Lebanon has banned Steven Spielberg's newspaper drama The Post just days before the film is set to premiere in Beirut.

A source involved with The Post's international rollout says the movie, which stars Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, was presented to the Lebanese censorship board, which nixed it, citing a "boycott Israel" list that includes Spielberg due to his Oscar-winning Holocaust film Schindler's List (the 1993 film shot some scenes in Jerusalem).

The matter has been transferred to Lebanon's Minister of Interior and Municipalities, who could overturn the decision.

Unlike Gal Gadot, whose film Wonder Woman was banned in Lebanon in May, Spielberg is not an Israeli citizen, nor has he ever fought with the Israeli Army. Lebanon is officially at war with Israel.

 [O]ver the past three years, at least five films either directed or produced by Spielberg were accepted and approved by the censorship board and it is only now that it is invoking Spielberg's inclusion on the "boycott Israel" list. Both The BFG and Bridge of Spies — which mark Spielberg's two most recent helming efforts before The Post — were released in Lebanon.

Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, has delivered a speech triggered by his rage at the President of the United States Donald Trump, going so far as to hurl the most bitter curse in the Arabic language at the POTUS: "May your house be destroyed."

This imprecation does not merely relate to someone's present home, but to all the members of his family being thrown into the street to lead lives of destitution, humiliation and shame. Only someone familiar with Middle Eastern culture understands the real significance of this curse.

The question that naturally rises is what happened that brought Abbas to the point where he is willing to burn his bridges with the US President and deliver a speech whose import is the severing of relations with the country which serves as chief funder of UNRWA, also pushing the US president towards a negative stand on the "Palestinian Issue."

"Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine," is an idea created after the Six Day War and further developed after the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993. Arafat turned it into a mantra, while official Israel – Shmon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Alon Liel and their cohorts – did nothing to stop him. They told us that the expression is meant for a Palestinian Arab audience, i.e. for "internal use" only. "Millions of shahids are on the march to Jerusalem!!" Arafat shouted day and night, but they told us to ignore it, that these were empty words, merely a pipe dream.

The world, led by Europe, went along with this Palestinian house of cards, financing it with billions of dollars over the years in the hopes of turning it into a real concrete structure, simply ignoring reality. Europe supported the establishment of a "Palestinian peace-loving state alongside Israel" while forgetting the fact that the PLO ideology calls for destroying the Jewish State and that its logo includes the map of that "Palestine" reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

In an article he published on August 4, 2017 in the Omani Al-Watan daily, Palestinian journalist Jawad Al-Bashiti, who resides in Jordan, wrote that Judaism has been a "religion of hatred" toward all mankind for the past 3,000 years, and that the Jews invented a god of their own who, they claim, instructs them to take the gentiles' property and to kill their elderly, women, and infants. Al-Bashiti concluded his article by saying that, if the Jews'"delusions" remain fixed in the minds of the "new Israelis," Nazism will seem like "a drop in the ocean of the Talmudic beastliness." It should be noted that slightly different versions of this article have been published in the past.

The following are excerpts from the article:
"According to every criterion of human development and progress, cultural, ethical and scientific, especially in the 21st century, there is nothing worse than devotion, in theory and in practice, to the Jewish religion – the Torah and the Talmud – and there is nothing worse than when this devotion takes on a Zionist and political [guise]… Judaism – the legends and the fables that it adopted, claimed for itself, created and developed, and the concepts, ideologies, and ideas that it invented – is the religion of hatred toward all mankind. And although in its Zionist permutation it directs the bulk of its hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs, the fact is that [Judaism] represents 3,000 years of hostility and hatred toward [all] gentiles, in other words, toward mankind as a whole...

"The ancient nomadic group [called] the Hebrews or the People of Israel fabricated the Jewish perception so that it would be consistent, in general and in principle, with this group's social and historical reality:... [The Jews] were a nomadic people that knew nothing of the culture of the ancient nations or of [life] in neighboring regions. They lived in a state of war and by means of war. Anxious about their survival, they distanced themselves from the danger of assimilation and absorption into the cultured pagan nations, and [adopted] a culture of war that is in no way similar to any [other] culture because of their beastliness and hostility toward non-Jews, i.e. toward all of mankind. They invented a god for themselves – Yahweh – according to their social and historic ideal. They first 'Judaized' the heavens so that they could Judaize the land, in other words, the land of the others, i.e. Palestine, which they saw in their Talmudic visions as the Promised Land…

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas revealed with his fiery and intransigent speech Sunday that the real reason for the lack of peace in the Middle East is the Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any border, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.

Netanyahu, in a briefing with reporters after a series of meetings with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, said that Abbas’s words will help Israel “present the truth” to the world. While much of the comments about the speech have centered on attacks on US President Donald Trump, Netanyahu said that what Abbas said, not only the shrewd way in which he said it, will help Israel get its point across.

“If we ever want to get to reconciliation and peace, there needs to be an understanding why this conflict has continued for so many years,” Netanyahu said. “There is always an attempt to hide this, and I have worked for many years to try and get across the truth that the root of the conflict is the continual and, unfortunately, unchanging denial of the Palestinians to recognize a Jewish state within any borders.”

He said that without a change in the position stated by Abbas, “there will not be peace.”

Netanyahu also said that Abu Mazen's outburst was because he was concerned about the diplomatic plan that the US administration is working on, and wanted to remove the Americans from involvement in the process.“The world has pampered the Palestinians, and not told them the truth,” he said. “I think Abbas is reacting. For the first time someone [Trump] is telling them the truth.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is serving Israel’s interests by lashing out against Washington and against a Jewish connection to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday, a day after the Palestinian leader angrily rejected US President Donald Trump’s approach to the Middle East peace process.

“He exposed what we have been saying all the time, that the root of the conflict is the basic refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any borders,” Netanyahu said from New Delhi, where he is on an official state visit, adding that the Palestinians would find no mediator to replace the Americans.

Abbas’s speech Sunday night was filled with perceived anti-Semitic comments, including denials of a Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. He went so far as to imply that European Jews during the Holocaust chose to undergo “murder and slaughter” rather than emigrate to British-held Palestine, and alleged that the State of Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion imported Jews from Yemen and Iraq to the country against their will.

The Palestinian leader further asserted that the State of Israel was formed as “a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism” to safeguard European interests.

Netanyahu was speaking hours after meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his first official trip to New Delhi. The two only briefly touched on the Palestinian issue, according to a joint statement following the meeting, with both affirming “their support for an early resumption of peace talks.”

President Reuven Rivlin lashed out Monday against comments made Sunday by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah in which he said, “The Europeans wanted to bring the Jews here to preserve their interests in the region.”

Speaking at his official residence to an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) delegation, Rivlin said: “What we heard yesterday from Mahmoud Abbas was terrible. He returned back to the ideas he expressed decades ago, when they were no less terrible. To say Israel is the result of a Western conspiracy to settle Jews in land belonging to Arab populations? To say that the Jewish people has no connection with the land of Israel? He forgot many things, and said exactly the things that led him to be accused years ago of antisemitism and Holocaust denial.”

In recent meetings with foreign officials, Rivlin has tended to find excuses for Abbas, citing his problems with Hamas and his loss of popularity among a population that is frustrated by lack of progress in ending the conflict that disrupts the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Rivlin has also quoted the Koran, often specifying chapter and verse. This time, however, he said Abbas “is rejecting our return to our homeland, even though Abu Mazen [Abbas] knows very well that the Koran itself recognizes the land of Israel as our land.”

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said on Monday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had “lost his senses” following his fiery speech against US President Donald Trump.

Liberman told Israel’s Army Radio that Abbas’s address on Sunday symbolized his giving up on the prospect of peace negotiations and opting instead for a confrontation with both Israel and the United States.

“This speech signals that he’s lost self-control, lost the support of the moderate Arab world and has clearly given up on negotiations,” said Liberman of Abbas.

Abbas sharply escalated his rhetoric in a speech on Sunday, lashing out at Trump over recent policy moves, such as recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Abbas also slammed Trump’s recent Twitter comment threatening to cut American aid and alleging the Palestinians were no longer willing to negotiate a peace deal with Israel.

The head of the Zionist Union faction, Avi Gabbay, on Monday slammed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas over a speech he had made denouncing Israel as a colonial plot devoid of Jewish elements, urging that Israel ignore what the Palestinians are saying and focus on separating from them instead.

At a meeting in the Knesset of the Zionist Union faction, Gabbay said Abbas’s comments were “serious, false, and have anti-Semitic fictions.”

In an address he gave the night before to a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council in Ramallah, Abbas asserted that the State of Israel was formed as “a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism” to safeguard European interests. He also implied that European Jews during the Holocaust chose to suffer “murder and slaughter” over emigration to British-held Palestine.

“We must not be confused and we must not focus on what the Palestinians say,” Gabbay told his faction. “Separation from the Palestinians is our interest.”

Gabbay warned that the alternative to a two-state solution would see Israel add two million Palestinians to the country with the added burden of administering the lives of another two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The banner that Abbas waved time after time, as official and unofficial policy — establishing the State of Palestine along the 1967 borders — became an idea disconnected from reality. It is easy to blame Trump for this situation, but to be realistic, that has been the case since 2009.

The rule of Hamas in Gaza and Israeli settlement building showed clearly that the dream was one thing and the reality was another. Trump’s December 6 White House speech, in which he recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, only made matters clearer for the Palestinians, as did the message sent from Saudi Arabia about the “deal of the century” being drawn up by the Trump administration.

The frustration of Abbas and his colleagues was palpable. Furthermore, on Sunday, he did what he is so good at doing — blaming the entire world for the situation of the Palestinians, from the US, to Israel, Hamas, and even the Europeans, for their role in sending the Jews to Israel.

Abbas also dedicated a large part of his address to his internal critics — not only Fatah activists who refused to participate in the conference, but also Hamas and the Islamic Jihad terror groups, who stayed away as well.

Israel, he further charged, destroyed the Oslo accords. “Israel is a colonialist project, which has nothing to do with the Jews,” he added.

Trump gave the Palestinians a slap in the face, he lamented. “The deal of the century became the slap of the century.”

Only a few in the Palestinian Authority and the top echelons of Fatah and the PLO were left off of his list of the culprits behind the failure.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Monday said Moscow “understands” the anger of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who earlier denounced White House peace efforts as the “slap of the century.”

“We completely understand the emotions the Palestinians currently have. For years they made concessions without receiving anything in return,” Lavrov said at an annual press conference in Moscow.

“We constantly hear that the US is about to unveil an important deal (on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) that would satisfy all sides. We have not seen this kind of document,” Lavrov added.

Palestinian leaders on Monday held a meeting called after US President Donald Trump’s December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Palestinians want the city as the capital of their future state and Abbas has said Trump’s stance means the US can no longer be the mediator in peace talks with Israel.

In a two-hour speech by Mahmoud Abbas to the PLO’s Central Council on Sunday night in Ramallah, the aging Palestinian president gave a quintessentially Palestinian talk – blaming everyone for his people’s problems but himself.

The low lights of the diatribe against the world by the “president”, who today celebrated the 12th year of a 4 year term, included his wish that ‘God may demolish the house’ of Donald Trump. He also criticised Hamas, Islamic Jihad, his critics within his Fatah party and the Europeans, who he blamed for Palestine’s Jewish problem. Israel, he insisted, “is a colonialist project, which has nothing to do with the Jews.” Abbas also traced the beginning of Zionism to what he called the Theodor Herzl’s efforts to “wipe out Palestinians from Palestine”. Abbas also promoted the conspiracy theory that “Israel has imported frightening amounts of drugs in order to destroy our younger generation”.

Thus far, only the Telegraph covered Abbas’s speech. However, their 620 word article, which included every other incendiary remark by the octogenarian leader, completely ignored his ahistorical, antisemitic and conspiratorial claims.

The Telegraph’s omission is but one example within a broader media pattern of obfuscating or ignoring incendiary, pro-terror or antisemitic remarks by the ‘moderate’ Palestinian leader.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) threat to refuse to negotiate with Israel unless President Trump withdraws his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel could see Jordan replacing the PLO as Israel’s negotiating partner to end the 100 years-old Arab-Jewish conflict.

This threat – unless unconditionally revoked – would give Trump the opportunity to consign the PLO to the political wilderness by inviting Jordan to step in and negotiate with Israel over Trump’s eagerly-anticipated “ultimate deal”.

Jordan-Israel negotiations would offer Jordan the opportunity to recover a substantial part of Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”) annexed by Jordan in 1950 – albeit illegally – but subsequently lost to Israel in the 1967 Six Day War (“disputed territory”).

Should Jordan buck at entering into such negotiations – some 60% of the disputed territory – under Israel’s full administrative and security control since the 1995 Oslo Accords and containing just 5% of the West Bank’s entire Arab population (“Area C”) – could be annexed by Israel.

The Palestinians are about to face two more problems.

One is a considerable drop in available cash to fund the PA, following the ratification of two laws in the Knesset and Congress – the Stern bill and the Taylor Force Act. These laws condition the transfer of at least NIS 1 billion (some 6% of the PA budget) on ceasing salary payments to terrorists and their families, and on abolishing the law facilitating such payments under the classification of terrorists as the Palestinian fighting sector.

This legislation, and the threat to slash funds to the Palestinians over their refusal to renew diplomatic talks, will challenge another vital element of the Palestinian position – the threat of the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. According to this logic, the PA cannot be asked to honor its commitments under the Oslo Accords to stop encouraging terrorism, and certainly no economic steps can be taken against it, because doing so could cause the PA to collapse or at the very least cease security coordination with Israel. The assumption is that the PA’s existence and its security cooperation are such key Israeli interests that no one would dare put them in jeopardy.

But the legislative process in Congress is pressing forward, and the PA will almost certainly not fall as a result, because its existence is first and foremost a Palestinian interest. This was evidenced during the metal detector riots, when the Palestinians terminated security cooperation with Israel but renewed it shortly afterward – without fanfare – because it was no less a Palestinian interest than an Israeli one.

The second problem at the Palestinians’ doorstep is the Americans’ ongoing push to present their own peace proposal. Only a small handful of people in the know are familiar with the details of the proposal, but the impression thus far is that it puts a far greater emphasis on Israel’s security needs than previous proposals, including the demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the democratic national home of the Jewish people and acceptance of a permanent Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley.

Crown Heights, January 10 – Adherents of the belief that the late Rebbe of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement did not, in fact, die in 1994, expressed shock today that anyone could think the Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has any life in it.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the seventh leader of the Lubavitch dynasty, is interred at Montefiore Cemetery in the New York City Borough of Queens. A small but vocal segment of the Chabad movement, the Lubavitch organization that spreads the teachings of the dynasty’s founder and his successors, insists that Rabbi Schneerson is not truly dead, and will reappear to claim his rightful status as Messiah when the time comes. To support their contentions they cite unconventional, controversial interpretations of classical Jewish teachings that run counter to authoritative teachings, and they disregard evidence to the contrary, but find the notion that the Two-State Solution remains in any way viable an absurd notion.

“Goodness gracious, it would take a credulous, willfully blind imbecile to believe that nonsense has anything to recommend it,” remarked Rabbi Yechi Admor as he hoisted a “Messiah” flag out his Eastern Parkway apartment window. “People still hold by that codswallop? I’m stunned. Anyone with half a brain should be able to make an honest assessment of the situation and conclude there’s no chance of ‘Israel and Palestine dwelling side by side in peace and security,’ as the plan’s proponents never tire of declaiming.”

Germany's Christian Democratic Union Party, headed by Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the country's Social Democratic Party, headed by Martin Schulz, agreed on a blueprint for coalition negotiations on Friday.

Such a German coalition has stoked fears in Israel, as the blueprint fails to mention neither Germany's unique connection with Israel nor the latter's Jewish character – points that were expressly stated in the basic guidelines that formed Merkel's two previous governments.

In addition, the blueprint includes an article dealing with the military, stating an opposition to "acts of targeted killings by automatic weapons systems," as well as a commitment to develop European drone technology.

This article may hinder a deal between Israel and Germany for the purchase of Israeli drones, which was suspended last summer after sudden opposition by the Social Democrats.

Despite these worries, the blueprint does detail a foreign policy in which Germany will not support the warming relations between Turkey and the European Union so long as Ankara continues violating human rights.

An IDF general on Sunday said the Israeli military, helped by the “Jewish brain,” had devised a solution that would see all of Hamas’s cross-border tunnels into Israel destroyed.

Speaking in Arabic to US-based satellite TV station Alhurra, Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said that “the Israeli genius along with the Jewish brain have come up with a solution to all of the terrorists’ tunnels.”

“Just like there’s ‘Iron Dome’ for the air, there’s a technological umbrella of steel underground,” he said. “I want to send a message to everyone who is digging or gets too close to the tunnels: As you’ve seen in the past two months, these tunnels bring only death,” he added (Hebrew/Arabic link) according to translations of the interview.

Earlier, the Israel Defense Forces announced it had destroyed a border-crossing Hamas attack tunnel, the third in recent months, that penetrated hundreds of meters into both Israeli and Egyptian territory from the Gaza Strip, in an airstrike on Saturday night.

During a visit to the area later in the day, Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir vowed the IDF would continue to destroy more tunnels in the coming months, as the Defense Ministry completes the construction of a barrier around the Gaza Strip designed to prevent underground penetration into Israeli territory.

The Israeli military has developed cutting-edge counter-tunnel technology that will enable it to destroy all Hamas terror tunnels by the end of 2018, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Sunday.

Lieberman's remarks followed the detection and destruction over the weekend of a Hamas terror tunnel running under the Egypt, Gaza and Israel borders.

It was the third terror tunnel the IDF has destroyed in recent months. An Islamic Jihad tunnel was blown up on Oct. 30, and a Hamas tunnel was leveled on Dec. 9.

In an interview with Hadashot evening news, Lieberman lauded the technological breakthrough that enables the tunnels to be detected, but declined to elaborate on it.

"By the end of 2018, we will have eliminated all of Hamas' attack tunnels. We may even manage to do so sooner, but the task is to destroy them all by the end of the year," Lieberman said.

He slammed Hamas for compromising the Kerem Shalom crossing, under which the tunnel opening on the Israeli side of the border was found. Kerem Shalom is the only crossing through which goods enter the Gaza Strip. Some 1,500 trucks, delivering an average 15 million tons of goods, travel through it daily, making it a vital pipeline for the coastal enclave.

Hamas' decision placed the residents of Gaza in harm's way, he said.

Kerem Shalom Crossing, January 15 – Israeli security officials announced on Sunday a renewed effort to target attack tunnels of the terrorist organization Hamas in and from the Gaza Strip, to include both direct demolition operations and a new technique for blasting atonal, experimental work by modern composers into those spaces to flush out any fighters inside.

While the Israel Air Force targeted a major tunnel on Saturday night running from Rafah, through Israeli territory, and into Egypt, the acoustic operations will be conducted from afar using radio signals, lasers, and other technology that will avoid putting personnel and equipment at risk, stated Ministry of Defense spokesman Elliott Carter.

“Two or three field trials have already produced promising results,” observed Carter. “We identified a tunnel within the Gaza Strip last month that fit the physical criteria for use of this new technology, and deployed the system. Within fifteen seconds, our surveillance drones captured footage of the dozen or so people in the tunnel running out with their hands over their ears, and they appeared to be in serious distress.”

The Wide-Echo Broadcast Emission of Revolutionary Noise (WEBERN) system is slated to begin full operations next month, following the completion of the testing phase. Spokesman Carter provided several key details regarding the WEBERN system, but declined to elaborate on the technology behind it.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman submitted a proposal to the cabinet on Sunday that would start the process of legalizing of the Havat Gilad outpost in the West Bank, less than a week after one of its residents was killed in a terror attack.

If adopted by the cabinet, the proposal would authorize the defense minister to instruct relevant government bodies to examine the legal aspects of recognizing Havat Gilad as an official settlement, a statement announcing the proposal said.

The settlement on “Israeli-owned land” in the northern West Bank would operate within the municipal framework of the Samaria Regional Council, the statement added.

But one West Bank council chairman, speaking on the condition of anonymity, dismissed the announcement as “spin.”


“He’s asking the cabinet for approval to direct bodies that are already under his jurisdiction,” said the official. “Liberman doesn’t want to make the decision himself so he’s passing it on to the cabinet.”

Police arrested three Palestinians Monday outside the West Bank settlement of Ma’ale Adumim after finding an automatic weapon and ammunition in their possession.

Officers stopped the suspects’ vehicle, which had no license plates, near the settlement on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

The driver and two passengers were questioned and the vehicle was searched, whereupon police found an automatic weapon, magazines for an anti-tank Carl Gustav rifle and other ammunition.

The three suspects, from the village of Ubeidiya, were arrested and being questioned by security officials.

Last week an Israeli father of six was gunned down on a West Bank highway outside Nablus.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Monday said the Hamas terror group had conducted rocket-launching experiments overnight, with the group preferring continued investment in war than in the well-being of the Gaza Strip’s population.

Speaking a day after the IDF announced it had destroyed another border-crossing Hamas attack tunnel, the third in recent months, Liberman said: “I hear a lot about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, about the difficult situation.

“The budget for Hamas’s military wing in 2017 was $260 million,” the minister said, noting that about $100 million was supplied by Iran. “All of this $260 million was invested in tunnels and in producing rockets. If they had invested $260 million in their water systems or their health systems they would be in a totally different place.”

Liberman said that on Sunday night Hamas “fired three rockets into the sea, and this shows that despite the humanitarian situation and despite shortages in basic supplies they continue” to focus on warfare.

Hamas suffered two major blows on Sunday. The first was the destruction of a cross-border terror tunnel that ran from the Gaza Strip under the Kerem Shalom border crossing into both Israel and Egypt. The second was the attempt on the life of Mohamed Hamdan, one of the terrorist group's top operatives in Lebanon.

The discovery of the tunnel was the harsher blow, as it neutralized a strategic asset. The tunnel could have been used to mount attacks against Israel and perhaps target Kerem Shalom itself, the only crossing point for goods into Gaza.

But it is more likely that Hamas planned to use the tunnel to smuggle weapons and terrorists into Gaza, right under Egypt's and Israel's noses.

The tunnel's detection landed Hamas in hot water with three parties: with Israel, which yet again has proof of Hamas' offensive tactics; with Egypt, which is working to promote the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and now knows Hamas is secretly digging terrorist tunnels breaching its border; and with the residents of Gaza, who depend on the Kerem Shalom crossing and have now realized that Hamas has placed this valuable pipeline at risk for its military purposes.

Ashdod port customs personnel discovered the largest ever consignment of military equipment destined for the Gaza Strip, the agency announced on Monday. The shipment stored thousands of items of military clothing, including boots, coats and combat vests, all in camouflage colors.

The Gazan importer of the consignment, which originated in China, was due to receive it via the Kerem Shalom crossing.

All items were confiscated and handed over to the security establishment.

"Ashdod port customs inspectors are doing their utmost to thwart the efforts of Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist organizations to arm and equip themselves. To this end, thousands of items for military use were seized in the past year," the agency said in a statement.

Israeli authorities intercept illicit goods heading to Hamas on a regular basis at crossings from Israel into the Strip. Last January, the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said that it had foiled 1,226 smuggling attempts in 2016 through the Kerem Shalom crossing, an increase of 165% from the previous year.

Hamas on Sunday blamed Israel for an alleged assassination attempt against Mohamed Hamdan, one of its Lebanon-based operatives, in a car bombing in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon.

Official sources in Lebanon said the bomb had been planted in Hamdan's car and exploded as he was about to get in. The car was destroyed and witnesses said Hamdan appeared to have suffered wounds to his legs. He was taken to a hospital in Sidon for treatment.

A statement from Hamas confirmed that Hamdan was a member of the group, without detailing his role, and said "initial indications" suggested Israel was behind the bombing.

"The Zionist enemy is the only one benefiting from attacking the stability of Lebanon," the statement said. "We must let the authorities in Lebanon finish their investigation and get to the criminals."

Ali Barakeh, a Hamas official in Lebanon, later said, "We think that this message carries the fingerprints of the Zionist enemy.

"The enemy wants to move the camera from inside Palestine to the outside because there is an intifada [uprising] going on in Palestine against their measures and the decision of the U.S. President [Donald] Trump. We are used to this enemy moving the battle to a different playground ... and we assure you that our battle will remain inside occupied Palestine and against the Zionist enemy.''

It’s been more than three years since we last provoked a war that killed thousands and left tens of thousands more homeless. One can debate the merits or timing of the conflict, but one clear political advantage it provided was an excuse to bump off anyone threatening our hegemony in the Gaza Strip, then claim they were killed by Israeli fire. With the way things have been going under our watch since then, and the rumblings of dissatisfaction and dissent creating openings for other rivals assert themselves at the expense of our prestige and authority, it may be time to launch another ill-advised round of bloodshed and destruction to help conceal our skulduggery.

Lest you think this cleansing, if you will, involves only those who pose an organizational or institutional threat, let me disabuse you of that misconception: it represents an operative feature at every level of Palestinian society, and this constitutes one of the finest manifestations of our democratic nature. Rockets flying back and forth afford even the lowest on the totem pole the opportunity to get others out of the way, be it in terms of career, finances, or family honor. The organs of law enforcement, such as they are, will hardly bat an eye at violent deaths of suspected homosexuals at the hand of family members under non-war circumstances; in the midst of war they will scarcely register, except as fodder for NGOs and the international media to look and the body count and demonize Israel for “collective punishment” and “disproportionate response” to our rockets.

Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan threatened on Monday to "strangle" a planned 30,000-strong US-backed force in Syria "before it's even born," as Washington's backing for Kurdish fighters drove a wedge into relations with one of its main Middle East allies.

The United States announced its support on Sunday for plans for a "border force" to defend territory held by US-backed, Kurdish-led fighters in northern Syria.

The Syrian government of President Bashar Assad responded on Monday by vowing to crush the new force and drive US troops from the country. Assad's ally Russia called the plans a plot to dismember Syria and place part of it under US control.

But the strongest denunciation came from Erdogan, who has presided as relations between the United States and its biggest Muslim ally within NATO have stretched to the breaking point.

"A country we call an ally is insisting on forming a terror army on our borders," Erdogan said of the United States in a speech in Ankara. "What can that terror army target but Turkey?"

"Our mission is to strangle it before it's even born."

Five men were arrested in connection with a firebomb attack on a historic synagogue in Tunisia.

Four of the men, ages 19 and 20, were arrested on Friday and a fifth, age 21, believed to be the main culprit in the Jan. 9 attack, was arrested on Saturday, the Kapitalis news website reported. None of the men, residents of the island’s main city of Houmet Essouk. had a criminal record and were not known to security services, according to the report.

The firebomb thrown at the El Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba caused minor damage and no injuries. The incident occurred amid protests over economic conditions taking place in several Tunisian cities, though not in Djerba itself, Reuters reported.

The Tunisian Interior Ministry said the suspects’ attack was not religiously motivated, but rather an attempt to “create chaos” amid the anti-government protests throughout the country, Ynet reported.

Four Jewish families live in the area. Most of the Djerba Jewish community, which numbers in the hundreds and is the largest in the Arab world, lives two miles north of there in a neighborhood that is under heavy protection and whose entrances are guarded around the clock by the country’s internal security services.

Tunisian police increased their security around the Djerba Jewish institutions.

Israeli authorities must release a 16-year-old Palestinian activist who could face up to 10 years in prison over an altercation with Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank last month, Amnesty International said as she appeared in court today.

Ahed Tamimi will go before Ofer military court in the occupied West Bank accused of aggravated assault and 11 other charges after a video showing her shoving, slapping and kicking two Israeli soldiers in her home village of Nabi Saleh on 15 December went viral on Facebook.

“Nothing that Ahed Tamimi has done can justify the continuing detention of a 16-year-old girl. The Israeli authorities must release her without delay. In capturing an unarmed teenage girl’s assault on two armed soldiers wearing protective gear, the footage of this incident shows that she posed no actual threat and that her punishment is blatantly disproportionate,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

“Ahed Tamimi’s ensuing arrest and military trial exposes the Israeli authorities’ discriminatory treatment of Palestinian children who dare to stand up to ongoing, often brutal, repression by occupying forces.

“It would be an unconscionable travesty of justice if Ahed Tamini’s act of defiance in the face of relentless oppression earns her a long prison sentence after a trial in a military court that does not ensure basic fair trial standards.”

Jerusalem defied many in the media’s expectations that it would explode into violence after President Trump’s decision to recognize the city as Israel’s capital. But that hasn’t stopped some liberal Zionists from predicting doom — and the demise of their own ideology.

Michelle Goldberg wrote in The New York Times this week that the announcement, along with the fruition of plans to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, would be the prime cause for the death of “liberal Zionism” — a concept that isn’t explicitly defined but is generally understood to center on a two-state solution. Goldberg claimed Trump showed “Palestinians and Israelis alike” that he was “giving the Israeli government carte blanche to continue claiming Palestinian territory,” even though she admitted the administration was “not prejudging the status of Jerusalem in a final peace deal.”

There is likely a one-state future, and it “can be Jewish or it can be democratic, but it cannot be both,” Goldberg argued. “Trump’s embassy decision was thus another nail in the coffin of liberal Zionism.”

She wasn’t alone. On Dec. 6, the day of Trump’s embassy announcement, Haroon Moghul wrote for NBC News that it “signal[ed] that the two-state solution is pretty much dead.” The next day, UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi wrote an op-ed titled “Trump Just Dealt a Death Blow to the Two-State Solution” in the Los Angeles Times. Both were riddled with half-truths and selective omissions of history — namely any mention of Arab nations rejecting repeated land-for-peace offers by Israel or the fact that Arab countries initiated many of the wars where, as Makdisi put it, Israel “illegally” took land.

It’s a particularly egregious bit of hypocrisy. From the Arab League’s famous “Three No’s” (no peace, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel) after the Six-Day War to Linda Sarsour telling Haaretz last year that she desired not a two-state solution but a single state (without Jewish self-determination), when those opposed to Israel’s existence have actually denounced a two-state plan, they’re not accused of hindering the peace process.

UNRWA provides aid to Palestinians. But it does some harmful things too: slandering Jews and putting Israeli lives in danger. It even worsens the refugee problem. Trump wants to cut funding. So why is the Israeli PM urging him to reconsider? The answers might surprise you.

ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Boko Haram justifiably appear on the UN’s list of grave violators of children’s rights in conflict zones. But UNICEF is also spearheading a campaign to have Israel’s military included on this blacklist, which could lead to Security Council sanctions if successful.

It’s preposterous that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could be grouped among terror groups and militias from failed states, together with the planet’s worst offenders in terms of protecting children.

But the problem is that UNICEF has for years been partnering with a group of virulently anti-Israel non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who play an integral role in advancing this campaign to blacklist the IDF, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from UNICEF to do so.

These NGOs, some of whom reportedly have links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group, supply UNICEF’s Palestinian office (UNICEF-oPt) with a steady stream of inaccurate information and distorted claims about Israel’s justice system and the operations of its security forces.

This propaganda then becomes the basis for misleading and false UNICEF reports about the alleged mistreatment of Palestinian minors involved in violent attacks and who are subsequently arrested by the IDF.

Basically, UNICEF has allowed itself to become corrupted by a virulently anti-Israel and pro-BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) agenda, which is now perverting its mandate of child protection and its guidelines of neutrality and impartiality, as documented in a 49 page report released last week by the watchdog group NGO Monitor, UNICEF and its NGO Working Group: The Campaign to Blacklist the IDF.

Considering the world’s hateful obsession with Israel’s purported misdeeds, one would think that the Jewish state devotes a disproportionate percentage of its budget to setting the record straight.

Yet, not only are our leaders not planning on beefing up public diplomacy efforts throughout the world, they are actually planning on further reducing Israel’s presence on the international stage in an effort to save money.

The original proposal put forward by the Finance Ministry was to cut a total of 22 of 103 Israeli missions abroad over three years at a savings of NIS 176m. and to fire 140 of the 686 Foreign Ministry employees based in Jerusalem for an additional NIS 40m. in savings.

This proposal was later scaled back to a plan to close seven diplomatic representations and to freeze layoffs altogether.

But we wonder what the powers-that-be could possibly be thinking when they behave so disparagingly toward our foreign corps. By allowing the Finance Ministry proposal to be widely publicized, the government message to them is very clear and very disheartening.

The following Quranic passages clearly illustrate the Jews' imperative to enter the land of Israel:

• And [mention, O Muhammad], when Moses said to his people, "O my people, remember the favor of Allah [God] upon you when He appointed among you prophets and made you possessors and gave you that which He had not given anyone among the worlds. O my people, enter the Holy Land which Allah has assigned to you and do not turn back and [thus] become losers." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:20-21]
  
• They said, "O Moses, indeed within it is a people of tyrannical strength, and indeed, we will never enter it until they leave it; but if they leave it, then we will enter." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:22]
  
• Two men among those who feared [disobeying the people upon whom] Allah had bestowed favor said, "Enter upon them through the gate, for when you have entered it, you will be predominant. And upon Allah rely, if you should be believers." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:23]
  
• [The Israelites] said, "O Moses, indeed we will not enter it, ever, as long as they are within it; so go, you and your Lord, and fight. Indeed, we are remaining right here." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:23]
  
• [The Israelites] said, "O Moses, indeed we will not enter it, ever, as long as they are within it; so go, you and your Lord, and fight. Indeed, we are remaining right here." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:24]
  
• [Moses] said, "My Lord, indeed I do not possess except myself and my brother, so part us from the defiantly disobedient people." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:25]
  
• [God] said, "Then indeed, it is forbidden to them for forty years [in which] they will wander throughout the land. So do not grieve over the defiantly disobedient people." [Surah Al-Ma'idah 5:26]

This Monday, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day across the country. While nearly every aspect of the great man’s life has been analyzed from every angle, including his relationship with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Jewish community, there are still little-known gems in the archives.

One of those is a speech Dr. King wrote on behalf of Soviet Jews. In December 1966, on Hanukkah, the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry was having a nation-wide organizing conference call, and invited Dr. King to speak over the phone, an offer he gladly accepted. What followed was a rousing address on behalf of what he called a “withered and restricted Jewish community.”

“Individual Jews,” Dr. King said in his comments, “may in the main be physically and economically secure in Russia, but the absence of opportunity to associate as Jews in the enjoyment of Jewish culture and religious experience becomes a severe limitation upon an individual.”

By all accounts, being a prophet is no picnic. No one wants the job. Nobody decides to do it; it gets thrust on you, and you do anything you can to get out of it (see: Jonah, Moses). Most prophets recognized in our society have been men, and the agony of shouldering a burden for the sake of others at enormous personal expense sometimes seems not unlike that of our pop-culture superheroes, like Spidey, Wolverine, or Superman. But a prophet is not a superman. He’s more like a noodge, a persecuted, driven noodge.

Our Jewish tradition’s most famous prophet (one shared also by Christianity and Islam) is the subject of an exhibition at the Musee d’art et du Judaisme in Paris. The show Moses: Paintings of a Prophet (Moïse: figures d’un prophète) opened on October 14 and runs until February 21. Featured in it are two men revered by liberal Jews in America: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose united efforts are represented by a 15-minute excerpt from a documentary film by Steve Brand titled Abraham Joshua Heschel & Moses. The full documentary, Praying With My Legs: the Spiritual Witness of Abraham Joshua Heschel (not yet released and seeking funding to complete), traces the life and philosophy of one of the 20th century’s great Jewish theologians. It details well the close relationship he shared with King and their involvement together in the civil rights and Vietnam War protest movements, which is the portion of the film on view at the museum in Paris.

King and Heschel initially bonded over the prophets. King was drawn to Heschel’s intimate knowledge of the topic (Heschel’s masterwork, in a body of masterworks, was his book The Prophets), and Heschel in turn admired King’s devotion to the Exodus story of Moses and the Israelites, adapted to the narrative of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and ’60s. King, like his model Moses, famously did not reach the promised land of equal rights for Black Americans, dying without seeing the vision he’d been journeying toward.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not only revolutionizing India by “catapulting” it into the future, he has already revolutionized the India-Israel relationship, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in India on Monday.

Speaking after a two-hour meeting, Netanyahu said he was “deeply moved” by the honor “shown the people of Israel and the State of Israel” in the welcome ceremony held at the presidential place.

"You are a revolutionary leader in the best sense of the word 'revolution,'” Netanyahu said, noting that Modi's visit over the summer was the first visit by an Indian leader to Israel “in 3,000 years of our own sovereign existence and our history.”

Noting that Israel and India have had diplomatic relations for 25 years, Netanyahu said that “something different is happening now because of your leadership and because of our partnership.”

Netanyahu said he spoke with Modi about cooperation in all fields, including defense, “so that our people are always safe and always secure. Indians and Israelis know too well the pain of terrorist attacks,” he said. We remember the horrific savagery in Mumbai. We grit our teeth, we fight back, we never give in.”

Modi greeted Netanyahu warmly, hugging him and greeting him in Hebrew, “Dear friend, welcome to India."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday he was “disappointed” by India’s refusal to back recognition of Jerusalem as his country’s capital but would not let it spoil his landmark visit to the Asian giant.

Netanyahu also vowed that Israel would “catch up” with the killers of a Jewish couple murdered in 2008 attacks in Mumbai whose son is accompanying him on a six-day trip to India.

The Israeli leader arrived Sunday at the head of the biggest business delegation he has taken on a foreign visit.

Netanyahu told the India Today media group, in an interview released Monday, that he has a “special relationship” with his counterpart Narendra Modi.

But the run-up was clouded by India joining more than 100 countries at the United Nations in voting last month to condemn Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Israel and India were poised to sign a memorandum of understanding on Monday to promote a free trade agreement between the two countries.

Manufacturers Association of Israel President Shraga Brosh, who is heading a delegation of over 100 business representatives accompanying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his visit to India this week, will sign the agreement on Israel's behalf. Confederation of Indian Industry President Shobana Kamineni will sign it on India's behalf.

A free trade agreement would allow for the bilateral removal of tariffs and regulatory barriers and for coordination on investments and taxation, all steps that would make it easier for Israeli exporters to do business with India.

The Indian economy is one of the world's largest and is characterized by very high growth rates.

The memorandum of understanding also includes the possibility for collaboration and the exchange of information.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make an emotional visit this week to a Jewish center targeted in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in a trip that India’s tiny and shrinking Jewish community hopes will boost its profile.

Netanyahu will talk trade in New Delhi and marvel at the Taj Mahal before rounding off his visit in Mumbai, where the majority of India’s estimated 4,500 Jews live.

There he will accompany 11-year-old Moshe Holtzberg as the boy returns for the first time to the house where his parents were killed in the 2008 terror attacks that left 166 people dead.

At Mumbai’s Magen David synagogue, worshipers were excited about the first visit to India by an Israeli leader in almost 15 years.

“It’s very good news for us. We’re very lucky to get to see the prime minister over here,” Joel Gershon Awaskar told AFP after concluding his morning prayers.

In the face of a series of crucial decisions for President Trump concerning certification of the Iran nuclear deal and continuing waivers from sanctions, the European Union is lobbying hard in the mullahs’ defense. These efforts culminated in a meeting Thursday between representatives of the EU/E3 including France, Germany, and the U.K., and Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, on the eve of the president’s first review deadline under the so-called Corker-Cardin legislation.

EU High Representative/Vice President Frederica Mogherini released a written statement following the meeting that exposes the hollowness of the accord. “The deal is working,” Mogherini asserts. “It is delivering on its main goal, which means keeping the Iranian nuclear programme in check and under close surveillance.” Leave aside for a moment Obama administration predictions that the deal would have a “moderating influence” on Tehran, putting it on the path to entering the “community of nations,” for which no evidence exists; Mogherini’s contention that the deal has kept Iran’s nuclear program “in check and under close surveillance” is demonstrably unproven, and if Iran has its druthers, unprovable. While Mogherini cites the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) “nine reports that Iran is fully complying with the commitments made under the agreement,” she omits what the IAEA cannot or will not verify regarding compliance. As I noted prior to President Trump’s October 2017 decertification decision, the IAEA has admitted that it can’t inspect the military sites where Iran’s illicit nuclear activities would likely be carried out, and Iran has said that it won’t provide access to such sites.

Mogherini continues: “The European Union remains committed to support the full and effective implementation of the agreement, including to make sure that the lifting of nuclear related sanctions has a positive impact on trade and economic relations with Iran, including benefits for the Iranian people.” Perhaps Mogherini’s apparent dismissal of the recent protests in Iran represents a Freudian slip. According to Western media sources, the unrest centers on the economic grievances of the Iranian people (whom Mogherini claims to be championing) against a regime that has enriched itself while lavishing funds on its proxy forces abroad—with the fruits of the very sanctions relief that she and her EU counterparts are fighting so doggedly to maintain.

Preface

Iranian-supplied weapons have led to casualties across the Western alliance for Britain, Israel, and the United States. Tehran has used its weapons deliveries to fuel a number of regional insurgencies, like the Houthi revolt in Yemen.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Hizbullah proxy serve as expeditionary forces for Iran throughout the Middle East, with the latter coordinating terror attacks and fundraising activities in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

State-of-the-art roadside bombs — Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs) — from Iran in particular were undoubtedly the most lethal Iranian weapon used against British and American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus the analysis that follows by two former British officers is of extreme importance to anyone concerned with halting the destabilization of the Middle East and the future security of the region. – Amb. Dore Gold

Executive Summary

• Iranian military action, often working through proxies using terrorist tactics, has led to the deaths of well over a thousand American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade and a half.
  
• Throughout the course of the Iraq campaign, a variety of weapons flowed into the country through direct purchases by the government of Iran. These included Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFPs), a shaped charge designed to penetrate armor. These weapons – often camouflaged as rocks – were identical to those employed by Hizbullah against Israeli forces. In 2006, the British Telegraph revealed that three Iranian factories were “mass producing” the roadside EFP bombs used to kill soldiers in Iraq.
  
• In 2007, American troops discovered over 100 Austrian-made Steyr HS50 .50 caliber sniper rifles in Iraq. These high-powered rifles, which fire Iranian bullets, can pierce all in-service body armor from up to a mile and penetrate U.S. armored Humvee troop carriers. The rifles were part of a larger shipment legally purchased from the Austrian manufacturer under the justification that they would be used by Iranian police to combat drug smugglers.
  
• Iran paid Taliban fighters $1,000 for each U.S. soldier they killed in Afghanistan. The Sunday Times reported that a Taliban operative received $18,000 from an Iranian firm in Kabul as reward for an attack in 2010 that killed several Afghan government troops and destroyed an American armored vehicle.
  
• Iranian President Rouhani’s so-called “moderation” was displayed when he appointed Brig.-Gen. Hossein Dehghan to be minister of defense. Dehghan played a key role in the October 1983 suicide bomb attacks in Beirut in which 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French paratroopers were killed. Meanwhile, inside Iran, Rouhani has presided over a rise in repression, including executions, torture of political prisoners, and persecution of minorities.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday said that fixing the Iranian nuclear deal signed with the world powers in 2015 would increase the chances of it remaining in place, amid threats by US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the accord.

Speaking by phone with French President Emmanuel Macron, the Israeli prime minister said that “Trump’s remarks should be taken seriously, and whoever wants to keep the nuclear deal would be wise to fix it,” a statement from Netanyahu’s office read.

The call came a day after Trump demanded that European partners work with Washington to “fix the deal’s disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw.”

Netanyahu also told Macron the free world should “strongly condemn the five crimes of the Iranian regime,” listing “efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, developing ballistic missiles against UN Security Council resolutions, supporting terror, regional aggression,” and “the cruel repression of Iranian citizens.”

In the call with Netanyahu, Macron called for the “necessary respect” of the nuclear deal. A statement from the Elysee said Macron “remembers the importance of preserving the Iran nuclear deal and the necessary respect by all parties of their engagements regarding the accord.”

On Thursday, Macron told Trump that it was important for all signatories to respect the Iran nuclear agreement.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday stressed that Moscow would not back changes to the nuclear deal with Iran, after US President Donald Trump last week said Washington would withdraw from the accord this year unless its terms were changed.

“We will not support what the United States is trying to do, changing the wording of the agreement, incorporating things that will be absolutely unacceptable for Iran,” Lavrov said at a news conference, according to a translation by Reuters.

Lavrov repeatedly attacked the US at the press conference, accusing Washington of issuing ultimatums and failing to recognize “the reality of the emerging multipolar world.”

Lavrov said the past year had not been easy from a foreign policy perspective as he took questions on Syria, Ukraine, the Korean peninsula and other global issues, in a diplomatic roundup of 2017.

Nuseir Yassin, better known online as Nas Daily, was born in Israel to a Muslim father and a Muslim mother. But he recently decided to do a DNA test to discover his genetic origins and found that he actually has 1% European Jewish ancestry!

“When I got my results, I was surprised,” he said in a video recorded in Shoham and posted Monday. “Specifically, 1% of my DNA comes from a European Jewish descent... a lot of people expect a Palestinian or Muslim to dislike Jews. But it’s practically impossible because I would be hating part of myself. And I love myself!”

Underneath the video, Yassin posted: “I know, I’m NOT Jewish. I was born 110% Muslim... but that 1%... that 1%... that says a lot!” His full results included 59% Middle Eastern DNA, 17% from the Caucasus and a mix from a variety of other places.

The 26-year-old native of Arrabe in the Lower Galilee has gained a serious following online after he quit his job in New York and began to travel the world, posting a one-minute video to Facebook each day – hence, the “daily” part of Nas Daily. He has close to four million followers online. And while he posts content from around the world, he spends plenty of time closer to home as well. Over the past few weeks, Yassin has shared many videos from around Israel and the West Bank, including a spotlight on the tax-free city of Eilat; the problems facing the shrinking Dead Sea; and the brand-new Palestinian city of Rawabi.

In October, he posted a video complaining how the boycott movement against Israel has prevented him, a Palestinian-Israeli, from flying from New York to India with Kuwait Airlines.

“Because I’m an Israeli, an entire airline is not allowed to take me on their plane, even if I’m not going to Kuwait,” he said in the video, saying such behavior was discriminatory and “should be illegal.”

Zionism cannot be equated with Nazism, Austria’s new foreign minister said, rejecting accusations that she had made such a comparison in the past.

In an in-depth interview with The Times of Israel, Karin Kneissl defended the far-right Freedom Party, saying neither its leader Heinz-Christian Strache nor its other members have anti-Semitic inclinations.

Kneissl, who was appointed by the Freedom Party but is not formally a member, also reaffirmed her government’s commitment to Israel’s security, and even appeared to support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

At the same time, Kneissl, who spent many years in the Middle East and speaks fluent Hebrew and Arabic, said the new government of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz rejects the US administration’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. She also criticized Israeli settlement construction and called for “affirmative steps” to resume peace negotiations that must lead to the implementation of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“To insinuate any comparison between Nazism and Zionism is utter nonsense. I have never made any such comparison,” Kneissl told The Times of Israel.

“What I pointed out is the historical fact that Theodor Herzl was certainly inspired by the nationalist aspirations that swept through many European countries during the 19th century. You always have to see things in the historical context.”

When she was appointed in December, the 52-year-old Vienna native made headlines in Israel for having described early Zionism in one of her books as a “blood-and-soil ideology based on German nationalism.”

Lebanon’s intelligence agency has banned Steven Spielberg’s latest film, political thriller “The Post,” and Australian drama “Jungle” to comply with a boycott of Israel, an official told AFP Monday.

“Screening of the film ‘The Post’ has been banned,” said the official from Lebanon’s General Security authority, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In addition to controlling borders, Lebanon’s General Security is responsible for censorship of films, plays, and books.

Spielberg “is blacklisted by the Arab League’s boycott office, which Lebanon complies with,” the official explained.

The Hollywood giant was blacklisted by the Cairo-based pan-Arab body after he donated $1 million to Israel during the 2006 war between the Jewish state and Lebanon.

The two countries are still officially at war.

According to a Sunday report by The Hollywood Reporter, Lebanon’s censorship board blocked “The Post” days before it was due to open on January 18 in Beirut because the Jewish director filmed some scenes of his magnum opus “Schindler’s List” in Jerusalem.

In time for Christmas, National Geographic published an interview with novelist Nicholas Blincoe which contains numerous factual errors about the holy city and surrounding area ("The Little Town of Bethlehem Has a Surprising History," Dec. 23). A note at the bottom of the piece indicates that the interview "was edited for length and clarity." Apparently, though, no effort was made to edit for accuracy. Over the last several weeks, CAMERA's Israel office prompted correction of some of the errors, resulting in an appended clarification, but other falsehoods remain, and the ongoing editing introduced new inaccuracies.

Blincoe, author of "Bethlehem: Biography of a Town," fancies himself an Bethlehem expert — "facts about Bethlehem a speciality" he boasts on Twitter, and in Christianity Today he presumptuously called himself Bethlehem's "biographer"— but in reality facts about Bethlehem are the author's undoing.

First Israeli Settlement 'In Bethlehem'

Blincoe's hold on reality is just as tenuous when he initially claimed that the "first Israeli settlement in Bethlehem was built in 1967." First, there are no Israeli settlements "in Bethlehem." Second, the first Israeli settlement built in the West Bank after the 1967 Six Day War started with a hotel in Hebron, not in Bethlehem. Third, the first Israeli settlement built near (but not in) Bethlehem was Kfar Etzion, re-built in 1970, and not in 1967. Kfar Etzion was, of course, one of the Jewish communities which existed in the area prior to 1948, at which point Palestinian Arabs expelled all of its residents. As The New York Times reported on Jan. 15, 1948 (70 years ago, to the day): "The Jewish colony [sic] of Kfar Etzion, thirteen miles south of Jerusalem, was besieged tonight by Arabs after twenty-four hours of raids on traffic along the main highway to Jerusalem."

Blincoe initially claimed in his National Geographic interview that 22 settlements surround Bethlehem. In Christianity Today, on the other hand, he took the liberty to claim there are 41 settlements around Bethlehem. When CAMERA pointed out this discrepancy to National Geographic editors, as an indication of Blincoe's fast and free relationship with facts, they simply revised the passage to state that "Now there are 42 settlements surrounding the town."

No Tourists For 10 Years

Tourism in Bethlehem was another point that Blincoe, Bethlehem's self-declared biographer, completely blundered, and which editors did correct in response to communication from CAMERA. Blincoe had falsely claimed that after the Israeli incursion in 2002, "For ten years there were no tourists!"

Yes, the NYT explains that Abbas "reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence and stopping terrorism, seemed to hold out hope of a return to negotiations"https://t.co/wF9qD6Hm8Uhttps://t.co/N7n1F5TfY7

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) January 15, 2018

Today in the Toronto Star’s print and online versions, columnist Tony Burman wrote the following egregious and unsubstantiated statement:
“For its part, Canada has made itself irrelevant in this process. In September 2012, at the urging of Israel, the government of Stephen Harper surprised everyone and broke off relations with Iran.“

While Mr. Burman is entitled to his own opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts. There’s no evidence to support his claim that the Harper government broke off relations with Iran at Israel’s urging. In fact, at the time, then Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird proclaimed that Canada’s decision to cut diplomatic ties with Iran, brand it a state-sponsor of terror, and to close its embassy in Tehran was a “made-in-Ottawa decision” saying that Canada acted alone in this regard. Baird listed many reasons to explain what prompted Canada’s move against Iran: the safety of Canadian diplomats, Iran’s military assistance to Syria, its hateful antisemitic rhetoric, support for terror, deplorable human rights record, and its destructive pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In an interview with Burman’s former employer, the CBC on September 9, 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “I wasn’t in consultation with Prime Minister Harper before he chose to do this courageous act in the diplomatic field…” Netanyahu’s official statement described Canada as having made its own determinations, while his spokesperson described Canada’s actions as being “their own, independent decision.”

This article in Haaretz describing the little-known exploits of a small band of Jewish resistance fighters, who paved the way for the Allied landing in Algiers in 1942 (Operation Torch), is a welcome effort to restore a much-neglected episode to the historical record. These fighters have been compared to the resisters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike them, however, the Algerian resistance had a strategic impact on the course of the war. (With thanks: Lily)

In 1940, following the German occupation during World War II, Algeria became a protectorate of the Vichy government that collaborated with the Nazis. The Vichy regime abolished the Crémieux Decree, depriving Algeria’s Jews of citizenship and launching a harsh anti-Jewish campaign. Soon all Jewish students were expelled from the universities and public schools.

In 1941, the Jews were about 2 percent of the population but over 37 percent of medical students, 24 percent of law students, 16 percent of science students and 10 percent of arts students. At that time masses of Jews were dismissed from their positions as doctors, jurists, teachers and officials. They were left to the rage of those Algerians and French settlers who sought revenge after decades of envy and hostility.

Young Jews led by José Aboulker decided to react. Aboulker was from a wealthy educated family; his father, Dr. Henri Aboulker, was a successful physician and surgeon and taught at the University of Algiers. His mother, Berthe Bénichou-Aboulker, was a celebrated poet and playwright, one of the first women in Algeria to publish her own literary work.

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the World Jewish Congress has launched a global campaign encouraging millions of people to use social media to raise awareness about the Holocaust.

The campaign calls on people in every country to hold up a sign with the words "We Remember," and post it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #WeRemember.

The campaign took off last Monday and has already spread to 45 countries.

"Anti-Semitism is more prevalent today than it has been at any time since World War II, and bigotry and discrimination still rear their ugly heads all around the world. This is why we all must declare, together, that we remember," said WJC CEO Robert Singer.

Holocaust survivors, MKs, government ministers, religious leaders from around the world, as well as soccer and basketball stars, have joined the project and been photographed holding up "We Remember" signs.

Doctors in central Israel performed a successful operation on Sunday on a Syrian baby who had been flown to Israel from Cyprus three weeks ago for urgent medical treatment.

The baby is recovering and is said to be in stable condition.

The baby was only three days old when he arrived in Israel to undergo a procedure to correct a serious congenital heart defect. The treatment was made available after the Cypriot Health Ministry reached out to Israeli Ambassador to Cyprus Sammy Revel and requested that he help bring the baby to Israel.

The Foreign Ministry, along with defense and security officials and the Border Crossings Authority at Ben-Gurion International Airport, informed Interior Minister Arye Deri and secured the necessary permits to allow the baby and his father – a Syrian refugee living in Cyprus – into the country.

British band Jamiroquai has announced it will perform in Israel for the first time. The band is scheduled to perform on May 2 in Rishon Lezion's Live Park, coinciding with the Lag B'Omer holiday.

Led by Jay Kay, the band released its eighth studio album, "Automaton," a year ago, 25 years after releasing its first single, "When You Gonna Learn."

The band's international breakthrough came in 1996 with "Virtual Insanity," a single from its third album, "Traveling Without Moving."

The album also featured the hits "Alright" and "Cosmic Girl." Jamiroquai received much attention and critical acclaim around the world as a leading voice in the acid jazz and funk scenes of the 1990s.

The band won a Grammy Award in 1998 for "Virtual Insanity" and two MTV Music Awards for the song's music video. "Traveling Without Moving" currently holds the Guinness world record for most successful funk album of all time, with over 35 million copies sold.

Lebanese-Australian Maria El-Hasrouny writes in a local Australian newspaper about how she came to Australia over 15 years ago.

It is an interesting story with a good ending, but it is some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it parts worth pointing out.

Fifteen and half years ago we were given an opportunity; we were granted a permanent visa to Australia.

We were among the lucky families who had a good reputable family member who signed off on our papers for our migrations.

We came from Lebanon.

My father was a soldier in the army in a territory which belonged to the Lebanese government but which was occupied by the Israeli army.

It was a conflict zone and we had to flee.

We had three choices: go back to Lebanon from which we’d fled, stay in Israel where we were recognised as refugees (being put up in provided hotels) or start the process to migrate to Australia where my uncle and his family were living.

Back in Lebanon we faced being beheaded or being jailed.

In 2002 after two long years we were accepted by Australia and in July that year we stepped foot into this wonderful country.

Besides being a reminder of the barbarity of our neighbors, this also shows how Israel took in Lebanese refugees associated with the pro-Israel South Lebanon Army, in a display of gratitude (even though the SLA believed Israel betrayed them by pulling out of Lebanon in 2000).

Advanced in years, Rabbi Dr. Yehuda Bohrer, of blessed memory, passed away on Shabbat. He and his wife Helen were among the original founders of the town Bet El, living in an army camp under minimal conditions. Rabbi Bohrer was a renowned tour guide and speaker, and worked on behalf of Yeshivat Bet El since its founding 40 years ago.
Rabbi Bohrer dedicated his life to the success and building of Bet El Institutions, dedicating his talents and wisdom to furthering the blossoming of Bet El up to and including the last weeks of his life.

Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz's ambitious plan to connect extend the railroad tracks from Beit She'an East to the Sheikh Hussein crossing at the Jordanian border was allocated NIS 15 million in the 2019 budget.

The funds will be invested in planning the extension of the tracks to the border crossing.

Trains are set to carry passengers and cargo between the Israeli Mediterranean coast and Jordan, or more optimistically—if there is a peace agreement between the countries—all the way to Iraq and Saudi Arabia as well.

In the interview [with Arabic newspaper Elaph], Katz explained that the railway will cut freight expenses from Europe to the Gulf countries and indicated that 25% of Turkey’s exports to the Gulf travel through Haifa’s port and pass through Jordan.

Army sappers detonated a cellphone-operated explosive device that was apparently planted by Palestinians at the entrance to the Joseph’s Tomb holy site in the city of Nablus early Tuesday morning, ahead of a visit by approximately 1,000 Jewish worshipers, the army said.

There were no injuries or significant damage caused by the controlled blast, and the pilgrimage to the shrine continued as planned, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson said.

According to the military, as the group was leaving the area, local residents began to throw rocks at the troops and the buses, causing no injuries, but some light damage to the vehicles.

Pilgrimages by Israeli or foreign civilians to the Joseph’s Tomb holy site are frequent catalysts for violence. In the past, Nablus residents have attacked the groups visiting the site with rocks, Molotov cocktails and rifle fire.

As a result, those interested in visiting the site require a military escort.

The left-wing B’Tselem rights group has condemned the routine practice, saying that “Israel has preferred the interest of Jewish worshipers over the rights of the Palestinian residents, their security, their safety and their daily routine.”

His bizarre description of Israel as colonial creation of European powers, his canard that Israel has no organic connection to Jewish history, is completely inconsistent with any plausible logic of accepting a two-state deal. His accusation of Israel importing drugs to poison Palestinian youth is shameful.

And his ardent defense of the payments made to Palestinian terrorists in prison tells Israelis, Palestinians, and the U.S. Congress that he will not educate Palestinians to give up violence directed at civilians in their struggle for independence.

Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say a more strategic version of Trump, capitalizing on (rather than wasting) the goodwill built up by envoys, had already - either before or together with his Jerusalem announcement -submitted a perfect plan for the "ultimate deal"/two-state solution, in which all legitimate Palestinian aspirations could be achieved. If Abbas believes the nonsense in his speech delegitimizing Israel’s existence, there is no way he could accept it.

A similar thought experiment applies: Even if Abbas, or some other Palestinian leader, met every Israeli condition - recognition as a Jewish state, renouncing the right of return of refugees, extensive arrangements to ensure Israel’s security - there is no chance that the current coalition would meet him halfway.

Not what I’m implying. I’m very clear on the responsibility Abbas bears. I also address the fact that the vast majority of the ministers in the current govt are very clear (& proud) that they do not seek and would not support 2 states. I listen to them and take them at their word.

But do you think that Bibi would hold new elections if something like that happened? In other words, do you think they have veto power? Because if not, still no analogy.

He very well might. Whether he would succeed or not, I have no idea. But your question makes my point: with *this* government, you could not get agreement for two states.

Sure, and thanks.

Last point: Here’s the weird thing. I listen to the Likud and Bayit Yehudi ministers who say they will never support two states. I believe them. I think they are completely sincere. You seem to think they don’t really mean it, or their minds can be changed.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) January 16, 2018

Israeli security forces removed a bomb on Monday from Joseph's Tomb in Nablus in the West Bank, according to the IDF Spokesperson's Unit.

The bomb, found in a cell phone during a security scan to secure the tomb for about 1,000 worshipers, was removed from the tomb and detonated by security forces. Protestors threw stones at security forces upon their entry to and departure from the site, damaging their bus but resulting in no casualties.

Nablus, built on the site of the ancient Biblical city of Shehem, is located in Area A of the West Bank, which is exclusively administered by the Palestinian Authority.

The Jewish holy site has been targeted by Palestinians in the past. In October of 2015, hundreds of rioters set the tomb ablaze before being dispersed by Palestinian Authority police. The religious site suffered severe damage, but again, no one was wounded.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the arson, stressing "his rejection of these actions and all actions that violate law and order, and which distort our culture, our morals and our religion.”

On January 14, 2018, the Palestinian Authority (PA) Prisoners Affairs Authority, in conjunction with the governor of the Ramallah district and the Palestinian Prisoners Club, held an event in Ramallah to mark the 36th year of imprisonment of two Israeli-Arab terrorists – Kareem Younis, aka "The Eldest of Prisoners," and his cousin Maher Younis – serving life sentences in Israel for the 1980 kidnapping and murder of Israeli soldier Avraham Bromberg. During the event, senior Fatah officials heaped praise on the two, describing them as "national examples of steadfastness" and "one of the symbols of the Palestinian struggle."

Fatah deputy chairman and Central Committee member Mahmoud Al-Aloul, who spoke at the event as the representative of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said: "The two prisoners are a national example of steadfastness for the Palestinian people against the Israeli occupation. They are a symbol from among the symbols of the Palestinian struggle, along with thousands of prisoners who have paid and are still paying a high price for the liberation of their people."

The head of the Palestinian Prisoners Affairs Authority, Issa Qaraqe, also spoke, saying: "The Israel jailor cannot break the willpower of the prisoners Kareem and Maher Younis, no matter how long their incarceration continues. Their struggle against the prisons of the occupation is a source of pride to all Palestinians."

Ramallah District Governor Dr. Laila Ghannam said: "The prisoners gave their lives for Palestine, and so it is our obligation to stand by them and support their families until they are released from prison."

Palestinian Prisoners Club head Qadura Fares said: "This event is in recognition of their sacrifice. They were and still remain a national school [sic] for the ongoing struggle against the occupation and its arrogance."

This outrageous speech was almost certainly prompted by the fact that Abbas and co realise that with Trump the game is now up. The US will no longer promote the interests of these Palestinian Arabs who have been given a free pass for their murderous lies all these years.

But Britain and the EU did not go along with Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. They continue to misrepresent international law and blame Israel falsely for preventing a peaceful solution to the Middle East impasse while persistently excusing, justifying and thus conniving at Palestinian Arab rejectionism.

In short, Britain and the EU continue to support, validate and this connive at an agenda aimed at the extermination of Israel promoted by hallucinatory lies and libels about the Jewish people along with gross Holocaust denial.

Abbas’s speech should be sent to every member of the British parliament, and the Prime Minister, Theresa May, should be asked how Britain can continue to give any money at all to such open antisemites and Holocaust deniers. She should be asked how the British government can continue to support giving such people a state of their own. She should be asked why the British government has ignored this horrifying reality, and the constant mortal danger it poses for the Israelis, for so long.

But then, many British people will be unaware of the appalling nature of Abbas’s speech since the BBC chose to bowdlerise it, as BBC Watch observes here.

Abbas clearly felt he had nothing to lose by making this speech. America has made clear it will no longer give the time of day to such an unconscionable agenda. Only Britain and the EU continue to keep it alive, to their undying shame.

German authorities said Tuesday they were conducting searches countrywide in connection with 10 suspected Iranian spies, with one report saying that the suspects were members of an elite military force that had been watching Israeli and Jewish targets.

The weekly German-language magazine FOCUS reported that arrest warrants for the suspects listed them as being members of the al-Quds force, which is part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

The alleged spies had been monitoring Israeli and Jewish targets, the report said.

Israel’s Ambassador to Germany, Jeremy Issacharoff, said Israel had “bolstered security” at the embassy and that Israelis were “warned” about the incident.

Authorities searched premises linked to the suspected Iranian spies following an extensive investigation by the country’s domestic intelligence agency, prosecutors said.

A CIA report released in 2010, yet not reported on until now, suggests there was a budding relationship between Iran and Yasser Arafat's Fatah party in the Islamic Republic's early days, referring to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as "one of Iran's closest allies" in 1980 and Ayatollah Khomeni as one of Arafat's earliest backers. Fearing a significant Palestinian role in Iran's internal affairs, however, the regime worked to limit the PLO's presence in the country.

The report confirms a February 19, 1979 story in The Washington Post that claimed Arafat was the first foreign leader to visit Tehran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Citing Iranian media reports, the story reported that Iran broke diplomatic relations with Israel just hours after Arafat met with Iran's new cabinet.

"An obviously overjoyed Yasser Arafat wound up two days of meetings with leaders of Iran's revolution here today and said the overthrow of the [pro-West] shah by a militantly Moslem movement offered a 'new dawn and a new era' to the Middle East struggle," the Post wrote.

According to the CIA report, the PLO's military presence in post-revolution Iran was reflective of the organization's overall role in the country: It began strong and eventually tapered off as Arafat began to embrace Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who had hostile relations with Iran.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has a lot working against him: He’s 82 years old; is serving the 10th year of a four-year term; and struggles under severe economic distress and an approval rating that is barely visible. On Sunday evening, President Abbas delivered a two-hour invective in which he attacked Israeli leaders, President Trump and other American officials, while offering a revisionist history that left jaws dropping.

With each day, the discussion of who will succeed Abbas becomes increasingly urgent. The Media Line spoke with one of those whose name is frequently mentioned for that position. Ahmed Majdalani is a leading Palestinian politician, former minister and professor of political economics. This exclusive interview was conducted by Felice Friedson for The Media Line prior to the Abbas speech:

TML: With the drive-by killing of a Jewish Israeli last week, the debate over the American Taylor Force act has been re-ignited. [A bill that has passed the House and is awaiting action in the Senate that bans US aid if the PA pays stipends to prisoners and those who committed violent acts. - Ed.] If the United States funding is cut-off because the PA pays stipends to those caught or killed while performing violent acts, can the PA absorb the loss?

Majdalani: First, let's go back to the roots of the problem. The base is the occupation, what is most important, and before we ask who killed the settler, let's ask what is the settler doing in the occupied West Bank? Second, the settler was killed in Area “C” [Portion of the West Bank designated by the 1993 Oslo Accords for both Israeli administrative and security control. – Ed.] If what is required from the PA is to protect settlers, well, that is not part of its duties. Taylor also was killed in Israel, not in the West Bank. His death was a result of the Israeli violence in the area. The PA can't hire a security-person for each Palestinian to control their way of thinking and actions. Therefore, the American procedure is a punishment and that is unacceptable, it’s a form of political black-mailing. In addition, we pay expenses for the families of martyrs. In the past ten years, Israel initiated three attacks against Palestinians in the Gaza strip, thousands were killed, and we [PA] take the social responsibility for the families of these martyrs. All of these who were killed in Gaza are terrorists? All of these who are killed by the IDF are terrorists? I believe the concept is reversed. I will speak very clearly: the principle of political blackmailing is unacceptable, even if the US stops all aid. By the way, the American aid comes through the USAID agency, and half of the aid goes back to the US, to their [Americans] directors, experts from abroad and consultant agencies. They spend the money on themselves.

Mahmoud Abbas’ speech to the meeting of the PLO Central Council in Ramallah proclaimed the launching of a political campaign, in tandem with a violent struggle, to achieve Palestinian independence and sovereignty in the 1967 territories without giving up what the Palestinians call the “right of return.”

On January 14, 2018, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), leader of the PLO, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and “president of the state of Palestine,” gave an important political speech to a meeting of the PLO Central Council. In it, he proclaimed in effect the launching of an independent Palestinian entity.

The Palestinian strategy that Abbas outlined includes the following elements:

A Change in the Rules of the Game
Abbas rejected exclusive American sponsorship of the diplomatic process because of “the crime it committed against the city of Al-Quds [Jerusalem]” in recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He also rejected what he called American “dictates” in the effort to reach a “deal” to resolve the conflict. The sole path to negotiations, Abbas asserted, is via an international conference or the framework of a group of states, as in the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program involving the P5+1 group of countries.

Abbas also called upon the PLO Central Council to “reexamine the signed agreements between the PLO and the government of Israel” and see whether they comport with the resolutions of international institutions on the status of the state of Palestine and the rights of the Palestinian people. This behest implies a threat to withdraw from the agreements with Israel and a demand to update them, in light of resolutions of the United Nations and its institutions.

Cognizant that the Palestinians are not going anywhere, and desperate for an accord that might liberate us from the choice of living by the sword or perishing, Israelis have shown a willingness — most dramatically represented by Olmert’s offer — for far-reaching territorial compromise. They have ousted prime ministers — notably Benjamin Netanyahu in 1999 — who they thought were missing opportunities for peace.

The Palestinians, by contrast, have refused to acknowledge Jewish legitimacy, and convinced themselves that Israel is a transient, shallow presence that can ultimately be ousted. This, despite the spectacular evidence of our strong, resilient, thriving nation.

A century ago, it was axiomatic in Islam that there were Jewish temples atop the Temple Mount; that’s why the Muslims subsequently placed mosques there. What Abbas’s speech so dismally underlined is that the false narrative of Jewish history that has taken hold in more recent decades is not only cynically disseminated by Palestinian leaders to their people, but also thoroughly accepted by the leaders themselves.

The UN can vote itself blue in the face against Israel. Foolish nations can unilaterally recognize Palestinian statehood — to the detriment of the Palestinians, since such “support” merely deepens their obduracy. But the only route to Palestinian independence runs via a negotiated settlement with Israel.

The Olmert offer of a decade ago showed how far Israel was prepared to go to partner the Palestinians to statehood. The despicable, tragic, self-defeating Abbas speech of Sunday night showed that so long as the Palestinians blind themselves to the fact of Israel’s legitimacy, no Israeli offer is going to be good enough.

He’s the most moderate leader the Palestinians could choose, and that’s their tragedy.

On Sunday, the famous moderate said he wouldn’t repeat 1948 and 1967, because those mistakes led to the Palestinian tragedy, the Nakba. But he is repeating the exact same mistakes. More hallucinations. More illusions. More rejectionism.

In Israel, there is dispute over whether the source of the problem is 1948 or 1967. Abbas has made it clear that the problem is 1917. In other words, the Balfour Declaration, which supported the Jews’ right to a national home.

There is an argument over the existence of a line separating between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Abbas made it clear that there is no such line. Both ideologies are based on lies.

It’s slightly embarrassing to refute the nonsense uttered by the moderate leader from the Muqata'a, but there appears to be no escape, because every lie that is repeated 1,000 times in the first act reaches textbooks and campuses in the third act. The legitimization based on the claim that it’s a “Palestinian narrative.”

There were many lies in Sunday’s speech, but at least three of them should be refuted.

First of all, according to Abbas, the Balfour Declaration is a colonialist project. Quite the opposite. The Balfour Declaration was issued as part of a growing recognition of the right to self-determination, which was the result of an anti-imperialist battle that led to the empires’ dissolution and to the establishment of nation states. The Jews, who lived under many empires, received the right to self-determination along with other people.

So Zionism is an anti-imperialist liberation movement. Zionist didn’t aim to banish anyone, and the Nakba itself is the result of Arab rejectionism. And anyway, tens of millions of people experienced uprooting and expulsion and population exchanges as part of the establishment of nation states, including Arabs and Jews.

In the best-selling book “Catch 67,” Michah Goodman frames the two-state solution as a trade of 1967 (Israeli relinquishes control of the Judah and Samaria) in exchange for 1948 (Palestine relinquishes the right of return).

Goodman argues that the Palestinians are “trapped” because the trauma of 1948 is greater in the Palestinian psyche than the military loss in 1967, and, moreover, Islamic law prevents them from agreeing to permanent recognition of a foreign power in once-Islamic ruled territory.

Perhaps that is why Abbas never even responded to Olmert’s detailed peace maps in 2008.

By reasserting that Jews are occupiers in the region, not just in the territory conquered in 1967 (False), Abbas sows the belief that the colonialists will go back to where they came from (Where exactly? Morocco and Tunisia?), and Palestinians will one day return to Jaffa and Haifa. Moreover, he proves Goodman’s thesis that Abbas can never trade 1967 for 1948.

It is, therefore, no wonder that both the Israeli right and left are so concerned with Abbas’s recent comments.

Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon demanded on Monday that Secretary General António Guterres condemn an inflammatory speech delivered by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas the previous day.

In a letter sent to Guterres’s office, Danon claimed that the PA leader had disparaged the State of Israel with “hateful” and “racist” language as he questioned the country’s right to exist.

“Among the many vile fabrications in his address, Chairman Abbas repeated the lie that the reestablishment of the nation-state of the Jewish people in our historic homeland is "a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism," Danon wrote in the letter.

"Chairman Abbas also accused European powers of ‘moving Jews from Europe to the Middle East’ as part of a plan to further their economic interests. These statements sadly remind us of the racist words of the worst regimes of the previous century."

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was condemned by Israeli politicians across the political spectrum on Monday for his speech on Sunday in which he denied the Jewish connection to Israel, rejected any negotiations as long as Donald Trump is US president and called for destroying Trump’s “house.”

Bayit Yehudi chairman Naftali Bennett said the time had come for Israel to prepare for the post-Abbas era and decide what is good for the country, which he said was applying sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

“Abbas is drifting away from the world, along with the idea of a Palestinian state,” Bennett said. “His behavior indicates that he has lost power and his connection to reality.”

Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon said Abbas confirmed in his speech the suspicions that his goal was not territorial compromise but renouncing the right of the Jewish people to a state in the land of Israel.

Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi wrote on Twitter that Abbas’s speech was “laced with vile antisemitic conspiracy theories and was unbecoming of a leader.” Hanegbi said Abbas’s incitement against Israel and the US was extremely dangerous and should be condemned by anyone interested in peaceful coexistence.

Former minister Gideon Sa’ar said: “Abbas’s speech of attacks and delusions proves he has lost his marbles. His attempt to isolate Israel and seek achievements in the international arena with unilateral moves has been blocked in the Trump era in the White House.”

Deputy Minister Michael Oren (Kulanu) asked new European Union Ambassador to Israel Emanuele Giaufret to have the EU publicly condemn the antisemitic and anti-European overtones in Abbas’s speech.

The Palestinian Central Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s second highest decision-making body, decided to entrust the PLO Executive Committee with suspending recognition of Israel, according to a declaration issued at the conclusion of a Central Council meeting on Monday.

The PLO recognized Israel in 1993 before signing a number of agreements with Israel, which established the Palestinian Authority.

“[The Central Council] decided to assign the PLO Executive Committee with suspending recognition of Israel until Israel recognizes the State of Palestine along 1967 borders, annuls its annexation of east Jerusalem and halts settlement building,” the declaration said.

The declaration did not lay out a timetable for the PLO Executive Committee, an 18-member body made up of leaders of several Palestinian factions, to suspend the PLO’s recognition of Israel.

The Central Council also decided to renew a decision it made at a past meeting to end security cooperation with Israel “in all its forms.”

The last time the Central Council met in March 2015, it voted to suspend security coordination between the PA security forces and Israel.

Last December, Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as capital of Israel. Yet nobody seemed to notice that he did not hand over all of Jerusalem to Israel, insisting: "We are not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem." That was "up to the parties involved." So, go for it and start talking, he signaled to the Palestinian Authority.

Predictably, the Palestinians revived their classic game, which has failed them regularly in the past. Their message read: "We will not deal directly with Israel; we want the world to force the Zionists to hand us our state on a silver platter." Palestinian leaders are going for the international option once more.

This seasoned negotiator knows a state can only be had from Israel, and it must embody a painful, dream-destroying compromise thrashed out by the two antagonists. A harsh conclusion follows: If one party says no for 80 years, it isn't interested. It is all or nothing, and "all" implies not only Hebron, but also Haifa.

During the UN partition vote in 1947, the Arab world acted as one. Yet today, Israel is a key player in a realigned regional system. Israel has peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt that have held during its wars against the PLO and Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. Jerusalem enjoys a tacit alliance with Riyadh and the "Gulfies." Putin's Russia coordinates with the IDF in Syria. China and India will not trade high-tech Herzliya for the backwater of Ramallah.

Angling for hegemony, Iran is now the deadly enemy of the Sunni Arabs and Israel-Palestine has receded toward the wings. The conflict is a nuisance, and the key Arab players will not soon sacrifice their Israeli ties on the altar of Palestinian self-deception.

The Palestinians will have to do better than in Gaza. This author went to Gaza with Yassir Arafat in 1994 and assumed that the coastal strip would gestate into a Palestinian proto-state, blessed with democracy and the rule of law. Today, Gaza is a corrupt Hamas fiefdom, a threat to itself and the neighborhood - a failed state.

Would that the post-Abbas leadership might exchange self-deception for sobriety. Alas, the mismeasure of reality has been the hallmark of Palestinian policy for 80 years.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s angry speech on Sunday castigating the US and Israel drew on the work of an Egyptian academic who dedicated his career to denying the existence of an independent Jewish people with political rights.

In his speech, Abbas described the late Egyptian academic Dr. Abdel Wahab Elmessiri as “one of the most important people that spoke about the Zionist and Jewish movement.”

On Israel, Abbas said, Elmessiri “described this entity with these words: ‘The significance of Israel’s functional character is that colonialism created it in order to fill a specific role; it is a colonialist project that is not connected to Judaism, but made use of the Jews so they would serve as pawns, and they were, under the motto ‘the Promised Land’ and ‘the Beloved Land,’ and they brought them here.'”

Abbas’ comments drew furious condemnation from Israeli leaders. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin accused the Palestinian leader of saying “exactly the things that led him to be accused years ago of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial,” while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the speech was a reminder that the “root of the conflict between us and the Palestinians is their steadfast refusal to recognize the Jewish state in any borders whatsoever.” Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, declared that the “hateful words of the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, which seem to question the very right of a United Nations member-state to exist, are completely unacceptable and must be unequivocally condemned.”

The Coverage

Too many media reports whitewashed Abbas’ coverage. Perhaps editors didn’t attach enough importance to the speech to give their correspondents a longer word count, which might account for the short, sanitized reports by Reuters, BBC News, CNN and Sky News.

Other news services touched on Abbas’ rant, but didn’t delve into the significance, such as AFP, The Independent, Irish Times and the Financial Times.

While the New York Times gave a sense of the PA chairman’s verbosity, the paper unfortunately didn’t fact-check Abbas, giving a pass to the false quote.

Testing his audience’s attention, Mr. Abbas also gave a lengthy history lecture reaching back to the 17th century, saying that Oliver Cromwell had first proposed shipping European Jews to the Holy Land, before tracing the beginning of Zionism to what he called the 19th-century journalist and activist Theodor Herzl’s efforts to “wipe out Palestinians from Palestine.”

“This is a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness,” Mr. Abbas said. “The Jews were used as a tool under the concept of the promised land — call it whatever you want. Everything has been made up.”

Indeed, Abbas has made everything up.

Can you imagine the headlines if an Israeli head of state denied the existence of the Palestinian people? Or fabricated quotes?

While I didn’t see any news coverage of the speech in The Guardian, an Ian Black commentary fretted over how the speech would play into the hands of right-wing Israelis. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d say the Irish Independent took Associated Press reports one and two and scrubbed them.

You're the president of the Palestinian Authority, a darling of the western left and western media, but largely powerless in your own back yard. You're 82 years old, in the 12th year of a four-year term, and many people are no longer taking you very seriously because your great patron and promoter, Barack Obama, is no longer President of the United States.

You know it's over, everyone knows it's over. Why bother keeping up appearances? Not that you tried very hard in the past. Back then, you made sly references to your belief, for example, that Jewish history in Israel and Jerusalem are fabrications of Zionism. But now you feel liberated to say what you really believe.

So you call a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization. You have a list of things to get off your chest. You have 400 years of alternative history to expound. The media is there to report everything you say. You held it all in for a decade, and you had to, because Obama couldn't stop talking about how you're a great man of peace and how much he loathes the Israelis. You were being a friend by not pointing out that the Jews were poisoning the drinking water in Palestine and getting young Palestinians hooked on drugs.

But now you can get into all that. It's time to go YOLO, Palestine style. And still, the New York Times won't tell the world what you have to say.

Abbas, the Times reports, "stopped well short of embracing an alternative to a two-state solution.""Mr. Abbas said nothing about abandoning it," the reporter, David Halbfinger, adds editorially. Not only was Abbas promoting peace, "he also shied away from urging the kind of provocative acts," like ending security cooperation with Israel, that would "shake officials in Jerusalem and Washington." In fact, Abbas "reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence and stopping terrorism, [and] seemed to hold out hope of a return to negotiations." The Times did allow a discordant note into its report, quoting Abbas saying that Zionism "is a colonial enterprise that has nothing to do with Jewishness."

There is of course nothing new about Abbas’ denial of Jewish history and his attempts to portray Israel as a European colonialist implant: such propaganda has been spread by the Palestinian Authority for years.

Unfortunately, there is also nothing novel about a BBC report on a speech made by the Palestinian president in which the parts of his remarks that do not fit the corporation’s chosen narrative are erased from audience view: only last month the BBC News website did the exact same when reporting on an address delivered by Abbas in Turkey.

Just as BBC audiences are never told about the ‘moderate’ Palestinian president’s personal role in the PA’s incitement to violence and glorification of terrorism or his refusal to recognise the Jewish state, they likewise do not hear anything about his longstanding denial of Jewish history and distortion of the origins of modern Israel.

The speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, on Tuesday called for a boycott of Donald Trump’s administration as well as the closure of all Israeli embassies in Arab and Islamic States until the US president reverses his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“I call on all Islamic embassies to move locations from Washington and to boycott Trump’s administration until he revokes his position regarding Jerusalem,” said Berri, who was speaking at the Conference of Islamic Parliaments in Tehran, according to a report by the Lebanese daily An-Nahar.

In his December 6 announcement, Trump said his decision merely recognized the reality that Jerusalem already serves as Israel’s capital and wasn’t meant to prejudge the final borders of the city. He also called for no change in the status quo at the city’s holy sites. However, the US leader later said he had taken Jerusalem “off the table.”

Trump’s move was hailed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and by leaders across much of the Israeli political spectrum, while enraging Palestinians and prompting condemnations worldwide.

Popular discontent at a longstanding peace agreement with Israel has residents of the Hashemite kingdom calling for the country’s ambassador to be withdrawn from the Jewish State, hopefully carrying some drinkable water when he makes the trip.

Solidarity with Palestinians and a strong Islamist streak among Jordanians has contributed to growing disfavor with the 1994 treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries, to the point that Jordan, a majority of whose population is ethnically Palestinian, faces constant internal demand that the treaty be abrogated, perhaps in a fashion that addresses the perpetual drought facing Jordan and the fact that Israel provides a significant portion of the country’s potable water.

Hundreds rallied in a downtown square of the capital city Monday to make their demands known. “What is our envoy doing in the wicked Zionist entity?” demanded a speaker. “Bring him back at once, and make sure he has enough water for the rest of us. Our crops will suffer otherwise.”

“We must boycott the Jews,” insisted an attendee who gave his name as Muhammad. “No good can come from their tourism or produce, or from selling them our goods. Trade with them only betrays Palestine! And while we’re at it, let us make sure the joint Israel-Jordan project to replenish the Dead Sea from the Gulf of Aqaba is completed, the employment of thousands of Jordanians in Israeli farms in the Arava Valley and Eilat continues, and that we continue to get all the fresh water Israel has committed to providing each year to help relieve our agricultural distress.”

Hamas isn't building just any tunnel pic.twitter.com/pXgvCyTt1B

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) January 15, 2018

A petition by Hadar Goldin’s family to the High Court of Justice has led the state to take a tougher stance regarding requests by Hamas operatives and their relatives to enter Israel for medical needs.

The major policy change, announced by the state in a legal brief filed with the High Court on Monday, means a blanket prohibition on Hamas operatives and their relatives entering Israel for medical treatment other than in immediate life-threatening situations.

Goldin, an IDF soldier, was killed during the 2014 fighting in the Gaza Strip, after which Hamas took his remains. His family has been pressing the government to force Hamas to return his remains, including a petition to the High Court to demand that the state comply with its own decisions committing it to take action.

Monday’s decision means the state is penalizing Hamas regarding certain humanitarian issues until it honors the generally accepted obligation of returning an enemy soldier’s remains.

Terrorist Israa Jaabis, the palestinian woman whose attempted terror attack went horribly wrong (for her) when the makeshift gas cylinder bomb went kaboom ahead of time, is currently the subject of an anti-Israel campaign. And Jewish Voice for Peace is one of those promoting her lies, recently posting the following video and caption:

Israa was severely burned when fire broke out in her car due to a faulty gas cylinder near an Israeli checkpoint. She was arrested and sentenced to 11 years, but that’s not the worst part of it. Israa is in dire need of medical care and Israeli authorities are denying her that care. Her family is hoping that by raising awareness, Israel can be pressured into doing the humane act of helping her.

Note how they unequivocally accept the “faulty gas cylinder” excuse, even though this is clearly a lie – given she cried out “Allahu Akhbar” beforehand and the inability of her supporters to keep their story straight. Not to mention the handwritten notes in her possession that contained messages of support for “martyrs.”

Having said that, it is not surprising the terrorist-lovers of JVP would support her.

Israeli troops shot dead a 24-year-old Palestinian man in clashes that broke out in the West Bank on Monday, Palestinian health officials said.

The Israeli military said it was checking reports of a Palestinian killed in a village near the West Bank city of Qalqilya, where it said scores of Palestinians threw rocks at soldiers who responded with riot dispersal means and live fire.

Tensions in the region have risen since President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital on Dec. 6. Over the past month, there have been frequent clashes between Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank and along the Israel-Gaza Strip border.

A total of 18 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed in the flare-up since Trump’s announcement, though analysts say neither Israel nor the Palestinians are interested in a major escalation.

This happened on Monday according to a report published late Monday night:
A rocket fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip struck a Palestinian home in Deir al-Balah by mistake, Arab media reported Monday. Located in the central Gaza Strip, two residents of Deir al-Balah were badly wounded and a third lightly wounded. ["Rocket from Gaza Strip accidentally strikes Palestinian home", Jerusalem Post, January 15, 2018]

Another "Fell Short". We only know about them from open sources but have reported on nearly a hundred of them in the past few years. Nearly a hundred rockets fired in the general direction of Israel with the intent of doing any sort of damage to any target that is Israeli - humans, buildings, vehicles, hardly matters what - that failed to cross the Gaza/Israel border. They fell short.

The ghastly aspects of this are not merely in the cold-blooded, blind Palestinian Arab pursuit of damage and injury to anything Israeli, which there certainly is. But where are the media reports about this? And about those that preceded? These rockets might just as well have been invisible for all the attention they get.

A seven-year-old Palestinian girl from the Gaza Strip has been reunited with her mother after she was abandoned by her father in Jerusalem on Sunday after receiving medical treatment in an Israeli hospital, the Hebrew news site Walla reported on Monday.

According to the shuttle diver who was transporting the two back to the Erez border crossing, the father had asked for the vehicle to pull over so his daughter could relieve herself. However, after the vehicle stopped, the father opened the door and took off running, leaving his daughter behind.

The young girl was brought to police station, where she was taken care while Israeli authorities arranged her return home to Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The father was found later in the day in central Israel and arrested.

Language Matters

A Note on Terminology and Transliteration 

The terminology used in this book generally reflects contemporary usage. In Ottoman times it was common to refer in Arabic, Hebrew and English to Muslims, Christians and Jews, reflecting the primary identity of the communities living under the imperial millet system of religious autonomy. The term ‘Arab’ became more widely used in Palestine and beyond in the first years of the twentieth century. ...Before 1948 the term ‘Palestinian’ was far less widely employed than it is today and it made no distinction between Arabs and Jews. ‘In those days people didn’t use the word “Palestinian” so much’, as the economist Yusif Sayigh explained. ‘There were many things that were called Palestinian, but official names usually had the word “Arab” - for instance al-Hay’a al-Arabiya al-‘Ulya, the Arab Higher Committee, not the Palestinian Higher Committee. Because the Jews were Palestinian too."

The country’s leading English-language newspaper was the (Zionist) Palestine Post, founded in 1932. (It was renamed the Jerusalem Post when Palestine ceased to exist.) Its leading Zionist institution was named The Jewish Agency for Palestine but in Hebrew the country was always referred to as Eretz-Yisrael. The use of the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Israelis’ followed the creation of the state in 1948, but the word ‘Jews’ (Yahud) continued to be commonly used, especially in colloquial Arabic. The refugees who were driven out, fled and dispersed in the Nakba (catastrophe) were widely referred to as ‘Arabs’ in the 1950s and 1960s. In English the term ‘Palestine Arabs’ was common. Usage changed gradually after the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, while Arab recognition of the PLO as the ‘sole legitimate representative’ of the Palestinian people in 1974 reinforced that trend. ...

Arabic-language Palestinian media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip nowadays often describe Israel simply as al-ihtilal - the occupation.

The United States sent $60 million to keep the UN relief agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) in operation but withheld a further $65 million while it urged others to pay more, a State Department official said Tuesday.

“There is a need to undertake a fundamental re-examination of UNRWA, both in the way it operates and the way it is funded,” the official said.

The official told AFP the decision to withhold some funds was meant to encourage more “burden-sharing” by other members.

“The United States has been UNRWA’s single largest donor for decades. In years past, we contributed some 30 percent of UNRWA’s total income,” he said.
US President Donald Trump, left, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas pose for a photograph during a joint press conference at the presidential palace in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on May 23, 2017. (AFP/Mandel Ngan)

“Without the funds we are providing today, UNRWA operations were at risk of running out of funds and closing down.

“The funds provided by the United States will prevent that from happening for the immediate future.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)

In his January 10, 2018 column in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Watan, 'Abdallah Al-Hadlaq supported the criticism voiced by U.S. President Donald Trump about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and Trump's decision to cut its funding. Calling UNRWA a "biased and racist organization" that "perpetuates the problem of the 'Palestinian' refugees," that succumbs to Hamas's dictates, and that strives to destroy Israel, Al-Hadlaq called to stop all funding and aid to this organization until it crumbles and disappears.

Al-Hadlaq is known for his uncommon positions on Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which are reflected in many of his articles. For example, in past articles he wrote that Iran, rather than Israel, is the Gulf countries' real enemy;[1] that Hamas is a terrorist organization whose "reckless" rocket attacks on Israel kill innocent people, [2] and that Israel has the right to defend itself from Palestinian knife terrorism.[3] In a 2017 interview on the Kuwaiti TV channel Al-Rai, he even stated that Israelis are not occupiers but rather "a people that has returned to its homeland."[4]

The following are excerpts from his column:

"Everybody agrees with the harsh [but] reasonable criticism leveled by U.S. President Donald Trump at UNRWA, for it is a biased and racist organization that perpetuates the problem of the 'Palestinian'[5] refugees and the narrative of the so-called right of return, an organization whose role is apparently to work towards the destruction of the state of Israel. Hence, the U.N. should stop funding this organization until it crumbles and disappears.

"On January 5, 2018, a few days after President Trump threatened to stop future aid to the 'Palestinians', the U.S. froze $125 million in funding for UNRWA... and announced that the funding would not be renewed until the Palestinians stopped being stubborn and resumed negotiations with Israel... [It should be noted that] the U.S. grants $300 million annually to the U.N. Refugee Agency.

"The terrorist Hamas movement, which supports the Persian Iranian regime, rejected [UNRWA's] curricula on human rights.[6] This caused a grave crisis between the Hamas government and UNRWA, following which the latter suspended these curricula in its Gaza schools... Hamas's complaint was that these curricula address everyone's human rights, including those of the Jewish and Israeli people, and contravene the culture and rights of the 'Palestinian' people. There are no signs on the horizon of any solution for this broad crisis that developed between the terrorist Hamas government... and UNRWA...

United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Monday that the work of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which helps Palestinian refugees, "is critical" and that if the United States or any other donor cuts its contributions "we will have to find other sources."

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States may withhold future aid payments to UNRWA over what he called the Palestinians' unwillingness to talk peace with Israel. The U.S. is the largest donor to the agency, with a pledge of nearly $370 million in 2016, according to UNRWA's website.

Dujarric said UNRWA has a mandate from the U.N. General Assembly to foster the "human development" of Palestinian refugees and serves "some of the most marginalized population in the Middle East."

He said the agency's health, education and humanitarian help "is a force for stabilization in a very volatile area."

Across the Middle East, millions of people who depend on UNRWA are bracing for the worst of the cuts go through, as they could also add instability to struggling host countries already coping with spillover from other regional crises.

UNRWA was established in 1949 and covers registered Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.

The U.N. General Assembly has repeatedly renewed UNRWA's mandate, as more than 5 million people now rely on it for services including education, health care and food.

Seen by the Palestinians and most of the international community as providing a valuable safety net, UNRWA is viewed far differently by Israel.

Leaving aside the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, the United States should withhold contributions to UNRWA until it implements critical reforms. In the medium term, Washington should seek to eliminate UNRWA, shifting responsibility for recent Palestinian refugees resulting from the war in Syria to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We should also demand that the Palestinians assume responsibility for the services provided by UNRWA. That’s what sovereign governments are expected to do, and the Palestinians aspire to become a sovereign state.

Are there risks to this policy? Of course, but risks are also inherent in adhering to the same policies that have led to the deeply unsatisfactory, insecure status quo. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama all failed in their ambition to negotiate a peace between the Palestinians and Israelis. Success hinges on the Palestinians understanding that there is a cost to their intransigence.

When Ambassador Haley announced that the United States was taking names, she implied that there would be consequences for voting against the United States and rewards for supporting America. President Trump followed up and made clear that voting for the condemnation would affect U.S. decisions to provide foreign assistance:

Let them vote against us; we'll save a lot. We don't care. But this isn't like it used to be where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars and nobody knows what they're doing.

America’s influence is due in no small part to the belief of other governments that the Trump administration will follow through on its promises. Failing to follow through will undermine U.S. credibility in Turtle Bay and around the world. Not every UN vote is important, but if the United States wants to influence important votes in the future, it needs to do more than take names.

Again, Israel’s immediate threat is not nuclear but conventional. However, Iran, a regional power with nuclear ambitions, is the prime backer of Hamas and Hezbollah. The 38 minutes of drama in Hawaii is just a taste of what Israel will face should Iran manage to achieve nuclear weapon capability and provide a nuclear umbrella to its proxies on Israel’s northern and southern borders.

More pressing than a nuclear-armed Iran, however, is the recent escalation in the South. On Saturday, the IDF destroyed a Hamas attack tunnel that ran underneath the Kerem Shalom Gaza crossing. It was the third tunnel destroyed in recent months. Since Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Jerusalem there has been an uptick in violence on the West Bank, in and around Jerusalem and coming from Gaza.

According to IDF data, in December alone, 19 rocket and mortar shells were fired from the Gaza Strip at Israeli cities and towns. This is more than half of the total number of ballistic attacks on Israel from Gaza Strip in all of 2017.

Supported by Iran, Hamas is once again prioritizing terrorism over the welfare of Gaza’s residents. Instead of focusing on turning the Gaza Strip into a viable, autonomous Palestinian state at peace with Egypt and Israel, Hamas, not unlike Kim’s regime in North Korea, devotes most of its resources toward preparation for war. Inevitably, this will lead to conflict with Israel, which cannot allow its deterrence to be undermined by Hamas.

For 38 minutes on Saturday, Hawaiians were convinced that a totalitarian dictator with what appears to be only a loose grip on reality had launched ballistic missiles. Israelis living near the border with Gaza face a similar reality on a regular basis, but instead of a Korean dictator, the aggressor is a group of nihilistic Islamist terrorists. If or when war breaks out again between Israel and Hamas we hope Hawaiians, Americans and the entire peace-loving world will know which side to support.

“When People Criticize Zionists They Mean Jews, You Are Talking Anti-Semitism,”

Truer words were never said, and they were said by the great civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. However they weren’t said in a letter as long believed.

Martin Luther King Jr. whose life and dream we celebrate today was a great leader for civil rights. Unlike today’s “Civil Rights” leaders who seek divisiveness and handouts, Dr. King dream was a post racial society where people where judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.

Also unlike most “Civil Rights” leaders today Dr. King was a supporter of Israel and the Jewish people. In recognition of MLK day many Jewish will post a letter supposedly penned by Martin Luther King called “Letter to a Zionist Friend,” but the story of the letter is a hoax.

The most famous line from the letter “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism,” was uttered by Dr King, just not in any letter. Over the next day or two you will read various posts containing the letter— most of the text does not contain the words of the great Civil Rights Leader. The good news however, is it does contain his sentiments.

Middle East experts often paint Iranians as an enigmatic people. Iranians are unlike Americans, to be sure. But with unemployment rates at over 30 percent, women and religious minorities treated as second-class citizens, rampant governmental corruption and no civil liberties, they are no different from any other nation that has ever rebelled against tyranny. In a country where women are relegated to the backs of buses and citizens receive unequal treatment in courts of law, Americans should pay less attention to pundits and, instead, follow the lessons of their own history.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is a great guide. Today, America’s best Middle East expert is Dr. Martin Luther King, who said, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Between war and inaction, there is much that America, and other nations with influence over Tehran, can do to prevent the Revolutionary Guards from future crackdowns against peaceful protesters. Demanding that Iran hold a nationwide referendum is, indeed, such an action.

The United States has every reason to do what it can to help Iran’s movement for economic justice and civil liberties. Just as the 1979 revolution uncorked the menace of fundamentalism that has since ravaged the region, authentic democratic change in Iran could pave the way for a brighter future in the Middle East.

Relationships with India were established just 25 years ago, and on Middle East issues is far from being our best friend. Yet, Israel’s relations with the giant state are heating up

The deepening relationship between Israel and India is marking another important milestone.

After the historic visit to Israel of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi last July, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will arrive in New Delhi today, where the two are to meet once again. In their meeting, it is expected they will discuss not only the partnership between the two countries, but also the latest developments in the Middle East.

During the visit, Netanyahu will stop at a number of sites, including the Taj Mahal and the central location of the Mumbai terrorist attack in 2008.

The important aspect of the visit though, is that Netanyahu will be the keynote speaker at the RAISINA Dialogue, the annual conference of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and the ORF Research Institute. The conference will include senior representatives from 86 countries, including the Egyptian foreign minister, the Russian foreign minister and the former Swedish prime minister.

Relations between Israel and India are on a slow and protracted rise, culminating in a warm and personal friendship between Netanyahu and Modi. But this was not always the case: India opposed the partition plan in 1947 and established diplomatic relations with Israel only in 1992 – even though it had received security assistance from Israel before. Netanyahu is the second prime minister to visit the subcontinent – Ariel Sharon preceded him in 2003.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his Indian counterpart, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is “revolutionizing” ties between the nations as the two leaders signed nine bilateral agreements on Monday in New Delhi.

“You are a revolutionary leader in the best sense of the word ‘revolution,’” Netanyahu said, noting that Modi’s visit to Israel last summer was the first such trip by an Indian prime minister “in 3,000 years of our own sovereign existence and our history.”

Netanyahu added that “something different is happening now because of your leadership and because of our partnership.”

Modi said that Netanyahu’s visit “is a long-anticipated moment in the journey of friendship between India and Israel. Your visit is also a fitting climax to the commemoration of 25 years of diplomatic relations between India and Israel.” He added that in Netanyahu, he has “a counterpart who is equally committed to taking the India-Israel relationship to soaring new heights.”

The two leaders issued a joint statement that reaffirmed the “strategic relationship” between the countries, while also signing nine different bilateral agreements covering areas such as cyber security, space, the film industry, aviation, investment, and oil and gas exploration. The agreements kicked off work on the start of a bilateral free trade pact.

Moshe Holtzberg, a young boy whose parents were killed at a Jewish center in Mumbai during a 2008 terror attack, returned to that city for the first time Tuesday to visit the site of the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu arrived in New Delhi for a six-day visit Sunday and will travel to Mumbai on Thursday, where he will visit the Chabad House where Holtzberg’s parents, Rabbi Gabriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivkah, were gunned down as 10 Muslim terrorists rampaged through Mumbai in a three-day siege. Netanyahu is to unveil a memorial to 166 people killed in the attacks.

Moshe was 2 at the time of the attack and was carried to safety by his nanny, who found him by his parents’ bodies. Holtzberg’s parents were emissaries of the Chabad movement living in Mumbai at the time.

On Tuesday afternoon the 11-year-old boy visited the Chabad House along with his grandparents.

“We are very excited for the upcoming visit of Baby Moshe, who is not anymore a baby. But he will always remain in our heart as baby Moshe,” Rabbi Israel Kozlovsky, the head of the Chabad Trust in India, told reporters Monday.

Israel and India are discussing the possibility that Air India, which will soon begin direct flights between Ben Gurion Airport and Delhi, will fly over Saudi Arabia on its way to Israel and back, the Yediot Aharonot newspaper reports.

According to the report, India wants to fly directly over Saudi Arabia to shorten flight time and save fuel costs. If the Saudis agree to the move they could present it as a gesture to India rather than to Israel. Nevertheless, if Air India eventually ends up flying over Saudi Arabia, it would be an unprecedented move that would constitute a kind of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Such direct flights will shorten the flight time by two hours and significantly increase the number of tourists between Israel and India, noted Yediot Aharonot. Shortening the duration of the flight will lower the price of the ticket and increase the competition on the route to India.

Air India operated flights to Israel about 20 years ago, but stopped them because of the lack of economic feasibility. The company's new plan is to operate flights between Delhi and Ben Gurion Airport on Boeing 787s.

Currently, only El Al operates flights between the two countries. El Al’s flights are to Mumbai and the flight route from Ben-Gurion Airport crosses the Arava, continues through the Red Sea to the south of Yemen and then turns east towards India. The flight time on this route is about eight hours.

Christians supporters of Israel can not assume the UK will back the Jewish state forever, rather that support has to be renewed time and time again, a top communications manager said.

European Coalition for Israel (ECI) Brussels Representative Ruth Isaac said that those who were looking to blame the British government should realize that the biggest hurdle is not to gather support for Israel, but to make that support heard.

“It is not our enemies that we need to worry about but rather the passivity and fear among many Christians who support Israel in their hearts but do not dare to express this support publicly,” she said over the weekend at the European Coalition for Israel’s second annual ECI National Conference in London, titled “Britain, Europe and Israel – after Brexit.”

Many Christian pro-Israel supporters had hoped for a new golden age in support for Israel as the British government prepares to leave the EU, but many were disappointed that British foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel had not aligned with the pro-Israel stance of the new US administration but rather stayed consistent with the line of the European Union.

Nonetheless, the British government’s failure to back the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a case of it giving in to the media slander, a top journalist said.

“This is not a sign of strength but of weakness and appeasement,” Simon Barrett of Revelation TV said.

Following American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, thirteen of the city’s prominent Christian leaders, representing a variety of denominations, signed a joint letter condemning the decision. Amit Barkat explains that they did so more out of fear of the Palestinian Authority (PA) than of animosity toward the Jewish state:

Most of the political activity of the Christian community [is undertaken] in response to pressure from the Palestinian Authority. The denominations centered in Jerusalem also have churches and monasteries in the PA, Gaza, and Jordan, and additional ties throughout the Middle East. Figures in the PA successfully exploit this fact and use the Christians for their propaganda purposes to cover for the injustices they commit against Christians in Judea and Samaria.

But as much as [Palestinians] try to hide [the reality of persecution of Christians], it’s difficult to debate numbers. . . . The best example of their disappearance on the ground is Bethlehem, the city of the birthplace of David and Jesus. Bethlehem was once a clearly Christian city where Christian residents formed an 86-percent majority. Today, that figure stands at fewer than 10 percent, and the negative trend is not stopping. The situation is even worse in Gaza, where among the thousands of Christians who used to live there, only a few hundred remain under the constant threat of persecution, with serious limitations on Christian ceremonies and holidays, and effectively without rights. . . .

Michelle Harris has been shortlisted to stand as the Labour candidate in Amber Rudd’s (very marginal) seat of Hastings and Rye. Her previous form with regard to antisemitism was revealed a few days ago by @GnasherJew, an account dedicated to exposing Labour antisemitism. One particularly egregious moment came in 2014 when she shared a David Icke post referring to ‘Rothschild Zionist Israel’. Here’s another example, also from 2014.

Most here would agree that the implicit parallel between the Nazis and Israelis is antisemitic. Her reference to Holocaust victims is also shocking in its moral vacuity: its meaningless characterisation of their deaths, its offensive presumption she can tell how they – all of them – would view a complex conflict, and her use of them as a weapon to attack Israelis.

Many Algemeiner readers are aware that students in Newton, Massachusetts, Public Schools (NPS) — as well as other US high schools — use anti-Israel materials as part of the class curriculum. These materials are not cited as examples of bias or compared with other materials, but are instead presented as factual.

Publications by CAMERA and other organizations, including the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Fordham Foundation, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and Verity Educate (an academic research organization that published a 152-page report on some of these materials) confirm that the issue is widespread.

An equally pernicious problem has so far remained unmentioned, however: retaliation against students, parents and teachers who report antisemitic incidents or protest anti-Israel materials.

This is the main reason why Newton parents have been unable to make further changes to the curriculum after the removal of a widely criticized text, the Arab World Studies Notebook, from high school history classes in 2012. And as with the anti-Israel class materials, it is likely that this situation is not unique to Newton.

A CBS Evening News segment on Jan. 1, 2018, Protecting the border, apparently politically motivated, likely left an unwarranted negative impression of Israel among many viewers by wrongly conflating Israel's security barrier with the infamous Berlin Wall. “Whether it's here [Berlin] or the security barrier the Israelis have built between them and the Palestinians or going back to the Great Wall of China, they [the Spitzer family] see all walls as monuments to political failure [correspondent Mark Phillips].”

The segment seems to have been prompted in part by the fact that Nov. 9, 2017 marked the 28th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It had been erected in 1961, totally encircling West Berlin, by the Communist East German authorities to stem the tide of refugees attempting to flee East Berlin for the West.

CAMERA sent this message to CBS urging an on-air clarification,

We urge CBS to air a clarification to reflect the fact that the purpose of Israel's security barrier is to prevent Palestinian terrorists from murdering Israelis. It includes less than eight percent of the West Bank. The barrier was constructed in response to the “al-Aqsa intifada,” the 2000-2004 Palestinian terror war in which more than 1,000 Israelis – Jewish and Arabs, more than three-fourths of them non-combatants – and foreign visitors were murdered by Palestinian terrorists crossing unimpeded from the West Bank. The barrier's completion has contributed significantly to the roughly 95 percent decrease in lethal attacks from the area.

Furthermore, there are numerous separation barriers all over the world including the U.S. southern border wall which is slated for upgrade and expansion. Does CBS mean for these barriers to be categorized with the Berlin Wall?

CBS’ stonewalling
CAMERA's initial message sent to evening@cbsnews.com and several Evening News editors elicited no response, not even an acknowledgment of receipt. A subsequent emailing yielded the same result. It was sent to several top CBS executives including Leslie Moonves (lmoonves@cbs.com), Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO of CBS Corporation.

A Guardian op-ed by radical anti-Israel activist, and Code Pink co-founder, Medea Benjamin (I am an American, Jewish and banned by Israel for my activism, Jan. 15) was full of misleading characterizations of the BDS movement. But, one counter-factual claim which immediately stuck out, and prompted us to contact Guardian editors, appears in the following paragraph:

Though Benjamin’s characterisation of Issa Armo as a “peaceful” human rights activist is (at best) extraordinarily misleading (see this piece by Petra Marquardt-Bigman for background), the claim that Pallywood star Ahed Tamimi (aka “Shirley Temper”) was arrested for her “peaceful” activism is just a lie.

As we pointed out to editors, the Guardian’s own coverage reported on the video of the Palestinian teen striking an Israeli soldier – an assault which led to her arrest. Further, the suggestion that Tamimi promotes anything resembling “peace” was contradicted in her ‘message to the world‘ video, also covered by the Guardian, which justified Palestinian stabbings and suicide bombings.

Editors quickly upheld our complaint, removed the word “peaceful” from the sentence and added the following addendum.

Despite both the threat to humanitarian supplies and fuel for civilians in the Gaza Strip and the significance of the fact that the tunnel reached Egyptian territory, the BBC chose not to report the story at all.

This is the third cross-border tunnel that the IDF has destroyed in the past two and a half months. On October 30th 2017 a tunnel belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was destroyed and while the BBC reported that story, its portrayal of the structure’s purpose was ambiguous. On December 10th 2017 the IDF destroyed a tunnel belonging to Hamas. The BBC did not produce any dedicated reporting on that story and the only mention of it came in half a sentence in an article on a different topic.

Now we see that the BBC – which has long under-reported and downplayed the subject of tunnels constructed by Hamas and other terror organisations – has chosen to completely ignore the story of Hamas’ construction of a structure breaching the sovereign territory of two neighbouring countries.

Audiences heard just one view on the topic from a representative of the political NGO ‘Ir Amim’ which has received funding from foreign sources – including from the EU.

In late January 2017 Tim Franks returned to the same location and BBC audiences again heard one view of the story; this time from the inadequately introduced founder of that same political NGO.

Franks: “This is Givat HaMatos – an area of scrubland really – on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Just a couple of kilometres behind me to the south is the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. And I’m here with a man called Danny Seidemann – he’s an Israeli attorney and specialist on the mapping of Jerusalem.”

Seidemann: “Givat HaMatos is pretty unique. It’s one of two or three schemes that we call a Doomsday settlement. These settlements are in and of themselves capable of making the two-state solution impossible.”

None of the BBC’s various reports on Givat Hamatos has informed audiences that part of the planned housing units have been ear-marked for Arab residents of the adjacent neighbourhood of Beit Safafa.

While all of you wait impatiently for Sarah’s new book on life in Jerusalem to come out, running old Daily Freier algorithms to build your own Sarah-Tuttle Singer article while trying to somehow find a way that the Israeli postal system will allow you to order the real thing from Amazon, the Daily Freier managed to steal a page of her final draft. How did we do it you ask? By patiently waiting at Crave Street Food until she got distracted by the arrival of her friend the Gay Mizrahi truck driver who always sells the best pomegranates. And we passed on this excerpt to YOU, our loyal readers. Don’t thank us. We’re not listening. So without further ado, behold a page of the manuscript!

……. seriously mixed feelings because how was I supposed to know that my Internet troll would be so cute in real life? I know, right? But anyway, let me tell you about the time my Palestinian cab driver was listening to Carlebach and OMG can I just tell you? Crave’s bathroom stocks free tampons! Hella Woke, Am I right? So then I’m just walking through Machane Yehuda rummaging through my purse for a coin for the scratch-off lottery ticket that I bought from that really funky Makolet that’s run by the totally chill lesbian Off the Derech couple who always let me use their bathroom when I have to pee. So where was I? OK so I’m drinking from my flask of Laphroaig 18 Years. The peat? OMG can I tell you about the peat? But anyway, I bought it at the Heathrow Duty Free, and the cashier was wearing full hijab. And we had an amazing moment in the checkout line that reminded me that anything is possible if we just…. wait a second. I think I misjudged the strength of the edibles that I took an hour ago and the last time this happened I ended up walking the entire ancient road from Ramle to Yafo and got these Painful blisters because I was wearing flats that were kinda too big but I didn’t have time to return them because Crave had just changed their menu and can I just tell you? Their lamb bacon? Better than the real thing. So anyway, let me tell you about the ride back. So I’m standing on the platform waiting for my train and I sneezed. Because it’s cold out. And I wasn’t wearing a coat. Don’t judge, OK? So Yeah. I sneezed. And then do you know what happened? This Haredi guy turned to me and said “Sei Gezunt”. Which was just incredible. Kind of like the time I went to Mid-Burn in the Negev and accidentally joined a cult for 6 hours before I figured out that the mushrooms must have been……

Racist and anti-Semitic fliers published by the Ku Klux Klan were delivered across a Virginia neighborhood.

The fliers were placed in plastic baggies and held down with a piece of candy on the doorsteps of homes in Leesburg, Virginia over the weekend.

One of the fliers reads “Join the United States Army and Fight for Israel.” The caricature shows an American soldier standing in front of a balding, bulbous nosed man in plaid shorts holding an Israeli flag. It also accuses Jews of controlling the media and provides a list of “high ranking Jews who control the media.”

Another flier reads “On Martin Luther King Day you are honoring a Communist alcoholic pervert.” The flier is addressed to Loyal White Knights and provides a web address for a KKK website.

Police told local media that there is no indication that any of the households who received the fliers were specifically targeted. It is believed the fliers were distributed over the weekend due to the upcoming Martin Luther King Day observance.

Dozens of gravestones were toppled and broken in a Jewish cemetery in Eritrea.

The damage at the cemetery located in the capital of Asmara is believed to have happened in recent days, according to two Jewish news outlets that received photos of the vandalism.

The Israel-based Haaretz published photos of the smashed gravestones, reported to be the first time that the Jewish cemetery has been targeted.

“The cemetery suffered vandalism and a large number of graves were defaced,” Danny Goldschmidt, from the Aden Jewish Heritage Museum located in Tel Aviv, told Haaretz. He said that the police have not made any arrests in the incident.

The London-based Jewish Chronicle also was sent photos of the damage by an unnamed reader in London of Eritrean descent, who did not want his name published for fear of retribution against family members who remain in Eritrea.

In addition to cemetery, the site in Asmara site is home to a now-defunct synagogue. The last Jewish family left Eritrea more than ten years ago. There reportedly is one permanent Jewish resident left in the city, who has been identified as Sami Cohen and who reportedly takes care of the cemetery and the synagogue.

The last grave was dug in the cemetery in 1996, Ynet reported in 2006. There are about 150 people buried in the cemetery.

Switzerland is again at the center of a dispute over a Nazi-era art trove as the Basel Art Museum reconsiders demands it return a Jewish art historian's collection to descendants.

It rejected their restitution bid in 2008.

The museum owns 120 drawings and prints, including a "Madonna" lithograph from Edvard Munch potentially worth millions of dollars, that belonged to Curt Glaser.

Glaser auctioned the works in 1933 after losing his job leading the Prussian State Art Library in Berlin and being evicted from his home in the first wave of Nazi anti-Semitic laws.

Basel Art Museum director Josef Helfenstein has called up a task force after Glaser's heirs demanded the case be re-opened, citing unearthed documents they say underscore their claims.

"We hope it won’t be put on the backburner, so everybody forgets about it again," said Valerie Sattler, a great niece of Glaser.

Basel may announce a meeting with the family and its lawyer as early as this week, a museum spokeswoman said on Monday.

Scrutiny of Jewish-owned art sold for low prices or stolen by the Nazis is nothing new in Switzerland.

With almost nothing remaining of the former Nazi transit camp Westerbork, visitors are turning to a simulation that “recreates” the site of Holocaust-era incarceration using virtual reality.

During World War II, Westerbork was used by the Nazis to imprison Dutch Jews on their way to “resettlement” in the east — the regime’s euphemism for genocide. Nearly every Tuesday for two years, a train with hundreds of Jews left Westerbork. Of the more than 100,000 Jews deported from the remote facility, only 5,000 survived the Holocaust.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Dutch government dismantled Westerbork, including the inmate barracks and almost every structure from the war era. Massive, highly sensitive radio telescopes were built on-site in 1970, and their operation still prevents cars from approaching the grounds. With little more to see than the former camp commander’s house preserved in a glass enclosure, visitors typically rely on tour guides and Westerbork’s up-to-date museum, located 2 miles away.

Last month, museum staff began piloting a virtual reality (VR) simulation with tour groups, in part to help visitors envision what took place at Westerbork. Inside a dimmed room with wrap-around screens, volunteers have begun using a console to explore the camp as it appeared between 1942 and the end of deportations in 1944, when Anne Frank and her family were held at Westerbork on the way to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The swastika, which was adopted by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, is banned in Germany, where right-wing sentiment has risen due to an influx of more than a million migrants in the last two years.

Ibo Omari, who runs a graffiti shop and ‘The Cultural Heirs’ youth club, encourages young people to look out for swastikas in their local area and then creatively paint over them - after getting permission from whoever owns the defaced property.

“It was important to spur young people into action and to encourage them to take responsibility so they don’t just ignorantly walk past such symbols of hatred,” Omari told Reuters. “It offends the whole neighborhood if someone in our midst paints swastikas in a children’s playground and I take it personally,” the 37-year-old said, adding that they also wanted to show graffiti had nothing to do with racism.

Omari and ‘The Cultural Heirs’ decided the best way to respond was “with humor and love” so they came up with designs such as rabbits, birds and a Rubik’s Cube to cover swastikas. Sketching potential designs during a graffiti workshop in Omari’s shop, 16-year-old Philip Keilholz said he got involved as racism had no place in the cosmopolitan German capital.

A former planetarium on the Edmond J. Safra Campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is to be repurposed as a $5 million museum and visitors’ center dedicated to the personal archives of renowned physicist Albert Einstein, father of the theory of relativity.

Einstein was among the founders of the Hebrew University. In 1923, a year after winning the Nobel Prize, he came from Germany to give a scientific lecture at the barely finished campus on Mount Scopus. After immigrating to the United States in 1933, he remained active as a member of the university’s Board of Governors and chairman of its Academic Committee.

Before his death in 1955, Einstein had willed his personal archives and the rights to his scientific and non-scientific writings (including his famous E=mc2 formula) to the university. The 55,000-item Einstein Archives, digitized in 2012, is housed at the Safra Campus in the Givat Ram quarter within walking distance of the Israel Museum, Bible Lands Museum and Bloomfield Science Museum.

The idea of a museum to make those archives more accessible to the public has been under discussion for years. One plan for the building was considered for the university’s Mount Scopus campus but was deemed too costly. In May 2012, the prime minister’s cabinet voted, in a non-binding decision, to build an Albert Einstein museum shaped like the physicist’s head.

A Cypriot company says its new sub-sea internet cable that will connect Israel with Spain will be powerful enough to handle up to 60 percent of the world’s internet traffic at peak time.

Quantum Cable chairman Nasos Ktorides said after signing on Tuesday an agreement to lay the cable that the $200 million project is expected to come online in 2020.

Ktorides said the cable will have 40 times more capacity than existing internet cables on the Mediterranean seabed. He said that’s enough capacity to handle as many as 80 million high-definition video calls between Asia and Europe simultaneously.

The 7,700 kilometer (4785-mile) cable will reach Bilbao, Spain, where an equally powerful internet cable now connects Spain with the US state of Virginia.

A cinema in northern Israel is to be named after Israeli-born Hollywood celeb Gal Gadot, star of the blockbuster hit “Wonder Woman,” the town of Nazareth Illit said Tuesday.

“We are going to name the new cinema after Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress who brings honor to this country,” municipal spokeswoman Orna Yosef said. “This is a message for our young people because Gal Gadot is an example of success, who has shown that dreams can be attained.”

The Gal Cinema, which will have two screens, will open officially on Wednesday with a showing of Israeli director Eran Riklis’s thriller “Shelter.”

Nazareth Illit was founded in 1956 adjacent to biblical Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel. Its population of 50,000 is 80 percent Jewish, with the remainder made up of Muslim and Christian Arabs.

Israel will celebrate 70 years of independence this year, and Culture Minister Miri Regev on Monday promised a massive party, as she revealed some of the plans for the anniversary events.

“I thought it would be appropriate to implement a concept of ongoing events, beginning with the Independence Day ceremony on Wednesday and ending on Saturday evening: 70 hours of Israeli festivity that will bring citizens together across the country in varied and joyous events,” Regev said at a press conference where she unveiled the official logo for the nation’s 70th anniversary to be held under the tagline “A Legacy of Innovation.”

“You won’t be bored,” she promised.

Regev said the annual state ceremony at Mount Herzl on April 18 will be accompanied by an official song to celebrate Israel’s 70th, followed by the largest fireworks display in the country’s history.

Everyone agrees completely with the sharp and logical criticism of the UNRWA by President Donald Trump. It is a biased and racist organization that perpetuates the refugee issue (Palestinians!), as well as the so-called right of return. The role of the Organization seems to be aimed at the destruction of the State of Israel, and the United Nations must therefore stop funding that racist organization until it vanishes.

On January 5, 2018, Washington froze $ 125 million in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), days after US President Donald Trump threatened to halt aid to the Palestinians in the future.

The United States announced that it would take a decision to suspend the funding of UNRWA programs unless the Palestinians ended their intransigence and returned to negotiations with Israel...

The pro-Iranian Islamic Hamas movement has opposed human rights approaches. As a result, the Hamas government has stopped UNRWA from teaching the human rights curriculum in its schools in Gaza. After arguing with the Hamas government, which accused UNRWA of adopting a human rights-sensitive platform for all, including the Jewish and Israeli people... the Agency temporarily stopped teaching human rights in its schools. The curriculum books were withdrawn from all UNRWA schools by the Ministry of Education of the Hamas government.

This is the case in which all forms of financial support and international funding of UNRWA must be stopped as long as their decisions are subject to the methods of terrorism, exclusion, racism and non-observance of the rights of other peoples. This approach is followed by the terrorist Hamas movement that governs the Gaza Strip and imposes it on UNRWA curricula and schools.

Sunday’s speech by President Abbas no doubt reflected his own and the Palestinian people’s deep despair at the ever-deepening occupation and the lack of diplomatic progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That frustration, however, is no excuse for calling into question either the Jewish connection to, or Palestinian recognition of, the state of Israel – or for language and proposals that are justifiably earning widespread condemnation.

This speech – and the undercutting of America’s role as a mediator in this conflict – would not have come about if it were not for President Trump’s inept and disastrous missteps regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By appointing a settlement movement ally as Ambassador to Israel, refusing to endorse the two-state solution and upending longstanding US policy on Jerusalem, the president and his team have taken one step after another to destroy the chances of peaceful resolution of the conflict.

The ruined Tiferet Yisrael synagogue, 1949

15. Since the presentation to the General Assembly of the Commission's first report to the Secretary-General, the Special Committee on Jerusalem has continued to work actively. In particular, it has held interviews with representatives of Arab and Jewish central and local authorities. On the basis of new instructions given to it by the Commission, the Committee is endeavouring to formulate, in conformity with the terms of paragraph 8 of the resolution of 11 December 1948, proposals which will at the same time be acceptable to both parties. The Commission is aware that acceptance by the two parties is not mentioned in the terms of reference which it received from the General Assembly on the subject of the international regime for Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the Commission feels that such acceptance would facilitate considerably the establishment and functioning of such a regime. In this connexion, the Commission is happy to report that, during its conversations in Beirut with the Arab delegations, the latter showed themselves, in general, prepared to accept the principle of an international regime for the Jerusalem area, on condition that the United Nations should be in a position to offer the necessary guarantees regarding the stability and permanence of such a regime. On the other hand, the Governments of the Arab States have reserved their right to give their final opinion after they have been acquainted with the text of the proposals which the Commission is to submit to the General Assembly.
16.The religious representatives mentioned above also emphasized to the Commission, during the Beirut meetings, the importance which they attach to the application of those paragraphs of the resolution which concern Jerusalem and the Holy Places. Some of them expressed a further desire to see the international regime extended to cover Nazareth.

There are two ways to understand the two-and-a-half hour rant Sunday from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in which he called for discarding past agreements with Israel.

The first way is straightforward: He means it. As Maya Angelou famously said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." In the case of Abbas, he has been showing us who he is for a while now.

He defends Palestinian Authority payments for terrorists. He called murderers "heroic brothers" when they were released by Israel in 2013 as a condition for restarting peace talks. In December he urged the Organization of the Islamic Conference to reconsider its recognition of Israel.

So when Abbas gives a Castro-esque speech laced with fake history about Israel being a colonial project of Europeans, it fits a pattern.

The second way of understanding his rant requires some creative accounting. Abbas doesn't really mean it. Abbas has been a patient peace partner now for 15 years, but along comes President Donald Trump, who recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital and asks Saudi Arabia to pressure Abbas to take a deal. What do you expect?

This is the interpretation of J-Street, the Soros-family-funded advocacy group that touts itself as pro-peace and pro-Israel. A J-Street statement on the Abbas speech began with this throat clearing: "Sunday’s speech by President Abbas no doubt reflected his own and the Palestinian people’s deep despair at the ever-deepening occupation and the lack of diplomatic progress toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

J-Street was careful to stipulate that this despair was "no excuse for calling into question either the Jewish connection to, or Palestinian recognition of, the state of Israel." But let's not lose the plot. This group asserts that Abbas would not have delivered his rant "if it were not for President Trump’s inept and disastrous missteps regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Gil Hoffman speaks to Zionist Union Knesset member Nachman Shai on the impact of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s anti-Semitic speech and rejection of peace talks on the Israeli Left.

Shai, like Naftali Bennett Monday says the Abbas era is over, but unlike Bennett, Shai says the 2-state-solution is still alive. He also laments Israel’s inability to get out its message when its Foreign Ministry’s funding has been cut again. (h/t Elder Of Lobby)

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday morning said he expects the US Embassy to move to Jerusalem within the coming year.

"Three things are happening in the US which have never happened before," Netanyahu explained. "My estimation is that the US Embassy move will happen faster than we think. Within the span of a year - that's my educated guess."

"There is a dramatic change regarding Iran, and the President has a time limit, at the end of which the Iran deal will either be fixed or canceled."

Regarding UNRWA, the UN organization created for the purpose of helping "Palestinian refugees," Netanyahu said, "This is the first time they are being challenged. This organization perpetuates the Palestinians' refugee status. This is the first time someone is standing up and challenging that."

A Netanyahu official said he "believes that the the Americans are discussing Israel's proposal to transfer care of the refugees in Judea and Samaria from UNRWA to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)." The many millions of refugees who are not Palestinian Arabs are represented by one organization UNHCR. Only the Palestinian Arabs have an organization of their own.

The US on Wednesday morning cut UNRWA funding from $125 million to $60 million.

Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Office Michael Oren (Kulanu) said, "I congratulate US President Donald Trump on his decision to drastically cut funding to UNRWA. This is a false and corrupt organization, which fabricates millions of refugees in order to receive world funding. UNRWA perpetuates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by teaching Palestinian youth to hate the State of Israel and to work to erase it. The President's decision is a crucial and vital step to putting an end to one of the greatest frauds in history. UNRWA's fraud has caused great damage to Israel and to the entire Middle East."

In a 1951 report to the UN General Assembly, UNRWA reported, “There must be a firm goal of terminating relief operations. Sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration.” It was right, but Arab state rejectionism got in the way. Arab states like Egypt, Syria, and Iraq quickly concluded that they could use UNRWA to perpetuate the problem, to undercut normalization with Israel, and to transform an aid agency into a weapon against Israel.

The rest is history. Both current UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl and UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness were born years after UNRWA was meant to dissolve.

Nor does UNRWA’s track record make it worth saving. While UNHCR has resettled refugees and allowed them to get on with their lives, UNRWA has actively undercut settlement. It has embraced a unique definition of refugee that differs with UNHCR and that is used everywhere else in the world. Consider: If India and Pakistan used the same definition of refugee from their partition that UNRWA embraces, there would be more than 100 million refugees in South Asia today. UNRWA has helped make the Palestinians the largest per capita recipient of aid on earth, but has the least to show for it.

The problem isn’t just waste of money, however. Almost a quarter-century after the Palestinian Authority began, UNRWA has eroded rather than supported the foundations of good governance. After all, if UNRWA promises to take care of housing, education, and support, why shouldn’t both the Palestinian Authority and their sometime-partner Hamas spend money on terror pensions, terror tunnels, and an arsenal of rockets?

Add into the mix UNRWA incompetence: schools used as arsenals, school books teaching incitement, UNRWA employees moonlighting as bomb makers, and terror recruitment in UNRWA high schools and the problem is even worse. UNRWA denials of complicity in such activities, if taken at face value, are just acknowledgment of its own poor oversight.

It’s long past time to cut off UNRWA and ask UNHCR to take over. The Palestinians deserve an apolitical agency rather than an amplifier for radicalism and waste. UNRWA has become a cancer not only for those who seek peace and reconciliation, but also for the entire UN system.

UNRWA in 1951 was right. Permanence is not a virtue; it’s an impediment.

State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said Tuesday: "We committed a voluntary contribution of $60 million [to UNRWA] for 2018 so far....That money is going to sustain schools and health services to ensure that teachers and also health care providers can be paid their salaries."
"This is not aimed at punishing anyone. The United States Government and the Trump administration believe that there should be more so-called burden sharing to go around....We don't believe that taking care of other nations and other people has to solely be the United States' responsibility....I would argue we're the most generous nation on the globe, but we will ask other countries to do more."

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon on Tuesday praised the Trump administration for announcing it would cut funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees.

Danon said in press statement that it was time for the “absurdity to end” in how funds provided to the relief agency were being spent on building terrorist infrastructure and teaching Palestinian youth to delegitimize Israel.

“UNRWA has proven time and again to be an agency that misuses the humanitarian aid of the international community and instead supports anti-Israel propaganda, perpetuates the plight of Palestinian refugees and encourages hate,” he said.

“Just over the last year alone, UNRWA officials were elected to the leadership of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, UNRWA schools denied the existence of Israel, and terror tunnels were dug under UNRWA facilities. It is time for this absurdity to end and for humanitarian funds to be directed toward their intended purpose – the welfare of refugees,” Danon added.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday he was "very concerned" by reports that the U.S. had cut its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees”, by half.

According to AFP, Guterres said he had not been informed of Washington's decision.

"I strongly hope that in the end, it will be possible for the United States to maintain the funding of UNRWA," he was quoted as having said.

"UNRWA is not a Palestinian institution but a UN institution," added the UN chief, who dubbed the agency "an important factor of stability" in the Middle East.

Krähenbühl called for a global fundraising effort to make up for the loss of US support.

“At stake is the access of 525,000 boys and girls in 700 UNRWA schools, and their future,” he said. “At stake is the dignity and human security of millions of Palestine refugees, in need of emergency food assistance and other support in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“At stake is the access of refugees to primary health care, including pre-natal care and other life-saving services. At stake are the rights and dignity of an entire community.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was not aware of the decision, but warned that UNRWA provides “vital services.”

“I am very concerned and I strongly hope that in the end it will be possible for the United States to maintain the funding of UNRWA in which the US has a very important share,” he told reporters at the UN.

Noting that the US “has consistently been UNRWA’s largest single donor,” Krahenbuhl announced he was “launching in the next few days a global fundraising campaign to capture the large-scale commitment to keeping our schools and clinics open throughout 2018 and beyond.”

He called on “host countries and our donors including those in the region,” as well as “people of good will in every corner of the globe where solidarity and partnerships exist for Palestine Refugees” to “join us in responding to this crisis and #FundUNRWA to ensure that Palestine Refugee girls and boys can stand strong.”

The call was shared Wednesday by UN officials, including the organization’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov.

UNRWA’s spokesman said Wednesday that the agency was facing its worst funding crisis ever. “The US has announced it will contribute $60 million to the program budget. There is for the moment no other indication of possible funding,” Chris Gunness told AFP. “This dramatically reduced contribution results in the most severe funding crisis in the history of the agency.”​

The Palestine Liberation Organization’s mission to the US also lashed out at the funding cut on Wednesday, insisting the funding of UNRWA was “not a bargaining chip but a US and international obligation.”

In a statement, the Palestinian representative in Washington, Husam Zomlot, said that “taking away food and education from vulnerable refugees does not bring a lasting and comprehensive peace,” and vowed that “the rights of Palestinian refugees will not be compromised by a financial decision.”

The Arab League chief charged Wednesday that a US decision to freeze crucial funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees was aimed at wiping out the whole issue of Palestinian refugees.

“This decision affects the education and health of Palestinians and aims to eradicate the question of refugees,” Ahmed Aboul Gheit said at a conference in Cairo on the disputed city of Jerusalem.

On Tuesday, the United States held back $65 million that had been destined for UNRWA, two weeks after President Donald Trump threatened future payments to the agency.

Washington is the largest contributor to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA).

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness warned Wednesday that “this dramatically reduced contribution results in the most severe funding crisis in the history of the agency.”

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the freeze amounted to “cruelty” toward an “innocent and vulnerable population.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday continued to rail against US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, cautioning that actions taken in the city could spark a future war, while also advocating a “peaceful” path.

“Jerusalem is the gate of peace and war — Trump must choose,” said Abbas, who was at a conference in the Al Azhar University in Cairo on “global support for Jerusalem.”

While warning of war, the 82-year-old Palestinian leader also reiterated several times that the only way forward for Palestinians to oppose both American and Israeli policies involved peaceful means.

“A popular and peaceful resistance is the path that will succeed and that we will continue on,” Abbas said.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas decided to give his fiery address denouncing Israel and the United States earlier this week after Saudi officials informed him of the parameters of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, which were overwhelmingly favorable to the Jewish state, Israeli television reported Tuesday.

A close associate of the PA president was summoned to Riyadh for an urgent meeting earlier this month. There, the details of Trump’s peace plan — which provides for a “state-minus” — were presented to the Palestinians for the first time, according to Hadashot news.

The plan’s main clauses were as follows: less-than-full statehood for the Palestinians, ongoing Israeli control over security matters, a permanent IDF presence in the Jordan Valley, land swaps not based on the pre-1967 lines, no settlement evacuations, and an Israeli veto regarding the final status of Jerusalem, which would be later negotiated by the parties, the TV report said.

On Sunday, Abbas gave a particularly harsh address at a meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council, lambasting Trump and rejecting US peace overtures.

Amid continued diplomatic fallout from US President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and a belligerent, fiery speech from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denouncing his administration’s peace efforts, Trump’s top peace envoy, Jason Greenblatt, will arrive in the region Wednesday to meet with envoys from the Middle East Quartet to advance an Israeli-Palestinian accord.

“Jason will be attending a regular meeting of the Quartet Envoys to exchange information and continue our engagement on advancing peace,” a White House official told The Times of Israel on Tuesday.

Greenblatt, who will arrive in Israel on January 17, will likely stay until US Vice President Mike Pence’s visit, which is scheduled for January 22-23.

The so-called Quartet consists of representatives from the US, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union. It was established in Madrid in 2002 to try and resolve the decades-old dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.

The upcoming meeting comes as Palestinians still fume over Trump’s Jerusalem decision.

Abbas made it very clear this week what he rejects: recognition of the Jewish people’s historic and religious claims to the Land of Israel; acceptance of the US as the principal broker in peace negotiations with Israel; making painful concessions for the sake of peace; normalization of relations with Israel as a precursor to peace; stopping the transfer of foreign aid to terrorists and their families.

But he gave no reason for hope, no sense that he was leading his people toward a goal.

Perhaps Abbas is under the impression he is restoring the Palestinians’ lost honor by lashing out at the US president with epithets such as “May God destroy your house,” or by vowing not to cooperate with the US in its peace initiative or by shouting bluster at Donald Trump such as “Damn your money!” But the opposite is true. Abbas’s pitiful performance is yet another missed opportunity to lead his people into a better, more promising era. Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been pressuring him to adopt a more pragmatic stance toward peace negotiations.

Instead of using Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital as an opportunity for more intransigence, use it as a chance to extract more concessions in negotiations with Israel. Instead of focusing on self-pity and victim-playing, Abbas should be taking advantage of the changing attitudes toward Israel to enlist Arab nations’ support for a comprehensive peace agreement that would improve the lives of Palestinians.

Unfortunately, Abbas seems incapable of changing course. He has thrived under the status quo of protracted conflict for so long that he cannot imagine a better reality. Doing so would be tantamount to admission of his own failure.

Just days before the reconciliation was announced, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called for the formation of an Arab army to “lead intifada after intifada, until the job” of liberating Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is accomplished.

And nothing has changed, as we can see with Shevach’s murder. Following the shooting, Hamas issued a statement in praise of the “heroic attack.”

Because the Palestinian people — who themselves suffer when money is funneled to terrorists for the murder of innocent Israelis rather than to helping their social, educational and economic needs — do not act against their own government, it is time that the Israeli and American governments take real steps to eradicate Palestinian violence.

Shevach’s friends say that the good-hearted family man was deeply loved by all who knew him. Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau described him in a statement as devoted to saving lives, teaching Torah and safeguarding Judaism in the Land of Israel.

In Shevach’s memory, the United States and Israel should clearly and definitively declare Fatah a terrorist organization — just like Hamas — and to treat those two major components of the Palestinian Authority as such, until the PA stops funding and perpetuating terrorism.

The US and Israel should immediately halt all cooperation with the PA, and place financial sanctions on anyone who does business with it.

Finally, Israel must close the roads connecting Palestinian Authority-controlled cities and towns to Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, so that Shevach will be the last Jew killed in Israel in cold blood — for nothing but his religion and faith.

Why is it that every time a female US government official says something that the Palestinian Authority (PA) doesn’t like, PA leaders respond by making a disparaging remark related to the fact that she is a woman?

In his bizarre, two-hour rant before the Palestinian Central Council on January 14, PA President Mahmoud Abbas declared that US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, “wears high heels not for elegance but to use to hit anyone who attacks Israel.”

When Condoleeza Rice was national security advisor, an official PA newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, called her (on June 23, 2002) “the dark complexioned lady,” “the Black Lady” and “this pitiful woman.” On November 3 of that year, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida railed against Rice for “her loose way of sitting, when she puts one leg on top of the other.” The writer then alluded to Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Another official PA newspaper, Al-Ayyam, referred to Rice (on June 22, 2003) as a “black widow,” a “single black lady” and a “black raven,” and patronizingly compared her to African-American supermodel Naomi Campbell.

And the PA’s problem with women is not limited to Republicans. In its October 3, 1997 issue, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida’s editor in chief denounced Arab leaders whom, he said, “would have sung love songs” to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright “were it not for her advanced age and the fact that she has passed her prime.”

I wonder if the PA’s disturbing obsession with the physical appearance of these female US officials is a reflection of the anti-woman culture that the PA fosters in Palestinian society.

Looking at a conflict, any conflict, requires us to understand the different sides. To understand the pain. But what applies to every conflict appears to be completely wrong when it comes to the Palestinians. The more we understand them, the more we bolster their rejectionism.

When we “understand” their claims about the Nakba, instead of telling them that what happened to them happened to tens of millions of people, and happened to Jews, even from Arab countries—we perpetuate the delusion of the right of return.

For years, they have been hearing the same chant from the Fisks and the Yiftachels. And if that’s what the world’s educated and enlightened people have to say, is there any chance that the Palestinians themselves give up the right of return fantasy? Does this “understanding” bring the chance for peace and reconciliation closer, or does it push it away?

When, for the sake of this “understanding,” they say we must understand what Jerusalem means to the Muslims in general and to the Palestinians in particular—although Jerusalem remained marginal and neglected under Muslim rule for centuries—they are helping inflate the lie. And when they spread the lie that the Palestinians are living under an oppression, which is similar to what happened at Auschwitz—it’s blood libel. Because under Israeli rule, the Palestinians have experienced huge growth in every possible area.

And no, terrorism isn’t justified, because the Palestinians have repeatedly received decent proposals for an agreement. They could have gained independence. They are the ones who have said no. And those who keep justifying them are justifying the continuation of violence and terror.

The public opinion in the free world is influential. It can and should have told the Palestinians and Israel: Get off your high horse. No more fantasies. There will be no return of Palestinians to Israel and no return of Jews to every hill in Judea and Samaria. But the understanding towards the Palestinians must stop—not to prevent an agreement, but on the contrary, to give it a chance.

In his speech on Jan. 14, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas made some important statements about future PA relations with the US. He insulted US President Trump, going as far as to say: "May your house be destroyed," and called US ambassadors David Friedman and Nikki Haley "an insult to an administration that respects itself." In addition, Abbas stressed that the Palestinians already decided in 1980 they would not have relations with any country that recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital, indicating that this is still policy. Finally, Abbas also mocked American aid, saying the US should not do the PA "any favors by paying us money."

Abbas' advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs and Supreme Shari'ah Judge, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, likewise ridiculed the US and its financial aid to the PA, asking: "What idiocy has taken control of your minds to delude you that Jerusalem is for sale, or that one grain of sand from Palestine, all of Palestine, is for sale, or purchase, or bargaining?"

With these statements, Abbas and Al-Habbash emphasized the anti-US messages PA and Fatah leaders have been disseminating since Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital in the beginning of December 2017, and which PMW documented in a recent report. The report exposes that the PA and Fatah are mocking Trump, demonizing the US, and rejecting US aid. Below is an updated version of the report that includes the additional statements by Abbas and his advisor Mahmoud Al-Habbash:

CNN's account of Mahmoud Abbas' dramatic speech Sunday (Jan. 14) was a blatant whitewash, completely skipping over the Palestinian Authority President's hateful and false statements about Jews as well as his call to arms. Among the Palestinian leader's falsehoods was his denial of any connection between Judaism and the Holy Land, the assertion that Jews preferred to be murdered in the Holocaust rather than come to pre-state Israel, and the charge that Israel is sending drugs to Palestinian youth ("Abbas slams US, others in defiant speech," Jan. 15).

Covering Up Abbas' Call to Arms

Also newsworthy, but omitted by the CNN piece, was what former U.S. Ambassador Dan Shapiro called Abbas'"ardent defense of the payments made to Palestinian terrorists in prison [which] tells Israelis, Palestinians, and the U.S. Congress that he will not educate Palestinians to give up violence directed at civilians in their struggle for independence."

Indeed, while ignoring Abbas' defense of payment to Palestinian terrorists, CNN's Andrew Carey and Abeer Salman maintained that Abbas "also said he advocated only 'peaceful popular resistance."

Though Abbas did say at one point in his long speech "I support only peaceful popular resistance," he also explicitly contradicted himself, giving his clear blessing to the use of violence.

There seems to be no limit to the lengths the Guardian will go to obfuscate or excuse Palestinian extremism, incitement or historical revisionism. Their former Middle East Editor, Ian Black, provided his take on Mahmoud Abbas’s recent speech in Ramallah and characteristically airbrushed (or just ignored) the most incendiary and indefensible parts in order to maintain the desired narrative of a ‘moderate’, even “principled”, PA President.

The headline of the Jan. 16th article, “Will Abbas’s ‘Eff off, Trump’ fury play into the hands of rightwing Israelis?”, is classic Guardian – expressing deeper concern over how ‘the Israeli right’ will respond to Abbas’s comments than to the truth or falsehood of his views, or the larger question of its political and ideological implications. As Matti Friedman has explained, within the media echo chamber, what Palestinians do, or what they believe, is not the story. The only actor in the drama who matters is Israel.

You can see this journalistic tick in the way Black introduces Abbas’s controversial remarks.
Israelis quickly condemned an “extremist” or “antisemitic” speech and focused on his description of Zionism as a colonialist movement by people who, he claimed, had no connection to the land they were settling. It was a bleak reminder of the irreconcilable narratives that lie at the heart of the conflict: Israelis and Zionists have always focused on their intentions in creating and maintaining a Jewish state; Palestinians on the results – and primarily the way they were displaced and oppressed by foreign intruders.

Israelis, readers are told, “quickly” condemned Abbas’s speech as extremist or antisemitic, presumably suggesting Israeli reaction was hasty, predictable, as if by rote. Moreover, Black significantly downplays Abbas’s charges. As Dov Lieber, Arab Affairs correspondent for Times of Israel reported, the Palestinian President’s lecture on Zionism alleged that “colonialism created Israel to perform a certain function”. It is a colonial project, Abbas continued, “that has nothing to do with Judaism, but rather used the Jews as a tool under the slogan of the Promised Land.” Contrary to Black’s claim, Abbas’s charge had nothing to do with “irreconcilable narratives”, a term suggesting the veracity of Abbas’s belief that that there’s no Jewish connection to the land can’t be determined.

The Mossad intelligence service provided critical information that led to raids on the homes of suspected Iranian spies throughout Germany, Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported on Tuesday.

Hours earlier, German authorities said they were conducting searches across the country in connection with ten suspected Iranian spies, with one report saying that they were members of an elite military force that had been eyeing Israeli and Jewish targets.

The weekly German-language magazine FOCUS reported that arrest warrants for the suspects listed them as being members of the al-Quds Force, which is part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

The alleged spies had been monitoring Israeli and Jewish targets, the report said.

The German journalist who first reported raids by local security forces at the homes of suspected Iranian spies across Germany supplied new details Wednesday about the Israeli and Jewish targets allegedly monitored by the suspects.

Josef Hufelschulte, of the weekly German-language magazine FOCUS, told Israeli public broadcaster Kan that the suspected spies had been gathering information on the Israeli embassy in Berlin, as well as on targets related to the local Jewish community, including kindergartens.

The operatives were monitored by German intelligence services for two months before the raids were conducted, Hufelschulte said.

On Tuesday, German authorities said they were conducting searches across the country in connection with 10 suspected Iranian spies, with FOCUS magazine claiming that they were members of an elite military force that had been eyeing Israeli and Jewish targets.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday praised a series of recent moves by US President Donald Trump and expressed confidence that the US would relocate its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem within a year.

“My confident assessment is that it will move much faster than people think, within a year from today,” he told Israeli reporters on a flight from New Delhi to Gujarat during a state visit to India.

Last month, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that relocating the embassy to Jerusalem would likely take at least three years, and quite possibly longer. “It’s not going to be anything that happens right away,” he said in a speech at the State Department reported by The New York Times. “Probably no earlier than three years out, and that’s pretty ambitious.”

Trump promised to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a December 6 speech at the White House in which he also formally recognized the city as Israel’s capital.

It began with a regular tour of the Temple Mount compound by a group of 42 Jews, which included rabbis and politicians. At some point, they ran into a provocation of local Arabs and Waqf officials, who got in their faces and verbally attacked the group, yelling the familiar pre-detonation slogan, “Allahu Akbar.”

At which point, the group members decided on the only proper monotheistic response and began shouting back: “Adonai hu ha’Elohim” (God is the only deity) and “Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad” (Hear, Oh, Israel, God is our Deity, God Is One.”

And that threw the Israel police into a loop, because, according to protocol, only Muslims get to declare their fealty to the Creators, while Jews have been arrested up there for saying a blessing before eating an apple or drinking a bottle of water.

The police clearly lost it, and resorted to violence – and that just when confronting 42 Jews who chuck the discriminatory rules and reach out to their Father in Heaven. What would happen when a thousand Jews ascend to the holy mountain? Who could stop them?

A military court judge on Wednesday ordered that 16-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi and her mother, Nariman — who were both filmed slapping and shoving IDF soldiers last month in their West Bank village of Nebi Saleh — remain behind bars until the end of legal proceedings against them.

In his decision regarding the younger Tamimi, Judge Haim Balilti wrote that “the gravity of the offenses of which she is accused do not allow for an alternative to custody.”

The Ofer Military Court judge argued that security forces treated the Palestinian teenager “leniently over a long period of time.”

“The intensity of her violence establishes a clear rationale for danger and indicates that her actions stem from the promotion of an ideological goal,” Balilti added.

Jerusalem – Today the Israeli Military Court ordered the continued remand of Ahed Tamimi pending her trial. Tamimi was indicted on multiple counts of assault of law enforcement officers, slingshotting stones, and incitement to commit suicide attacks.

Since her arrest, NGOs claiming to promote human rights have been calling for her release, primarily on the basis of her age as well as the political motivations surrounding the incidents.

In response, Lt. Col. (res.) Maurice Hirsch, former head of prosecution in Judea and Samaria and Military Justice Consultant at NGO Monitor, states, “Tamimi’s repeated attacks on security forces, other violent crimes, and incitement to terrorism would in most, if not all, Western legal systems warrant her arrest pending trial. NGOs cannot have it both ways: arguing that she is treated too harshly for a 16-year old, but also lauding her for engaging in an intentional provocation against soldiers.”

NGO Monitor notes that the NGOs advocating for Tamimi’s release regularly attack the military courts, claiming inherent bias. However, today’s decision shows that the court acted independently and applied the law, basing its decisions on the evidence presented and the other relevant factors.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is taking aim at Israeli school textbooks, claiming they encourage murder of Palestinian Arabs.

In its weekly meeting on Tuesday, the PA government headed by Rami Hamdallah expressed its full support for the decisions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Central Council from earlier this week.

The PLO Central Council had authorized the organization’s Executive Committee to suspend its recognition of Israel (though the PLO never actually recognized Israel despite pledging to do so), to stop the security coordination with Israel and to stop the economic dependence on the Jewish state.

The PA government expressed willingness to help implement the decisions in order to realize the "legitimate national rights, first and foremost the right of return of our people to their homeland."

The government also called on the international community to provide international protection for the "Palestinian people", to formulate an international mechanism for settling the conflict in order to reach a two-state solution and to recognize the state of “Palestine” within the pre-1967 borders with eastern Jerusalem as its capital.

Gaza University Lecturer and Hamas TV Host Iyad Abu Fanun: Love for Jihad Is in the Palestinian People's Genes pic.twitter.com/TlV6pQAzez

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 17, 2018

Al-Aqsa Mosque Address by Sheikh Muhammad Ayed "Abu Abdallah": We Need a Caliph with His Finger on a Nuclear Button, Like Kim Jong-un pic.twitter.com/0RbzwBvGhz

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 17, 2018

A report from a United Nations panel found that remnants of missiles used in Yemen’s civil war originated in Iran, showing that Iran did not block the transfer of ballistic missiles to Yemen’s Houthi rebels, in violation of a UN Security Council resolution, CNN reported Monday.

UN Security Council Resolution 2216 demanded that member states “immediately take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer” of arms to parties in the Yemeni civil war including the Houthi rebels.

While the report also faults Saudi Arabia, which is leading a coalition to fight the Houthis and support the internationally-backed government of Yemen, CNN reported, that ” a significant portion of the report blames Iran” for its actions in Yemen.

“The Panel has identified missile remnants, related military equipment and military unmanned aerial vehicles that are of Iranian origin and were introduced into Yemen after the imposition of the targeted arms embargo,” the report reads. “As a result, the Panel finds that the Islamic Republic of Iran is in non-compliance with paragraph 14 of resolution 2216 (2015) in that it failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer, of Borkan-2H short-range ballistic missiles, filed storage tanks for liquid bi-propellant oxidizer for missiles and Ababil-T (Qasef-1) unmanned aerial vehicles, to the then Houthi-Saleh alliance.”

The UN report, which has not yet been officially released, appears to support charges made by United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley at a press conference last month, that Iran is the “arsonist” in the Middle East, destabilizing the region by transferring arms to terror groups.

A ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s armed Houthi group toward Saudi Arabia’s southern Jizan region was shot down by Saudi forces on Tuesday, Saudi state TV Ekhbariya reported.

The station gave no further details. There were no reports of casualties or damage.

The Iranian-aligned Houthis have fired several missiles at the kingdom, and while these have not caused any serious damage they have served to deepen tensions between Riyadh and its arch-rival Tehran.

Saudi Arabia accuses Iran of supplying missile parts and expertise to the Houthis, who have taken over the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, and other parts of the country during its civil war. Iran denies the charge.

Saudi Arabia is leading a coalition that has been fighting the Houthis in neighboring Yemen since March 2015, after the movement drove Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile.

Saudi Arabia said on Nov. 4 it had intercepted a ballistic missile over Riyadh’s King Khaled Airport, an attack that led the coalition to close air, land and sea access to Yemen in a move it said was meant to stop Iranian supplies to the Houthis.

In a rare friendly gesture to a country Israel still formally considers an enemy state, the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday empathized with the victims of two major terror attacks in Iraq earlier this week and called for closer ties between Jerusalem and Baghdad.

A short text posted to the Ministry’s Arabic Facebook page expressed the wish for normalization.

“Israel expresses great sorrow and shock at the deaths of innocents in terror attacks, and hopes that peace and stability will return to Iraq,” the text reads. “Israel extends its hand to its neighbors and waits for the day when the political circumstances will be conducive to the establishment of normal relations and fruitful cooperation for the benefit of all the peoples of the region.”

On Monday, two suicide bombers blew themselves up on the Iraqi capital’s Tayyaran Square, killing 38 people and injuring dozens. The twin attack shattered hopes that the country would stabilize after years of war and armed insurgencies.

“Given the long, trusted, and historic relationship between the United States and UNRWA, this reduced contribution threatens one of the most successful and innovative human development endeavors in the Middle-East,” UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl said in a statement.
“The reduced contribution also impacts regional security at a time when the Middle East faces multiple risks and threats, notably that of further radicalization.” he said.

“At stake is the access of 525,000 boys and girls in 700 UNRWA schools, and their future,” he said. “At stake is the dignity and human security of millions of Palestine refugees, in need of emergency food assistance and other support in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At stake is the access of refugees to primary health care, including pre-natal care and other life-saving services. At stake are the rights and dignity of an entire community.”

“The US Administration seems to be following Netanyahu’s instructions to gradually dismantle the one agency that was established by the international community to protect the rights of the Palestinian refugees and provide them with essential services,” said Hanan Ashrawi on behalf of the PLO Executive Committee.
“This administration is thereby targeting the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people and depriving the refugees of the right to education, health, shelter and a dignified life,” she said.
The PLO official too said that shaving $65 million off the US donation would destabilize the region.

“It is also creating conditions that will generate further instability throughout the region and will demonstrate that it has no compunction in targeting the innocent,” she said, adding that, “Once again the US Administration proves its complicity with the Israeli occupation.”

The jihadist aim is to isolate Israel politically; to influence political leaders, public opinion, international institutions and international organizations so that on the day their planned offensive begins, no one will be there to support Israel and the Jews. The Palestinian Authority, the PLO and the Arab/Muslim states will be unhampered to do what Hitler was unable to do in historic Palestine -- make it Judenrein (free of Jews).

Terror is "to achieve Palestinian political goals, to influence Israeli politics, to favor a given Israeli candidate for the post of Prime Minister, to compel the Israeli government to conceal more land, to prevent a final peace settlement by maintaining a state of conflict that could eventually lead to total war, to erode Israeli and American resolve and to demonstrate to Arab population that peace is not an option and that the existence of the Jews on their land cannot be recognized". Some of the attacks occurred just when foreign representatives landed in Israel, "to prevent the revival of the peace talks." Mr. Jason Greenblatt should take that into consideration.

The same jihadist war is also underway against the Americans and all "infidels": Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Hindus, Buddhists, and in a general manner all those who do not believe in the "religion of truth", namely Islam; and against those Muslims who compromise with such so-called infidels.

This Article provides the first comprehensive, global examination of state and international practice bearing on Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which provides that an “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” This provision is a staple of legal and diplomatic international discussions of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and serves as the basis for criticism of Israeli settlement policy.

Despite its frequent invocation in the Israeli context, scholars have never examined – or even considered – how the norm has been interpreted and applied in any other occupation context in the post-WWII era. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) influential Study on Customary International Humanitarian Law lists 107 instances of national practice and UN practice applying or interpreting the prohibition, and all but two relate to Israel. Many questions exist about the scope and application of Art. 49(6)’s prohibition on “transfer,” but they have generally been answered on purely theoretically.

To better understand what Art. 49(6) does in fact demand, this Article closely examines its application in all other cases in which it could apply. Many of the settlement enterprises studied in this Article have never been discussed or documented. All of these situations involved the movement of settlers into the occupied territory, in numbers ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Indeed, perhaps every prolonged occupation of contiguous habitable territory has resulted in significant settlement activity.

It’s been nearly ten years since two terrorists stormed the Nariman House in Mumbai in order to kill the Jews who lived there. It was the Chabad House for the city, started by a young couple, Gavriel and Rivka “Rivky” Holtzberg. Two men stormed the building on November 26; by November 28, the terrorists, the, Holtzberg’s, and four Jews who had been passing through were dead. Rivky was five months pregnant at the time.

Their only son, Moshe Holtzberg, was two years old at the time. He was rescued from the horrors by his nanny, Sandra Samuel, who was granted honorary Israeli citizenship in 2010.

This week, Moshe returns to the Nariman House for the first time, along with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is visiting India to meet once again with Narendra Modi. Moshe will be with Netanyahu to commemorate a plaque that will serve as the first step in a Living Memorial to his parents at the Nariman House, situated in the Colaba district of Mumbai.

It’s difficult to conceive of the violence that took place that November, and it’s even more difficult to imagine how it must feel to a 12 year-old whose life is defined by something he (presumably) can’t remember. But the concept of the Living Memorial speaks to how we can constructively think and talk about those nights, not by focusing on the circumstances of death, but on the prospect of continuing life.

A massive missile deal between India and Israeli defense contractor Rafael is back on the table, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday, as he wrapped up his third day of a state visit to the subcontinent that sought to foster closer economic ties.

Netanyahu’s visit came shortly after Rafael Advanced Defense Systems had confirmed that Delhi backed away from a $500 million agreement to purchase Spike anti-tank missiles, casting a cloud over the trip.

“They are reauthorizing the Spike deal,” Netanyahu said as his plane took off for Mumbai from Ahmadebad, where he spent the day with Indian counterpart Narendra Modi.

Netanyahu said the details were being worked out, raising questions as to whether the final agreement would be as large as the canceled weapons deal.

But the prime minister insisted that the outlook on the deal was “very positive.”

Netanyahu announced the news as the centerpiece of a series of achievements during his five-day trip to the Asian giant.

Argentina will export more kosher frozen beef to Israel, following an official visit of Argentinian Vice President Gabriela Michetti.

Michetti on Sunday completed an official visit to Israel with an economic team of vice ministers to turn the good relations between both countries “to concrete economic improvements,” she told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting last week.

The first improvement was announced during the visit: Israel extended the expiration of frozen Argentine beef from 45 to 85 days, opening a new market of Argentinean kosher meat at Israeli supermarkets. Meat accounts for 63 percent of Argentinean export to Israel.

“We have excellent ties, also with the Jewish community of Argentina. We are also trying to leverage the economic issues. We want to deepen these ties so that bilateral trade and investments will grow. We mainly need to realize this view, that everything is done via actions, trade, investments and the market,” Michetti told Netanyahu during their meeting.

Israel is often referred to as the “Start-Up Nation” and is world renowned for its technological advancements. In this spirit, the IDF has made strides in the technological field. In 2017, the IDF integrated new technology, including 62 Merkava tanks, 30 “Namer” armored personnel carriers, 150 operational trucks, 35 night vision goggles, 180 multicopter drones, 40 loaders, 400 parachutes, 21,000 aiming devices, 120 Chevy Savannas, and 257 Jeeps. All of this new equipment helped the IDF take steps towards the future.

1. Yahalom Glasses
Fighting on screens and using virtual reality goggles used to be just for gamers, but that’s no longer the case. Soldiers in the Yahalom Unit of the Engineering Corps are using these same goggles for an entirely different purpose; overcoming the challenges of underground warfare.

VR (virtual reality) goggles allow these soldiers to learn about several different types of ammunition in a visual and accessible way. There are three kinds of VR goggles that are currently used. The first allows the user to coordinate their movements in the real world with those in the virtual space. The second has built- in motion detectors. The third type is controlled using a mobile remote control, meaning one can walk around and choose objects on which to focus.

2. UAV with Night Vision
Until recently, the IDF only used UAVs for daylight photography. Thanks to new thermal cameras with night vision capabilities, the “Matrix” UAVs can focus on small objects, even something as small as an assailant raising a knife to attack someone.

The Matrix as a whole is more advanced than the UAVs that the IDF used previously. It can stay in the air longer, focus on small objects and fly just over a mile high.

Commander of the Israeli Air Force Maj. Gen. Amikam Nurkin today appointed Major T. to be commander of an aviation squadron.

T., a transport pilot by training, will be promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and will be the first woman pilot in this position and the first woman to achieve this rank.

In addition, the Commander of the Air Force appointed Major M., an airborne flight controller by training, to command the control unit in operational headquarters. Major M.was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, becoming the first female air controller to be promoted to that rank.

Tag a friend who needs this door pic.twitter.com/IPC7Cy3CKG

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) January 16, 2018

It is not often that the UK House of Lords is made aware of the tragic plight of the Jews of Iraq, but in a debate on religious minorities in Iraq on 11 January, Baroness Ruth Deech managed to devote a few minutes to their history while appealing for the British government to take a proactive approach to the protection of minorities.

"Sometimes it is difficult for us here in this tolerant country to understand the role played by religion elsewhere. In the area under debate today, it is not just a question of choice of belief; religion equates with identity. Indeed, one reason why so many countries in the Middle East are in turmoil is that the nation states there, sometimes created by western colonialists 100 years ago, do not coincide with religious boundaries.

Those new states have bundled together people who identify with their communities across boundaries rather than in their own neighbourhoods. To be a religious minority is seen by the ruling class as if one was a foreigner at best and a traitor to the community at worst. It has become especially dangerous to be a minority since the rise of Daesh. Nor is this attitude confined to Muslims; we have seen the atrocities committed against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma by the majority. But in determining cash and protection allocation, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees does not include religious persecution as one of the vulnerability categories. It is time for religious persecution to be up front in UN relief work. Will the Government urge the UN bodies to confront this?

Global cosmetics chain Revlon recently offered Amani al-Khatahtbeh a Changemaker Award for her advocacy on behalf of Muslim women. But the writer and activist said on Tuesday she will be declining the recognition, because the makeup company just named Gal Gadot as its global brand ambassador.

“I cannot accept this award from Revlon with Gal Gadot as the ambassador,” she wrote on social media. “Her vocal support of the Israeli Defense Forces’ actions in Palestine goes against MuslimGirl.com’s morals and values.”

Revlon did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Khatahtbeh, who grew up in New Jersey as the daughter of Jordanian and Palestinian parents, is best known for starting the online magazine MuslimGirl.com in 2009. She also wrote a book, Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age, which was published in 2016.

“I can’t, in good conscience, accept this award from the brand and celebrate Gal’s ambassadorship after the IDF imprisoned a 16-year-old girl named Ahed Tamimi last month, an activist who is still currently incarcerated,” she wrote on Tuesday. “I think we are in a moment where we must persist that women’s empowerment includes ALL women.”

Jim Jefferies is an asshole. A hilariously entertaining asshole.

For close to two hours the Australian comedian who now lives in the US, paced a stage set up in the center of the Menorah Mivtachim Arena in Tel Aviv. He was vulgar, he was disgusting, he was offensive and he was uproariously funny. He was Jim Jefferies, basically.

As Jefferies pointed out on Hayom BaLayla with Guri Alfi Monday night, he didn't sell as many tickets as the last time he performed in Israel, in 2016. It's true that the hall was far from full, but Jefferies' target demographic of 20-something slightly unwashed men was out in full force. It's likely that the lower attendance had something to do with the influx of comedians in Israel this month; last week Chris Rock showed up and two weeks ago was Jerry Seinfeld - and there are few Israelis who can afford all three. In a way, Jefferies is the anti-Seinfeld, a man whose jokes are squeaky clean, well-rehearsed and often predictable. And Jefferies was a hell of a lot more entertaining.

With his signature lightning-fast wit, perfect timing and endless vulgarities the comedian was in top form Tuesday night. Perhaps he was happy to hear earlier in the day that his Comedy Central show was renewed for a second season. Or perhaps he's just doing what he loves. Either way, no topics were off limits, and no profanity left behind: His favorite and most frequent word of the night can't be printed here, but safe to say it rhymes with... runt. He was even selling mugs emblazoned with the word as people filed out of the show.

Jefferies had no problem jumping into jokes about his host country right from the start. "Stop fighting over this land, it's not that good," he said. "I mean, it's nice it's just not worth the argument, you know? I'll give you Tasmania or something... Florida maybe."

Lebanon’s interior ministry has overturned a ban on screening the newspaper drama The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Lebanon’s censorship board had made the decision to ban the film based on a “boycott Israel” list, which Spielberg appears on since he shot some scenes from the 1993 film Schindler’s List in Jerusalem, the Hollywood Reporter reported Sunday, citing a source involved with the movie’s international roll out.

But on Wednesday, the interior ministry decided not to sign off on the decision. “Interior Minister Nohad Mashnouk is going to allow the film to be shown,” a senior ministry official told the French news agency AFP.

The company distributing the film in Lebanon confirmed to AFP that the film about the Washington Post’s pursuit and publishing of the Pentagon Papers would be released in movie theaters in the capital of Beirut and elsewhere on Thursday.

In the last three years, at least five films directed or produced by Spielberg were screened in Lebanon, including The BFG, and Bridge of Spies.

AFP reported that a second film was censored by Lebanon this week. The film, Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe, is the story of about Israeli adventurer Yossi Ghinsberg who got lost in an uncharted part of the Bolivian Amazon in 1981. The film already had been playing in theaters for two weeks when it was censored and removed. In addition to the main character in the film being Israeli, one of the film’s producers also is Israeli.

Last month, a video showing a man waving a Palestinian flag and smashing the windows of a kosher Amsterdam restaurant went viral. Thereafter, two policemen — who stood by during the vandalism — overpowered the attacker.

Two days later, the attacker was freed by the police with a warning that if he committed additional crimes, he would be rearrested. Later, it became known that the perpetrator is a Palestinian-Syrian asylum-seeker who’s lived in the Netherlands for several years. He reportedly promised not to repeat his hate/terror crime in Amsterdam. The prosecution also withheld several salient facts from the public — for example, that the man was an ex-combatant in Syria’s civil war.

When the restaurant owner’s lawyer released this additional information, the prosecutor’s office said that it would seek disciplinary action against the lawyer. While the Palestinian Syrian was being investigated, the kosher restaurant was vandalized for a second time. Also, on New Year’s day, a rock destroyed the windows of the Chabad House in Central Amsterdam.

When the perpetrator of that attack came before the court, it was decided to request a psychological examination, which will take several months. In the meantime, the attacker will remain free. Michael Jacobs, a Jew, wasn’t so lucky. He was arrested for holding an Israeli flag on Amsterdam’s main square last summer because he stood too close to a pro-Palestinian demonstrator. Jacobs remained in jail for a full week. Yet there is nothing in the Dutch legal system which forbids his action.

When I was a child — having been born in the 1950s, under the shadow of the Holocaust — I naively thought that antisemitism was mostly a thing of the past, and that it vanished in the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz. Yet within the past few decades, I have witnessed antisemitism blossom into a socially acceptable hatred that has managed to make its way into the corridors of polite society in a fashion that is as overt, obvious and unconcealed as it is alarming.

Antisemitism has migrated not only into college classrooms and campuses, but into the most respectable chambers of the US Senate, in the very committees whose mandate is to authorize and appropriate taxpayer-funded programs to eliminate racism and antisemitism as well as other hatreds –and to appoint professionals within those agencies.

Recently, much of this antisemitic invective has been directed against a colleague of mine, Ken Marcus, who has been nominated to serve as assistant secretary of education for civil rights within the Department of Education. For reasons that I will explain, Marcus has been the victim of an ugly and disgusting smear campaign.

Marcus served in a similar capacity from 2004-2008 under President George W. Bush, as assistant secretary of education for civil rights, and later as staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights. He monitored and investigated complaints against minority groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ individuals and people with disabilities. A firm believer in free speech rights under the First Amendment, Marcus has always expressed the view that hate speech is protected speech under the Constitution, and that the best antidote for hate speech is more speech.

Dozens of advocacy groups on Monday called for the confirmation of Kenneth Marcus — a leading figure in efforts to combat campus antisemitism — to a prominent civil rights post at the US Department of Education.

The founding president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which aims to fight anti-Jewish and anti-Israel discrimination in universities and colleges — Marcus was nominated to serve as assistant secretary at the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. He previously held the same position under President George W. Bush from 2003-2004.

Marcus’ record was strongly endorsed by 60 “Jewish, Christian, education and civil rights” organizations in a letter sent to members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which is expected to consider his nomination this week.

The groups — representing “millions of your constituents” — praised Marcus’ protection of both civil liberties and free speech rights during a career that has included posts at the US Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

During his service, “Ken championed the civil rights of all Americans in a wide range of areas, including strengthening Title IX enforcement, fighting against racial segregation, increasing fair housing rights for the disabled, and ensuring that Jewish, Sikh and Muslim students were protected under Title VI,” the letter said.

The report then went on to promote equivalence between the murder of an Israeli civilian in a terror attack and the deaths of Palestinians engaged in violent rioting and terrorism.

“At least 16 Palestinians and one Israeli have now been killed since 6 December, when President Donald Trump reversed decades of US policy by recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and starting preparations to move the US embassy.

Fourteen of the Palestinians have been killed in clashes with Israeli troops, while two have died as a result of Israeli air strikes in response to rocket fire from Gaza.”

The BBC refrained (once again) from informing readers that the two people who “died as a result of Israeli air strikes” were members of Hamas.

“In one of the IAF strikes late Friday on a Hamas base in Nusseirat, located in the central Gaza Strip, two Palestinians were killed. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza named the men as Mahmud al-Atal, 28 and Mohammed al-Safdi, 30. […]

The terror group later confirmed the dead men were members of its military wing.”

As we see the BBC continues to frame the recent rise in Palestinian violence as having been caused exclusively by the US Administration’s announcement recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – rather than by the choices made by those throwing rocks and firebombs, launching missiles, stabbing a security guard at a bus station or shooting a volunteer first-aider on his way home.

At the same time, the corporation continues to refrain from producing any serious reporting on the long-standing efforts made by terror organisations to increase attacks (particularly in Judea & Samaria) and the incitement appearing in official PA media and on the social media of Palestinian factions.

Sackur’s presentation of course would not have surprised anyone familiar with the BBC’s long history of promoting the ‘one man’s terrorist’ narrative that fails to distinguish between means and ends and results in inconsistent BBC reporting on terrorism in differing locations.

Another notable point was Sackur’s adoption of Hamas’ own terminology and his breach [from 20:09] of the BBC Academy’s “journalists’ guide to facts and terminology” which, as noted here recently on two occasions, instructs the corporation’s staff not to use the term Palestine except in very specific circumstances.

Sackur: “Is the resistance in Palestine now in the hands of ordinary people – young people particularly – not with veteran leaders like you?”

Viewers and listeners may have noticed that during this interview some of the messaging they have previously received from the BBC was contradicted.

For example, the BBC’s long-standing and repeated claim that the Gaza Strip is occupied even though Israel withdrew from the territory over twelve years ago was contradicted by Zahar [from 04:00].

Zahar: “But lastly, lastly by our method of self-resistance, self-defence against the occupation in Gaza we succeed[ed] to eliminate the occupation in Gaza.”

As we saw in part one of this post, the January 8th edition of ‘Hardtalk‘ (aired on the BBC World News channel, the BBC News channel and on BBC World Service radio) was devoted to an interview with Hamas’ Mahmoud Zahar in which some of the messaging audiences have previously received from the BBC was contradicted.

Throughout the interview Zahar also promoted numerous falsehoods, smears and inaccuracies which went unchallenged by presenter Stephen Sackur – thereby leaving audiences with misleading impressions and false information.

1) Despite Hamas’ known misappropriation of thousands of tons of building materials intended for the repair and reconstruction of civilian homes damaged during the 2014 conflict and its spending of millions of dollars on tunnel construction and missile production rather than on public services for the impoverished residents of the Gaza Strip, Sackur failed to challenge Zahar’s claim that the poor quality of life in Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas “management”.

Zahar: “Yes, our life is very miserable – not because of bad management on our side but because of the crime committed by the Israeli occupation and by the cooperation of the Palestinian Authority with them and lastly by the impact of the international community, represented mainly by Mr Trump, against our human rights in the most important third shrine in Islam, al Aqsa Mosque.”

Student union leaders are set to be taken to visit Auschwitz to tackle anti-Semitism on campus, the Government has said.

Students from all 108 universities and university colleges in England are set to be taken to visit the former concentration camp to learn about the Holocaust as part of a Government-funded project.

The £144,000 programme has been announced amid concerns about high levels of anti-Semitism among university students.

Last month then-universities minister Jo Johnson said there were "unacceptable" levels of anti-Semitism among students.

Two sabbatical officers from each university will visit the former Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland in trips run by the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Student leaders will then take part in seminars which will teach them how to identify and tackle antisemitism at their own university.

The Government said the original 200 student leaders were expected to pass their experience on to another 7,500 students across the country as part of a programme of events.

Chelsea Football Club is launching a campaign to fight anti-Semitism in football, targeting fans as well as players and the club’s support staff.

The long-term initiative begins on 31 January at Chelsea’s Premier League game against Bournemouth and forms part of what the club describes as “on-going inclusion work”, through the Chelsea Foundation’s Building Bridges campaign. The initiative is supported by the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich.

Chelsea Football Club wants to raise awareness of and educate players, staff, fans and the wider community about anti-Semitism in football.

The move follows anti-Semitic chants by Chelsea FC fans during their win at Leicester last September that were condemned by the club.

As Breitbart Jerusalem reported, on that occasion blues supporters repeated a song about Alvaro Morata previously used to abuse London rivals Tottenham, who have a large Jewish fanbase.

“Alvaro, Alvaro. He comes from Madrid. He hates the f****** Yids,” sang Chelsea supporters at the King Power Stadium.

“The club and the players appreciate the fans’ passionate support away from home, of course,” Chelsea head of communications Steve Atkins said in that game’s aftermath. “But the language in that song is not acceptable at all.”

The presenter of a top-rated US reality TV show is in the spotlight for using an antisemitic epithet during a scene in which a guest was challenged for not haggling over a price of $36,000.

In the most recent episode of the DIY Network‘s “Texas Flip N Move” — a reality show in which houses and other lodgings are refurbished and then “flipped” at a profit — that aired last Friday night, Jan. 12, presenter Toni Snow asked the guest whether he was going to “Jew us down” after she and her sister Donna informed him that $36,000 was their “price point” for a refurbished school bus.

After the delighted guest replied, “That’s a done deal right there, all day,” Toni Snow interjected: “You’re not even going to bicker a little bit? Jew us down?”

“Texas Flip N Move” is one of the DIY Network‘s leading shows, currently in its seventh season.

A spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League roundly condemned the show, pointing out the connection between Toni Snow’s remark and the ancient antisemitic depiction of Jews as driven by financial greed.

Israeli high-tech companies raised $5.24 billion in 620 deals in 2017, an increase of 9 percent compared to the $4.83 billion attracted in 2016, in 673 deals, Israel’s IVC Research Center and attorneys Zysman, Aharoni, Gayer & Co. (ZAG S&W) said in a report Wednesday.

The total capital raised by Israeli high-tech companies has been growing since 2013, the data showed. The jump in 2017 was fed by four large deals of over $100 million each, capturing 12 percent of the total amount raised. These were funds raised by cybersecurity startup Cybereason, ridesharing firm Via, AI- insurance firm Lemonade and Skybox Security.

The average financing round in 2017 rose to an average $8.5 million in 2017, from an average $3.6 million in 2013, the IVC-ZAG 2017 Israeli High-Tech Capital Raising Survey said.

Israeli VC funds invested $814 million in 2017, the highest sum since 2013, and an increase of 25 percent from $651 million in 2016, making up some 16 percent of all of the money raised by Israeli high-tech companies, with the other 84% of funds raised by foreign VCs and other investors, both Israeli and foreign.

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) has launched a global campaign encouraging millions of people to use social media to raise awareness about the Holocaust.

The campaign calls on people in every country to hold up a sign with the words “We Remember,” and post it on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter using the hashtag #WeRemember.

The campaign took off last Monday and has already spread to 45 countries.

“Antisemitism is more prevalent today than it has been at any time since World War II, and bigotry and discrimination still rear their ugly heads all around the world,” said WJC CEO Robert Singer. “This is why we all must declare, together, that we remember.”

Holocaust survivors, lawmakers, government ministers and religious leaders from around the world, as well as soccer and basketball stars, have joined the project and have been photographed holding up “We Remember” signs.

WJC President Ronald Lauder said it was the responsibility of the young generation to teach their friends about the horrors of hatred and spread the message that “never again” means “never again.”

In the summer of 1944, Albert Franko was being deported from the Nazi-occupied Greek city of Piraeus to Auschwitz, when suddenly he was taken off the train — because his wife was a Turkish citizen.

His life was saved due to the personal intervention of Selahattin Ülkümen, Turkey’s consul-general in Rhodes.

At his own initiative and with tenacious perseverance, Ülkümen saved some 50 Jews. Most of them weren’t Turkish citizens, but he told the Gestapo that Turkish law considers spouses of Turks to be citizens themselves, demanding their release. Survivors later realized that no such law existed, and that Ülkümen had invented it to save their lives.

Some 75 years later, Israel’s Foreign Ministry is honoring Ülkümen and 35 other foreign diplomats who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust with a monument at its Jerusalem headquarters and an exhibition to be displayed in more than 60 Israeli missions around the globe.

The exhibition, called “Beyond Duty,” pays tribute to the diplomats, hailing from 21 countries, who were recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

“In a time of supreme moral testing and in the darkest hours of the Jewish people, these people acted by the dictate of their conscience in order to save Jews, without regard for personal and professional consequence,” said Ran Yaakoby, who spearheaded the project.
Part of the exhibition’s panel on Selahattin Ülkümen (courtesy Foreign Ministry)

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Israel is eternally grateful and will forever salute their courage and moral example,” said Yaakoby, the director of the ministry’s Department for Combating Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Remembrance.