that bad of a person, are you?”

The reading was held on Saturday at Book Culture on Columbus.

Allenby deliberately chose to walk into the Old City because, he said, only the Messiah should ride into the Holy City.
On December 11, 1917, Gen. Edmund Allenby’s forces officially liberated Jerusalem.

Actually, a Jerusalem delegation, led by the mayor, surrendered the city to a pair of British army cooks on December 8. Thus began a comical farce.

The Turkish army and its German commanders had fled the city ahead of the British advance, leaving the city officials nervously waiting for the liberators. The first uniformed men to arrive were privates Andrews and Church, two cooks who got lost while searching for cooking water. They wandered near the Jaffa Gate entrance to the Old City and were confronted by a large delegation of city officials. The cooks were so scared they ran back to their unit.

At 8 a.m. the following morning, James Sedgewick and Fred Hurcomb, two British sergeants, were scouting around the Old City walls when they were approached by a group of Arab dignitaries holding a white flag. The two soldiers were overwhelmed by the sudden responsibility of accepting the surrender of Jerusalem and apologized after pictures were taken for posterity, saying they were unable to accept the surrender but promised to send a more senior officer.

Later the same day, two artillery officers, majors Beck and Barry of the 60th Division, were met by a party of officials and asked to accept Jerusalem’s surrender. Again, they politely refused, saying they had to bring one of their superiors.

A Lt.-Col. Bayley, commander of the 303rd Brigade of the 60th Division, arrived shortly after their departure. He wrote, “Arriving at the top of the road within sight of the Jewish Hospital in Jerusalem and with my three battery commanders I was amazed to see a white flag waving and a man coming towards me. He said the mayor of Jerusalem was with the white flag. We sat on chairs outside the Jewish Hospital and he informed me that the Turks had left Jerusalem heading towards Jericho.”

Bayley sent a message to the 60th Division headquarters informing them that he had just accepted the surrender of Jerusalem and that he was waiting for a general to come and take over the city.

Goldberg doesn’t make grand judgments when he finds himself in situations that raise legitimate moral questions over how to deal with the Palestinian civilian population while fighting terror. He doesn’t need to. Incidents involving the military takeover of Palestinian civilian family homes in the dead of night or dealing with stone-throwing Palestinian children feature in Goldberg’s musings, offering a human and personal side to the conflict while allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Many of us, and Goldberg himself, were brought up on heroic accounts of grand Israeli military operations or Mossad-style adventures. Yet Goldberg eventually becomes swallowed in the gulf between that vision and the reality of his service. Disillusionment starts to set in and Goldberg finds himself questioning the purpose of the routine guard duty, jeep patrols and arrest operations that become his world, to the extent that his coping mechanism for leaving that world is to drink himself to oblivion.

The book is highly readable and it is to Goldberg’s credit that the writing flows easily and encourages the reader to invest his or her time in following Goldberg’s journey. You may not learn everything you wanted to know about how the IDF operates and operated during the Second Intifada (and, in any case, would it have got past the IDF Military Censor?) but you will get a real insight into the life of an Israeli soldier as told through the eyes of an outsider now on the inside. That Goldberg is an immigrant from a Western country makes him far easier to relate to for the target audience.

And if his part memoir, part self-therapy puts a human face on the brave Israeli soldiers who give up some of their formative years to serve their country, then this can only be a positive thing.

Anyone who attended university in the past few decades in the US and the West in general has been subjected to the cult of Noam Chomsky, “the world’s top public intellectual.” Generations have been misled and encouraged to take the word of one man on a variety of the world’s conflicts and problems without even an iota of critique.

Chomsky has fed a myth that he, and some other public intellectuals, can possess instant expertise on almost any topic from Kosovo to Latin America, class struggle, the “Arab Spring” and lately, the Syrian civil war. In his constant pushing of faux expertise he has done tremendous damage to the world of intellectuals, perpetuating a kind of Orientalism that posits that Western intellectuals like himself should be the go-to experts on everything that happens in the world, and that local experts who might have spent a lifetime living and studying their own societies can be ignored. Ironically this feeds the very Western edifice Chomsky sought to critique, and manufactures the consent he ostensibly opposed.

The ivory tower of Chomskyism has been cracked a bit by his interest in the Syrian civil war. In a piece in The Guardian on November 15 George Monbiot criticized Chomsky and others for adding fuel to “far-right conspiracy theories.” How did this happen?

It begins with the Khan Shaykhun chemical weapons attack on April 4. Then it continues with a professor named Theodore Postol, who “has produced a wide range of claims casting doubt on the Syrian government’s complicity in chemical weapons attacks,” Monbiot writes. Monbiot points out that these doubts are false; the Syrian government did carry out the attack. However, Chomsky sought to highlight Postol’s work in an interview on Democracy Now! on April 27, 2017.

Chomsky claimed that the chemical weapons investigation “was analyzed closely by a very serious and credible analyst, Theodore Postol, professor at MIT, who has a long record of highly successful, credible analyses.” Chomsky read off some other bona fides and concluded that now there are “some questions” about the “White House report.”

This is classic Chomsky. He poses as an expert on a chemical weapons attack in Syria by laundering his own views through experts he has selected. He wonders in the same interview whether we will ever find out what happened.

NBC's Vivian Salama seems to be stuck some dozen years in the past. In her Nov. 15 news story ("'An open secret': Saudi Arabia and Israel get cozy"), she writes:
An Israeli-Saudi alliance would also be vastly unpopular on the Arab street given the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. (Emphasis added.)

In 2005, Israel withdrew every last one of its citizens, both living and dead (having exhumed remains from the cemeteries), as well as all of its soldiers, from the Gaza Strip in 2005, ending its occupation of the territory.

Following the 2005 withdrawal, then Secretary of State Rice said in a May 1, 2006 briefing:
And in fact, the Israelis do not any longer occupy Gaza; it is Palestinian territory. And that is in no small part thanks to the tireless efforts of Jim Wolfensohn, who worked day and night to make certain that that could happen.

While the United Nations and Human Rights Watch regard Gaza as still occupied, Hamas' Mahmoud Zahar disagrees, stating in 2012: "Against whom could we demonstrate in the Gaza Strip? When Gaza was occupied, that model was applicable."

Anti-Defamation League (ADL) chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt appeared Sunday morning on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation with host Al Sharpton to discuss hate crimes in America — and failed to mention Sharpton’s own history of allegedly inciting hate crimes against Jews.

Sharpton is widely blamed for a riot in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, in 1991 in which a mob killed an innocent religious student, Yankel Rosenbaum.

In addition, Sharpton has been blamed for inciting the 1995 firebombing of Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, New York.

As the Media Research Center noted in 2015, on the 20th anniversary of the attack:
Sharpton was one of the main causes of the hatred which led to fire bombing of Freddy’s Fashion Mart. He didn’t toss the firebomb, but the anti-Semitic and racial bias which came out of his mouth and out of the mouths of other while in his presence, produced the massacre as assuredly as if the fire was set with his hands.

On December 8, 1995, Al Sharpton incited the violent fire-bombing of the Jewish-owned Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem, causing the the deaths of Angelina Marrero, Cynthia Martinez, Luz Ramos, Mayra Rentas, Olga Garcia, Garnette Ramautar, and Kareem Brunner – the seven victims of the massacre. There was an eighth death, Roland James Smith, the man who burned the store down.

Sharpton also played a role in fomenting racial divisions around the death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012. He spread claims that the Hispanic man who shot him, George Zimmerman, was “white,” and that he had used racist language during the incident. Using his perch at MSNBC, his National Action Network activist group, and his connections with the Obama White House, Sharpton whipped national outrage over Martin’s death into a frenzy that set the stage for the violent Black Lives Matter protests of 2014, and that continues to divide the nation.

Greenblatt, a former Obama administration official, never once mentioned Sharpton’s past in his appearance on Sunday’s show. Instead, he joined Sharpton in attacking President Donald Trump for his reaction to the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August.

Last week I posted about a New York Times puff piece on Reems, the bakery with a mural of terrorist Rasmea Odeh. The piece entitled An Arab Bakery in Oakland Full of California Love mentioned Odeh as merely a “controversial activist”, and spent most of the time talking about how great Reems and its owner Reem Assil are, while empathizing with her in the face of poor Yelp Reviews and accusations of glorifying terrorism (which she most certainly does).

Following my post, the New York Times corrected the piece.
EDITOR’S NOTE
An earlier version of this article lacked context about the Palestinian activist Rasmeah Odeh, the subject of a mural inside Reem’s. That has been added.

Here is exactly what was added:
(In 1970, Ms. Odeh was convicted by Israeli courts for her role in the murder of two students. In 2014, she was convicted of immigration fraud in U.S. federal court and deported to Jordan in 2017.)

And that’s it. Despite adding her terrorist conviction, the piece still carries the same title An Arab Bakery in Oakland Full of California Love, still focuses on the greatness of Reem Assil and her bakery, and empathizes with her in the face of poor Yelp Reviews and terror glorification accusations.

Both of those reports opened with promotion of a theme often seen in BBC content: the exaggerated notion of the Arab-Israeli conflict as the world’s prime dispute.

Filmed: “100 years ago, a British promise – just a few words in a letter – lit a fire in the Holy Land. The Balfour Declaration ignited one of the most bitter and intractable struggles of modern times: the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Written: “One hundred years ago, only 67 words on a single sheet of paper lit a fire in the Holy Land, igniting the most intractable conflict of modern times.”

Very early on, both reports also included promotion of Palestinian talking points concerning the Balfour Declaration.

Filmed: (synopsis) “But the Palestinians and many Arabs will greet the centenary with protest and bitter accusations – they still hold Britain responsible for a century of injustice, and conflict in the Holy Land.”

Written: “While many Israelis believe it was the foundation stone of modern Israel and the salvation of the Jews, many Palestinians regard it as a betrayal.”

As has been the case across the board in the BBC’s coverage of the Balfour Declaration centenary, both Corbin’s reports focused audience attentions on one particular part of the text. Coincidentally or not, it is that section of the text that has also been the focus of anti-Israel campaigners’ Balfour related propaganda.

Like most of the rest of the BBC’s Balfour Declaration centenary coverage, these two reports by Corbin promoted the narrative that implementation of that declaration was incomplete. In the filmed report Corbin even went so far as to describe its intention as “[t]he Balfour vision of Arabs and Jews living together in the same country”.

While the Balfour Declaration’s commitment to the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people was eventually realised (some might say despite the best efforts of the British mandate), Corbin made no reference at all in either of her reports to the fact that part of the territory originally assigned to that purpose was subsequently made over by the British (with League of Nations approval) to the creation of the Arab state known today as Jordan.

Another very significant omission in both of Corbin’s reports – particularly in light of her repeated references to Palestinian refugees – is the subject of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands: people whose rights were also supposedly safeguarded by the Balfour Declaration but whose existence and story has barely been acknowledged in the BBC’s coverage of this centenary.

Media reportage that presents the details of incidents in which Israel’s description matches observable reality must present that description at face value and refrain from casting doubt on its veracity through the addition of the clause “Israel claims,” Israel claims.

Israeli officials made the statement at a meeting with the Foreign Press Association, members of which have often taken a less skeptical tone regarding Palestinian assertions regarding security, political, or legal occurrences than regarding Israeli contentions about the same events. That persistent phenomenon betrays unacceptable bias in the field of journalism, Israel claims.

According to Israeli officials, taking Palestinian claims at face value while treating Israeli claims as doubtful at best, if not outright false, constitutes “lack of objectivity” and “favoritism,” implying that those values have a place in journalism about Jews.

Palestinian observers who Israel claims were not present at the meeting characterized it as yet another example of Israeli perfidy. “Another day, another instance of violent Israeli oppression,”intoned Saeb Erekat.

“The world must put a stop to this genocide,” declared Hanan Ashrawi.

Recordings of the meeting indicated that Israeli officials spoke at length about what they called improper framing of stories, such as when everyday events in Palestinian society are presented only in the context of Israeli occupation, and no effort is made on the part of reporters to assign volition or responsibility to Palestinians. “OK, yeah, so?” wondered Erekat. “You see how Israel distorts reality to suit its oppressive agenda.”

“Anti-restitution bias” is being blamed for the sudden decision by the mayor of Dusseldorf, Germany to cancel a planned exhibit about world-renowned Montreal art dealer Max Stern.

Due to open in February after more than three years of planning by Dusseldorf’s Stadtmuseum, the exhibit – entitled “Max Stern: from Dusseldorf to Montreal” – also was slated to include a stop in Israel before finishing in Montreal.

The German city officials on Tuesday cited “current demands for information and restitution in Germany” as the reason for the exhibit’s abrupt cancellation.

“There are very influential people in Germany who don’t want to see art returned to Jews,” Concordia University professor Frank Chalk told the Montreal Gazette.

“There’s an element of anti-Semitism in this. But we never suspected the mayor [of Dusseldorf] could be vulnerable to this kind of pressure,” he said.

A native of Dusseldorf, Stern took over his late father’s art gallery there in 1934, until the Nazis made it illegal for Jews to sell art. During that period, the Nazis looted hundreds of valuable artworks from his gallery.

Israeli fans were delighted and moved by Aussie rocker Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ first Tel Aviv performance Sunday night, calling it a concert that exceeded expectations.

Cave, who hasn’t played in Israel for 20 years, sold out his two consecutive concerts, both at the Menora Mivtachim arena.

On Sunday morning, before the performance, he held a press conference in which he spoke about his decision to counter BDS by finally coming back to Israel, a country he said he has loved since the first time he visited.

Cave also spoke about the recent, accidental, drug-induced death of his teenage son, which has moved him to perform with renewed vigor, as he wants to reach out to his audiences worldwide.

The concert began with Cave’s newer works from his most recent album, “Big Changes.”

He then moved into his music from the ’80s and ’90s, with songs like “From Here to Eternity,” “Tupelo,” and “Jubilee Street.”

Cave is often referred to as rock music’s “Prince of Darkness,” his music characterized by emotional intensity and lyrics dealing with death, religion, love and violence.

After stunning the Israel-hating world (and even those of us who love Israel) with his huge show of support for Israel (and flipping the bird at BDS) at yesterday’s press conference, Aussie rocker has put on a hell of a show in his first concert – including more emphatic declarations of love for his Israeli fans.

What Cave lacked in friendly banter with the crowd in between songs, he made up for with constant physical interaction with the audience.

Only offering up a simple “Shalom Tel Aviv” and replying to an almost constant stream of “WE LOVE YOU!”s from the crowd in between songs: “I love you, I love you, I’m f***ing crazy about you” he replied before diving directly back into the band’s repertoire.

In the meantime, Israel haters have been imploding over Nick’s pro-Israel/anti-BDS comments.

It is delightful.

Is @nickcave taking a guided tour with a key 'Brand Israel' tourism agency, with a guide who just happens to have been a paratrooper on "the front lines" of major military assaults? pic.twitter.com/ULFp9aa7I3
— Boycott From Within (@BFW_IL) November 18, 2017

.@nickcave's performances in Tel Aviv and recent statement are a propaganda gift to Israeli apartheid. Nonetheless, we thank him for making one thing abundantly clear — playing Tel Aviv is never simply about music. pic.twitter.com/VkfRCXYnPt
— PACBI (@PACBI) November 19, 2017

* Yeah, A-Ha are coming to Israel too!

There’s been a slew of concert announcements in recent days, and one very tantalizing rumor — that Ringo Starr is in advanced negotiations to perform in Israel next year.

The news about a possible late spring performance by the former Beatles drummer was reported by the Israel Hayom daily, and couldn’t be confirmed with any local promoters.

Since 1989, Starr has toured with different variations of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.

He released a new single in July, on his 77th birthday, entitled, “Give More Love,” followed by his nineteenth studio album in September, also called “Give More Love,” featuring Paul McCartney and other collaborators.

Other than Starr, some of the confirmed, upcoming concerts include Britain’s Rag ‘N’ Bone Man, otherwise known as Rory Charles Graham, whose single, “Human,” was a major hit, and was followed by “Skin.” His performance will be on May 16 in Menora’s Mivtachim Arena.

The University of Juba, in South Sudan, has joined IsraAID, an Israel-based humanitarian non-governmental organization, and other partners to set up a first center for the studies of science and technology in the East-Central African state.

The Center for Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) will train South Sudanese youth to become engineers, technicians and mathematicians with the aim of contributing to the economic and social development of South Sudan. Over the next three years, the center is expected to provide vocational training to 10,000 young people in subjects such as building and construction; electronics; computing; chemistry and optics.

The University of Juba, in partnership with IsraAID, STEM Synergy — an international NGO that aims to provide students access to education in science and engineering, the Mark Gelfand Family Charitable Fund and UNESCO, opened the center last week.

IsraAID has been working with the University of Juba since 2016 in providing training and technical support to help establish the STEM Center. The university will now lead the process, while IsraAID and STEM Synergy will continue to provide technical support and training throughout the second phase of the project, IsraAID said in a statement announcing the opening of the center.

Want to know the real reason why some people are objecting to this unbelievably cool idea? Read on.

The following plan to link Jerusalem’s First Station, a beautiful redevelopment with restaurants and entertainment and a large parking lot, to the Dung Gate, the nearest point of access to the Kotel (Western Wall) by a stunning cable car is being pushed through I hope. Watch the video then we’ll look at how Ha’aretz covers this.


Here’s how Ha’aretz describes it:

The Jerusalem Development Authority is presenting the 200-million shekel ($57 million) project as a means of solving the snarled traffic around the Old City. The first phase calls for three stops: near the old train station, at the Mount Zion parking lot and on the roof of the Kedem Center, the planned visitor center at the City of David. According to the plan, each car along the 1.4-kilometer line will be able to carry up to 10 passengers, and 73 cars will operate simultaneously for a total capacity of 3,000 passengers per hour at peak times.

The system will be automatic – a car will leave every 15 to 20 minutes whether or not there are passengers. The cars will travel at 21 kilometers per hour, making the trip in less than five minutes.

The cable car will require construction of 15 large concrete pylons, the tallest of which will be 26 meters high.

Ha’aretz makes a glaring mistake “a car will leave every 15 to 20 minutes” should be every 15 to 20 SECONDS as anyone who’s ever been skiing would know (and basic maths).

What’s your favorite Dry Bones cartoon? Ask any English-speaker who came to this country after the mid-1970s and you’ll no doubt get an answer. Is it the one about sniffing cottage cheese? Getting a wintertime buzz from your kerosene neft heater? Measuring your apartment size by counting the balata floor tiles?

For over four decades, cartoonist Yaakov “Dry Bones” Kirschen has been commenting on Israeli absurdities, from the small ironies of daily life to the major geopolitical SNAFUs.
Vintage “Dry Bones” cartoons.

Recently, Kirschen took a break from current events for a look back with a new book entitled Young and Innocent: The Way We Were, a collection of classic Dry Bones cartoons originally published in The Jerusalem Post, where he started his career in Israel in 1973.

During the week, Dry Bones occupied a unique four-box layout on the newspaper’s back page. For the weekend edition, the cartoon was given a full-page layout where one of its most popular recurring themes was “You Know You’ve Been Here Too Long When…”

 The spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) Christopher Gunness warned the precarious situation of both UNRWA and Gaza Strip.
UNRWA, which is considered the world's oldest humanitarian organization, remains on the edge of its financial predicament with the growing humanitarian crisis in the region that are overshadowing the growing dependency of Palestinian refugees on the services of UNRWA.

"The world may not be paying attention to them, but the situation in Gaza has gotten incrementally worse hour by hour, while that attention has drifted to other parts of the world," he said, warning that "you now have 64 percent unemployment," which is a "record."

In recent months, it was made public that 95 percent of the water in Gaza is undrinkable and power outages last for long hours every day, which has lead to a series of setbacks in the health, reconstruction and psychological situation of Gazans, among others.
Gunness said despite this dark situation, he sees a ray of hope for Gaza in the Palestinian national unity government that has recently taken over the executive bodies in the coastal enclave, after rival political parties Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation deal in Cairo last October, ending a decade of the control of the Islamic Hamas movement on Gaza.

The Palestinians have frozen all contacts with the United States after it decided to close their representative office in Washington, officials said on Tuesday.

“In practice by closing the office they are freezing all meetings and we are making that official,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told AFP.

A spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization confirmed that it had received instructions from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “regarding closing down all communication lines with the Americans.”

The Palestinian move comes as the Trump administration seeks to broker the long-out-of-reach Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

Speaking in the Spanish Parliament today, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the Palestinians were “committed to a historic peace deal [with Israel] under the auspices of President Trump.”

Is the PLO’s long vacation from accountability coming to an end? How about the State Department’s? In 1987 the US State Department placed the PLO on its list of foreign terrorist organizations. The PLO was removed from the list in 1994, following the initiation of its peace process with Israel in 1993.

As part of the Clinton administration’s efforts to conclude a long-term peace deal between the PLO and Israel, in 1994 then president Bill Clinton signed an executive order waiving enforcement of laws that barred the PLO and its front groups from operating in the US. His move enabled the PLO to open a mission in Washington.

In 2010, then president Barack Obama upgraded the mission’s status to the level of “Delegation General.” The move was seen as a signal that the Obama administration supported moves by the PLO to initiate recognition of the “State of Palestine” by European governments and international bodies.

Whereas Obama’s PLO upgrade was legally dubious, the PLO’s campaign to get recognized as a state breached both of its agreements with Israel and the terms under which the US recognized it and permitted it to operate missions on US soil.

The Palestinians are once again angry -- this time because the Trump administration does not seem to have endorsed their position regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians are also angry because they believe that the Trump administration does not want to force Israel to comply with all their demands.

Here is how the Palestinians see it: If you are not with us, then you must be against us. If you do not accept all our demands, then you must be our enemy and we cannot trust you to play the role of an "honest" broker in the conflict with Israel.

Last week, unconfirmed reports once again suggested that the Trump administration has been working on a comprehensive plan for peace in the Middle East. The full details of the plan remain unknown at this time.

However, what is certain -- according to the reports -- is that the plan does not meet all of the Palestinians' demands. In fact, no peace plan -- by Americans or any other party -- would be able to provide the Palestinians with everything for which they are asking.

The Palestinian Authority and Fatah continue to present to Palestinians an image of a world without Israel, using a map that erases Israel and replaces it with "Palestine."This continues despite the PA and Fatah's numerous assurances to American and European leaders that they recognize Israel and support a two-state solution.

Here are three recent examples of the use of this map in which "Palestine" replaces all of Israel.

An official announcement on the Facebook page of the PA government included the image of hands raising a Palestinian flag, beside the PA map of "Palestine" that presents all of Israel and the PA areas as "Palestine". The image is part of the PA Government's announcement of the 2017 general population census of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. [Facebook page of the PA Government, Nov. 13, 2017]

An official PA TV program I'm Palestinian displays a logo in the shape of the PA map of "Palestine" that erases all of Israel, and on it the words "I'm Palestinian." The first image below is from the opening of the program, and the following two images are from the studio and from a sequence in the program. [Official PA TV, I'm Palestinian, Nov. 18, 2017]

Fatah also uses this map of "Palestine," below wrapped in the Palestinian flag, symbolizing Palestinian sovereignty over the entire area, including over the State of Israel:

The truth must be told: Regardless of the new initiative's parameters, it won’t lead to an agreement. On the contrary, it will hinder the chances for an arrangement, because no matter what the US president offers the Palestinians, their answer is predetermined. They will say no.

Last week, in Washington, I heard from workers of research institutes that have the Trump administration’s ear that the president’s new peace initiative is about to materialize. Rumor has it that in the coming weeks it will be presented to the relevant parties.

Everything they know, and everything that has been published so far, is too vague for us to seriously address the new outline. At the moment, there is more to it than meets the eye.

But the truth must be told. Regardless of the new outline’s parameters, I can say with a great amount of certainty that the new initiative won’t lead to an agreement. On the contrary, it will hinder the chance for an arrangement, because with all due respect to Trump, he will not be reinventing the wheel, and no matter what he offers the Palestinians, their answer is predetermined. Not because the plan will be so bad. Not because it won’t give them a state. They will say “no” because it’s what they know how to say. So far, the only plan they have said “yes” to is the Saudi-Arab initiative.

There is a dispute over a component in the initiative that has to do with the most difficult issue—the refugees. There have been comments from Arab leaders clarifying that this isn’t about the “right of return.” Occasionally, there have even been comments from Palestinian leaders that hinted at a waiver of a mass right of return.

Israel has been warning of Iranian territorial ambitions since forever and was dismissed by Obama and his acolytes as being intransigent and, well, just not enlightened enough. Meanwhile, within 50 kilometres of the Israeli northern border, Iran has recently built an advanced military base. Hezbollah swarms the Lebanese border and has a military capability greatly enhanced since the 2006 war with Israel, aiming well over 100,000 powerful and accurate missiles at Israel from underground tunnels and civilian villages it uses as shields.

Enmeshed in this mess is the Palestinian Authority and its President, Mahmoud Abbas. After touting a recent “reconciliation” with the Gaza-controlling Hamas — another terror group also allied with Iran — Abbas is in a jam. Does he maintain his most recent rapprochement with Hamas, despite its collusion with Iran, and risk angering Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel? Or does he capitulate to their demands that he bolster their efforts to isolate Iran and its agents?

In the last few weeks in Israel, there have been much-publicized Air Force drills, focusing on the northern fronts with Lebanon and Syria. In the event that there is armed conflict, it almost certainly will flare up on Israel’s northern fronts, with Lebanon and Syria, but the war will actually be with Iran. And it will be unprecedentedly ferocious, likely with significant civilian casualties.

After eight years of Obama’s Mideast policy, this is the outcome. The Saudis, Egyptians, Israelis and others in the region learned from Obama’s snubs that they can trust no one but themselves and have made it very clear that they will confront Iran, whether or not the West continues to cling to its illusion of moderate Iranian leadership. It could all get very ugly, very quickly.

A policy expert at an off-the-record briefing for Capitol Hill staffers on Monday sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, slammed Trump administration efforts to crack down on Iran and advocated in favor of closer ties with the Islamic Republic, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the conversation.

AIPAC, the country's most prominent pro-Israel organization, sponsored an Iran briefing at its Washington, D.C., headquarters with policy experts Ilan Goldenberg and Michael Singh, according to those familiar with the event.

Goldenberg, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, which backed the Obama administration's nuclear deal, is said to have blasted Trump administration efforts to tighten the landmark nuclear deal and advocated for closer ties with the Islamic Republic, according to those familiar with the briefing.

These sources expressed concern that the nation's foremost pro-Israel policy shop would sponsor such an event, particularly given its past efforts to rally against the nuclear deal.

An AIPAC official, speaking only on background, would not directly comment on Goldenberg's remarks, telling the Washington Free Beacon that, "As with all of our outside speakers, the views expressed are their own."

Lawmakers behind a House bill aimed at designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization have prepared a draft letter calling on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to designate the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The draft letter was signed by some two dozen congressmen and was shown to Fox News.

The draft letter, which Fox News has authenticated, calls on Tillerson to consider the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2017 that is sponsored by 63 members of Congress.

The letter gives examples of how the Muslim Brotherhood had been outlawed in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and says by following suit, the U.S. would be in a position to stifle those organizations by adding financial and travel restrictions and making it difficult for the group to function, while also further isolating them.

While the lawmakers support a full designation of the group, they also suggest a new strategy by which the administration could first designate country-specific organizations. It notes that chapters of the Brotherhood in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are all good examples of where a country-specific designation would work.

One Middle-East adviser closely involved in the congressional push on the Brotherhood told Fox News the designation is a “no-brainer.

Marking 40 years since Anwar Sadat’s landmark visit to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday he had yet to meet the Palestinian equivalent of the Egyptian leader who went on to sign a peace deal with the Jewish state in 1979.

“It is with sadness that I say, I have not yet met the Palestinian Sadat, who will declare his desire to end the conflict, who will recognize the State of Israel in any borders and our right to security and peace,” said Netanyahu.

“Our Palestinian neighbors refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist,” the prime minister added, speaking during a special plenary session held in honor of the anniversary of the historic visit.

Rebuking the prime minister, opposition leader Isaac Herzog said Israel lacks the equivalent of then-prime minister Menachem Begin, the Likud leader who clinched the accord with Cairo.

Forty years after Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Israel, Egyptian Ambassador to Israel Hazem Khairat on Tuesday urged Israeli leaders to seize a “real opportunity” to normalize ties with neighboring Arab states by pursuing a peace deal with the Palestinians based on the Arab Peace Initiative.

That peace framework, backed by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, is an extension of the peace initiative started by Sadat 40 years ago, said Khairat at a Knesset event attended by Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely and Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein.

“I say to the Israeli side, there is a real opportunity to open a new page with the Arab neighbors, based on co-existence and mutual understanding for a better future leading to peace,” he added, speaking in Arabic.

On November 20, 1977, Sadat made history when he became the first Arab leader to visit Israel and address the Knesset with a call for peace with Israel. Sadat’s visit helped pave the way for Israeli-Egyptian talks at Camp David a year later, and a full peace agreement between the two former enemies in 1979, just six years after the painful Yom Kippur War.

Speaking ahead of Khairat, Hotovely and Edelstein hailed the “courageous” pact between then-prime minister Menachem Begin and Sadat.

In the words of Jimmy Carter, the personalities of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat “were totally incompatible”; they were two men with nothing in common. The president’s characterization interpretation of the two leaders, widely accepted both now and at the time of the 1978 Camp David negotiations, inflated Carter’s own image as heroic peacemaker. But, argues Martin Kramer, Begin and Sadat actually had very similar backgrounds and career trajectories—and these similarities might have made possible their success at achieving a compromise:

One obvious similarity is [that] both entered politics through the back door, as conspirators who planned political violence and were steeled by long stints in political prison. Sadat, as a young revolutionary, immersed himself in conspiratorial plots, both against the British (who then controlled Egypt) as well as against Egyptian leaders he regarded as collaborators. As a result, he found himself in and out of prison. . . .

Menachem Begin had the more famous “underground” career. He was first sent to prison during World War II by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. . . . By then, he too had been initiated into a life of clandestine conspiracy—methods of operation he would bring with him to Palestine in the last days of the British Mandate. . . .

Both men [later] spent many years on the political margins, overshadowed by domineering leaders who had a stronger grip on the imaginations of their peoples, . . . [and] who issued the declarations of independence of their countries. (David Ben-Gurion actually declared Israel’s independence in 1948, and Gamal Abdel Nasser effectively declared Egypt’s independence by nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956.) But neither of these giants had managed to bring peace to their peoples. . . .

Revelry and rivers of enthusiasm washed over Israeli media over the past week: "Saudi newspaper interviews Israeli chief of staff!""Peace with Saudi Arabia has begun!""The days of the messiah are upon us!" That was the general spirit of the responses to the interview Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot gave to the Arabic news website Elaph last Thursday.

This site is, in fact, not at all a Saudi newspaper, as claimed in the various reports, and is run from London by two people, one born in Saudi Arabia and the other in Iraq.

Few Israelis know that the interviewer was not some Saudi journalist who landed in Israel in secret, as was suggested, but by Druze-Israeli Majdi Halabi, one of our own, who serves as Elaph's Israel correspondent.

This site has given a platform to a number of Israeli writers since its establishment in 2001, including articles by my mentor, the late Prof. Shmuel Moreh, and even yours truly. But by all means, if we can get everyone excited about a historical event or the coming of the messiah, why not?

Incidentally, I combed the Saudi news outlets for any mention of the interview, but I did not find one.

Israel can’t build ties to the Arab world based on the common regional threats they face without also resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov told The Jerusalem Post.

“The Palestinian question” remains “a very emotional issue for the Arab public,” said Mladenov, who will be appearing at the Post’s Diplomatic Conference on December 6.

“I do not believe any Arab leader, whether a king or a president, can go to their own people without saying something on how the Palestinian question is being addressed,” Mladenov said.

He spoke with the Post last week, as Israel has increased its outreach to moderate Arab countries, primarily Saudi Arabia, which are banding together to oppose Iran.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman has called for moderate Arab leaders to visit Jerusalem to form a coalition against Tehran with Israel.

Activists in the country’s leading organization promoting removal of Jewish communities from areas Palestinians claim for a future state are leveling criticism at two major leaders of the nation for promoting the establishment and development of such communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines with Jordan.

Joshua, son of Nun, and King David, came under fire from Peace Now this week for what the organization called efforts to undermine a peace agreement. Organization spokesman Yariv Oppenheimer told reporters that the unrestrained conquest by Joshua and David in areas that, under any foreseeable peace agreement, would become part of a Palestinian state, demonstrated how determined the extremists are to prevent territorial concessions even at the price of Israel’s soul.

“The policies of those governments will make a sustainable peace accord impossible,” contended Oppenheimer. “We will forever be condemned to rule by force over millions of Palestinians because Joshua and David cannot refrain from taking territory beyond the Green Line. Such occupation will bring inevitable moral decay, and force us to choose between a Jewish state and a democratic state. I, for one, refuse to entertain participation in the Apartheid that must characterize iron-fisted rule over another people.”

Jordan will not allow the reopening of the Israeli embassy in Amman or the return of Israel’s ambassador unless the Israeli security guard involved in the killing of two Jordanians in July is brought to trial, a Jordanian government minister said Thursday.

Jordanian Media Affairs Minister Mohammed Momani issued a press release to this effect, in which he added that Jordan’s position on the issue was very firm.

Saleh al-Armouti, a Jordanian member of Parliament, told The Media Line that Israeli ambassador Einat Schlein is unwelcome in Amman because she “accompanied the murderer,” security guard Ziv Moyal, back to Israel. The appropriate response to the entire incident, according to al-Armouti, would be for Jordan to “close the embassy and cut ties with Israel for good.

“The security guard doesn’t have diplomatic immunity,” said al-Armouti, “but [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu wants to challenge Jordan.”

Al-Armouti stressed that to reopen the embassy without Moyal having been put on trial would constitute a blot on Jordan’s history.

The IDF rescued three Israelis who illegally entered the West Bank Palestinian city of Nablus late Tuesday night after their car was stolen and set ablaze, the army said.

The civilians were there in violation of military law prohibiting Israelis from entering into Palestinian-controlled Area A. The car theft and arson attack took place after the trio left their vehicle to roam through the city.

It was not immediately clear why they entered the city.

Separately in Nablus, the IDF gave special permission for some 1,000 Jewish worshipers to enter Joseph’s Tomb holy site. While the army said the prayers were carried out without incident, Palestinian media outlets reported clashes between local youth and Israeli forces.

The brother of an Israeli man who has been imprisoned by Hamas in the Gaza Strip for more than three years urged the international community on Thursday to act to bring his sibling home.

During a visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Ilan Gashao Mengistu — the brother of 30-year-old Avraham Avera Mengistu, an Ashkelon resident who crossed into Gaza on his own accord in September 2014 and has not been heard from since — accused Hamas of “toying with the life of a mentally disabled civilian.”

“They are playing a cynical and cruel game with the life of a man who has never harmed a soul,” Mengistu — standing between his mother Agarnesh and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon — continued. “I have a brother — he is helpless — and he needs your help.”

“Look at my mother,” he added. “She is a mother like all other mothers, and she deserves to know the fate of her son.”

“We are here today, at the United Nations, to call on the international community to put the full weight of its authority on anyone who can help release my brother,” Mengistu declared. “Pressure the international organizations that have showed weakness and helplessness. And of course, pressure Hamas, which is holding an ill individual captive more than three years, and is responsible for his fate.”

Strategic Affairs and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan on Monday sent a letter to Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, who is also in charge of the country's national service program, asking him to rescind eligibility quotas for organizations that boycott Israel or support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

The national service program functions as an alternative to mandatory military service, allowing young Israelis to serve the state by volunteering instead. The program allots quotas of national service volunteers to different institutions and organizations deemed to be contributing to the state.

"It is unacceptable that an organization working to harm the country with boycotts enjoys quotas [from the government] that are intended for the betterment of the country and its citizens," Erdan wrote.

Erdan named the rights group Amnesty International as an example of a nongovernmental organization that receives six national service volunteers from the state while waging a broad and prolonged campaign urging other nations and international companies to boycott goods manufactured in Judea and Samaria.

Amnesty International has even accused Israel of committing war crimes and supports draft-dodging, he said.

Lebanon's army chief urged "full readiness" at the southern border to face the "threats of the Israeli enemy and its violations," the army said in a tweet on Tuesday.

Army Commander General Joseph Aoun called on soldiers to be ever vigilant for the "good implementation" of the UN resolution 1701 to "preserve stability" at the border with Israel.

The Lebanese army is responsible for security on its side of the border under the resolution that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

His remarks came a day after Lebanese president Michel Aoun appeared to defend Hezbollah as necessary to resist Israel, after an Arab League statement accused the group of terrorism and noted it is part of Lebanon's coalition government.

"Israeli targeting still continues and it is the right of the Lebanese to resist it and foil its plans by all available means," the President's office quoted him as saying in a Tweet.

Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah boasted in a speech Monday that his organization shipped anti-tank missiles to the Gaza Strip. "I'm proud and honored to say we sent Kornet missiles to the Gaza Strip. We're using our own weapons in Syria as well," he said.

The Hezbollah chief was nevertheless dismissive towards allegations his organization was responsible for the ballistic missile recently launched from Yemen at Saudi Arabia by Iran-affiliated Houthi rebels.

Nasrallah also complained that while no Israeli attack has thus far caused the Arab League's foreign ministers to convene, a single missile launched at Riyadh led to a special session of Arab countries' organization.

Touching on Lebanon's political turmoil following the surprise resignation of Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, Nasrallah remarked, "I wish to remind (the Arab League ministers) and public opinion that the single greatest threat to Lebanese security and stability is the Israeli occupation. Likewise, the most important factor contributing to Lebanon's liberation is resistance, and the backbone of that resistance is Hezbollah."

Nasrallah also went on to bemoan the Arab League's decision to recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. "I thank the Palestinian factions for their responses to the Arab League decision marking Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The excitement we can now see within the Arab world is covering for relations with Israel."

Hamas on Monday rejected an Arab League resolution labelling Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

In a statement quoted by AFP, Hamas said it "rejects the description of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement as terrorist."

Instead, it added, Israel's actions against Palestinians should be labelled "terrorism."

It also called on Arab states to "support the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people" and urged them to work together to solve their differences through dialogue.

The statement came a day after Arab League members adopted a resolution saying they would hold the "terrorist Lebanese Hezbollah... responsible for supporting terrorism and terrorist organizations in Arab countries, with modern weapons and ballistic missiles".

Sunday’s meeting of the Arab League was held at the request of Saudi Arabia, amid growing tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, its regional rival.

The Palestinian Authority submitted a report to the United Nations blaming Israel for the phenomenon of domestic abuse in PA-controlled areas, according to a human rights NGO.

Human Rights Voices (HRV), a UN watchdog organization, reported that the PA submitted the report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), a group of independent experts who monitor implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. CEDAW will consider the report in July 2018.

According to HRV, the PA report contains "a litany of anti-Semitic accusations and blood libels against Israel."

The report describes Israelis as terrorists but refers to Arabs who attack Jews, including civilians and children, as "martyrs." Terrorist attacks on Israelis are called the "liberation movement.

The report further blames Israel for the "psychological suffering" of the family members of terrorists, and boasts about the payments the PA issues to terrorists in Israeli prisons.

Egypt opened its Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip for three days starting Saturday, after the Gaza-ruling Hamas terror group handed over administrative control of the checkpoint to the Palestinian Authority (PA) earlier this month.

Hamas’ move was part of the implementation of its Palestinian reconciliation deal with PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party.

The terror group removed its forces from Rafah, and now PA security forces stand guard with a framed portrait of Abbas hanging on the crossing’s gates adjacent to a portrait of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Egypt’s government played a central role in mediating the recent reconciliation pact between the rival Palestinian factions, and is expected to arbitrate additional talks in Cairo during the coming weeks regarding the expansion of the PA’s rule in Gaza.

The Palestinian unity deal, announced in October, will see Fatah end sanctions on Hamas in return for allowing the PA to regain full control of Gaza by Dec. 1. The Israeli government reacted to the unity deal by calling for Hamas to disarm and recognize Israel.

German police on Tuesday arrested six Syrian refugees suspected of preparing a terror attack in the name of the Islamic State jihadist group, prosecutors said.

The suspects, aged 20 to 28, were detained in dawn raids that saw some 500 police officers swoop on residences in the cities of Kassel, Essen, Hanover and Leipzig.

The men are accused of belonging to “the foreign terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State,” Christian Hartwig, a spokesman for the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office, said in a statement.

“The accused are also suspected of preparing an attack on a public target in Germany using weapons or explosives,” Hartwig said.

The investigators believe the men had not yet finalized their attack plan, he added.

The suspects arrived in Germany between December 2014 and September 2015 at the height of Europe’s migrant crisis.

Iran-backed Shia paramilitary forces operating in northern Iraq have been accused by a Kurdish parliamentarian of engaging in “flagrant injustice” toward Christians in the region which until earlier this year was in the grip of ISIS terrorists.

Wahida Yaqo Hormuz — a Christian representative in the parliament of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) — said she had alerted the Vatican and international human rights groups to what she called the “Shia-ification” of the Nineveh Plains, where the northern Iraqi city of Mosul is located. Conquered by ISIS in 2014, Iraqi government forces retook the city in July.

“This is a flagrant injustice done to Christians,” Yaqo Hormuz said, commenting on reports that the Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary, a coalition of armed Shia groups supported by Iran, was preventing the return of Christians who fled during the recent assault on KRG-controlled territories in northern Iraq.

According to a Christian refugee from ISIS interviewed by the Kurdish news outlet Rudaw, Hashd al-Shaabi forces are persecuting those Christians, once a population of 40,000, who remain in his home town.

“The situation of these areas is getting worse day by day,” the refugee, Amir Yaqu, said. “The Hashd al-Shaabi forces are systematically trying to change the Christian demography of these places. They have started to operate sectarian schools in churches and religious centers.”

The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on six Iranian men and companies for counterfeiting Yemeni currency as a part of a scheme by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to destabilize the country.

The Treasury Department said Monday that those sanctioned, including two German-based printing and design firms, are part of a network that produced potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in fake Yemeni cash. It said the network used “deceptive measures” to get around European export restrictions to buy advanced equipment and materials to print the counterfeits for the Guard Corps.

The sanctioned companies are Pardazesh Tasvir Rayan Co., Tejarat Almas Mobin and the German firms ForEnt Technik and Printing Trade Center. Their owners also face sanctions, which include a freeze on any assets they may have in U.S. jurisdictions.

The Israeli chess team is preparing to participate in the World Chess Championship in the Saudi capital of Riyadh next month. The seven contestants are waiting for Saudi approval of their visa applications to enter the kingdom, a move that would ultimately broadcast to the world Saudi Arabia’s acceptance of Israel as a valid and recognized participant.

If Saudi Arabia approves the visas, however, it will place itself in an awkward position regarding normalization with Israel. On the other hand, if the Saudis reject the Israeli delegation, it might lose the right to host further matches and the International Chess Federation confirmed it would not pay the tournament prizes, estimated to be millions of dollars.

The Israeli participation in the championship is based on an invitation received from the World Chess Federation.

When reached by The Media Line, Ahmad Al-Hbilani from the Saudi Chess Federation refused to comment on the issue.

Lior Eisenberg, spokesperson for the Israel Chess Federation, expressed to The Media Line how important it is for Israelis to participate and play against Arab countries in such big championships. “If Saudi Arabia agrees to host the Israelis, it will be a very big thing; allowing the Israelis to enter the kingdom publicly for the first time,” he said. “Our policy is to develop this game in Israel and to use it as a bridge to play abroad, but we have to wait and see.”

Eisenberg further noted that both “Israel and Iran are now in the same situation, waiting for the Saudi approval of our visas.”

The Trump administration is reconsidering its position on closing the Palestinian mission in Washington, said Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki on Tuesday morning.
The Trump administration began to reconsider the move following threats by the Palestinian Authority’s leadership that Ramallah would cut its ties with Washington, Maliki told the official Voice of Palestine radio station.

Fatah leader Raafat Alian called on Arab and Islamic countries to take a serious and clear stance against the recent US threat to close the offices of the PLO in Washington.
Alian said in a press statement on Tuesday that this political blackmail is contrary to all conventions and international laws and resolutions related to the Palestinian issue and the peace process in general.

Mount Holyoke College will host a leadership conference next semester exclusively for “women of color,” featuring known anti-Zionist Linda Sarsour.

Sarsour, one of several leaders behind the record-setting Women’s March in Washington D.C., allegedly supports the implementation of Sharia Law, endorsed the throwing of rocks at Israeli cars, and even called Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu “a waste of a human being.”

"If students do not show up and claim space, they are making a choice and sending a message that they don’t need it."

The 2018 Women of Color Trailblazers Leadership Conference will be open to students and community members and will ultimately “provide a space to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of women of color.”

The conference will be keynoted by the founders of the anti-Trump Women’s March, including Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez, and Sarsour, a frequent critic of Israel whom many people consider to be anti-Semitic.

In the spirit of inclusivity, the event is open to “all individuals (from ages 4 and up) who self- identify as women of color,” according to its event page. No men of color, nor white women, will be permitted to attend.

A private university in New York City is hosting a panel on combating anti-Semitism -- but there's at least one glaring problem, according to critics: an avowed anti-Zionist protester is among the so-called experts.

Brooklyn-born Muslim activist Linda Sarsour is set to be a panelist at the New School's Nov. 28 event, "Anti-Semitism and the Struggle for Justice."

Sarsour has previously said “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” has lauded National of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan and objected to the Jewish right to return to Israel.

Further, the event, which is moderated by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, appears to reject anti-Semitism while also exhibiting an anti-Israel stance.

“When anti-Semitism is redefined as criticism of Israel, critics of Israeli policy become accused and targeted more than the growing far-right,” the event description reads.

The New School, which says it was founded on principles of tolerance, social justice, and free intellectual exchange, told Fox News, in a statement, the school has “been contacted by several individuals who have expressed their concerns about the university’s participation.”

The New York Post Editorial Board labeled the event an Orwellian “fake panel...meant to promote Israel-bashing.”

The Jerusalem Post Editorial Board slammed it as “a forum of ‘antisemites on antisemitism’” that “makes as much sense as a KKK forum on civil rights.”

Manson's conviction arose from the murders of nine people. By comparison, our daughter's murderer was convicted in an Israeli court - after confessing to all the charges - of the murder of fifteen people. (A sixteenth person, a young mother, has been comatose from the moment of the Sbarro pizzeria explosion more than 16 years ago until today.) Tamimi has said for the record that she wished the toll were higher.

Like Manson, Ahlam Tamimi is a woman with a mission. But unlike Manson, she never needed to ask for parole which, in any event, the court which tried and sentenced her strongly recommended should be perpetually refused. But she walked free anyway, thanks to the catastrophic Gilad Shalit Deal of 2011 ["19-Oct-11: Haaretz: Shalit prisoner swap marks 'colossal failure' for mother of Israeli bombing victim"]. And did we mention that she is regarded as a national hero throughout the Arab world? And had her own TV program to propagate her values throughout the Arabic-speaking world from January 2012 until September 2016? (The program continues but she is no longer its presenter.)

Living free as a bird in Amman, Jordan, where she was born and where her family lives, she has happily (very happily) boasted of the central role she took in the planning and execution of the Sbarro pizzeria massacre. She has spoken of the pride she felt when fleeing the scene of the massacre that awful day, in the company of exultant fellow Arabs who were elated by the fresh news of a massacre in the center of Jerusalem. She has said on camera that she wished she could have told them it was she who did it.

She presented the evening news a few hours later on a Palestinian Arab television station in Ramallah called Istiklal, opening naturally enough with big news of a "resistance" activity in "Occupied Jerusalem" and the many dead Jews, especially the many dead Jewish children. How that evil creature's heart must have soared.

Golbarg Bashi is in the news for her children’s book “P is for Palestine,” which has been described an anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish screed addressed to children.

Believe it or not, Bashi and I go way back.

In August of 2013, a publicist was arranging interviews for me to discuss the issues raised in my just released book, “An American Bride in Kabul.” CSPAN had tendered a special offer just for me.

“They want to give you a full hour, one on one, with an interviewer. You should grab this.”
“Who is the interviewer?” I asked.
“Golbarg Bashi.”

I had no idea who she was. And so I said:
“Ok, give me five minutes and I’ll get back to you.”

Within five minutes I had determined that Golbarg Bashi was an Iranian, married to Hamid Dabashi, another Iranian, and the professor who had stepped into Edward Said’s shoes at Columbia. Bashi was a professor at Rutgers, the very institution that has succored the likes of Puar Jabari whose book of Big Lies against Israel has just been published by Duke University Press

Bashi herself was a protégée of American born “Palestinian” Lila Abu-Lughod, whose American-born mother and British Mandatory born father both enjoyed long academic careers in America, not in “Palestine.”

Barchi began his address by illustrating the difference between free speech and harassment, noting that placing “a swastika on the side of a building on campus” would not be a violation of the First Amendment, even if it might breach university policies against vandalism.

His argument drew an objection from a woman in the crowd, who said to applause, “it is not free speech.”

“If you take that swastika and put it on the door of a dormitory, that’s not protected,” Barchi argued in return, “but if it is a general building on the university, by first amendment rights, it’s protected.”

He went on to address the ongoing controversies surrounding Chikindas, Puar, and Adi, noting that “the one thing that is common to all of these is that they were all brought forward by The Algemeiner.”

Barchi called The Algemeiner — a newspaper in circulation for over 40 years — “a blog out of New York, which is the follow-on to what was a Yiddish-language newspaper that folded 10 years ago. They are the ones that have researched each one of these stories that have been picked up elsewhere.”

The Algemeiner’s print edition — which features English and Yiddish-language articles — has never gone out of business. Moreover, while The Algemeiner was the first to interview Chikindas, his postings were initially exposed by the Israellycool blog.

Barchi acknowledged that Chikindas — who described Judaism as “the most racist religion in the world” — made “crude jokes about Israel, Judaism, women, homosexuality, a whole lot of things which most of us would find repugnant.” (h/t Jewess)

We question the university’s decision to hire Adi in the first place, and want to know why both professors are still employed at the university. We also believe it’s unacceptable that Rutgers has yet to properly address the troubling actions of both professors.

Adi was hired at Rutgers in 2015, after working for the Assad regime in Syria for over 16 years. He had a hand in defending Syria to international bodies such as the UN, and has “justified the war crimes of the genocidal Assad regime,” according to UN Watch. Ironically, he is scheduled to teach a class on “International Criminal Law and Anti-Corruption” next semester. Rutgers has responded to demands to fire Adi by saying that, “Rutgers will not defend the content of every opinion expressed by every member of our academic community, but the University will defend their rights to academic freedom and to speak freely.”

But, we have to ask ourselves, should an “apologist for … mass murder” be given the platform to speak freely in the context of a political science class about anti-corruption, while being so blatantly a part of it? And if Adi really opposed what was happening in Syria, why did he continue working for Assad years into the civil war (and that’s ignoring Syria’s blatant war crimes and other indefensible behavior prior to the civil war). Adi clearly has a biased and unethical world worldview, and it should not be shared at our university.

Furthermore, according to The Algemeiner, a former student has claimed that Adi defended Palestinian terrorism in class as a legitimate form of “resistance” to Israeli “occupation.” Clearly, Adi’s positions cannot be part of the fabric and culture of inclusion and peace that Rutgers University promotes. The university defends its decision to hire Adi based on “his expertise in international law and diplomacy, and other fields.” But is genocidal diplomacy the type of politics that we want taught at our university? Where is the line drawn?

We were heartened to learn that a Philadelphia synagogue is offering an adult education course about antisemitism — a timeless scourge that every generation must combat.

But why is the course seemingly prompted, as its website suggests, solely by Christian sources of Jew-hatred and August’s despicable anti-Jewish events in Charlottesville — rather than July’s equally despicable calls in two California mosques for Jews to be slaughtered, or even the continuous despicable Jew-hatred from Nation of Islam leaders?
Are Jew-hatred and threats from some Muslims in America less vile, less threatening or less problematic than the same actions from white supremacists?

To some in the Jewish community: yes, apparently.

In a brief description of the course on the Society Hill Synagogue’s website, these are among the questions posed: “What is the role of Christianity and the Church in antisemitism? How has antisemitism morphed over the centuries? In the shadow of Charlottesville we must ask, to what extent does antisemitism threaten the Jewish people in this country? Is it confined to isolated, albeit frightening and horrific, incidents? Is it a larger threat?”

While acts of antisemitism have been and continue to be perpetrated by some Christians, there seems to be a tendency by many Jews to brush aside, downplay or even ignore Jew-hatred from some Muslims; some of these hatreds are motivated by aggressive mosques or certain interpretations of Islam.

Israel should be proud of itself for having active human rights organizations in the country, including Breaking the Silence. Soldiers are allowed to expose the wrongs, and there are wrongs. The problem is that in the past few years, the organization has undergone a complete changeover.

The organization, which started off by exposing wrongs in a bid to fix them, has turned into an organization that is ceaselessly spreading lies against the State of Israel. This isn’t about the organization’s spokesman, Dean Issacharoff, who has been caught telling a blatant lie. It’s about the system. It’s about the organization.

Breaking the Silence Director Avner Gvaryahu responded to the exposed lie by insisting that the story about Issacharoff brutally attacking a Palestinian during his military service was true. Issacharoff’s comrades testified that it never happened. The Palestinian testified that it never happened. But that doesn’t matter, because instead of insisting on exposing the truth, the organization is insisting on spreading lies.

There are serious incidents which should be exposed. The problem starts when the organization’s leaders turn IDF soldiers into bloodthirsty monsters interested in committing nonstop war crimes.

Noam Chayut, one of the organization’s three board members, published an article titled “The exceptional person is one who is unwilling to kill civilians.” He is the moderate of the three. The other two are supporters of the anti-Israel boycott campaign. There is no surprise, therefore, in the fact that Issacharoff and Gvaryahu have gone from exposing wrongs to disseminating lies. When you get money from pro-BDS bodies, you act like the BDS movement.

When controversial Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy was hosted on i24 News television, HonestReporting was there: holding the media to account and setting the record straight. We are the only organization working to change the conversation about Israel at every stage of the news cycle: before, during and after.

I have mentioned before the Palestinian Information Center, an antisemitic website that sure loves a good blood libel against Israel (its Facebook page is in fact where I happened across a comment by antisemitic Rutgers professor Michael Chikindas, ultimately leading to his exposure).

Their latest libel is this:

The implication is clear: Israeli forces captured or detained a small palestinian boy, making them cruel monsters.

Besides the Jews, I think the Palestinian Information Center’s greatest enemy is reverse image search, because it helps us find the sources of their photos, in this case here.

Escorted from a crime scene in Jerusalem
Israeli border policemen escort a boy away from a blocked alley after a stabbing attack inside the old city of Jerusalem according to Israeli police, April 1, 2017. (Photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters)

The professor further claims there that
Israel has used UN Security Council Resolution 242 to retroactively legitimate [its] colonial takings

There are two ways to counter her arguments besides discounting her use of "colonial".

There is the easy way which is to point to the website of Jadaliyya where Ms. Erekat serves as co-editor. I signed up to receive its newsletter but I had to note I reside in "palestine" (yes, with a small P) which is not a country nor a state but a region.

Why?

Well, Israel isn't listed:

Not nice.

And she complains about Israel, which is a real state? I hope I'm updated.

The second way, as she lectures in law, is to be a bit more serious.

We get it: Kuwait doesn’t like Israel. Boycotts it, in fact. But state-owned Kuwait Airways should not be able to peddle that poison in other countries.

Like, of all places, Germany, where the airline bars anyone with an Israeli passport from boarding its planes.

They tried the same stunt here at JFK last year. The federal government, standing on principle, said no way. So the airline pouted and pulled out.

In Germany, a Frankfurt court has okayed the blatant discrimination, ruling Thursday that the airline was well within its rights to cancel a Frankfurt-to-Bangkok ticket sold to an Israeli because it acted not based on race, ethnicity or religion, but on the traveler’s citizenship.

The mayor of Frankfurt is correctly outraged.

Step eins: Change German law to include citizenship in the protected groups. Step zwei: Bar any airline from operating out of Germany unless it accepts all passengers willing to buy tickets.

Step drei: Tell the world sneaky Israel-hating anti-Semitism has no home in 21st century Deutschland.

Since 2002, student activists have tried to pass anti-Israel divestment resolutions at the University of Michigan. This month, they succeeded on a 23-17 vote of the university’s Central Student Government. But opponents of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement should not be demoralized by this result.

In spite of favorable circumstances for BDS in the United States, where fervent opposition to Donald Trump has opened a space for even marginal elements on the left, the BDS brand has not been selling at our colleges and universities. Perhaps it is the flirtation with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Perhaps it is BDS’ effective endorsement of violence against Israeli civilians wherever they may reside. Or perhaps it is BDS’ romance with unrepentant terrorists. But the University of Michigan’s resolution mentions the call of “Palestinian civil society” that supposedly initiated the BDS movement just once. And Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), whose very name obscures its primary purpose, the promotion of BDS, didn’t mention “Palestinian civil society” at all in its statement of support for divestment.

For BDS to triumph with students, it has to obscure just what it is students are being asked to vote for. One supporter of the resolution described its effect this way: “I understand the very deep connection many, many students have with Israel . . . I want to emphasize over and over again that this resolution emphasizes the voices of Palestinian students . . . and to give this community a voice for the first time in CSG history is to not take away from any other community.” That this claim, by no means limited to one student, had any purchase suggests that some proponents were not clued in to the resolution’s intent, however softened for pragmatic reasons. This is a movement dedicated to casting Israel out of the family of nations.

To make sure that representatives would be as clueless as possible, the resolution’s supporters successfully persuaded student government to deny history professor Victor Lieberman the opportunity to speak. Lieberman, who has written about and taught courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict, has apparently been too effective in opposition to BDS in the past. University of Michigan’s Hillel has rightly condemned the student government’s positive aversion to hearing from someone who has devoted years to studying a conflict on which these students have now pronounced their verdict, although most have presumably not studied it at all.

Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters responded to criticism from Australian singer Nick Cave, telling him the artists’ boycott of Israel “isn’t about music – it’s about human rights.”

Cave and his band, The Bad Seeds, played to sold-out crowds on Sunday and Monday in Tel Aviv.

Prior to his concerts, Cave told a news conference that he was performing in Israel to take a stand against BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

He took a dig at Waters, saying: “If you play Israel, you have to go through a sort of public humiliation from Roger Waters and Co., and no one wants to be publicly shamed. It’s the thing we fear the most, in a way, to be publicly humiliated.”

Waters is a leading proponent of the BDS movement against Israel and has been active in urging fellow artists to boycott performing in the country.

“Nick thinks this is about censorship of his music? What?” Waters wrote in a statement following Cave’s concerts in Israel. “Nick, with all due respect, your music is irrelevant to this issue. So is mine, so is Brian Eno’s, so is Beethoven’s. This isn’t about music – it’s about human rights.”

“We hurl our glasses into the fire of your arrogant unconcern, and smash our bracelets on the rock of your implacable indifference,” Waters also wrote, adding “if at some point in the future you want to climb out of the dark, all you have to do is open your eyes, we, in BDS will be here to welcome you into the light.”

As I posted earlier, Nick Cave’s outspoken support of Israel and opposition to BDS has sure rubbed the BDS-holes the wrong way.

Now some high-profile BDS-holes have responded publicly, including Roger Waters, who had this to say (and naturally it is full of lies):

Yup, he really did just mutter the words “we, in BDS will be here to welcome you into the light,” without the slightest hint of irony.

There are also comments from fellow haters Brian Eno, Ken Loach and some others I have never heard of. I’m just glad to see this scum and villainy get their panties in a bunch.

Among the thousands who packed Tel Aviv’s Menorah Mivtachim Arena for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ show Sunday night was Coldplay vocalist Chris Martin.

Martin was spotted backstage at the well-received show, but had already been seen in Israel over the weekend in Herzliya, together with 50 Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson, with whom he has been romantically linked. According to Ynet, Martin and Johnson dined in Tel Aviv with Cave, who was making his first visit to Israel in some 20 years.

Martin has been a frequent visitor to Israel according to entertainment industry insiders, and late last year reports proliferated about a planned concert by Coldplay at the Dead Sea or another venue in the country. So far, there has been no official announcement about such a show, but could Martin’s presence at the Cave show be a precursor of things to come? If so, Coldplay will join the Australian singer/songwriter and other performers who have raised the ire of BDS supporters and bucked Israel boycott calls.

At a pre-show press conference on Sunday, Cave said his two performances in Israel on Sunday and Monday marked a "a principled stand against anyone who tries to censor and silence musicians." In response, two of the most vocal public figures supporting BDS, Roger Waters and Brian Eno criticized Cave.

What makes this even sweeter: Besides Coldplay being one of the world’s biggest bands, they were at one time regarded as the great white hope for BDS-holes everywhere when they posted link to a pro-palestinian song on their Facebook page back in 2011.

But since then, they have been a major disappointment for BDS-holes. After removing the link to the song from their Facebook page, they invested in an Israeli company, employed an Israeli visual design company to produce a video clip, and hired Israelis to direct a video clip. Chris Martin was also here last year checking things out.

So yes, this has been a hell of a bad week for BDS. May the trend continue!

The victims of Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan are in the tens, if not hundreds, stretching back over more than two decades, according to a new exposé.

Majda Bernoussi, a woman of Moroccan origin, kept a daily journal throughout her tumultuous relationship with the prominent Islamic scholar, extracts of which have been unveiled in French magazine Le Point.

While Ms Bernoussi was herself not raped or beaten in the five year relationship, which lasted from 2009 to 2014, she claims to have been threatened by his fans when she tried to denounce him for his “predatory” behaviour towards women.

She is now planning to publish her journal, entitled: A voyage into troubled waters with Tariq Ramadan.

The latest development follows a string of damning allegations about Mr Ramadan, who is a professor at Oxford University and the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Three women have accused him of rape or sexual assault in the past month, providing graphic details in interviews and on social media. Four of his former students also claimed he seduced them when they were just teenagers

The play also features a trope known as the Livingstone Formulation (the charge that Jews cynically use false charges of antisemitism to silence debate about Israel):

“If you attack Israel, they say you are an anti-Semite … we must be free to criticise any political ideology that advances the right of one people over another. And that includes Zionism”

And of course the accusation that those who accuse Walker of antisemitism “are really trying to destabilise Corbyn………..”

In the post-show discussion at SOAS, Walker suggested that the Jewish Chronicle newspaper was in cahoots with the compliance department of the Labour Party (the unit which deals with disciplinary issues, including accusations of antisemitism) – a nasty innuendo about Jewish power in UK politics.

But her nastiest comment in the post-show discussion at SOAS was this:

“Those people who write in the Jewish Chronicle, who do the harassing, those people, they are not the friends of the Left, they are what I call protofascists … One thing I know, the same people who are Jewish essentialists are the same sort of people who are white nationalists – and they are all our enemy.“

Sayle of course has form ……………

He has also compared Israel to a prolific sex offender

He is a Patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

And (like Walker) he believes that antisemitism in the Labour Party is “fabricated”.

They deserve each other don’t they…

The BBC’s rising star, Reggie Yates, has apologise after remarking that it is “great” that the young generation is not “managed by some random fat Jewish guy from north west London, they’re managed by their brethren”, adding that they were “idiots”, “dickheads” and not “your people.

Mr Yates was talking about grime music artists when he made the comments. During the programme, which was recorded a month ago, he said: “Like I said it’s about perspective. The thing that makes it great about this new generation of artists is that they ain’t signing to majors. They’re independent, they’re not managed by some random fat Jewish guy from north west London, they’re managed by their brethren. Wretch, Stormzy, Skepta, its all – you know what I mean – these are all people that we’ve all known, that we’ve all come up with, from time. So it’s amazing to see now the example isn’t get hot and then give all of your publishing to these idiots. Or go and give all of your rights to these dickheads over here. It’s now get hot, bring the family in, keep the family close, and win with your people. That’s the example now in music.”

The comment was brought to light by Telegraph journalist Camilla Turner in an article yesterday. In response, Mr Yates said: “I am hugely apologetic for this flippant comment. It was not my intention to offend or reinforce stereotypes, but I’m aware that this could have been interpreted that way and for that I am also deeply sorry. What I was actually trying to say was how proud I am of the new generation of artists making their success independently on their own terms and without giving away control or their rights to major labels.”

A leading French Socialist Party (PS) politician was on Monday facing expulsion and possible legal proceedings following a crudely antisemitic tweet which displayed France’s president, Emanuel Macron, in the grip of a Jewish financial conspiracy.

Gérard Filoche — a member of the PS National Bureau and veteran labor unionist — posted the offending tweet on Friday night. An accompanying photo montage showed Macron wearing a Nazi armband with the swastika altered to a dollar sign. Looming behind Macron were three leading French Jews — the economist Jacques Attali, and the investors Patrick Drahi and Jacob Rothschild — flanked by the American and Israeli flags. Filoche added as a comment, “A dirty guy, as all the French people will know soon enough.”

Filoche deleted the tweet shortly after posting it — but not before it had been widely shared. On Monday, he told the French newspaper Liberation, “I withdrew this message and I apologized, it was bullsh*t.”

Filoche claimed that he had not posted the tweet himself, and that it had been removed as soon as it was brought to his attention. He blamed “Macron and the right-wing of the PS” for drawing attention to the tweet to gain political advantage.

“Where is the problem?” he complained.

Cathay Pacific, the flagship airline of Hong Kong, is set to launch an office in Israel as well as daily Tel Aviv-Hong Kong flights beginning in 2018.

“The company’s agenda is to allocate airliners to destinations for which we see strong demand, and it can therefore be assumed that we will also increase the frequency of the flights to daily,” said Cathay Pacific’s Israel manager, Jonathan Bailey, Globes reported.

Cathay Pacific’s first flight to Israel landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport in March. The airline currently offers around four to six weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Hong Kong, and uses the environmentally friendly 280-seat Airbus A350 planes on the route. Next year, the airline may introduce Airbus A350-1000 planes for the Israel route, increasing seating capacity by 10 percent, according to Globes.

“The [Israeli customer] segment that surprised us was business class, both in comparison with other countries and with the forecasts,” said Bailey. “Demand for business class was huge. The feeling is that the passengers, especially businessmen who fly a lot, appreciate what they get for their money.”

The British Library last week launched a new website showcasing 1,300 Hebrew manuscripts, ranging from ancient Torah scrolls and prayer books to philosophical, theological and scientific works.

The new site is the library’s first bilingual online collection, allowing users to search for scans of the manuscripts in Hebrew and English.

“The British Library holds one of the world’s greatest collections of Hebrew manuscripts,” said Ilana Tahan, lead curator of the library’s Hebrew and Christian Orient Collections.

“Digitizing and making these beautiful and very important items available online is a huge step forward in opening them up to international scholars and a wider public audience. We hope that, by providing access to the articles and collection highlights in Hebrew as well as English, we will make them accessible to even more people, allowing them to learn more about our incredible collection of Hebrew manuscripts.”

The works searchable on the site include the Hispano-Moresque Haggadah from 13th century Spain, an illustrated edition of Maimonides’ Code of Law from 15th century Portugal, and the Lisbon Bible from 1482, 14 years before the Portuguese Jews were expelled from their homeland.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been ranked 62nd in the Global University Employability Ranking published by The Times of London last Thursday, five places higher than it ranked last year.

The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology placed 113th, while Tel Aviv University ranked 135th.

The ranking, designed by French human resources company Emerging, is published exclusively by The Times. It lists the universities considered by human resource scouts in the economy's leading companies as the best at preparing students for the job market. The ranking surveyed 2,500 companies from 22 countries and 3,500 executives from a range of firms and industries around the world.

The survey asked participants to describe what they look for in candidates and which universities, in their opinions, provide the most employable graduates.

The first five spots on the prestigious list went to the California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cambridge University.

"We're proud to be in first place among Israeli universities in the ranking of such an important subject. The ranking is a stamp of approval guaranteeing the quality of Hebrew University graduates," said Hebrew University's rector and vice president, Professor Barak Medina.

For more than four years, the IDF has been helping injured Syrians who come to Israel’s northern border. Nearly a year and a half ago, Israel launched Operation Good Neighbor, which provides Syrians in need with medical, infrastructural, and civilian aid.

“Mazor Ladach,” whose name translates to “Bandaging Those in Need,” is a field hospital where the staff treats injured Syrians. “The clinic has already cared for hundreds of Syrians and changed their lives,” said Lt. Col. A., Commander of Operation Good Neighbor.

The clinic itself is located in an uninhabited military post in the southern Golan Heights, in Israeli territory. The 210th Division helped train the staff and the clinic gradually became a real military field hospital.

The clinic began operating last September, and since then the staff has managed to treat hundreds of Syrians every day. “All of the organization’s members are unpaid volunteers,” said Lt. Col. A.

“Take, for example, a Syrian mother who comes with her children. At the end of the day, she leaves the clinic with healthier children and an aid kit from the State of Israel that includes food, basic hygiene products, and medicine. A day at the clinic also includes, time in the playroom and a hot meal. The Syrians also understand that the State of Israel is doing a great thing for them.”

I regret that this meeting should have begun with the statement that we heard from the representative of Syria. On his interpretation of the resolution I have nothing to say, but on his comments on my country's policy I must say a few words.

The Syrian utterance speaks for itself; it was a hymn of hate and aggression trumpeted by the Government which, more than any other, was responsible for disrupting the tranquility of the Middle East in 1966 and 1967. The Syrian representative has repeated the revolting attempt to hang the odious Nazi label on the only people that sustained the full brunt and fury of Nazism without interruption or compromise for all the twelve Nazi years. What a sorry spectacle it is to see a tribunal of peace thus transformed into an arena of hate.

The policy of the Israel Government and nation remains as it was when I formulated it in the Security Council on 13 and 16 November [1375th and 1379th meetings], namely that we shall respect and fully maintain the situation embodied in the cease-fire agreements until it is succeeded by peace treaties between Israel and the Arab States ending the state of war, establishing agreed, recognized and secure territorial boundaries, guaranteeing free navigation for all shipping, including that of Israel, in all the waterways leading to and from the Red Sea, committing all signatories to the permanent and mutual recognition and respect of the sovereignty, security and national identity of all Middle Eastern States, and ensuring a stable and mutually guaranteed security. Such a peace settlement, directly negotiated and contractually confirmed, would create conditions in which refugee problems could be justly and effectively solved through international and regional co-operation.

Those are our aims and positions. They emerge from five months of international discussion, unchanged, unprejudiced and intact. It is now understood as axiomatic that movement from the cease-fire lines can be envisaged only in the framework of a lasting peace establishing recognized and secure boundaries.

The time has come to adapt the Middle Eastern situation to the general principles and concepts which regulate the international order. Let us be done, after nineteen years, with truces, armistices and "demarcation lines based on military considerations" which leave territorial problems unsolved. The relations between States in the Middle East for nineteen years have been fragile, anomalous, indeterminate and unresolved. The hour is ripe for building a stable and durable edifice within which the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean can pursue their separate national vocations and their common regional destiny. The tensions and rancours of the past cannot be ended overnight, but if the relations of States in the Middle East are contained in a permanent and contractually binding framework the patient task of reconciliation can go forward.

The Security Council, like the General Assembly, has consistently refused to endorse proposals which would have sought a return to the ambiguity, vulnerability and insecurity in which we have lived for nineteen years. It has now adopted a resolution of which the central and primary affirmation is the need for "the establishment of a just and lasting peace" based on secure and recognized boundaries. There is a clear understanding that it is only within the establishment of permanent peace with secure and recognized boundaries that other principles can be given effect. As my delegation and others have stated, the establishment for the first time of agreed and secure boundaries as part of a peace settlement is the only key which can unlock the present situation and set on foot a momentum of constructive and peaceful progress. As the representative of the United Kingdom indicated in his address on 16 November, the action to be taken must be within the framework of a permanent peace and of secure and recognized boundaries. It has been pointed out in the Security Council, and it is stated in the 1949 Agreements, that the armistice demarcation lines have never been regarded as boundaries so that, as the representative of the United States has said, the boundaries between Israel and her neighbors: "must be mutually worked out and recognized by the parties themselves as part of the peace-making process" [1377th meeting, para. 65].

We continue to believe that the States of the region, in direct negotiation with each other, have the sovereign responsibility for shaping their common future. It is the duty of international agencies at the behest of the parties to act in the measure that agreement can be promoted and a mutually accepted settlement can be advanced. We do not believe that Member States have the right to refuse direct negotiation with those to whom they address their claims. It is only when they come together that the Arab States and Israel will reveal the full potentialities of a peaceful settlement.

There were proposals, including those submitted by three Powers and then by the Soviet Union, which failed to win the necessary support because they rested in our view on the wrong premise that a solution could be formed on the basis of a return to the situation of 4 June. We hold that that premise has no logical or moral international basis. Similarly, the failure to understand that Israel's action last June was a response to aggression has prevented certain Governments from keeping pace with the development of international thinking. Israel notes, however, that recent Soviet statements and drafts reflect an understanding that the establishment of peace requires, amongst other things, an explicit respect of Israel's national identity and international rights.

I also note that the Soviet text [S/8253], like that of the United States [S/8229], included a reference to the need for curbing the destructive and wasteful arms race. I hope that the absence of this provision in the text on which the Council has voted does not mean that that objective will be lost from sight.

The termination of this debate takes us into a new phase, of which the center lies not here in New York, but in the Middle East. What will henceforward be decisive is not the particular words of an enabling resolution, but the spirit and attitude and policies of the Middle Eastern States. One of the points most strongly emphasized around this table and in all the exchanges which I and my associates have been privileged to have with representatives of Member States is that the only peace that can be established in the Middle East is one that the Governments of the Middle East build together. Peace can grow by agreement. It cannot be imposed. Our Governments in the area must look more and more towards each other. For it is only from each other that they can obtain the satisfaction of their most vital need, the need of peace.

I reiterate that in negotiations with our neighbors we shall present a concrete vision of peace. Before saying what that vision is, I should like to make one comment on the course of this debate with special reference to the remarks of the Indian representative. The establishment of a peace settlement, including secure and recognized boundaries, is quite different from what he had been proposing, namely, withdrawal, without final peace, to demarcation lines. The representative of India has now sought to interpret the resolution in the image of his own wishes. For us, the resolution says what it says. It does not say that which it has specifically and consciously avoided saying.

Thus, if the representative of India is in any predicament, he should not escape it by reading into a text adjectives and place-names which do not occur in the text. He must know that the crucial specifications to which he referred were discussed at length in consultations and deliberately and not accidentally excluded in order to be non-prejudicial to the negotiating position of all parties. The important words in most languages are short words, and every word, long or short, which is not in the text, is not there because it was deliberately concluded that it should not be there.

I have said that we would, in peace negotiations, present a vision and a program of peace. I draw attention to the ideas which I proposed to the General Assembly at its 1577th meeting on 3 October 1967 under the heading of an "agenda for peace". In direct negotiation, we would seek the discussion of juridical problems, including the establishment of peace treaties instead of cease-fire or armistice lines; security and territorial problems, including the establishment of permanent and agreed frontiers of peace and security; population problems, involving regional effort and international co-operation to resolve the problems of displaced populations created by wars and perpetuated by belligerency; economic questions, including the replacement of blockades and boycotts by intense economic co-operation; communications problems, including the opening of the Middle East to a free and normal flow of commerce; cultural and scientific problems, involving an attempt to substitute the best traditions of Arab-Jewish co-operation for the recent tensions and disputes, thus ending the epoch of alienation and hostility.

These are the horizons to which we shall address ourselves. For all the States and peoples of the Middle East, they hold the promise of a new and better age.

Mr. TOMEH (Syria): The test of the success or failure of any major resolution can be measured only by its results. The future will prove whether or not the resolution adopted today will secure the cause of peace in the Middle East
I have listened very carefully to Mr. Eban's statement and his interpretation of the resolution, but not equally so to the acrimonious part about Syria, which is to be expected. His interpretation of the withdrawal only confirms, but in a very roundabout way, the full intent of Israel to consolidate its gains as a result of its aggression, which was amply explained in my statement to the Council. Again, the words spoken are denied by the intent expressed and the deed achieved. I should have liked Mr. Eban to have denied some of the facts and occurrences which I brought out in my statement. However, it is to be noted that the following sentence occurred in Mr. Eban's statement: "Peace... cannot be imposed" [supra, para. 92]. I should like to quote what I said in my statement about peace, which was the following: "A lasting peace cannot be imposed by force. One does not open the way for it by seizing another's property and demanding certain concessions before that property is given back to its legal, lawful Owner." [supra, para. 25.] Mr. Eban went on to attribute aggressive acts and intentions to Syria, I need not go into the details of what happened on 7 April 1967, which we put before the Council when an attack was perpetrated against Syria, and which included seven sorties by the Israel air force, with a battle ensuing that took place over Damascus, the capital of Syria.
Finally and briefly I should like to comment on the description given by Mr. Eban of my statement as a "hymn of hate" [supra, para. 83]. That is really an amazing interpretation because, reduced to its basic principles, my statement invokes two of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not kill"; and "Thou shalt not covet" other people's property. That two of the Ten Commandments should be interpreted as a "hymn of hate" is really beyond my understanding, but the twisting of words and meanings can result in anything. We condemn killing and the stealing of other people's property most strongly and most vehemently, whether it has been committed by Nazi Germany against the innocent Jews, the French, the Danes or the people of any other country which it occupied, just as we condemn it most strongly and vehemently when it is committed by the Israelis against the Arabs--by Dayan and Begin and justified by Mr. Eban.

Mr. EBAN (Israel): I do not propose to maintain the discussion with the representative of Syria, except to say that if he is interested in the document of Hebrew literature to which he referred I recommend that he should not stop short with two commandments but should also study the statement "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor", because the quotations which he put in my mouth were not there.
I intervene for another purpose, which is to say that I am communicating to my Government for its consideration nothing except the original English text of the draft resolution as presented by the original sponsor on 16 November. Having studied that text, document S/8247, my Government will determine its attitude to the Security Council's resolution in the light of its own policy, which is as I have stated it.

BRUSSELS---The European parliament has endorsed a proposal of its president, Antonio Tajani, to systematically deny access to all persons, groups, or entities involved in terrorist acts.

The decision followed a complaint by several MEPs after Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled, a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was invited last September to speak in the European Parliament at a conference hosted by two Spanish far-left MEPs. She used that platform to praise extremist violence and demonize Jews.  She glorified terrorism and trivialized the Holocaust.  "Don’t you see a similarity between Nazi actions and Zionist actions in Gaza?," she declared. "While the Nazis were tried in Nuremberg, no one has ever tried the Zionists," she said.

‘’The European Parliament’s Bureau unanimously endorsed the President’s proposal to systematically deny access to all persons, groups, or entities involved in terrorist acts, as listed in the annexed Council Decision (CFSP) 2017/1426,’’  the parliament's Directorate General fo Security and Safety said in an information notice.

‘’In view of that decision, and in the context of combatting terrorism, Members of the European Parliament and Political Groups are requested not to invite persons listed in the Council Decision or individuals representing entities or groups on that list, nor to facilitate their access to Parliament. In addition, these persons, entities, and groups may not be promoted through audio-visual presentations or other events on Parliament’s premises.’’

‘’I am happy that we have eventually established what should have been obvious before!,“ commented Czech MEP Tomas Zdechovský (European People's Party, EPP) who was the initiator of the complaints to President Tajani.

''The Council may adopt some amendments now, so we can be sure the situation with Leila Khaled will not happen again,“ Zdechovsky added.

A woman who was wounded as a girl in a March 2011 bombing in Jerusalem succumbed to her wounds Wednesday, after more than six years in a coma.

Hodaya Asulin had been heading home to the Mevo Horon settlement when a bomb hidden in a backpack exploded at a bus stop outside the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

The blast killed British national Mary Jean Gardner and injured dozens of passersby.

In November 2013, a military court in the West Bank sentenced Palestinian Hussein Ali Qawasmeh to life in prison for orchestrating the terror bombing.


Asulin, who was 14 at the time of the attack, had been unconscious for the six and a half years since, receiving round-the-clock care from family, friends and volunteers.

She succumbed to her wounds early in the morning at the Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem

“Her fight for her life inspired people to do so much good over these past six and a half years. It’s impossible to describe,” her uncle Rafi Asulin told The Times of Israel.

Recordings have just surfaced of a speech the then-secretary of state gave in Dubai last December — where he explained that the failure to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is . . . Israel’s fault.

“The Palestinians have done an extraordinary job of remaining committed to nonviolence,” he said — ignoring that fact that the Palestinian Authority rewards terrorists (“martyrs”) and their survivors with cash stipends and has its schools teach Jew-hatred.

And Hamas, which rules Gaza and is now once again partnering with the PA’s Fatah leadership, doesn’t even pretend to believe in nonviolence: It’s dedicated to Israel’s destruction and to atrocities against Jews.

Kerry also complained that “the majority of the Cabinet currently in the Israeli government has publicly declared they are not ever for a Palestinian state.” Actually, most simply won’t support one as long as Palestinians refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.

The secretary even managed to ignore his own experience: Kerry spent months wringing concessions out of Israel for a possible peace deal — only to have PA chief Mahmoud Abbas reject the draft out of hand, and refuse further negotiations.

Sadly, President Barack Obama fully shared Kerry’s “up is down” denial of reality. No wonder their leadership left the world in such a mess.

A private university in Ramallah held a memorial for five student terrorists who died as "Martyrs." At the event, a mother of one of the terrorists spoke on behalf of the families and stated:

"The blood of the Martyrs has watered the ground and made gardens bloom"
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 20, 2017]

The official PA daily further reported that she "expressed pride at being the mother of a Martyr who did not hesitate to sacrifice his blood and soul for his homeland and people."

Likewise a father of one of the terrorists "emphasized that the blood of the Martyrs is a beacon that lights the path to liberation and freedom."

Coordinator of the Fatah Shabiba Student Movement at Modern University College Hussein Ajouli "repeated the commitment and loyalty to... the blood of our people's Martyrs, among them the Martyrs of Modern University College who have ascended [to Heaven] in defense of the honor and for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, and Palestine."Fatah official Jamal Muhaisen was also present at the event.

Among the five terrorists, one attempted to ram his car into Israeli soldiers, another stabbed and wounded an Israeli soldier, and a third attempted to stab an Israeli soldier. The fourth was injured during a confrontation with Israeli security forces and later died of his wounds, while the fifth died of a fatal disease after being released from an Israeli prison.

An attempt to smuggle tons of explosive material into the Gaza Strip has been thwarted by the Israeli Ministry of Defense's Crossing Authority, it was announced on Wednesday.

The attempt was foiled thanks to a new, advanced chemistry laboratory that was set up in recent weeks at Israel's Kerem Shalom crossing with Gaza.

The new laboratory is a joint project of the Ministry of Defense's Crossing Authority, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and Israel Police.

Advanced technology permits experts to precisely identify gases, liquids, powders, metals and other substances before they enter the Gaza Strip. The primary focus is to prevent substances which could benefit terror groups in the enclave.

During the laboratory's initial trial period, a truck transporting motor oil raised the suspicions of the border crossing's security inspectors.

Chemical testing subsequently revealed that the supposed vehicle oil was actually a dangerous substance, destined to assist the production of large quantities of explosive material by terror groups in the Gaza Strip.

Since Trump has taken office, the administration has been busily restoring sanctions on the Iranian regime that were relieved as a result of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, aka the Iran nuclear deal. President Trump’s decision to punt the Iran deal back to Congress is likely to preserve the deal while avoiding responsibility for that outcome. Yet his administration’s outward determination to abrogate the agreement has allowed it the freedom to call balls and strikes when it comes to the Islamic Republic, even if that angers America’s “partners” in Tehran.

Take, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department’s most recent sanctions on Iran. On Monday, Treasury singled out a network of Iranians believed to be responsible for counterfeiting hundreds of millions in Yemeni bank notes for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Qods Force. The scheme allegedly circumvented European sanctions and allowed the IRGC to support what Secretary Steven Mnuchin called “destabilizing activities” in Europe and the Gulf States. Trump declared the IRGC a terrorist network last month, providing the Treasury with all the authority it needed to take action against this plot.

This is not the first time Iran has been implicated in currency counterfeiting. In 2010, U.S. military officials seized at least $4.3 million in counterfeit American dollars in Iraq. Some of it, officials said, was crude and easily detected while many of these $100 notes were printed on special presses using sophisticated ink and paper—a revelation that indicated some level of complicity by or cooperation with the Iranian government or its regional proxies. The sudden influx of false notes was believed to be part of a campaign by Iran to influence forthcoming elections in Iraq, which was apparently successful. Within days of those elections, three of the country’s four major political alliances sent delegations to Iran for political guidance. The head of Iraq’s secular, anti-Iranian bloc noted at the time that America’s silence was deafening. Now, with a new round of Iraqi elections scheduled to take place next year and amid increasing sectarian divisions and Iranian interference, the United States is abandoning its self-defeating neutrality. Try as we might, the U.S. cannot pretend it has no stake in Iraq’s political evolution.

Donald Trump’s flatterers like to reinforce this administration’s image as a group of outsiders “draining the swamp” of its corrupt professional class. That’s a self-serving narrative that confounds the diplomatic class and has led to a confused foreign policy. At the same time, though, declaring North Korea and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps supporters of terrorism is a decision that seems obvious only to those who are not steeped in granular diplomatic contrivances. In May, I noted that no American governmental institution would benefit more from an outsider-led shakeup than the diplomatic corps. The Trump administration’s actions over the last 48 hours show how true that was.

Special counsel for the United States Department of Justice Robert Mueller is investigating an attempt by US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to block the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlement activity, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The probe is part of a larger investigation by Mueller into Kushner and his conversations with foreign leaders, including Israelis, during the two month transition period between the November election and the time that Trump took office.

Under the Obama Administration the US abstained and was the only one of the 14 countries on the UNSC not to approve the measure in December 2016.

But the decision not to use its veto power to block the move, something it did in 2011, was widely seen as a form of tacit approval by the Obama Administration.

The Trump team’s opposition was well known at the time. Trump, then president-elect, issued a number of tweets on the matter.

A group of leading House lawmakers have petitioned President Donald Trump to immediately move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem ahead of a deadline that could see the White House delaying the move for at least another six months, according to a letter sent to the president and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.), chair of the House Subcommittee on National Security, spearheaded the letter, which urges Trump to finally make good on a heavily scrutinized campaign promise to relocate the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Jewish state's capital city.

While Trump has promised to move the embassy—which Congress legally mandated in 1995—as one of his first moves in office, the White House sent shockwaves through the pro-Israel community earlier this year when it renewed a longstanding waiver that ignores the congressional mandate and requires the embassy to remain located in Tel Aviv.

Every president since the law was initiated has signed the waiver, claiming that moving the embassy would interfere with U.S. diplomatic efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Many observers in Congress and elsewhere thought Trump would finally break that cycle.

Since deciding to renew the waiver preventing the embassy's move, DeSantis and other lawmakers have been pressuring the administration publicly and privately to make good on its promise.

The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt remains incomplete as long as a Palestinian state has not been created, Cairo’s ambassador to Israel said Wednesday, urging Jerusalem to restate its commitment to a two-state solution and accept the terms of the Arab Peace Initiative.

At an event at the President’s Residence marking the 40th anniversary of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking speech to the Knesset, Hazem Khairat also urged Israel to support the reconciliation deal between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party and the terrorist group Hamas.

“In the absence to a just solution to the Palestinian problem, never will there be a durable and just peace,” Khairat said, paraphrasing Sadat’s November 20, 1977, speech. “We cannot attempt to achieve partial peace and export the whole problem to future generations.”

In his address to the Knesset, which paved the way for the signing of an Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty months later, Sadat had said that even if Israel achieved peace with all Arab states, “in the absence of a just solution to the Palestinian problem, never will there be that durable and just peace upon which the entire world insists today.”

From the Israeli perspective, there is both some bad news and some good news with regards to the legal bombshell that the International Criminal Court prosecutor dropped on the US on Monday.

The ICC prosecutor filed a formal submission to move the US’s conduct in the Afghanistan War and its interrogation of its prisoners to a full criminal war crimes investigation.

In short, the bad news for Israel is four-fold. The ICC crossed the Rubicon in daring: 1) to go after a democracy, the US, which said it had investigated itself, 2) to go after the world’s superpower despite the diplomatic consequences, 3) to go after “war crimes” beyond the traditional paradigm of prosecuting genocide, namely the US’s “torture” interrogations, which many thought the ICC would stay away from, and 4) to go after top US defense and intelligence officials and not just the rank and file.

Until now, Israel’s main hopeful defenses to keep the ICC out of its affairs have been: 1) that it is a democracy which said it had investigated itself, 2) that the ICC would be afraid to endure diplomatic sanctions from the US and other Israeli allies, 3) that it would shy away from going after non-traditional “war crimes” beyond genocide, such as the settlement enterprise or Israeli interrogations of Palestinians, and 4) it would be deterred from going after senior Israeli officials.

But if the ICC dared to go after the US despite all four of these issues, what will stop it from going after little Israel next? If it went after the Americans for torture (and after Malians for destruction of cultural heritage sites as war crimes), why won’t it go after Israel for settlements and interrogations – even if these have never been prosecuted as war crimes before? The simple answer is that the ICC going after the US ensures that it is more likely than ever that it will also go after Israel at some point.

And yet there is also good news from the Israeli perspective.

The ICC is not going after the US for its targeting decisions which killed Afghan civilians. This is despite its conclusion that the US and allied forces have killed at least 1,600 civilians.

In 1987, Congress passed legislation that declared there would never be an office of the Palestine Liberation Organization on US soil. US President Ronald Reagan agreed and signed the law.

Seven years later the law was still on the books. But that year the PLO opened an office in Washington — with the blessing of Congress and US President Bill Clinton.

Since then, a PLO office has remained in the US capital, navigating a persistent anomaly: The 1987 law officially bans the existence of a PLO office, but it remains open as long as the Palestinians abide by certain conditions.

Now, however, the PLO may have violated some of those conditions — consequently, its DC office may close.

Late Friday, the Trump administration announced that the PLO cannot operate a Washington office because it tried to get the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israelis for crimes against Palestinians.

Confused? You’re not alone. Here’s an explanation of the law and what’s happening.

The law is clear, but Congress has been lenient.

The Trump administration on Tuesday rebuffed the Palestinian Authority’s claim that it has frozen communications with the United States over Washington’s recent threat to shutter the Palestine Liberation Office’s DC office.

“In our view, communications are not frozen,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters in a briefing Tuesday afternoon.

“Conversations will be taking place,” she went on. “We are in contact with Palestinian officials about the status of that PLO office in Washington, as well as having conversations with them about our larger efforts on the part of a lasting and comprehensive peace process.”

A spokesman for the PLO confirmed that it had received instructions from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “regarding closing down all communication lines with the Americans.”

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told AFP on Tuesday that “by closing the office they are freezing all meetings and we are making that official.”

Abbas' spokesman, currently with the PA president in Madrid, clarified that the directive issued by Abbas was issued only to low-ranking staffers in the U.S.

"Relations with the U.S. and its leader are excellent," Nabil Abu Rudeineh said. "U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's visit to Bethlehem next month will go ahead as planned."

A State Department official said on Saturday that under U.S. law, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could not renew a certification for the PLO office to operate "given certain statements made by the Palestinian leaders about the International Criminal Court."

Under the law, the PLO, the main Palestinian umbrella political body, cannot operate a Washington office if it urges the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israelis for alleged crimes against Palestinians.

In September at the United Nations, Abbas called on the ICC "to open an investigation and to prosecute Israeli officials for their involvement in settlement activities and aggression against our people."

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told a press briefing that the matter was under discussion and that, as far as she knew, the office was up and running.

The Palestinians have frozen ties with the US Consulate in Jerusalem and with American officials visiting the West Bank in response to the State Department’s decision not to renew the certification of the PLO’s representative office in Washington, a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Tuesday.

The PLO representative office is the unofficial Palestinian Embassy in the American capital. Without a certification, it could be shut down.

“Communications with the consulate in Jerusalem and meetings between American and Palestinian officials in Palestine are currently frozen because of the decision not to renew the PLO office in Washington’s certification,” Abbas’s diplomatic affairs adviser, Majdi al-Khalidi, told The Jerusalem Post. “This is temporary until they clarify to us if the office is closed or open. If they tell us the office is closed, we will continue to freeze our communications.”

According to Khalidi, if Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, or Jason Greenblatt, the administration’s main peace envoy, came to the West Bank, PA officials would not be able to meet with them.

Khalidi added that the PLO representative in Washington, Husam Zomlot, and top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat were in contact with the Trump Administration.

“Saeb Erekat and Ambassador Zomlot are meeting with the higher authorities in Washington to seek clarifications about whether the office is going to be closed or not,” Khalidi said. “We are still waiting to know if they actually plan to close the office.”

The policy organization for the German Green Party - the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation - is co-sponsoring November conferences in Gaza and Beirut with top Hamas leaders.

The Jerusalem Post obtained a copy of the program listing the German tax-payer funded Böll-Foundation as one of the partner organizations for the late November conferences titled: "The 1987 Intifada, : History and Memory, Commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the first uprising against the Israeli occupation."

The conferences are slated to take place in Gaza (November 24-26) and Beirut (November 28-30) and will feature the Gaza-based Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad and the Hamas movement leader Hasan Yusuf as listed speakers on the program.

The US, the EU and Germany classify Hamas as a terrorist organization.

Olga Deutsch, director of the European desk of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, told the Post on Tuesday: "The record reflects years of support and cooperation between the Heinrich Boll Stiftung in Ramallah and other groups including those allegedly linked to terror organizations. The Stiftung's involvement in an event which lends a platform to a Hamas leader is unprecedented in its severity."

She added, "This sort of activity is inconsistent with the body of the Stiftung's activities and its values. The management's silence, as well as the silence of the Israel branch, is difficult to understand."

A draft motion urging the Dutch government to recognize immediately a Palestinian state and a second urging it to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital foundered in the country’s parliament.

The motion on Jerusalem, which was voted on Tuesday at the Tweede Kamer, the lower house, received the support of parties accounting for 30 lawmakers out of 150, the Center for Information and Documentation, or CIDI, reported. The motion on recognizing a Palestinian state received the support of parties with a total of 64 seats.

The Jerusalem motion was submitted by the anti-Islam Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders, who coauthored the draft motion with Raymond de Roon.

Denk, a radical pro-Muslim party, submitted a counter draft motion on recognition of a Palestinian state.

Both motions were submitted in connection with annual negotiations over the foreign ministry’s budget, which in the Netherlands also features scrutiny of the kingdom’s foreign relations.

“The results reflect the position of the Dutch government which has not changed for many years,” CIDI wrote on its website.

The alleged mastermind of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai — in which the Indian city’s Chabad center was one of the targets — was ordered released from house arrest by a Pakistani court on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

Hafiz Saeed — the head of the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), a charity said by the US to be a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group — has been under house arrest since January.

Prosecutor Sattar Sahil told Reuters on Wednesday that a request by the government of Pakistan’s Punjab province for a 60-day extension of Saeed’s detention had been rejected by the Lahore High Court.

“His previous detention for 30 days is over, which means he would be released tomorrow,” Sahil was quoted as saying.

On November 26, 2008, ten LeT operatives entered Mumbai by sea and launched a coordinated gun-and-bomb assault on multiple sites in India’s most populous metropolis, killing 166 people — including six Jews at the Nariman House.

Belgium is upholding its commitment to suspend construction projects with the Palestinian Ministry of Education, a spokesperson for Brussels told The Algemeiner after a Belgian official was spotted at the inauguration of a new Palestinian school.

Last month, the monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) revealed that a Palestinian school built with Belgian aid in the town of Beit Awwa was renamed in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 helped massacre 38 people — including 13 children — near Tel Aviv. The school’s logo also includes a map erasing Israel, while its Facebook page has posted pictures glorifying Palestinian attackers.

Didier Vanderhasselt — a spokesperson for the Belgian Foreign Ministry — told The Algemeiner at the time that Belgium was initially unaware of the name change, and has decided to “put on hold any projects related to the construction or equipment of Palestinian schools” while it resolved the matter with the Palestinian Authority.

However, PMW reported last week that a Belgian official — Eric De Muynck, representative of the Belgian Development Cooperation Institution — participated in the inauguration of a new Palestinian Authority school in the West Bank on October 18th, about two weeks after the announced suspension.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by telephone on Tuesday and reiterated Israel's concerns about border security in postwar Syria, given Iran's military entrenchment not far from the Syria-Israel border.

The Kremlin said the call took place at Netanyahu's request.

Putin met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Russia on Tuesday. The two reportedly discussed potential peace initiatives for Syria ahead of a summit between Russia, Turkey and Iran and a new round of Syria peace talks in Geneva later this month.

Putin briefed Netanyahu, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and Saudi King Salman on his meeting with Assad, the Kremlin said.

The Prime Minister's Office said Netanyahu and Putin spoke for about 30 minutes and that the prime minister "stressed to the Russian president Israel's security needs and its opposition to any Iranian presence in Syria."

Israel is particularly concerned that the American-Russian deal outlining the situation in postwar Syria, which intends to keep rival factions inside Syria away from each other, would effectively keep Iranian-linked forces only 5 to 30 kilometers (3 to 19 miles) from the Syria-Israel border, depending on current rebel positions on the Syrian Golan Heights

A former Saudi minister said on Tuesday that there can be no justification for any violence, even in Israel.

Muhammad Bin abdel-Kareem Aleissa, the former Saudi justice minister, was reported by Israeli newspaper Maariv to have said, "any act of violence or terrorism that tries to hide behind religion has no justification whatsoever, not even in Israel."

Aleissa was appointed last year as the secretary-general to the Muslim World League, and is reportedly close to the Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammad bin Salman.

The Muslim World League is an international organisation, that while is based in Mecca, is not formally affiliated with Saudi Arabia.

Since his appointment, Aleissa has been vocally supportive of the reforms pushed by Bin Salman in his move to "fight extremist Islam". In a talk given before the Diplomatic Academy, he reiterated his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism and those that use religion to serve their own agenda.

When asked by the Maariv correspondent about acts in Israel or Jewish communities around the world that are framed as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Aleissa replied, "any act of violence or terrorism that tries to hide behind religion is unacceptable. Islam cannot be tied to politics, it is a religion of love, tolerance and respecting the other".

Aleissa added that conferences are being organised in the United States with various Jewish communities, and Saudi Arabia is keen on establishing friendly relationships.

An editorial in a Turkish conservative pro-government newspaper said Ankara could leave Israel exposed to an Iranian missile attack by disabling a US radar station, in retaliation for a possible Washington ban on the purchase of F-35 fighter jets.

The editorial was published on Sunday by the Yeni Safak newspaper in apparent response to concerns voiced by a US Air Force official. Heidi Grant, the deputy undersecretary of the USAF for international affairs, had earlier said that Turkey’s deployment of the Russian-made S-400 long-range anti-aircraft missile system may expose vulnerabilities of the US-made F-35 Lightning II fighter jets. Turkey plans to purchase over 100 of the advanced warplanes from Lockheed Martin.

The newspaper called the implication that the planned deal may be frozen “blackmail” by Washington, and suggested that in retaliation Ankara could dismantle the Kurecik radar station. The powerful AN/TPY-2 X-band early-warning radar, which was set up by the US in the eastern province of Malatya in 2012, is part of NATO’s system of airspace surveillance in the region.

The newspaper says that unlike similar surveillance sites in Israel, Jordan, Qatar and the UAE, the Kurecik radar station can detect missile launches from the entire western part of Iran. With the site disabled, that airspace would no longer be properly monitored by NATO, the editorial said.

“In case Turkey decides to dismantle the Kurecik radar in response to the ongoing attempts by the US to use the F-35 jets to blackmail Turkey, Israel will lose its ‘early warning system’ in case of a missile launch from eastern or northern Iran,” the newspaper said.

Turkey’s hosting of NATO radar facilities is a matter of controversy in the country. In 2014, the ruling AKP party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister, had to defend itself from opposition accusations which said the site only benefits Israeli security and fails to make Turkey safer. The accusations were part of a heated presidential race laden with anti-Israeli sentiment.

A parole board recently refused to grant early release from prison to a Palestinian from Gaza who was sentenced for a number of security-related crimes, citing the fact that Hamas is still holding onto the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, who were killed during Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

A gag order was placed on the prisoner’s identity, but he is said to be serving a three-year sentence for a list of offences, including establishing contact with foreign agents, training in an outlawed militia, weapons offences and affiliation with illegal groups—namely Hamas.

Among the reasons for the rejection, the parole board insisted that weight had to be given to the fact that the prisoner in question belongs to Hamas’s military wing, which has been holding onto Goldin and Shaul’s bodies since they fell in battle, and refuses to hand them back to Israel.

He joined the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and agreed with his brother to participate in riots. To that end, he crossed the border into Israel where he was arrested.

The parole board said that its decision was not guided by a desire to exert pressure on Hamas, but rather to maintain faith in the legal system.

“It is not the job of the parole board to produce levers to pressure Hamas for their (Shaul and Goldin’s) return, but the board believes that the early release of the prisoner who is affiliated with the Hamas terror organization could and would be harmful to the public’s confidence in the judicial system.”

Furthermore, the board went on to say that the onus rested on the prisoner to prove that he had repudiated the beliefs that resulted in his incarceration.

“The burden of proof is on the prisoner to show that he deserves to be released and that the release will not endanger public safety,” it was written in the board’s summary.

Some 73% of Israeli Arabs feel a sense of belonging and 60% are proud to be Israelis, according to a new poll commissioned by Israel Hayom and conducted by the New Wave Research Institute that was released Tuesday. The poll questioned 426 Arab Israelis aged 18 and up, and did not include the Druze community.

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (65%) defined themselves as not religious, while 35% said they were religious. Some 46% identified as Israeli Arabs and 42% identified as Palestinian Arabs, while only 3% identified as Israelis.

Almost three-quarters of the respondents (73%) believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about land, while 19% believe it is about religion. The remaining respondents either did not know or declined to answer.

A total of 60% said they were "very proud" or "fairly proud" to be Israeli, while 37% said they were "not proud" to be Israeli.

Most Israeli Arabs also said they believed that Jews have historic and religious ties to Israel. Some 82% said they had no desire to live under Palestinian rule, while only 14% said they did. Some 4% said they did not know or refused to answer.

The poll also showed sweeping support for a right of return for Palestinian refugees, and slightly less than half of respondents said they supported Israel's right to exist. Slightly more than half said they opposed Israel's right to exist.

About half the employed Arab residents of east Jerusalem, some 35,000 people, work in the Jewish sector, a new study has found. The study, by researchers Marik Shtern and Ahmed Asmar, is due to be published by the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.

Through a series of interviews, questionnaires and focus groups, Shtern and Asmar draw a complex picture of formal and informal ties between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem workplaces, both in periods of quiet and during waves of terrorist attacks. Often, the picture contains contradictions. For example, the study found that Jews are comfortable interacting with Arab employees, whereas the Arab employees often feel exploited.

The figures show that Arabs comprise 71% of workers in the construction sector and 57% of workers in public transportation. Arabs also make up 40% of workers in the hotel and restaurant industries, 20% of workers in municipal health care and welfare, and 46% of workers in water, sewer, and cleaning services.

Most Arab employees in Jerusalem come from a society in which 82% of families live below the poverty line and which features one of the highest school drop-out rates in the country (36%). City infrastructure in Arab neighborhoods – sewage, water, roads – is also for the most part substandard.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri said on Wednesday he would hold off from presenting his resignation in response to a request from Lebanese President Michel Aoun to allow more dialogue.

"I presented today my resignation to President Aoun and he urged me to wait before offering it and to hold onto it for more dialogue about its reasons and political background, and I showed responsiveness," Hariri said in a televised statement.

He said all Lebanese parties must commit to keeping Lebanon out of regional conflicts, a reference to the powerful, Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, whose regional role is a source of deep concern in Saudi Arabia. He said hoped his decision would open "a new gateway for a responsible dialogue."

Earlier Wednesday, Hariri participated in Independence Day celebrations, his first official appearance since he suddenly announced his resignation from Saudi Arabia on Nov. 4, stunning the country.

Hariri, who returned to Lebanon on Tuesday after his puzzling three-week absence, appeared on the parade's grandstand with Aoun and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri.

In 1848, some Jewish families came to Mount Chouf seeking sanctuary from growing anti-Semitic violence in Damascus. During this period, the Lebanese-Jewish community settled in Sidon, Hasbaya, and Beirut. Also, Jews immigrated to Beirut from different parts of the world, where the city’s Jewish quarter was home to Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews, Arabic and Berber speaking Jews from Morocco, and French-speaking Ashkenazi Jews.

Their presence ultimately proved to be pivotal to the economic growth of Lebanon’s most important city. Beirut’s Jewish quarter, Wadi Abu Jamil, became the center of Jewish worship in the city when the Magen Abraham Synagogue was constructed. Even after the neighborhood was deserted at the start of the civil war, it remained known as the Valley of the Jews.

Currently, Wadi Abu Jamil has virtually become Beirut’s safest neighborhood because of its proximity to the Grand Serail, the seat of Lebanon’s Prime Minister, in addition to the offices of several Lebanese politicians.

It is specifically from there, in Wadi Abu Jamil, that the Jewish community is attempting to rebuild itself, and rise from the ashes in a neighborhood that was reduced to rubble during Lebanon’s destructive war. This attempt was put under the spotlight when finally, after a lot of political back and forth, the decision was made to renovate the synagogue.

The main issue was obtaining guarantees from Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most dominant political party and paramilitary organization, for the safety of the workers involved in renovating the structure and the community members it was going to serve. Hezbollah subsequently came out with a statement welcoming the idea behind the project, and declaring that it had no problem with Lebanese Jews as long as they rejected political Zionism and denounced Israel.

After comments by French President Emmanuel Macron, and apparently also by other European elements, about a need for a discussion with Tehran on the issue of Iran's ballistic missile development program, Iranian regime spokesmen reiterated Tehran's position of rejection of any and all foreign interference in this matter.

This absolute rejection was expressed in two ways. Officially, Ali Akbar Velayati, advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, threatened harm to French national interests if France continued to act in this direction.[1] At the same time, Iranian Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee member Hashmatollah Falahat-Pishe reassured the Europeans and offered an enticement. He reiterated earlier statements by the commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Mohammad Ali Jafari, who had said that Iran had restricted the range of its missiles so that they would not reach Europe, and that therefore Iran was not a threat to Europe (see MEMRI Inquiry and Analysis No. 1357, IRGC Commander Jafari In Message Meant To Reassure Europe: Right Now, We Are Settling For Missiles With 2,000-Km Range – A Range That Covers U.S. Forces In The Region, November 13, 2017). Moreover, he said, Europe could benefit from the security offered by Iran's missiles, which "can constitute a barrier to threats entering Europe," but gave no details about what such threats might be or who would pose them.

Falahat-Pishe stressed that Iran had made a strategic decision in 2011 not to threaten enemies situated beyond the range of 2,000 km, because, he said, U.S. President George W. Bush had depicted Iran as a threat to Europe. For this reason, Iran announced a halt to the production of its Shihab 4 missile, which has a range of over 2,000 km. It should be noted that according to a statement by then-Iranian chief of staff Hassan Firouzabadi Iran had, in nuclear negotiations in 2013-2015, agreed to restrict the range of its missiles to only 2,000 km, covering Israel – which he said is a red line for the Iranian regime – and the Obama administration agreed to this.[2]

It should be noted that although Falahat-Pishe called the 2,000-km range strictly defensive, this range is accepted in the professional community as clearly offensive.

After calling for the assassination of Pope Francis, ISIS has called for the assassination of Donald Trump's 11-year-old son, Barron.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, "pro-ISIS internet channels are calling for the assassination of President Donald Trump's son, Barron, and have shared personal details of the child's life on its social media networks, including the address of his school."

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated a mass call for terrorists to assassinate Barron Trump that was disseminated on the widely-used Telegram app. The message not only shared the name of Barron's school, but also a Google map image pinpointing its location.

"Using the hashtag ‘handle the son of the mule of America,' the supporter, who uses the name "Dak Al-Munafiqeen,' Arabic for ‘striking the hypocrites,' wrote: ‘Barron Trump goes to this school in Washington,'" according to MEMRI. "The post was followed by a photo of Barron Trump. To widely disseminate the call for assassination, several pro-ISIS Telegram channels have shared and forwarded the post."

Thankfully for both President Trump and 11-year-old Barron, America's First Family is well protected by the Secret Service, though technology in coming years could make protecting the First Family outside the White House a difficult task.

Three Syrian rebels wounded last week in an alleged chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad were sent for treatment in Israel, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

If Syrians hurt in the attack entered Israel for treatment, it would be the first confirmed case.

“The [Syrian regime] forces shelled a strategic site controlled by the rebels named ‘Bardaya Hill,’ and three of the rebels who suffered suffocation as a result of the gases were sent to Israel for treatment,” Abo Omar al Golany, spokesman for the Revolutionary Command Council in Quneitra and the Golan, told The Jerusalem Post. “Helicopters belonging to the Assad regime threw explosive drums containing toxic gases on the hill.”

Al Golany said the chemicals were believed to be chlorine, which has been used by the regime in the past.

According to a separate source in Israel, Syrian casualties injured in a chemical attack were transferred to Ziv Medical Center in Safed. The hospital did not respond to the Post’s inquiry by press time.

The attack was part of an ongoing offensive by the Syrian government and its Hezbollah allies to retake an area around Mazra’at Beit Jinn near the Hermon. The offensive has attempted to pressure the rebels in a small finger of territory they control near the Golan and Majdal Shams extending 15 kilometers toward Damascus along the foot of Mount Hermon.

“In recent weeks, Assad was trying to push an offensive and there was difficult fighting on the night of the 15th-16th,” the source said. “They hit [the rebels] from helicopters and used gas in at least three places. The same day, the wounded came to Israel.”

Jews are about to be demonised in the soon to be released From Balfour To Banksy, a new documentary film by Martin Buckley. In it Jews are portrayed as Nazis, thieves and thinking they’re the superior race.

Buckley is ex-BBC and now senior lecturer in journalism at Southampton Solent University. In From Balfour To Banksy, which was shown at SOAS on Monday night, he interviews Palestinians living next to Israel’s security wall. His cameraman/editor is Alexander Wilks, a 23-year-old graduate just out of film school. The producer is Miranda Pinch, a Christian-believing Jewish woman.

Soon into the film we hear a Palestinian describe Gaza as a “child concentration camp”. This evokes the image of Jews as Nazis.

We are also sold the lie that “Jewish-only highways feed the settlements”. Then, after more accusations that Israel is an “apartheid state”, Buckley says:

“It’s surely amazing that Israel, built by the survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust, could be accused of the notorious human rights violation that scars South Africa. But for over a decade critics outside and inside Israel, Jews as well as Arabs, have been accusing Israel’s right-wing governments of practising apartheid. Shocking as the accusation of apartheid is it has serious formal backing.”

In Jerusalem Buckley then finds a Jewish-Israeli family who invite him over for dinner. One of the family members tells Buckley that Israeli children are taught in school: “We are the chosen ones, everyone else is beneath us.” This false accusation is an antisemitic trope.

The scene moves to Tel Aviv where we are told “Palestinians have lived for hundreds of years”, eventhough Tel Aviv was founded in 1909. Buckley interviews Palestinian students at Tel Aviv University. The claim is made that TAU is built over a Palestinian village.

Like A State of Terror, the makers of this film will want to make it an icon of ‘human rights’, to be shown to young people at institutes of learning worldwide. So it’s important to deconstruct it in detail. The footage is accompanied by interviews conducted by Martin Buckley who is ex-BBC. See his Facebook page for a clue as to where he stands on Israel:

(The film also includes an irrelevant dig at Brexit supporters by Buckley…). I didn’t manage to write down the names of all the interviewees but they included: Sut Jhally, Lucas al-Zouaghi (not sure this is spelt correctly, I couldn’t find his name using Google), Robert Cohen, Edra Gluckman (Women In Black) , Raed Sadeh, Terry Boullata, Mahmoud Muna, Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, Fida Jiryis and Sir Vincent Fean. Plus a young Palestinian called Georgina (not a common Arab name) who clearly attends a good school in East Jerusalem and was clearly coached.

‘Israel has committed genocide and theft’ – Jhall
‘Child concentration camp’ (referring to Gaza) – al-Zouaghi
‘Illegal settlements; Jewish only highways’ – Buckley
(No Court has ever ruled them illegal. The ICJ did but it’s not a proper Court. Those roads can be used by any citizen of Israel regardless of religion – the rule is for security).
‘The settlements are illegal according to the Geneva Convention’ – Cohen.
(Wrong. The Convention refers to forced transfer. No Jew in Judea/Samaria was ‘forced ‘ to move there).
‘Israel’s policies are relentlessly anti-Palestinian’ – Buckley
(Nonsense. The Palestinian leadership consistently refuses peace offers)
‘The Wall is ineffective – kids jump over it’ – Sadeh
(Obvious nonsense)
‘Jews are forcing their way back into the City [Hebron] because they feel they have a historic right to do so’ – Ofra Yeshua-Lyth
(Hebron has a long and rich Jewish history and is the site of the oldest Jewish community in the world).

It is often incorrectly asserted that the United Nations created the State of Israel by means of UN General Assembly Resolution 181, what is also known as the Partition Plan, which was adopted on November 29, 1947, 70 years ago. That is completely untrue.

UN Resolution 181 called explicitly for an independent Jewish state alongside of an Arab state and provided international legitimacy for the Jewish claim to statehood. It was a morally significant action, but like all UN General Assembly resolutions, it was not legally binding.

What established Israel was not the action of the UN. What actually established Israel was the Declaration of Independence by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, on May 15, 1948. To this day, what establishes states are not actions in the UN, despite what Mahmoud Abbas might hope.

When I served as Israel's ambassador to the UN, a campaign began which called for reviving Resolution 181, led by the Palestinian UN Observer, Nasser al-Qudwa. At the time, Israeli Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon said to me, "Go back to Ben-Gurion's speech in the Knesset from December 1949."

When Arab armies converged on the nascent State of Israel, put Jerusalem under siege, and bombarded the Old City with artillery, the UN did nothing. As Ben-Gurion told the Israeli Knesset in December 1949, "The UN didn't lift a finger."

Ben-Gurion declared, "We cannot regard the decision of the 29th of November 1947 as being possessed of any further moral force since the UN did not succeed in implementing its own decisions." Eight days later he moved the capital of Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem just as the Jewish state was being reborn.

A court in Frankfurt has ruled that Kuwait Airways did not break the law by refusing to carry a passenger who had booked a flight with the airline company last year.

Who was this rogue and what unpardonable crime had he committed that led to Kuwait Airways banning him from even setting foot on their plane?

He was a young student, living in Germany, who had booked to fly to Bangkok. But he had an Israeli passport. And the flight would have involved a stopover in Kuwait.

And since the Kuwaiti rulers are involved in a boycott of Israel (along, shamefully, with many academic institutions and so called "liberal" entities in Britain and Ireland) the airline staff refused to allow him to board the plane.

Shocking enough.

But how much worse was that subsequent court ruling that, while it is illegal in Germany to discriminate against someone on grounds of race, religion or ethnicity, it isn't, apparently, illegal to discriminate on the grounds of nationality.

To sum up then, a court in Germany, forever synonymous with the Holocaust, finds that it is perfectly acceptable in 2017 to discriminate openly against someone solely for being a citizen of Israel, the Jewish state.

As darkly ominous as the court finding, I think, has been how little debate this ruling has elicited in the media.

The New School, a liberal Manhattan-based university, has garnered considerable controversy over a program on antisemitism that’s currently scheduled for Tuesday, November 28. The program is titled Antisemitism and the Struggle for Justice and it is designed to promote a book by Jewish Voice for Peace of a similar name.

Criticism of the event has been almost entirely focused on the university’s “misguided invitation” to Linda Sarsour and the “absurdity” of this self-identified anti-Israel firebrand and boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement “poster girl” being asked to discuss the nature of contemporary anti-Jewish hatred and how best to tackle it.

The focus on Sarsour is understandable given that she’s a celebrated voice on the progressive left and a controversial public figure, best known for her prominent role as co-chair of the National Women’s March.

But, as I discuss further below, even worse than the spectacle of Sarsour speaking at The New School’s antisemitism event is the fact that leaders of the grossly misnamed Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)—including its Executive Director Rebecca Vilkomerson—will be sharing the stage with her.

Supporters of Israel have long been at the forefront of the effort to expose JVP for what it is—a group that promotes the view that the fight for social justice and civil rights requires that people demonize and isolate Israel and denigrate and deny the humanity of Zionists.

After weeks of dogged Algemeiner coverage of antisemitism at Rutgers University, we expected that the school’s president, Robert Barchi, would respond. But when he finally did, it left us astounded.

Speaking over the weekend at a town hall event sponsored by the student government, Barchi dedicated the first part of his remarks to the series of antisemitism scandals plaguing his campus. The first story related to Jasbir Puar, a women’s studies professor who has written a book accusing Israel of injuring Palestinians “in order to control them.” The second concerned Professor Michael Chikindas, who called Judaism “the most racist religion in the world,” and accused Jews — and not the Ottoman Turks — of perpetrating the Armenian genocide. The third called attention to the employment at Rutgers of Mazen Adi, an adjunct professor who formerly served as a UN spokesman for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and who has accused Israeli officials of trafficking children’s organs.

President Barchi rightly noted that the controversies facing the three members of his faculty staff originated with exposés published by The Algemeiner – but his goal wasn’t to offer a vote of thanks to Shiri Moshe, our reputable journalist who brought these vital issues to the public attention. His intention was clearly to disparage, undermine and delegitimize. And on what basis? On the basis that the reports had originated in a Jewish newspaper.

He referred to The Algemeiner, incorrectly, as “a blog out of New York, which is the follow-on to what was a Yiddish-language newspaper that folded 10 years ago.” And then, later in his speech, he advised students to “keep in mind when you hear things and those things get picked up by another newspaper, there is very often a back-story to it.”

Two Stanford administrators present -- Nanci Howe, associate dean and director of student affairs, and Snehal Naik, assistant dean and associate director of student affairs -- not only nodded approvingly at the walk-out, but actively aided it, first by denying entry to many students who actually wanted to attend the event, and then by not allowing them to enter after the walkout, despite the fact that the auditorium was largely empty. They also forbade the hosts from live-streaming the talk on the Internet.

The reason for having to smear Robert Spencer was clear. Portraying him as someone who has led to the killing of Muslims was the way to try to have him banned from the campus, without abandoning the principle of free speech. Yet no student or faculty member produced a shred of evidence linking Spencer to violence against Muslims at Stanford or anywhere else. All they were able to produce as "proof" of Spencer's incitement was the same libelous blurb on the Southern Poverty Law Center website.

What De Leon, Najaer, Beckman and Fine failed to mention was that a mere few months earlier, at the end of May, the Stanford student senate voted to fund an on-campus speech by the son of Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for orchestrating three deadly attacks.

On November 14, the Central Student Government (CSG) at the University of Michigan (UM) passed a BDS resolution against Israel, as reported by the The Algemeiner. Early in the session, many members of the CSG successfully moved to forbid UM history professor Victor Lieberman from speaking during the debate.

What follows is an open letter from Professor Lieberman to the CSG.

On November 14, the [University of Michigan] Central Student Government voted to prevent me from delivering a carefully prepared talk on divestment from Israel. The argument against my speaking was that “a structural power imbalance” within the university militates against the views of UMDivest, which could only be rectified by removing me from the discussion.

This argument cannot withstand scrutiny for three reasons. First, it was claimed that junior faculty who speak against Israel risk being fired. In fact, no junior faculty have ever been fired for expressing political views, and such views have no bearing whatsoever on tenure or promotion.

A panel at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) considered the undue influence of Jewish campus and community institutions on the teaching of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At the Monday afternoon session, Hillel International, a Jewish organization with chapters across North America, was called out for its policies against partnering with those who deny Israel's right to exist.

Ilan Troen, an Israel studies professor at Brandeis University who attended the session, took issue with the contention that a non-academic group should be condemned for having a point of view.

"If an academic department can't sustain a lecture series on its own and chooses to invite the assistance of an outside group, why shouldn't they expect that group will come with requests for how to shape program? If you don't like it, then don't collaborate with Hillel or anyone else," he said.

At the roundtable discussion, which was led by Jewish academics, allegations were made that Jewish donors pressure universities on their Israel education.

One case was mentioned of a Jewish organization participating at Case Western University in a search for a Middle East studies professor.

"The notion of a Jewish cabal that manipulates universities from Harvard to Berkeley is sheer fantasy," said Troen. "And if it's true, then what about all the Saudi money, what about the money flowing in from the Gulf emirates?"

A University of California-Berkeley professor and leading force in the Palestinian activism movement apologized Tuesday for sharing pictures on social media that depicted Orthodox Jews as murderous and suggested a moral equivalency between North Korea and Israel, but stood by his work focused on "opposition to Zionism."

Hatem Bazian, a lecturer in the Berkeley department of ethnic studies, has said he recognized the "offensive" nature of a post he retweeted, which included a doctored image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wearing a kippah, or Jewish skullcap, standing below the caption, "I just converted all of North Korea to Judaism."

"Now my nukes are legal & I can annex South Korea & you need to start paying me $34 billion a year in welfare," the caption continues, directed at President Donald Trump, suggesting that if North Korea were only Jewish, it might expect to share a similar relationship with the United States as Israel.

The image also bears the phrases "God chose me" and "101 Judaism we teach it" written over images of nuclear weapons.

In the second image Bazian retweeted, the hashtag "#Ashke-Nazi" was applied to the image of a man in mock-Hasidic garb, including a traditional black hat and side curls. The caption reads, "Mom, Look! I is chosen! I can now kill, rape, smuggle organs & steal the land of Palestinians YAY."

Bazian said that he retweeted the post while traveling to teach a course in Spain and France, "and did not read the message or image carefully on my phone."

In case you missed it, another US University professor just got himself Chikindas-ed: the appropriately named Hatem Bazian was caught retweeting some antisemitic memes.

A student at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa has condemned the “addiction” progressive activists have for the anti-Israel boycott campaign as “akin to insanity.”

Adam Dison wrote in Haaretz last week that the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement helped define his participation in student politics at Wits, and — following four years of hostile and sometimes violent incidents involving BDS supporters — eventually led him to cut ties with progressive activists in South Africa.

“The number of intelligent fellow students who’ve attempted to deny the Holocaust to me is utterly depressing,” Dison observed. “The level of education about Holocaust history, Zionist history and real thinking about the Israel-Palestine conflict is sub-par.”

Dison noted that throughout the years, the flags of the Islamist terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas were waved on campus; a Wits student greeted Jewish peers “with a Hitler salute and goose-stepping”; the Student Representative Council president professed his “love” for Adolf Hitler; representatives from the Congress of South African Students placed a pig’s head in the kosher/halal section of a local shop as an “anti-Israel” protest; a BDS leader defended chants of “Dubula e juda” (“Shoot the Jew”); and graffiti reading “Kill a Jew” and “Fuck the Jews” was found on campus.

“There is no space left for progressive Jews at Wits who don’t support this illogical way of thinking and action,” he warned.

Morrissey has spoken in detail about his admiration for the people of Israel and his “love” of the city of Tel Aviv.

In an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel to promote the release of his new album, Low In High School, the former Smiths frontman also slammed the anti-Israel BDS movement as “absurd”.

But the same interview has sparked anger with Morrissey attempting to defend both actor Kevin Spacey and disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein over allegations of sexual misconduct.

And in comments like to raise further concern the 58-year-old singer, whose real name is Stephen Patrick Morrissey, compared the conduct of the British media to that of the “Third Reich”.

Asked about a song on his album titled The Girl from TelAviv Who Wouldn’t Kneel, Morrissey replied:” I love this city [Tel Aviv].

“The rest of the world does not like Israel well. But the people there are very generous and friendly. You should never judge a people by their government. It is very rare for the government to reflect the wishes of the people. “

An article published yesterday by Guardian Australia’s Culture Editor Steph Harmon (Brian Eno and Roger Waters scorn Nick Cave’s ‘principled stand’ to play in Israel, Nov. 21) continued in this pattern of mischaracterising the moment:
Eno, Waters and Loach are among a group of artists who have joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a global campaign that aims to increase pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, and lobbies artists, academics and businesses to refrain from engaging with or touring in Israel.

In fact, BDS leader Omar Barghouti has been clear on two points:

Far from being ‘pro-peace’, he openly supports ‘armed Palestinian resistance’ against Israelis, and calls for the end of the Jewish state within any borders.

The Guardian also initially included, in the online and print editions of the article, the erroneous claim that the popular rock band U2 (and Bjork) are among the bands supporting BDS.

In fact, U2 performed in Tel Aviv in 1997, and their front man, Bono, visited the state (which included a trip to the Western Wall) with his family in 2012.

(Two more noteworthy facts: Bono was known for his friendship with the late Israeli leader Shimon Peres. Also, U2’s manager is an Israeli-American named Guy Oseary who has attended fundraisers for Friends of the IDF – a fact ‘noted‘ by the hate site, Electronic Intifada.)

The Guardian error was later corrected in the online edition

Activists combating what they call Israeli appropriation of indigenous Palestinian culture have published a culinary guide that will help users determine whether by the food they eat they are engaging in colonialist imperialism by eating dishes with local pedigree or in malicious prejudice by eating dishes not of local pedigree.

A group of academics, social protesters, and Palestinian solidarity activists have issued “Hate or Just Appropriation? A Guide to ‘Israeli’ Foods,” an alphabetical guide that features thousands of types of food, each one classified either as “appropriation” or “hateful rejection,” based on whether that food type has any cultural linkage with Palestinian society. The group aims to raise awareness of Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Palestinian culture, and intend to use the guide to help shape discourse around the subject.

“People use words carelessly all the time,” expounded the publication’s editor, Ayama Dusch, a Cultural Studies major at Tel Aviv University. “It doesn’t help to throw around accusations that Israeli consumption and marketing of, for example, pizza, is ‘cultural appropriation’ when as far as we know pizza isn’t a traditional Palestinian food. Such pronouncements get jumped on by the dishonest defenders of Zionism, and we can’t let them create such distractions from the awful truth. Instead of calling all Israeli eating appropriation, it’s helpful to take a more critical approach and accept that some foods are not indigenous to Palestine, so Israelis eating them can’t be committing cultural appropriation merely by doing so. Instead, when Israelis eat them they are specifically rejecting Palestinian cuisine, which is a hateful act.” The guide will soon be released as an app for mobile devices, she added.

A year after Facebook vowed to stamp out discriminatory advertising, landlords can still exclude specific races, minorities and other categories of people from seeing rental ads on the social media site.

ProPublica bought dozens of rental housing ads last week and had no issue filtering out Jews, African-Americans, Spanish speakers and many more groups from viewing them, the news site reported Tuesday.

One ad excluded Facebook users with “interests” such as “Judaism,” “Hasidic Judaism,” “Orthodox Judaism” and “Reform Judaism.”

“This was a failure in our enforcement and we’re disappointed that we fell short of our commitments,” Ami Vora, Facebook’s vice president of product management, said in a statement to ProPublica. “The rental housing ads purchased by ProPublica should have but did not trigger the extra review and certifications we put in place due to a technical failure.”

When The New York Times hired Bret Stephens earlier this year as an op-ed columnist, I wrote, “His voice will be a welcome addition and corrective to the Times tilt against Israel.”

Who knew then that he’d wind up using his new platform to criticize a pro-Israel organization?

Yet that’s exactly what Stephens did in a recent column lacing into the Zionist Organization of America for allowing a former Trump administration official, Stephen Bannon, to speak at its dinner in New York.

The Times columnist’s overall point — that Jews should beware antisemitism on the right as well as on the left — is perfectly sensible. But the column suffers from a series of flaws that hurt its credibility.

First, it’s hypocritical of Stephens to attack the ZOA for associating with Bannon on the grounds that a website Bannon operated published articles about, and in some cases by, other figures that Stephens finds objectionable. “No organization that purports to represent the interests of the Jewish people should ever embrace anyone who embraces anti-Semites,” is the way that Stephens phrases it. The hypocrisy comes from the fact that the New York Times op-ed page, where Stephens works, has published articles by Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti and by the foreign minister of Iran, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Quite what ‘incentives’ Julian Worricker believes Ben Gurion had to offer Iraqi Jews at the time – apart from a shack unconnected to mains water or electricity in a transit camp, dubious employment prospects and loss of social status – is unclear.

Notably though, while Worricker did find time in this item to suggest that Israel ‘pressured’ Jews to leave Iraq, listeners heard nothing at all about the main turning point in the story of that community – the Farhud in 1941. Neither did they hear any explanation of the political events that led to that pogrom or – beyond the one law mentioned by Mr Shuker – the legislations by the Iraqi government that resulted in Jews being criminalised on suspicion of being Zionists, dismissed from government employment and stripped of their assets. No mention was made of another seminal event that contributed to the exodus of Jews from Iraq: the show trial and hanging of a prominent Jewish businessman in 1948.

During the subsequent conversation with Worricker’s studio guests Jonathan Steele and Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, listeners heard the latter describe Iran as having “a vibrant Jewish population” along with the claim that Jews who did leave the country did so “because they didn’t want their boys going off to fight in the Iran-Iraq war”. They did not however hear any mention of the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran as a factor that caused Persian Jews to flee the country.

With the BBC having a very dismal track record on reporting the topic of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands, listeners to this programme would not be well placed to fill in its serious omissions for themselves. Hence, the question presented as a description of this item was clearly left largely unanswered.

As we see, none of these BBC reports gave audiences a comprehensive view of Hizballah’s designation as a terror organisation by the United States, the Arab League, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Canada, France, the Netherlands and Israel and the designation of its so-called ‘military wing’ by the EU, the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

The majority of the reports (eight out of eleven) failed to clarify that Hizballah members have been indicted for the murder of a previous Lebanese prime minister.

Portrayal of the extent and significance of Hizballah’s influence on Lebanese politics and armed forces was mostly absent from the BBC reports and the role it played in the “political deadlock” before Saad Hariri became prime minister was ignored.

Most glaring, however, is the fact that none of these eleven reports made any effort to provide BBC audiences with details of the extent of Iran’s financial and military support for the terror group’s activities.

Clearly BBC audiences have not been provided with the full range of information necessary for proper understanding of this story.

CAMERA's Israel office yesterday prompted correction of a Los Angeles Times article which upgraded a Palestinian diplomat from envoy to ambassador. The Nov. 18 article ("Trump administration threatens to shut down Palestinian delegation in Washington") by Noga Tarnopolsky had erred regarding Husam Zomlot's title, stating:

Reached in Washington, Palestinian Authority Ambassador to the United States Husam Zomlot said, “I have no comment. No comment at all.”

Given that the Palestinian mission in Washington is not an embassy, Zomlot is not an ambassador. He is an envoy, or head of the delegation. The New York Times accurately referred to Husam Zomlot as an envoy (not ambassador) earlier this month.

Following CAMERA's communication with The Los Angeles Times, editors commendably published this correction at the top of the digital article:

A top official in France’s Socialist Party was expelled on Tuesday days after tweeting an image with anti-Semitic overtones against President Emmanuel Macron.

Gerard Filoche, a member of the Socialists’ national bureau, claims to have written the tweet out of “negligence,” but the party’s National Office voted unanimously to exclude him in his absence.

“The National Office has voted for the exclusion of Gerard Filoche. He can no longer speak on behalf of the Socialist Party, nor be a member,” party coordinator Rachid Temal said at a press conference.

“Gerard Filoche is no longer a member of the Socialist Party. He is excluded.”

He added: “It is not possible for a socialist leader to write an anti-Semitic tweet.”

A German political art group on Wednesday said it had built a pared-down version of Berlin's Holocaust memorial near the home of a far-right politician who sparked outrage by suggesting history books should more focus on German World War II victims.

Bjoern Hoecke, a senior member of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, criticized the memorial in Berlin in January, saying: "Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital."

The Centre for Political Beauty, a Berlin-based art group, was livestreaming work on a copy of the memorial near the politician's house in a small village in the eastern state of Thuringia.

The original memorial includes 2,711 concrete slabs of varying heights, arranged in a grid pattern, that serves as a somber reminder of the six million Jews who were killed by the Nazis.

The group said it has collected a third of the 28,000 euros required to keep the replica memorial in Hoecke's neighborhood until the end of 2019.

It said it offered to remove the memorial if Hoecke would kneel in front of it and ask sincerely for forgiveness.

Four Penn State University students are being charged with stealing a 9-foot menorah from the home of the campus Chabad rabbi and leaving it damaged outside a traditionally Jewish fraternity.

The students, who were caught on surveillance camera footage late last month placing the damaged menorah on the porch of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, reportedly are members of other campus fraternities.

State College Police said Monday that they had filed charges against the students, including misdemeanor counts of theft by unlawful taking, receiving stolen property and criminal mischief. They are scheduled to appear in court on December 20.

Rabbi Hershy Gourarie, co-director of Chabad of the Undergrads at Penn State, told The Daily Collegian that the menorah was too damaged to be repaired and would cost about $1,800 to fix.

“I hope that this is a time of introspection for the four suspects. At the right time, I would like to meet with them to educate and heal,” Gourarie said in a statement that also thanked the State College police.

“In response to this act of ignorance, we have resolved to take steps to raise awareness of Jewish history and traditions to the broader campus community and to increase the pride of our Jewish heritage among the Jewish student body,” the statement also said.

A woman captured on surveillance cameras after breaking in to an Orthodox synagogue in Norfolk, Virginia, turned herself in.

Morghan Rogers, 29, was charged with one count of larceny and one count of trespassing, according to local reports.

Rogers and an unidentified man last week spent two hours inside B’Nai Israel Congregation wandering through its halls, drinking and smoking, and vandalizing the inside of the building. They reportedly entered the synagogue through an unlocked front door at 10:45 p.m. on November 14.

The man has not been identified, though police told local media that Norfolk detectives are working on charging the man.

When Universal Music contacted Haifa’s Broken Fingaz Crew to say that U2 wanted the renowned Israeli street-art group to create an animation lyric video for the band’s new song, “American Soul,” Broken Fingaz didn’t hesitate – even though the crew had only a week to get it done.

“We weren’t sure if it was even possible but of course we said yes,” blogged Unga of Broken Fingaz on November 20.

“We teamed up with Adme [Israeli editor-director Adam Alboher] the genius who we worked with for most of our videos, and shot it all in an intense 4 days, completely DIY.”

Since Broken Fingaz members travel all over the world doing their thing on commission, the video was shot in segments in Haifa, London and Rajasthan.

Rep. Eliot Engel has become the first U.S. congressman to be featured on a postage stamp in Kosovo.

Engel, a New York Democrat, may be the first Jewish member of Congress on a stamp, period. Bella Abzug helped inspire a 1999 stamp celebrating the women’s rights movement, but the late New York Democrat’s face isn’t on it.

There’s a Jewish story behind why a Muslim majority nation honored Engel this week with a two-euro stamp.

Engel was among a cadre of U.S. lawmakers and public figures who urged the Clinton administration to intervene during the Kosovo war in 1999, heading off what many feared would be a genocide of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians at the hands of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

Many of the same figures were part of the push to recognize the Balkan state when it declared independence in 2008.

Among those out front in the push to protect Kosovo were Engel and Rep. Jerry Nadler, a fellow New York Democrat, along with Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., and two late congressmen, Reps. Tom Lantos and Ben Gilman, as well as the late Holocaust memoirist Elie Wiesel. Ask Kosovar Albanians why, and more often than not they’ll explain that it’s because the men are Jewish. Albanians saved Jews during the Holocaust, and Jews subsequently returned the favor is how it usually goes. (h/t Zvi)

Canada issued its first Hanukkah stamp in its official mail carrier’s 150-year-history.

Described as part of an initiative to highlight the nation’s cultural diversity, the stamps from Canada Post feature two colorful geometric designs: of dreidels and the menorah. Each pattern also has an online explanation of their relevance to the holiday.

They are arriving three weeks before the first candle is lit.

“In offering the great products, Canada Post is enabling our community to share the beauty and inspiration of Hanukkah with all Canadians,” said Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

Canada Post made an initial issue of 3 million Hanukkah stamps and has indicated that if trial-run sales go well, it will make more over the next few years and eventually add new designs.

In 1789, in response to a resolution offered by Congressman Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, President George Washington issued a proclamation recommending that Thursday November 26th of that year "be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation."

In New York City, Congregation Shearith Israel convened a celebration on that day at which its minister, Gershom Mendes Seixas, embraced the occasion: "As we are made equal partakers of every benefit that results from this good government; for which we cannot sufficiently adore the God of our fathers who hath manifested his care over us in this particular instance; neither can we demonstrate our sense of His benign goodness, for His favourable interposition in behalf of the inhabitants of this land."

While the celebrations at that venerable Orthodox synagogue continue unabated to this day, other American Jewish appreciations of Thanksgiving have ranged from the skeptical to the outright antagonistic. In an essay entitled "Is Thanksgiving Kosher?" Atlanta's Rabbi Michael Broyde examines three rabbis' halakhic positions on the subject: that of Yitzhak Hutner, who ruled Thanksgiving a Gentile holiday and forbade any recognition of it; that of Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who regarded it as a secular holiday and permitted its celebration (particularly by eating turkey), and that of Moshe Feinstein, who permitted turkey but prohibited any other celebration because of reservations over the recognition of even secular holidays.

Newly presented historical information, however, may swing the annual autumnal pendulum back in favor of participation in what now appears to have begun as a holiday with both a patent Jewish theme and associated rituals. In his recent book, Making Haste From Babylon, Nick Bunker reveals an item of particular significance for both Jewish observers and critics of Thanksgiving.

.@TzipiHotovely calls US Jews "people that never send their children to fight for their country," classic anti-Semitic trope. Off the top of my head there are 6 ex-Jewish servicemen just among those running for office. https://t.co/47uckZxa8y

— (((Ron Kampeas))) (@kampeas) November 22, 2017

“The other issue is not understanding the complexity of the region,” she said. “People that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, or to Iraq. Most of them are having quite convenient lives. They don’t feel how it feels to be attacked by rockets, and I think part of it is to actually experience what Israel is dealing with on a daily basis.”

The Secretary General of the Presidency, Tayeb Abdul Rahim, received a delegation from the "Rabbis for Peace" movement at the presidential headquarters, in cooperation with the Coordination Committee of the Israeli Community.

The delegation presented a petition signed by 50 rabbis demanding the end of the occupation and independence for the Palestinian people, and the provision of conditions for a return to negotiations.

The meeting was attended by a group of legal judges and representatives of the Office of the Chief Justice and Endowments.

Abdel Rahim spoke of the need to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state on the borders of June 4, with Jerusalem as its capital. He praised the activity of the group of rabbis in order to achieve peace, which is in Israel's interest as it is in the Palestinian interest.

Rabbi Levitsch said that he is ashamed of the Israeli society, which tends to extremism and called for the need to cooperate with the Palestinian leadership, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, who believes in a true and just peace for his people..