President Donald Trump has promised that in the Middle East under his presidency, “there are many things that can happen now that would never have happened before.” Two speeches of the last ten days offer dramatic confirmation of the emerging reconfiguration of America’s relationship with Israel and the Middle East under his leadership.

In a two-hour speech before the Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) last week, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, denounced the British, Dutch, French, and Americans for having conspired, ever since the 1650s, to create a Jewish colonial outpost that would “erase the Palestinians from Palestine.” As Abbas tells it, all this reached a climax on the eve of World War I, when the West realized that it was on the verge of collapse and that the Islamic world was “poised to inherit European civilization.” To put an end to this threat, the Western nations went about carving up the Muslim world so that it would be forever “divided, backward, and engulfed in infighting.” As for the United States, it has been “playing games” of this sort ever since then, importing, for example, the disastrous Arab Spring into Middle East.

Abbas summed up by demanding an apology and reparations from Britain for the Balfour Declaration and denying that the United States can serve as a mediator in the Mideast. Finally, he went to the trouble of cursing both President Trump and the U.S. Congress: Yehrab beitak (“May your house be razed”), he said.

I have been following the speeches of the PLO and its supporters in the Arab world for 30 years. Nothing here is new. These are the same things that Yasser Arafat, Abbas, and the mainline PLO leadership have always believed. It is a worldview that reflects an abiding hatred for the West, blaming Christians and Jews not only for the founding of Israel but for every calamity that has befallen the Muslim and Arab world for centuries.

Hezbollah is the most powerful terrorist organisation in the world. Yet Britain has proscribed only part of it: its military wing. This Thursday the MP Joan Ryan will lead a parliamentary debate aimed at designating the whole organisation, as the US, Canada and the Netherlands already do. Her chances are slim. The film Darkest Hour has reminded us of British ministers’ penchant for appeasement and, like Churchill, that is what she’s up against.

Hezbollah, the creation of Iran, emerged onto the world stage in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroopers in the most devastating terrorist attack before 9/11. Since then it has attacked in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East and planned strikes from Cyprus to Singapore. Last summer US authorities charged two Hezbollah terrorists with planning attacks in New York and Panama. Hezbollah is fighting to keep Assad in power in Syria and maintains an arsenal of 100,000 rockets in Lebanon, pointed at Israel.

During the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hezbollah was involved in Iranian-directed bombings that killed well over 1,000 British and US servicemen. Despite this, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe Hezbollah can freely raise funds for terrorism. Its supporters flaunt their assault rifle-emblazoned flags on our streets. They maintain sleeper cells in this country: planning, preparing and lying in wait for orders to attack.

When I worked for the Joint Intelligence Committee I monitored Hezbollah’s activities. I knew there was no division into peaceful and warlike elements. The regional states don’t buy it either; the Arab League designates the entire organisation. Even Hezbollah’s leaders don’t make any such pretence. In 2009 its deputy secretary-general confirmed that it was one unified organisation.

You wouldn’t think that one isolated Israeli counter-terror raid could explode every major myth about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. But last week’s raid in Jenin came pretty close to doing just that.

Overnight on January 17, Israeli commandos entered the city of Jenin in search of two particular Arab terrorists. When the operation was over a few hours later, the Israeli forces withdrew

Wait — the Israelis withdrew? But isn’t Israel “occupying” the Palestinians? That’s what J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace are always telling us. Just this week, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote that Israel is “ruling over millions of Palestinians.”

I guess that Rabbi Jacobs hasn’t been to Jenin lately. In fact, I would imagine that he hasn’t been there since at least 1995. That was the year when Israel withdrew all of its forces from the city (and the other areas where 98 percent of Palestinians reside), and a new power took over: the Palestinian Authority (PA). Counter-terror raids like the one in Jenin are the only occasions when Israeli forces enter PA-ruled cities.

[Eisner is] wrong about Democrats and liberals being unable to identify with Pence’s language. That would be a surprise to former President Bill Clinton, who often spoke of the way his religious background compelled him to support Israel. The same is true of other liberal Democrats who, whatever their differences with Pence about fiscal or social issues, share his ideas about America’s biblical heritage and the moral imperative for backing a Jewish state.

But Eisner’s lack of perspective isn’t confined only to Americans. She’s just as wrong about Israel’s founders, whom she claimed wouldn’t care for their achievement to be praised by Christian Bible-thumpers. But as much as those socialists didn’t share the faith of evangelicals, they did have an equal appreciation of the Bible. According to David Ben-Gurion, the Bible was the founding document of Jewish statehood and its history. He and other Labor Zionists were largely irreligious, but they wanted Israelis to be knowledgeable skeptics about the Bible, not its opponents or disconnected from it. And, unlike contemporary liberals, they were smart enough to know that the Jewish people needed to embrace its friends wherever they could find them. The contempt for Christian conservative defenders of Israel often heard these days on the left would have appalled them, not Pence’s emotional embrace of Zionism.

The Forward editor is also wrong about the definition of friendship. . . . [T]he problem with many on the left is that . . . they have come to believe that the only way to express friendship for Israel is to attack its government. . . . [T]he notion that it is the U.S. government’s duty to override the judgment of Israel’s voters and, in effect, to save Israel from itself is neither respectful nor particularly friendly. . . .

Trump, Pence, and their evangelical supporters haven’t redefined the term “pro-Israel” in an effort to exclude liberals. The opposite is true. Liberals have sought to change [the term’s] meaning in order to justify support for policies that undermine Israel’s self-determination and to delegitimize the Jewish state’s conservative friends. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Israel needs to make a well-funded, concerted effort to win back the support of progressives in the United States, Deputy Minister for Diplomacy Michael Oren said Wednesday, responding to a dramatic survey published the day before that showed that Democrats are almost as likely to sympathize with the Palestinians as they are with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian peace conflict.

“We have to make a decision to set us a strategic goal of bringing the Democratic party back on our side,” Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, told The Times of Israel. “This effort requires resources and personnel. You need a team of serious people with a serious budget to work on this in a very serious manner.”

Oren said an office comparable in size to the Strategic Affairs Ministry was required to adequately tackle the problem. Headed by Gilad Erdan, that ministry is tasked with combating the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement.

BDS is the cough, but this the flu

Earlier this month, the government approved a plan setting aside $75 million to fight BDS.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to fly to Switzerland on Wednesday afternoon to participate in the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, through Friday.

Netanyahu will meet with over ten heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Swiss President Alan Brest, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rota, a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office said.

No meeting with US President Donald Trump, who will also be attending the conference, has been confirmed.

The prime minister’s delegation will include his wife Sara, National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat and his chief-of-staff Yoav Horowitz.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Wednesday with several heads of state on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, urging them to act to fix the Iran nuclear deal and vowing that Israel would not allow Iran to establish military bases in Syria.

Netanyahu held meetings with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, Swiss President Alain Berset and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev.

All five meetings were behind closed doors.

Netanyahu said the meeting with Merkel was “important.”

“We spoke about the nuclear agreement with Iran. I said that in my opinion, the only option at the moment is to introduce real, rather than cosmetic, amendments that will prevent Iran from nuclearization, which is currently guaranteed under the agreement,” Netanyahu said, adding that “I expressed my appreciation for the real commitment of the chancellor to Israel’s security.”

Netanyahu said that Merkel “repeated her commitment and said that she understands our concerns about the nuclear agreement. She does not necessarily agree with the way we want to deal with it….but she understands that it has to do with our concern for something that threatens our very existence, which she is committed to [safeguarding].”

Netanyahu raised the Iran issue at his other meetings too.

It is difficult to imagine a more pro-Israel speech than the one given by US Vice President Mike Pence. What moved more than a few listeners to tears was Pence’s utter lack of cynicism or desire to find favor in the eyes of Israel’s many detractors. Pence spoke from the heart and “words that come from the heart enter the heart,” to paraphrase a verse from Proverbs.

What magnified the impact of Pence’s speech was the simple fact that everything he said was perfectly true.

Israel’s fight with radical Islamic extremism, whether on the West Bank, in Gaza or on the northern border, truly is, as Pence stated, “a battle between right over wrong, good over evil, and liberty over tyranny.”

The formation of America, which was envisioned as an ideal before it was realized in actuality, is strikingly similar to the Exodus story. Both are narratives of people escaping persecution who enter a promised land, bringing with them high moral aspirations. This perception has deep roots in American history. As Pence noted, John Adams, America’s second president, declared that the Jews “have done more to civilize man than any other nation.”

And both the Exodus and the creation of the United States of America are similar to the story of Israel’s formation, which is about the establishment of a free and democratic nation-state for a downtrodden people who had just endured a Holocaust.

At the very outset of Pence’s speech, Israel’s democracy was on display.

A delegation led by Zionist Union MK Hilik Bar, the head of the Knesset’s two-state caucus, will meet in Dublin next week with a group of Palestinian Authority officials.

The Palestinian delegation will include PA Supreme Shari’a Court Judge Mahmoud Habbash, who is an adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and former PA ministers Ashraf al Ajrami, Tahani Abu Daqqa, Anwar Abu Eisheh and Samih al Abed.

The MKs going besides Bar are Deputy Finance Minister Yitzhak Cohen (Shas), Akram Hasson (Kulanu) and Saleh Sa’ad (Zionist Union).

The organizers of the meeting from the British organization Forward Thinking invited 10 Likud MKs to attend, but they all said no, except for MK Oren Hazan. When the Palestinians found out Hazan was coming, they threatened to all cancel their participation, so the organization canceled Hazan’s invitation.

“Wow, I am really hurt,” Hazan responded on Twitter. “Please, super-terrorists: Don’t boycott me. Seriously, when Abu Mouse boycotts you, it means one thing – they are s-c-a-r-e-d!”

Bar said the cancellation of Hazan’s participation was unfortunate. He said it was important that right-wing MKs such as Hazan meet the Palestinians, and that the Palestinians meet MKs like him.

European countries do not think they can replace the United States as the main broker of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a senior White House official said Tuesday, pouring cold water on efforts by Palestinians leader Mahmoud Abbas to court the EU as a replacement for the US.

“There isn’t a single European country or other country we’ve spoken to since the December 6 announcement that in any way, shape or form believes a US-led process could be replaced,” a White House official told reporters during a briefing Tuesday. “They all want to work with the US, despite the Palestinian reaction.”

Since Trump’s Jerusalem decision last month, the Palestinian leadership has refused to meet with US officials on peace talks and has repeatedly said the US can no longer be an honest mediator in the conflict.

While US Vice President Mike Pence was in Israel this week, Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, snubbed him and instead flew to Brussels trying to woo the European Union to take from Washington its mantle of main sponsor of the peace process.

On Monday, European Union Foreign Policy chief Federica Mogherini said Brussels was ready to take a “central role,” alongside the United States, expanding the international role in mediating between Israel and the Palestinians.

With the U.S. withholding millions in aid to the Palestinians agencies — including UNRWA, the notorious UN body that perpetuates Arab “refugee” status, first created after the Arab invasion of 1948 — Abbas is looking to the Europeans to foot the bill. Abbas, who is in the 12th year of his 4-year-term, also needs hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign ‘aid’ each year to secure the loyalty of his henchmen and armed militia.

The Palestinian Authority, created following the Oslo Accord of 1993, has failed to create any viable economy in the territories it holds. It was turned into a kleptocracy by the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and inherited by his Soviet-trained protege Abbas.

“I want to reassure Palestinians and President Abbas of our continued support, including financial,” Mogherini said on Monday. “The EU and its member states are collectively by far the largest donor, the largest supporter for the Palestinians. And our support will continue, including to UNRWA.”

The U.S. and the EU were on a confrontational course and ‘staging a long-distance duel” over Arab-Israeli conflict, commented the German current affairs magazine Der Spiegel. “US Vice President Pence plays up to the Israeli government in Jerusalem, Europeans give a platform to Palestinian President Abbas. The discord sits deep.”

Despite German weekly’s resentful tone, the contrast between the U.S. and the EU couldn’t have been sharper. While Vice President Pence visits a trusted U.S. ally and addresses the Israeli Knesset with a speech steeped in biblical references, the EU top brass embraces the PA-chief Abbas, an unrepentant terrorist, and anti-semite. These divergent affinities are, however, very natural. While the U.S. and Israel are true democracies based on Judeo-Christian values, the EU and the PA are run by unelected apparatchiks and power-grabbers deceiving the very people they purport to represent.

Border Police forces on Tuesday thwarted a terrorist attack at Tapuach Junction in Samaria. The terrorists were wounded in the indecent, no injuries were reported among the Israeli troops.

According to available details, the troops, deployed in the area as part of their routine security assignment, spotted two Palestinian teens approaching one of the bus stations at the junction, which is a major West Bank crossroads.

The troops approached the teens, who refused to stop. One border policeman fired a warning shot in the air and in response, one of the teens pulled out a knife and both attempted to rush the bus stop.

The troops then fired at the teen's legs. One suspect sustained minor wounds, while the other suffered moderate injuries. Both were treated at the scene and taken to Rabin Medical Center in Petach Tikva for treatment.

The infrastructure in the Gaza Strip is crumbling, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said during a tour of southern Israel bordering the Hamas-run territory, because the terrorist group is “preventing rehabilitation” of the territory it rules, The Times of Israel reported Sunday.

Rivlin called on the world to recognize “that the ones who are preventing rehabilitation are Hamas.” He added that “Israel is the only one in the region, that whatever the situation, transfers basic essentials to the residents of Gaza, so that they can sustain the body and mind.”

Rivlin’s observations comport with those made by other observers in recent years.

The Times of Israel’s Avi Issacharoff reported in March 2016 on a scheme where Hamas enriched itself using Qatari money that was intended to build homes for Gazans. Although the homes were meant to be free, Hamas charged families $40,000 each, ostensibly to connect utilities, collecting an estimated $38 million to fund its other activities.

Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh pointed out a month earlier that Hamas has prioritized building up its terror infrastructure over rebuilding Gazan homes, writing that “the last thing Hamas cares about is the welfare of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

amas on Tuesday denounced U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, saying his prayer there "desecrated" a Muslim place of worship.

The Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray, is part of the Temple Mount compound, which also houses Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.

Pence visited the site on the last leg of his Middle East tour. He stood solemnly with his hand on the wall and left a note, as people who pray there traditionally do. In response, the Gaza Strip-based terrorist group said that by praying at the Wall, Pence had "defiled Al-Aqsa with a Jewish ritual."

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said Pence's tour in Israel was "unwelcome." He accused the U.S. of promoting pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian policies, saying that Pence's speech before the Israeli parliament "proves the USA has a strategic alliance with the Zionist entity."

America "doesn't take the interests and requirements of the Islamic and Arab nation into consideration," Haniyeh said.

The UN expressed “deep concern” on Tuesday over the killing of a Gaza man by family members last week over his suspected collaboration with Israel.

The Hamas terror group suspected Ahmed Barhoum aided Israel in killing three of its commanders during the 2014 Gaza war.

In a statement, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said it “condemns this killing in the strongest terms and reminds the de facto authorities in Gaza of their legally binding obligation to respect and protect the right to life and security of every person in Gaza.”

It called on Gaza’s Hamas leaders “to undertake immediate, full, independent and impartial investigation into this killing in order to bring the perpetrators to justice and to deter further violations of the right to life.”

On Friday, Barhoum’s family said that a relative shot him dead, but did not say which family member pulled the trigger. It said they followed developments in the Hamas investigation and believed their son was guilty.

Palestinian students protest ongoing closure of Rafah border crossing (by Egypt): "We're students, not terrorists." pic.twitter.com/jY8qBP7P93

— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) January 23, 2018

A top US finance official is urging Lebanon to sever links between the Hezbollah terror group and the country’s financial system.

Visiting Lebanon this week, the Treasury Department’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea “urged Lebanon to take every possible measure to ensure (Hezbollah) is not part of the financial sector,” according to a statement by the US embassy in Beirut cited by Reuters.

The visit came amid a renewed push by the US to disrupt Hezbollah’s sources of income, including its money laundering and drug trafficking activities worldwide.

In his talks with Lebanese officials, Billingslea “stressed the importance of countering Iranian malign activity in Lebanon,” according to the embassy.

Iran is Hezbollah’s political patron and chief source of funding.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, responded on Tuesday to reports of chlorine gas being used by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's army against civilians in Eastern Ghouta.

In a statement, Haley said that the reports of chlorine gas being used by the Syrian regime "are yet another demonstration of its blatant disregard for international law and cruel indifference for the lives of its own people."

In November, Russia vetoed the renewal of the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), the independent, impartial, technical group unanimously created by the UN Security Council to investigate the perpetrators of chemical weapons attacks in Syria and identify those responsible.

“When Russia killed the JIM, they sent a dangerous message to the world – one that not only said chemical weapons use is acceptable but also that those who use chemical weapons don’t need to be identified or held accountable. If these reports are true, this attack in Syria should weigh heavily on their conscience. The United States will never stop fighting for the innocent Syrian children, women, and men who have become victims of their own government - and those who continue to prop it up,” Haley said.

In a video, a woman protesting in the streets is seen saying, "You raised your fists and ruined our lives. Now we raise our fists. Be men, join us. I, as a woman, will stand in front and protect you. Come represent your country." Another woman, in a crime punishable by death, courageously chanted against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Her chants encouraged and prompted men behind her to chant also. These women can be labeled true heroes.

During the protests, in Iran, however, Western feminist groups did not even issue a simple statement of support for these extraordinary women, let alone take any concrete actions to help them.

The Iranian regime brutally cracked down on the protesters. It killed more than 20 people and injured many more. The regime also arrested more than 3,700 people, including young girls and women.

Again, there was not one statement from Western so-called feminists condemning the Iranian regime.

Leila, a young Iranian woman interviewed by the author via Skype, pointed out that, "The regime wants you to think that either there are no protests, or that the protest are solely about the economy. But I am not protesting the economy. Women are protesting the repressive Islamist laws. I am sick of Hijab, Sharia law and Sharia police. Women are sick of the Sharia police monitoring them constantly for what they wear, what they say, what they drink, where they go, and what kind of relationships they have".

A slated Tuesday meeting between the European Parliament and Iran's Aladdin Boroujerdi, chairman of the Committee for Foreign Policy of the Islamic Republic's parliament, sparked outrage because the Iranian MP participated in a conference featuring Holocaust deniers, and for his role in this month's crackdown of Iranian protests against the regime in Tehran.

"Outrageous EP hosts Iranian delegation to talk about climate change, counter-terrorism and trade. Anything but #humanrights and #Iranprotests," Anders Primdahl Vistisen, the co-chair of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, tweeted on Sunday.

The Danish MEP wrote last week on his Twitter feed that it is "shocking" that the EU "will give floor to Chair Foreign Affairs & National Security Committee at Iranian Majlis - key figure of violent crack down on peaceful protests" and that it "holds counter-terrorism seminar with biggest sponsor of terror in region & against own people!"

Vistisen is a member of the Danish People's Party, which is part of the European Conservatives and Reformists group.

Iran's regime allegedly murdered over 20 citizens and incarcerated 3,700 people for protesting in late December and January against the lack of political and economic democracy under the rule of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Twelve camels have been disqualified from an annual Saudi beauty contest after their owners were found to have used Botox.
The animals were ejected from the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, taking place near Riyadh, for violating strict beauty contest rules.

Cash prizes for camel competitions at the 28-day festival total $57million, so pressure to cheat can be intense.
Twelve camels have been disqualified from the beauty contest at Saudi Arabia's annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival after their owners used Botox on them

The rules of the beauty contest state that animals found with 'drugs in the lips, shaved, dyed in any parts or with changes from the natural form' are not allowed
The 28-day festival, which takes place just outside Riyadh, has total prize money in excess of $57million so the pressure to succeed is intense

A new handbook was issued to beauty contest entrants last year, Newshub reports.
'Camels that are found with drugs in the lips, shaved, dyed in any parts of the body, or with changes from natural form are not allowed,' the handbook says.

Aside from the beauty contest there are awards for camel racing, obedience training, camel hair art and the best photographs of camels.
Chief judge of the show, Fawzan al-Madi, told Reuters: 'The camel is a symbol of Saudi Arabia.

The choice facing Ivry on that day in October 1982 was only one example of a dilemma that has confronted many Israeli authorities over the course of the nation’s brief history — the violent and sometimes irreconcilable clash between the fundamental principles of democracy and a nation’s instinct to defend itself.

As a reporter in Israel, I have interviewed hundreds of people in its intelligence and defense establishments and studied thousands of classified documents that revealed a hidden history, surprising even in the context of Israel’s already fierce reputation. Many of the people I spoke to, in explaining why they did what they did, would simply cite the Babylonian Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” In my reporting, I found that since World War II, Israel has used assassination and targeted-killing more than any other country in the West, in many cases endangering the lives of civilians. But I also discovered a long history of profound — and often rancorous — internal debates over how the state should be preserved. Can a nation use the methods of terrorism? Can it harm innocent civilians in the process? What are the costs? Where is the line?

Increasingly, people want to talk. It was during a conversation in 2011 with a senior officer in a North Tel Aviv cafe that I heard for the first time about how Sharon had ordered that transport plane carrying Arafat to be shot down in 1982. He described everything in detail but set a stiff condition for publication of the story — another person had to describe the event on the record as well. Only by doing that could I publish the story. I went to see that person, knowing how difficult it would be to get him to speak about the episode. I approached in a roundabout manner before I touched on the relevant point. The man looked at me with his steely gaze, but then a softer and slightly sad expression came over his face. “For more than 30 years,” he said, “I have been waiting for someone to come and ask me about this story.”

No target thwarted, vexed and bedeviled the Israeli assassination apparatus more than Yasir Arafat, the charismatic P.L.O. leader who died in 2004. Sometimes he would simply escape, and sometimes the officials overseeing an effort would call it off because the target could not be confirmed or because the price in civilian lives was deemed too high. Time and again, the desire to kill Arafat placed Israel at the center of the ongoing debate about what a nation can and cannot do to survive. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

And it is important to remember that the issues mentioned are serious, but localised. After I released the last report, some press articles lost both perspective and context, painting Jewish existence at Warwick as an image of constant peril. Little could be further from the truth. As someone who constantly seeks context rather than headlines, and in support of Jewish students at Warwick, I need to address some of this here.

As a result of the exaggerated threat, Jewish students on Warwick released a statement that is worth reading. These students firmly believe that Warwick is one of the ‘greatest campuses’ in the UK for Jewish students. They remain proud of the growth and activity of the Warwick Jewish Israeli Society.

The facts speak in their favour. They firmly defeated the BDS motion, and passed a ‘Warwick Against Antisemitism’ motion in the students union, organising a ‘whole week celebrating the diversity in Israel and hosting holocaust survivors’. It was the BDS defeat that led to the small group of Faculty founding ‘Warwick for Justice in Palestine’ in the first place.

They accept they have issues with university support and individuals within the Student Union, but are insistent this does not reflect on their experience of Warwick as a whole. For them, most of the Faculty, and most of the student body are on-side and supportive. Anti-Israel activism is in general seen for what it is. Remember, only 10-15 students turned up for the event last Wednesday. On a campus that holds thousands.

This small group of activists are an issue, and whilst holding the greater picture in focus we must be allowed to deal with it. In context, and bearing in mind the real-life issues of the students. I am absolutely certain many of the Faculty on Warwick are appalled by the actions of the few. I am also certain over-exaggeration, confuses the issue, complicates life for all students on Warwick, and in many cases can be self -defeating.

What everyone deserves, is for the university to recognise the problem that does exist, and deal with it. The only question is – do they have the guts?

Please join me here as I discuss with Avi Abelow of Israel Video Network the implications of Mahmoud Abbas ripping off his mask, as well as the pressure building for Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May to go and the May/Trump fiasco.

The answer possibly lies in the fact that the Chanukah story is one of the few instances of a biblical battle waged against overwhelming odds. It is a tale, as the Jewish liturgy puts it, of rabbim be-yad me’atim, of the many falling into the hands of the few. As the film depicts, Churchill’s own cabinet contained those who, like Lord Halifax, were so frightened by the British plight that they urged negotiation and capitulation. Churchill’s choice of quotation from Maccabees is thus understood in the context of the verses earlier in the same chapter, where Judah’s own compatriots confess themselves daunted by their situation.

Who, when they saw the host coming to meet them, said unto Judas, How shall we be able, being so few, to fight against so great a multitude and so strong, seeing we are ready to faint with fasting all this day? Unto whom Judas answered, It is no hard matter for many to be shut up in the hands of a few; and with the God of heaven it is all one, to deliver with a great multitude, or a small company: For the victory of battle standeth not in the multitude of an host; but strength cometh from heaven. They come against us in much pride and iniquity to destroy us, and our wives and children, and to spoil us. But we fight for our lives and our laws. Wherefore the Lord himself will overthrow them before our face: and as for you, be ye not afraid of them.

In 1960, a retired Churchill met with David Ben-Gurion, another leader who had overseen a war in which the many fell into the hands of the few. Churchill gave Ben-Gurion an essay that he had composed in 1931 titled “Moses: The Leader of a People.” In it Churchill appears to describe his own journey during the decade to follow.

“Every prophet,” he wrote, “has to come from civilization, but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society and all that it has to give, and then he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.”

It was in the wilderness, Churchill wrote, that Moses encountered a vision of a burning bush, through which God, from the midst of an ethereal fire, informed him that “there is nothing that man cannot do, if he will it with enough resolution.” Churchill composed these words in 1932; eight years later, he returned from the political wilderness, with “psychic dynamite” that helped save civilization. Churchill, seeking a source of inspiration in England’s darkest hour, turned to the story behind the Jewish Festival of Lights. It is a fascinating footnote in the life of a man who wrote these words in 1920: “Some people like Jews and some do not, but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.”

After Syrian independence from France in 1946, the 1947 partition plan, and the 1948 founding of Israel, Jews in Syria faced terrible discrimination, including several deadly pogroms and riots. By the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, there were an estimated 5,000 Jews in Syria, down from 40,000-45,000 in 1948. Jews could not work for the government or banks, or own telephones or driver’s licenses. Jewish property and passports were seized; bank accounts were frozen; Jewish schools were closed; the Jewish cemetery in Damascus was paved over. A 1964 law restricted Jews from traveling more than five kilometers from their hometowns. Jews who were allowed to leave for medical or business reasons had to leave behind money and family members as collateral.

The three largest Jewish communities, in Damascus, Aleppo, and Kamishli, were placed under house arrest for eight months following the Six-Day War. Jews began escaping in secret, sometimes with help from abroad, even though the penalty for attempting to escape or helping someone to escape was either imprisonment with hard labor or death, and any family members left behind could be imprisoned. Most of those who escaped were young single men. . . . As a result, by 1977, there were 500 unmarried Jewish women in their late teens and early twenties who had no marriage prospects within the Jewish community and who were not allowed to marry non-Jews.

Representative Solarz traveled to Damascus in December 1976, where he spoke with Jewish leaders as well as Syrian government officials. . . . [After Solarz lobbied the Carter administration], Secretary of State Cyrus Vance spoke with President Hafez al-Assad about the young women in February and May 1977; [then] National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski put Congressman Solarz in touch with President Carter, who made a personal plea to the Syrian president in May. Assad eventually agreed to let twelve women leave through proxy marriages.

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein on Wednesday accused European leaders of duplicity for embracing their local Jewish communities in the aftermath of anti-Semitic attacks and hate crimes, even as they accuse Israel of “fabricated war crimes.”

“The efforts to combat anti-Semitism and protect the Jews of Europe are sincerely appreciated,” said Edelstein at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Brussels.

“But what is the message when elected officials march with the Jewish community one day, and against Israel the next? When leaders embrace the local rabbi in solidarity after a hate crime and then treat Hamas as a legitimate voice? When an attack is anti-Semitic, and then Israel is denounced for fabricated war crimes?” he told the European Parliament.

“These contradictory messages do not build trust. Instead they prevent us from meeting our joint obligations,” he added.

Edelstein further charged that Europe’s “post-war sense of mission has faded,” and drew attention to anti-Israeli incidents across the continent over the past year that spiraled into anti-Semitism, including the firebombing of a Swedish synagogue and rallies in Vienna, London and Berlin where protesters shouted “Death to the Jews.”

Much of world Jewry is afraid of being the target of anti-Semitism, a new survey conducted by the World Zionist Organization ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day reveals.

According to the survey, whose findings were presented to the Knesset Aliyah and Absorption Committee on Tuesday, 27% of European Jews said they felt unsafe as Jews where they lived, compared to 11% of Jews in North America.

When asked how safe they felt wearing clothing or symbols that identified them as Jewish, such as a kippah or a Star of David, or using their Jewish names, 51% of Jews living in Europe said they felt unsafe doing so, twice the number of North American respondents who said they felt unsafe wearing items that identified them as Jews.

Nearly three-quarters (70%) of all respondents said they had experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic insults or remarks, and 29% of Jews from Europe said they had experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic vandalism.

Most of the respondents who said they had experienced or witnessed verbal anti-Semitic attacks said they had not reported the incident. When asked, 6% said they did not file a report because they feared for their personal safety; 30% opted "not to make a big deal out of it," and 42% said they had no faith in local law enforcement to handle the problem. Other explanations for not reporting the incidents included a sense that "anti-Semitism is too common to report. It's best to deal with it yourself,""They won't do anything anyway," and "The people who hurt me will say it was a joke."

For the first time ever, the European Parliament’s annual event to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day marked both the Holocaust of six million Jews and the Genocide of Roma and Sinti populations at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators.

The main ceremony, held on Wednesday afternoon, was preceded by the launch of an exhibition about the Roma and Sinti victims of the Nazis.

“The meaning of this exhibition is to give visibility to the Roma Holocaust, and that’s what we want to achieve – more knowledge about the Roma Holocaust,” Soraya Post, MEP, rapporteur on Roma fundamental rights, told The Jerusalem Post.

She said the joint commemoration gives an important message to mainstream society: “that all victims suffered the same thing by the same perpetrators during the same era.”

“We should be concerned by what we see in Europe today,” Post told the audience. “We cannot accept neo-Nazis marching in the streets. Please join us in this fight,” said Post, whose father was Jewish and mother Roma.

The involvement of UN Watch also apparently troubles Amnesty. Hillel Neuer of UN Watch has rightly drawn attention to the double standards at play here. By contrast with their new found fastidiousness, back in 2015 Amnesty co-sponsored an anti-Islamophobia event in Belgium where one of the four speakers held unambiguously extreme views:

Dyab Abou Jahjah is one of four individuals scheduled to speak at the rally. He has called the 9/11 attacks “sweet revenge,” said Europe made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion,” and labeled gays “AIDS-spreading faggots.” He has also questioned the existence of the Nazi gas chambers, and is a former fighter for the anti-Semitic group Hezbollah, an officially designated terrorist group by the U.S. and European Union. For his hateful activism, Abou Jahjah has been banned in the United Kingdom since 2009.

Amnesty has pushed back in the face of criticism.

Kerry Moscogiuri, Amnesty International UK’s director of supporter campaigning and communications, said a wide range of organisations held events at its offices “but we reserve the right to withhold permission for our building to be used by organisations whose work runs directly counter to our own.

Things were quite different back in 2011 when the MEMO event ‘Complicity in oppression: Do the media aid Israel?’ was booked to take place in the same venue as the cancelled JLC debate – and went ahead on schedule.

Here’s a reminder of some of the people whose work does not apparently ‘run directly counter’ to Amnesty’s own.

Journalist Abdel Bari Atwan – investigated by police following a university lecture at which he referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling America – is among those due to speak at the Complicity in oppression: Do the media aid Israel? event, in Amnesty’s central London headquarters on May 23.

LFI said it was “deeply worried” by Amnesty’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Given Hamas’ appalling human rights record, and the PSC and MEMO’s apologism for this, it is entirely inappropriate for Amnesty to support their work, especially since it has itself documented Hamas’ human rights abuses on a number of occasions.”

The event is jointly organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the pro-Hamas Middle East Monitor Online (MEMO) media and lobby group.

Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh, a regular contributor to MEMO, was this week forced to apologise after calling a Jewish pro-Israel blogger a “kike” in comments posted online.

It is now being suggested that Amnesty may have acted illegally in cancelling the event.

It is important to understand the death trap of the classic liberal position of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who, at Toronto's Pride Parade wore rainbow-colored socks printed with the Arabic words "Eid Mubarak" (a traditional Muslim holiday greeting). Trudeau just wished "happy pride to Allah", while many Muslim countries today condemn, if not murder, homosexuals.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained:
"no fewer than 40 out of 57 Muslim-majority countries or territories have laws that criminalize homosexuality, prescribing punishments ranging from fines and short jail sentences to whippings and more than 10 years in prison or death".

We need to understand that, as Milo Yiannopulous said, "as a gay person, the scariest words you will ever hear are "Allahu Akbar".

Gay fashion legends Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana faced a boycott and a backlash of controversy when they said they opposed gay "marriage" and adoption, find in vitro fertilization unnatural, and believe procreation "must be an act of love". The Italian pasta-maker Barilla caused outrage when its chairman Guido Barilla said he would only portray the "classic family" in his advertisements. But LGBT activists and celebrities have never once promoted a boycott of the Islamic regimes which stone, execute and jail their homosexual citizens. Why do they not orchestrate a campaign to boycott Iranian, Indonesian, Palestinian and Turkish goods?

The "LGBT resistance" need get out from under its "safe space" of Western "rights", complacency, moral relativism and security. They need to fight for their fellow persecuted "immorals" languishing in the Islamic world, beyond the borders of Western freedom. Their silence only encourages the intolerance aimed against them and others. It is not liberalism, permissiveness or tolerance. It is merely blindness, relativism and cowardice.

Leading communal representatives and advocates in the United Kingdom are drawing attention to difficulties faced by Jewish students on campus — particularly surrounding the subject of Israel — amid an ongoing parliamentary probe into free speech regulations at universities.

Baroness Ruth Deech, formerly a principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford, and the UK’s first independent adjudicator for higher education, told the Joint Committee on Human Rights last week that she encountered “many instances where unlawful speech” — including “antisemitism, often served up in the guise of criticism of Israel” — “goes on and is not stopped.”

“Hundreds of extremist speakers [are] arriving on campuses all over the country and not being stopped,” Deech said, echoing a report published by the Henry Jackson Society think tank in September, which found that several major British universities hosted Islamist speakers with a history of endorsing terrorist groups and making hostile remarks about Jews and Israel during the 2016-17 academic year.

“Universities are simply overwhelmed,” she explained. “There are hundreds of speeches going on every week, and it is very hard for them.”

A group of BDS-holes have staged a bizarre protest at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Someone impersonating a caricature Jew, with Kippa, Jewish accent, large prosthetic nose and ears? Check

Impersonator ranting about killing “any children who stand in our way”? Check

Impersonator with girl (‘Ahed Tamimi’) imprisoned in a bubble? Check

Rolling the bubble over the Israeli Jewish Steven Spielberg’s star? Check

It is like they are not even trying to hide their disdain for Jews anymore.

Women aspiring to land prominent roles in representing manufacturers of beauty products rushed to update their resumés this week after reports that two influential firms in the industry had hired antisemitic models as their public faces.

A flurry of activity occurred in the French capital, in Milan, and in New York, where fashion and cosmetics design and marketing personnel seek out fresh young talent, following exposure of social media activity by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh of Revlon and Amena Khan of L’Oreal that revealed antisemitic bias. In the sensitive realm of public relations, reason aspiring models, these major players in the industry could not have failed to check the backgrounds and reputations of candidates, and therefore could only have hired them or named them as awardees having already ascertained that the two harbor hatred for Jews and Jewish sovereignty.

“Clearly it’s an asset to express dislike for Jews in this industry, so I’d better start showcasing it,” resolved Amy Thorpe, 20, of Lansing, Michigan. “The difference in beauty and talent between the women who get selected and the ones who didn’t quite make it is so narrow, so subtle, that every little advantage has to be brought to bear. I can only hope that my antisemitism puts me over the top the way Ms. Khan’s and Ms. Al-Khatahtbeh’s did for them.”

“Oh, no, I haven’t made a single anti-Israel or anti-Jew Instagram post,” fretted McKayla Murphy, 21, of Coral Gables, Florida. “I made sure to put ‘anti-Israel protesting’ in the ‘interests’ section of my CV, but I’m sure everyone’s going to do that now. I need to find a way to make my existing portfolio reflect the antisemitism the executives are clearly looking for. I’m so stressed right now, I can’t even tell you.”

After taking control of Baghdad from Saddam Hussein, US troops discovered what came to be called the Iraqi-Jewish archive in the waterlogged basement of the Iraqi secret police headquarters. This priceless collection of Jewish books and documents was shipped to the US for restoration at a cost of $3 million.

And now: it’s heading back to Iraq.

In spite of fierce protests by Iraqi Jews and even members of Congress, the US government, which is committed to an agreement signed in 2003, has announced that it will return the archive next September.

Why is this a problem?

Not only were its contents originally stolen from the rightful owners (the Jews of Iraq), but upon the archive’s return, it will almost certainly become inaccessible to scholars as well as to any Jews who may be interested in their own history.

Enter Al Jazeera and its article by Dalia Hakuta entitled, “Iraqi-Jewish archive triggers traumatic memories.”

In the first paragraph, Fisk expresses concern that “the four principle US peacemakers” under Bill Clinton “were all Jewish Americans” and derides as fanciful “the myth that American peacemaking in the Middle East was even-handed, neutral, uninfluenced by the religion or political background or business activities of the peacemakers”.

There was a time when we all went along with the myth that American peacemaking in the Middle East was even-handed, neutral, uninfluenced by the religion or political background or business activities of the peacemakers. Even when, during the Clinton administration, the four principle US “peacemakers” were all Jewish Americans – their lead negotiator, Dennis Ross, a former prominent staff member of the most powerful Israeli lobby group, Aipac (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) – the Western press scarcely mentioned this.

(Fisk actually gets a detail wrong. Whilst most of Clinton’s Mid-East peace advisers – Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, Robert Malley and Daniel Kurtzer – were indeed Jewish, one, Gamal Helal, was Arab.)

In further support of his argument, Fisk then quotes Israeli Meron Benvenisti writing, in Haaretz in July 1993, that “it is hard to ignore the fact that manipulation of the peace process was entrusted by the US in the first place to American Jews…” and warning of “the tremendous influence of the Jewish establishment on the Clinton administration”.

CAMERA's Israel office today prompted corrections of a Jerusalem Post headline and article which inaccurately referred to radical anti-Israel activist Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, as a journalist.

The headline had originally stated: "Zioness Movement hits back at journalist who called them 'fake' organization."

In addition, the article's second paragraph initially referred to Abunimah as a "pro-Palestinian journalist." Yet, Electronic Intifiada does not practice journalism, and Ali Abunimah is not a journalist.

As previously noted by CAMERA's Gilead Ini, the radical activist has termed Israel the "Zionist butcher regime" and its army "the cowardly, murderous rabbleof a psychotic apartheid settler-colony." Ali Abunimah, opposes the existence of the Jewish state in any borders and has tweeted that supporting Zionism is "continuation in spirit" of the Holocaust. He has called for violent attacks against Israelis and has suggested that Israel targets the organs of Palestinian children. Electronic Intifada’s Rana Baker literally cheered when three Israeli teens were abducted in June 2014. “Wonderful wonderful news that three settlers have been kidnapped,” she said on Twitter. “Celebrations celebrations. Cheers everybody (Zionists excluded!)” Abunimah came to her defense. Another EI contributor, Joe Catron, has said: "Zionists are racist scum. Never let them forget it. In their homes, in their workplaces, in the streets, remind them. Rania Khalek published a piece at EI criticizing the far-left The Nation for running two many pieces written by Jews (never mind that the Jews were critical of Israel.)

Vice President Mike Pence's recent visit to Jerusalem provided an opportunity for the anti-Israel Christians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to run for the cameras and tell everyone how bad Israel is.

In a now all-too-predictable turn of events, a Christian “leader” who has little, if any influence on life in Palestinian society, was recently portrayed as a credible source of information about the Arab-Israeli conflict by journalists in the United States.

The Christian in question is the former Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, His Beatitude Michel Sabbah, who has made a career of demonizing Israel and downplaying Muslim violence against Israel — and Christians. In a segment that aired on Monday January 22, 2018, he told a reporter, "Our fear is not from our people, from Muslims,” Sabbah said. “Our fear is from America.”

H.B. Sabbah's message fit in neatly with the thrust of CNN reporter Ian Lee's report — that “U.S. foreign policy is hurting the local Christian community” in the Holy Land. The problem for that narrative is that Israel's local Christian population has increased from 34,000 in 1949 to 130,000 today, an increase of 282 percent.

This increase did not stop H.B. Sabbah from chiding the U.S. for its support of Israel, declaring that it is bad for Palestinian Christians. “American policy must change in the Middle East," he told CNN. "If truly the American administration is Christian, go back to the commandment of love. You love Israel. That's very good. But you [should also] love the Palestinians if you're Christian. Jesus said, love everyone.”

It is hard to believe that after recent events, Christians in the Middle East fear American policy more than they do the prospect of jihadist violence, but His Beatitude Sabbah is a former Catholic Patriarch — in Jerusalem no less — so who are outsiders to argue?

Just in case it wasn’t already clear what a total garbage person Paul Nehlen is, today he spent a few hours on Twitter reminding everyone that he is an anti-Semitic nutcase.

Nehlen, who has launched another challenge for Speaker Paul Ryan’s Congressional seat despite losing by a humiliating 68 points in 2016, is annoyed that an article posted at Buzzfeed last week reported how he was coordinating with alt-right Twitter users to attack his critics in the “Jewish media.”

Nehlen attempted to refute the accusations of anti-Semitism by posting a series of tweets complaining about Jews in the media.

Yes, really.

In a string of tweets Monday afternoon, Nehlen claimed that the private message discussions that Buzzfeed reported were merely “a coordination effort by my supporters on my behalf.” He then argued that the references in these messages to the “Jewish media” aren’t anti-Semitic, but are actually a “well-founded observation.”

Churchgoers in Budapest said a senior lawmaker will attend a ceremony honoring the Nazi collaborator Miklos Horthy that they are organizing on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The KESZ group, a Christian organization, said this in an invitation for the January 27 event at Budapest’s Main Parish Church of the Assumption, noting it will be attended by Sandor Lezsak, who is deputy speaker of the National Assembly, which is the Hungarian parliament, and who is also a member of the Fidesz ruling party.

“In the Holy Mass, we remember with affection and respect the late governor Miklos Horthy (1868-1957), who was born 150 years ago,” read the invitation, according to a report Tuesday in Szombat, the Jewish Hungarian weekly. The editorialized article said the event was “provocative” though it is not yet clear whether it was planned to take place on January 27 for the date’s symbolic significance.

Also scheduled to attend is Sandor Szakaly, who in the 2014 government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban was appointed to head the Veritas Historical Research Institute. Szakaly said in an interview that year that the 1941 deportation and subsequent murder of tens of thousands of Jews was an “action of the immigration authorities against illegal aliens.”

The far-right candidate in an Austrian state election was under pressure Tuesday after a magazine report about song texts celebrating the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities.

According to the Falter weekly, Udo Landbauer of the Freedom Party (FPOe), which is in the national governing coalition, is deputy chair of a student fraternity behind a songbook containing the texts.

According to the weekly, the lyrics of one song reads: "In their midst comes the Jew Ben Gurion: 'Step on the gas, old Germanics, we can make it to seven million.'"

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust during World War II. David Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister of Israel.

Other songs pay tribute to the Condor Legion, the Nazi unit responsible for the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, as well as paratroopers behind atrocities in Crete in World War II, Falter added.

Finland will investigate evidence suggesting that soldiers of its army were involved in killing Jews during the Holocaust, the office of Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said.

The announcement about the initiation of the probe, the first of its kind in Finland, came Wednesday in a letter to Efraim Zuroff, a hunter of Nazis for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Earlier this month Zuroff urged Niinistö to set up an inquiry following the discovery of a written testimony by a Finnish Waffen-SS officer who said he actively participated in the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine.

“The Finnish government will, in response to the recent concerns, fund a further independent survey of the operations of the Finnish Volunteers Battalion of the Waffen-SS and particularly examine its operations in Ukraine,” Hiski Haukkala, the secretary general chief of the cabinet of the president of the Republic of Finland, wrote to Zuroff. “Should any criminal activities be uncovered they will be followed by due process,” he added.

Zuroff told JTA the probe will be “an important development” that is part of a broader process in Scandinavia, where Denmark and Norway acknowledged their troops’ roles in actively killing Jews only in 2014 and 2013, respectively.

A man has been arrested in Stamford Hill after allegedly shouting “Heil Hitler” and shoplifting from a kosher bakery.

The incident occurred on Monday evening at 22:30 when a man allegedly shouted “Heil Hitler” at a group of Jewish women, who called Stamford Hill Shomrim, the Jewish volunteer neighbourhood watch patrol. The man then allegedly shouted “Heil Hitler” at them too, before shoplifting from a kosher bakery.

Stamford Hill Shomrim volunteers then stepped in to detain him until the Metropolitan Police Service arrived to arrest him.

Once again, we applaud our brave colleagues at Stamford Hill Shomrim for stepping in to ensure that this man could be arrested.

A leading learning disability and mental health charity has opened an investigation after one of its employees reportedly posted on Facebook an account of how she told a Jewish man: “The 40s called…your shower’s ready”, according to controversial anti-racism group Hope Not Hate.

Julie Brownlee, from Lowestoft, allegedly made the comment, an apparent reference to Nazi gas chambers which were sometimes disguised as showers, to the man, whom she also referred to as a “Jwish [sic] prick” on social media, at a Christmas party in response to him criticising her shirt.

In reply to Ms Brownlee’s Facebook post, former National Front activist, Paul Warburton, replied: “Fire up the ovens”.

Ms Brownlee’s role involves helping people with disabilities and learning difficulties to find employment and independent living. Those she helps would have been murdered under Nazi Germany’s programme to kill those with certain disabilities.

As well as posting her outrageous, antisemitic comments, Ms Brownlee also posted asking for party game ideas for the adults with learning disabilities whom she was assisting. The post attracted some appalling replies which Ms Brownlee commented would not “go down well with the powers that be”.

A book printed in 1546 that was looted in Poland by the Nazis during World War II was recently found in the University of Potsdam Library and returned to its rightful owners in Israel.

The book, Sefer Mitzvot Gadol, written by Rabbi Moses of Coucy and printed in Venice by Daniel Bomberri, explains the fundamentals of the 613 commandments of the Torah.

The book was returned to the family as part of a German initiative to return Nazi looted heirlooms to their rightful owners.
Berl Schor and his son David, an attorney, flew to Berlin to accept the book from the University of Potsdam on Monday and reunite it with the family’s extensive collection in Israel.

David Schor, a keen family historian, told The Jerusalem Post that he had identified the book online by coincidence.

“I often search online because many new documents and information are becoming more readily available,” he said. “I typed in the name of my father’s maternal great, great, great grandparents just for the sheer fun and all of a sudden the photograph of the book appeared on my screen.”

What happens when a communications satellite runs out of juice? That’s a problem Effective Space hopes to address with its life-extending Space Drone.

Effective Space, which has its R&D center in Tel Aviv and headquarters in London, last week signed a $100 million multi-year contract with a major regional satellite operator and hopes to launch two Space Drones by 2020.

The 400-kilogram Space Drone is designed to work with satellites that are running low on fuel but are otherwise operational. A Space Drone will dock with an existing satellite and provide station-keeping and altitude-control capabilities.

Space Drone will use its own electric propulsion to maneuver into position with the target satellite, then take over maneuvering the satellite itself – either for the long-term or for shorter activities (such as moving an aging satellite into a “graveyard orbit”).

Effective Space’s managing director is Daniel Campbell, previously head of the connected car group at Israeli electric car startup Better Place. Effective Space was started in 2013 by Arie Halsband, former general manager of the space division at Israel Aerospace Industries.

"The possibility of having the Israel Natural Gas Lines Company take part in building a pipeline for exporting gas to Europe is being considered," Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water Resources Yuval Steinitz told the company's management and board of directors, headed by chairperson Eitan Padan. "The project of exporting gas from Leviathan to Europe is making progress, and the possibility of including Israel Natural Gas Lines in the work of building the undersea export pipeline is under consideration. The company has a significant role in continuing to promote connection of the economy to natural gas, and it is good that there are efficient, lean, and successful government companies like Israel Natural Gas Lines." Steinitz was speaking at the presentation of Israel Natural Gas Lines' multi-year strategic development plan. The involvement of a government project in this giant project increases the chances that it will materialize.

The plan pipeline for transporting gas from Israel to Italy via Cyprus and Greece will be 2,100 kilometers long, making it the world's longest undersea pipeline. The cost of construction, slated for completion in 2025, is estimated at NIS 25 billion. Six weeks ago, the energy ministers of Cyprus, Greece, Israel, and Italy signed a memorandum of understanding for construction of a gas pipeline from Israel to Italy.

This ambitious project, however, is far from being realized. The engineering difficulty in this difficult infrastructure project lies in its undersea route, which reaches a depth of 3.3 kilometers, and in volcanic sea bottom between Cyprus and Greece. This feature is liable to cause damage to the pipeline that will be very difficult to repair. Another difficulty of no less importance is the project's economic viability. The average natural gas price in Europe over the past year was around $5.40 per BTU, while the average price in Israel is not much cheaper -- $5.30.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon have reason to be proud as they attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week: A new index that rates economies around the world ranks Israel in 25th place, right after the U.S. and Japan.

The new index takes into account a number of variables to rank the overall economic development of various countries: average per capita income; unemployment vs. participation in the workforce; fertility; public debt; poverty rate; equality; air quality; the availability of vital natural resources; foreign investments and more.

Ahead of the Davos conference, World Economic Forum economists applied the new criteria to the nations of the world. Norway topped the list, followed by Iceland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Australia and Austria.

Economists are suggesting that the new model replace existing ones that measure per-capita income and growth, which are considered "quick" indices that tend to indicate countries' strength. According to the researchers, these traditional criteria do not accurately reflect a country's true economic strength, especially since the global financial crisis of 2008.

In addition to being ranked the 25th-strongest economy in the world, Israel's ratio of government debt-to-gross domestic product has dropped to 59.4%, the first time it has come in at below 60%.

Two major US publications have listed Israel within their top ten rankings, citing the country’s military prowess and innovation capabilities, respectively.

Web-based publication US News and World Report, best known for its influential ranking lists, named Israel as the 8th most powerful nation in the world. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News listed the Jewish state as the 10th most innovative, hailing its high-tech industry and technological advances.

Partnered with global marketing communications company BAV Group and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, US News surveyed more than 21,000 people from four regions of the world and asked them to associate 80 countries with specific attributes.

The power aspect of the survey measured how “economically” and “politically influential” a country was and took into account both its “strong international alliances and strong military alliances.”

“Israel has a technologically advanced market economy with cut diamonds, high-technology equipment and pharmaceuticals among its major exports,” US News also noted in its report, adding, however, that the county still “has one of the most unequal economies in the Western world, with significant gaps between the rich and poor.”

Rounding out the top 10 after Israel were two Arab rivals: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

"I lost a close friend in the terror attack in the “Hypercasher” in Paris because he was Jewish. Today, three years later, I feel proud to be fighting terror in the IDF.” - Pvt. Noémie pic.twitter.com/2k9esUHp6G

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) January 23, 2018

Written in encrypted ancient Hebrew, one of the last unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls has finally been deciphered by a University of Haifa post-doctoral researcher. According to Dr. Eshbal Ratson, the almost impossible year-long mission was like “putting together a jigsaw puzzle — without knowing what was the picture.”

Using hi-tech images provided by the Israel Antiquity Authority’s Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, Ratson, 38, spent countless hours in front of her computer manipulating, deciphering and joining the 60 minuscule “puzzle pieces” which now form a comprehensive “calendrical scroll,” a document which outlines the intricate mathematical computations used by the Qumran sect to set the rhythm of their year and way of life.

Its discovery is being hailed by scholars this week as “important” and “exciting.”

“It’s always exciting to discover a pile of tiny fragments that were basically considered to be a hopeless conglomerate of fragments and realize that meaningful text can be extracted from that,” said Tel Aviv University Prof. Noam Mizrahi. “It is important on a number of levels.”

The monumental deciphering of this scroll, the second to last of the cache of more than 900 scrolls discovered near Qumran in Israel’s Judaean Desert beginning 70 years ago, could only have been completed with new digital technologies, said Ratson.

The conference urges the wise people of the Jews themselves to take into consideration history, which witnessed their persecution in every place yet they were tolerated only under the Muslim civilization, and to expose Zionist practices contrary to the teachings of Moses, peace be upon him, (including)  violation of the sanctity and the theft of the land and the looting of our sanctities .

In pursuit of the perfect pout, a dozen camels have been disqualified from a camel beauty pageant in Saudi Arabia for receiving Botox injections.

What distinguishes a beautiful camel is not just its height, shape and the placement of its hump. A full, droopy lip and large features are essential to achieving camel celebrity-status in the multi-million dollar industry of camel pageantry.

“They use Botox for the lips, the nose, the upper lips, the lower lips and even the jaw,” said Ali Al Mazrouei, 31, a regular attendee at Gulf festivals and son of a top Emirati breeder. “It makes the head more inflated so when the camel comes it’s like, ‘Oh look at how big is that head is. It has big lips, a big nose’.”

Beauty season is in full swing and 30,000 camels have gathered for the second annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, the largest pageant in the Gulf. It takes place in Al Dhana, 120 kilometres from Riyadh, and runs through January following Abu Dhabi's Al Dhafra Festival.

Prize money at the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival totals US$57 million (Dhs209.3 million), with more than US$31.8 million for pageantry alone. About 300,000 visitors have attended the festival since it began on January 1, up a third from last year.

Days before it started, Saudi media reported that a veterinarian was caught red-handed performing plastic surgery on camels. At his clinic, camels were not only given botox but went under the knife to reduce the size of their ears. Delicate ears are a winning attribute on some Saudi breeds.

 Cheaters are creative, said Ali Obaid, a camel owner and pageant guide from Medinat Zayed. “For example they start to pull the lips of the camel, they pull it by hand like this every day to make it longer. Secondly, they use hormones to make it more muscular and Botox makes the head bigger and bigger. Everyone wants to be a winner.”

In a freewheeling press availability on Thursday, US President Donald Trump said the US would no longer transfer monetary aid to the Palestinians unless they entered peace negotiations with Israel, and excoriated the Palestinian leadership’s reaction to his decision last month to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“That money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace, because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace, and they’re going to have to want to make peace, too, or we’re going to have nothing to do with it any longer,” he said.

Sitting alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before their bilateral meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump called Palestinian Authority officials’ unwillingness to meet with members of his administration — including US Vice President Mike Pence during his visit to the region last week — “disrespectful.”

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has also recently sought to have European powers replace the United States as the primary mediator in Middle East peace talks.

“If you look back at the various peace proposals, and they are endless, and I spoke to some of the people involved. And I said, ‘Did you ever talk about the vast amount of funds, money that we give to the Palestinians? You know, we give hundreds of millions of dollars.’ And they said, ‘We never talk about it,'” Trump said. “Well, we do talk about it. When they disrespected us a week ago by not allowing our great vice president to see them, and we give them hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and support, tremendous numbers, numbers that nobody understands, that money is on the table.” (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Full text: Netanyahu-Trump meeting in Davos

The US leadership is looking beyond its recent cuts to the the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, with the State Department reexamining the entirety of its aid budget to the Palestinian Authority, Hadashot news reported Wednesday.

According to the TV station, which indicated the report was based on US sources, the $100 million cut to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) earlier this month may well only be the start, as the crisis between Washington and Ramallah deepens.

A top proponent of further cuts is said to be US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who reportedly wants the Palestinian leadership to pay for its attitude towards the US government and President Donald Trump. Other officials are said to oppose further cuts.

There was no confirmation of the TV report.

.@nikkihaley: "President Abbas declared the landmark Oslo Peace Accords dead. He rejected any American role in peace talks. He insulted the American president. He called for suspending recognition of Israel." pic.twitter.com/5BaU4nRtY8

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 25, 2018

Even as the Palestinian Authority faces major funding cuts from the US, it has purchased a new luxurious $50 million private jet to be used by President Mahmoud Abbas, Hadashot news reported Wednesday.

The report, which did not provide sourcing, said the plane was set to be delivered to Amman within weeks, and will be stationed there for use by the PA chief.

Funding for the plane was said to have been provided both from the PA budget ($20 million) and from the Palestinian National Fund ($30 million).

The report comes amid deep cuts to US aid to the Palestinians, and reports that further cuts may be coming.

When US President Donald Trump originally threatened to cut aid earlier this month, top PLO official Saeb Erekat said it would lead to starvation among Palestinian refugee children.

“Now, he is threatening to starve Palestinian children in refugee camps and deny their natural rights to health and education, if we don’t endorse his terms and dictations,” Erekat said, referring to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Not only is rhetoric like this from Jordan-approved Imams a clear-cut violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (which makes incitement to genocide a crime), Jordan's tolerance for anti-Jewish and anti-Western rhetoric at the site is a violation of the treaty signed between Israel and Jordan in 1994.

"Allah called them 'infidels' so why should I be ashamed to call them that?... There is only one kind of punishment for those people: to stop them, to wreak vengeance upon them, and to teach them a lesson. This is not achieved through tolerance, negotiations, or kindness."— Palestinian Imam Issam Amira, using the Al Aqsa Mosque, June 18, 2016.

In the United States, landlords who allow their tenants to use a property for criminal enterprises, such as the sale or manufacture of drugs are liable to having their property seized in a process called "asset forfeiture." Maybe a similar process needs to be applied to Jordan's custodianship of the Temple Mount, for clearly, the Hashemite Kingdom is not serious about preventing the site from being used for criminal incitement against Jews and Westerners.

In an interview, a Fatah official described “all of the Palestinian land” as covering the area “between the [Jordan] River and the [Mediterranean] Sea.” This leaves no room for the State of Israel, obliterating it in its entirety:

Deputy Secretary of Fatah Revolutionary Council, Majed Al-Fatiani: “It is not enough that only the residents of Jerusalem stand against [the occupation] in its streets, alleys, and neighborhoods... This act needs to spread over all of the Palestinian land between the [Jordan] River and the [Mediterranean] Sea. Our identity is between the river and the sea. Our national popular sovereignty is between the river and the sea.” [Official PA TV, Palestine This Morning, Jan. 1, 2018]

Palestinian Media Watch has documented many statements by PA and Fatah officials using this specific term - “from the river to the sea” - to indicate the size of “Palestine,” thereby erasing the State of Israel. In addition, Palestinian leaders use numerous other ways to pass on to Palestinians this ideology of not recognizing Israel in any borders.

One such way is by consistently using a visual map of “Palestine” that includes all of Israel.

After US Vice President Mike Pence's private visit to the Western Wall this week, Abbas' Fatah Movement has accused Pence of "defiling the Al-Buraq Wall":

"Pence defiles the Al-Buraq [Wall] plaza, and the occupation forces reinforce their presence at the Al-Aqsa Mosque." [Facebook page of the Fatah Commission of Information, Culture, and Ideology,
Jan. 23, 2018]

"The Al-Buraq Wall" is the name used by Palestinians for the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple because the wall is said to be where Islam's Prophet Muhammad tied his miraculous flying steed named Al-Buraq during his Night Journey. Palestinian Media Watch has exposed numerous statements by Palestinian leaders denying the Jewish historical ties to Jerusalem and the existence of a Jewish Temple at the site.

Pence is not the only one the Palestinians have accused of "defiling" Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem. In a speech in 2014, which has been rebroadcast numerous times since December 2017 by official PA radio and TV, PA Chairman Abbas called on Palestinians to prevent Jews "in any way" from "defiling our holy places":

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: "We have to prevent them, in any way whatsoever, from entering the Sanctuary. This is our Sanctuary, our Al-Aqsa and our Church [of the Holy Sepulchre]. They have no right to enter it. They have no right to defile it. We must prevent them. Let us stand before them with chests bared to protect our holy places."
[Official PA TV, Oct. 17 - Nov. 4, 2014; Official PA TV and PA radio station The Voice of Palestine,
from Dec. 6, 2017 to most recently Jan. 21, 2018]

At a protest vigil, Secretary of Fatah's Nablus branch Jihad Ramadan called the US "an enemy of the Palestinian people and its aspirations for freedom and independence." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Jan. 23, 2018]

The Big Lie of Palestine is that the Islamic colonists are the indigenous population of Israel and that the Jews are colonizing Palestine. But an indigenous people can never colonize their own country.

“Palestine” is a twisted colonial fiction. The name reflects Greek colonization of the region. And its use by the modern Islamic colonists shows their lack of any actual historical connection to Israel.

After all the agonized wailing about the deeply meaningful “Palestinian” connection to “Palestine”, they still haven’t come up with their own name for the place. One that they can properly pronounce. (There’s no proper “P” in Arabic.) But Abbas keeps coming up with new lies about which ancient people the “Palestinians” are descended from this week.

I can’t wait until he claims to be Cherokee.

The claim of the “Palestinian” colonists to Israel is a lie of Islamic imperialism. The Muslim powers of the region have funded the racist attacks by the PLO, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups on Jews.

The “Palestinians” are not the victims of colonialism. They are its perpetrators.

The fighting between Israel and Islamic terrorists is a struggle between imperialism and colonialism. The imperialists are not the oppressed Jewish minority that has been forced out of nearly everywhere else in the region. It’s the Arab Islamic majority that represses minorities across the region.

“Palestine” is a pathetic attempt to launder one imperial identity with another followed by shameless efforts to appropriate the identities of nearly every ancient people in the region. Including the Jews.

The only way to end the conflict is to end the lies.

How can one explain why an international statesman with a Ph.D. in history would consistently resort to such gross distortions of the historical record?

A skeptic might point to the quality of his education. Abbas earned a law degree at the University of Damascus, which is controlled by a regime with precious little regard for laws or facts.

Similarly, he received his Ph.D. from the Soviet-controlled Oriental College in Moscow, an institution whose regard for history may be measured by the fact that it approved Abbas’ Holocaust-denying dissertation.

But that would be letting Abbas off too easy. It has been four decades since he completed his dissertation.

That’s more than enough time to read some genuine history books and become acquainted with basic historical facts.

A more plausible explanation for his chicanery is that Abbas is well acquainted with the facts — but cynically chooses to disregard all but the ones that he can wield as weapons in his fight against Israel.

Support for the principle of a two-state solution among Palestinians and Israeli Jews stands below half, according to a public opinion poll published on Thursday.

Forty-seven percent of Palestinians and 46% of Israeli Jews said they back a two-state solution, which would include the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Taking into account Arab-Israelis, however, the total number of Israelis in favor of two states stands at 53%.

The survey of 1,270 Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem and 900 Israelis was jointly conducted in late November and early December by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research.

In a similar poll conducted in June 2017, 52% of Palestinians and 47% of Israeli Jews said they back the two-state solution.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said he supports the two-state solution, while his rival Hamas in Gaza has not backed such an arrangement.

A plurality of Palestinian Arabs support terror attacks against Israelis Jews, while only about a quarter say they support negotiations to resolve the conflict, a new poll shows.

According to the results of a survey released Thursday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly 40% of Arab residents of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip backed the use of violence against Israelis – called by the euphemism “armed struggle” for the purposes of the poll.

The survey polled 1,270 Arab respondents from December 7th to 10th, including 830 Arabs in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and 440 residents of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

The poll also showed that were a peace plan presented to both sides following negotiations, a majority of both Israelis and Palestinian Authority residents would not accept it.

An even smaller number of Palestinian Arabs, the PCPSR survey suggests, support the renewal of negotiations, with just 26.2% saying they believe the PA should pursue a peace deal.

A plurality of respondents (38.4%) said they backed the use of violence – called “armed struggle in the poll, the PA’s term for anti-Israel terrorism – including 43% of Gaza Strip residents. Smaller minorities supported waging an “unarmed struggle” against Israel (11% of all respondents), and maintaining the status quo (19.7%).

Jordan’s King Abdullah II said Thursday that the US now faces the challenge of getting Israel to make a significant concession in exchange for its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in order to get the peace process back on track.

“The challenge that the Americans have with the Israelis is that if this [Jerusalem recognition] is to make any sense, it’s to give something pretty good to the Palestinians,” he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria during an open interview session at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Abdullah gave the response after upon being asked whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu truly believed in a two-state solution. He “had his skepticism,” he said, but would reserve judgment until after US President Donald Trump presented his peace plan.

Trump had hinted that the move would require something big in return from Israel, saying in a cryptic tweet that “Israel, for that, would have had to pay more.”

The Palestinian leadership believes the United States has never given anything of “substance” to the Palestinians, Mahmoud al-Aloul, the deputy chief of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, said.

“Recently we were forced to review all of our relations with the American administrations in recent years, and not just the Trump administration. We assessed that nothing good will come from them for the Palestinian people and the nation, and this is completely clear,” said Aloul in an interview with the London-based Pan-Arab daily Al Quds Al Arabi published Saturday.

When asked by his interviewer whether this was his personal assessment, Aloul responded, according to a translation of the interview Wednesday by the Israeli watchdog Palestinian Media Watch, that this is “the assessment of the entire Palestinian leadership.”

“If we review the relations with all of the American administrations, we see that they have not given the Palestinians anything of substance but rather worked in order to pull the rug out from under their feet by exerting pressures on them, and that with all their might they support [the Palestinians’] enemy that is occupying their lands,” he said.
Mahmoud Abbas (center) attends the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on September 1, 2015. (Flash90)

Following the US decision in December to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the Palestinian leadership declared that Washington could no longer fulfill the historic and central role in the peace process it has held for over two decades.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is in Switzerland attending the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, said Wednesday that the world powers that negotiated a landmark nuclear agreement with Iran in 2015 must introduce "real – not just cosmetic – changes" that will prevent the Islamic republic from becoming a nuclear power.

Netanyahu met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on the sidelines of conference, telling reporters after the meeting that Merkel had "said that she understands our concerns regarding the nuclear agreement, even though she does not necessarily agree with the way in which we want to confront them."

The German government confirmed for the first time Wednesday that top-level consultations were being held in London on the matter and that German, French and British experts were discussing the matter with their American and Iranian counterparts.

"I said that, in my opinion, the only option at the moment is to put in real – not just cosmetic – changes that will prevent Iran from going nuclear, which would otherwise be assured by the agreement as it stands," Netanyahu said, noting the meeting, the first in six months, was "very important."

The German chancellor "understands that this touches on our concerns, the things that could threaten our very existence," he noted, adding that Merkel has "proven this commitment in the past at various opportunities. I am satisfied that our positions have been well understood."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is headed to Moscow next week for a whirlwind trip, during which he is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin and visit an exhibition on the Holocaust.

On the agenda of his meeting with Putin will be Iran’s attempts to entrench itself militarily in Syria, since Moscow is one of the key allies of both Damascus and Tehran. Other issues likely to come up in their talks will be the future of the Iranian nuclear deal, of which Russia is one of the signatories, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Monday morning, Netanyahu will fly on a small plane to the Russian capital, and return to Israel several hours later.

Netanyahu’s trip to Moscow comes on the heels of a weeklong trip to India earlier this month and a three-day stay in Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. In February, he is scheduled to participate in the Munich Security Conference, and the following month in the AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC.

Former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks met with US Vice President Mike Pence to help him frame religious and historical elements of his speech before Israel’s Knesset.

Sacks and Pence met in New York for 90 minutes prior to Pence’s departure for a two-day visit to Israel, part of trip that also included Egypt and Jordan, the Guardian reported.

Sacks’a spokesman Dan Sacker confirmed to the newspaper the meeting, which he called “positive and productive.”

Pence sought Sacks’s guidance on the sections of the speech which dealt with the historical connection between the Jews and Israel. He was not paid for the consultation.

The meeting “centered around how best to frame elements of the speech – in particular the biblical and historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, and the American and Jewish stories,” Sacker said in a statement.

US President Donald Trump’s top peace envoy, Jason Greenblatt, met Thursday with families of Israelis held captive in the Gaza Strip, expressing complete support for their plight and slamming the Palestinian terror group Hamas for confining them.

In a series of tweets, Greenblatt said he had met with families of Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, Israeli civilians who are believed to have crossed into Gaza of their own accord. He also met with the families of IDF soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, whose remains were seized after they were killed in battle during the 2014 war with Hamas.

Greenblatt, who previously met all the families in 2017, wrote that he had “again met with the Goldin & Shaul families,” adding that they are “suffering unbearable pain as a result the shameful, despicable acts of Hamas. All Israelis must be returned.”

The peace envoy then met the Mengistu and al-Sayed families. “How reprehensible of Hamas to cause such horrible suffering,” he said, echoing his previous remarks on the matter.

The US Embassy in Israel may already be preparing its expected move to Jerusalem, having purchased additional real estate in the Israeli capital for its consulate, Hadashot news reported Wednesday.

Consulate staff were seen moving equipment and boxes into the former boutique Eden Hotel, in the city’s Arnona neighborhood.

The US Consulate in Jerusalem currently operates two facilities: the main branch on Agron Street (where it has owned a building since 1912) and the Consular Section on Flusser Street in Arnona. In 2014, the US purchased a building adjacent to the facility on Flusser Street known as the Diplomat Hotel, which is currently home to elderly new immigrants.

US officials cited by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal last week said Washington, seeking to expedite the relocation, will not build a new structure, but will instead convert the Arnona buildings into the new US mission.

Hadashot news speculated that the embassy is seeking to bring consular services nearer to the site, as it prepares to relocate — thus the move into the Eden Hotel.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that he would not recognize Palestine as an independent state as a reaction to US President Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“I will not take any decision in reaction to any decision,” Macron told reporters in response to a Times of Israel question on the potential recognition of a Palestinian state.

The comments came during a photo op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of their closed-door meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting lasted nearly an hour.

Several European nations, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Slovenia, are reportedly mulling recognizing an independent Palestine in response to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem. The Slovenian foreign minister has already confirmed his country’s intention.

Macron began his statement by saying bluntly, “What we have to do is we have to work fairly on a peace process in the short run.”

Macron said he wanted to “accompany and facilitate” the two sides in a peace process, but added that France’s positions on the end result of such talks had not changed.

“Our philosophy is very clear from the very beginning, with recognition of two states. Jerusalem will be the capital of two sides and common frontiers recognized according to international rule,” he said in English.

Salah Diab, an Egyptian businessman and the owner of the daily Al-Masri Al-Yawm, who goes by the pen name Newton, published a series of four articles in which he expressed his longing for a visionary leadership that would extricate the Arabs from the sorry state in which they have been mired for decades due to intellectual rigidity, and claimed that former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who initiated the 1973 October War against Israel and later signed a peace treaty with it, furnished an example of such leadership. He claimed that any person could be a visionary, as shown by the example of the Norwegian researcher who initiated the Oslo Accords.

Newton urged the Arabs to think in a Sadat-like manner by exploiting the international outrage over Trump's Jerusalem declaration and responding to it with a "comprehensive peace offensive" that would rapidly achieve results, instead of submitting to the radical ideology that views normalization with Israel as a crime. Such a peace, once obtained, would remove Iran's pretext for intervening in the Arab countries and allow the Arabs to end their justified state of alert in response to this intervention, he wrote. He concluded that, after the Palestinian problem finds a just solution, the region will be able to engage in development and advance itself in the modern technological world.

Actual events don’t align with the Rhodes-Obama rhetoric. Vladimir Putin, frustratingly, keeps failing to be bent by the Arc of History (™) and doing whatever he wants, seizing Crimea and abetting Bashar al-Assad. Perhaps he notices the nonstop signaling from the White House that there’s a new sheriff in town, and said sheriff thinks crime-fighters have been way too tough on outlaws. “The error that we may have made is Putin doesn’t seem to pursue Russia’s national interests. He pursues Putin’s interests,” Rhodes says. In other words, surprise! — Putin doesn’t share a liberal American Democrat’s vision about what’s best for Russia. Only liberal American Democrats would need seven and a half years to figure this out. Power, riding in the back of a car, marvels at Russia’s naughtiness: “If they’re allowed to bully they just bully more.” Funny how that works. Kerry, after Russia breaks the ceasefire in Aleppo in 2016: “It’s just so frustrating because we really had an agreement that could have worked. And unfortunately we have some people who didn’t want to cooperate.”

So The Final Year is about the Obama Doctrine, also known as hashtag diplomacy, also known as leading from behind, also known as voting “present” — also known as hands-off. That a lot of people can get killed while you’re wringing them is the movie’s unintended lesson. Summing up, I give you none other than Samantha “Soft” Power herself, who near the end of the doc says in a moment of sudden clarity: “My world is a world where you have 65 million displaced. Yemen and Syria and Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi, South Sudan, Darfur, you know, the list, Afghanistan, of course, Venezuela imploding . . . There are concerns about terrorism and there is a fear of the other and . . . all the trendlines — on democracy, right now, at least — are going in the wrong direction.”

If only she or her friends had held positions of authority, maybe they could have done something about some of that.

Proposal

Given UNRWA’s background and the dysfunctional role it currently plays, reducing or even eliminating it would be a salutary objective. What follows is a proposal to leverage the UNRWA budget cuts into a constructive framework.

President Trump should announce that the U.S. will not make any further donations or offer support of any kind to UNRWA, but will consider giving the balance of the money to UNHCR, under the following conditions:

1) That UNRWA hand over all of its responsibilities to UNHCR and close up shop, completely and permanently.
2) That UNHCR bring in its own personnel at least at the managerial level, and commit to ending all cooperation with terrorists. (e.g. by employing Hamas personnel and allowing Hamas to store weapons and tunnel entrances in its facilities.)
3) That UNHCR identify who/how many of the people registered as eligible for UNRWA services actually meet UNHCR’s definition of refugees. Only the latter would be eligible for services/aid from UNHCR.
4) That UNHCR review all educational materials and revise/remove anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda from them.
5) That UNHCR prepare a written plan to integrate Palestinian refugees into their host countries and/or resettle them in another country outside of the conflict zone.

UNHCR must assume responsibility from UNRWA and take serious steps showing it has at least begun to fulfill each of the other conditions before any funding is restored (or, rather, given to UNHCR in the first instance.)

Former director-general of the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs Dore Gold said Tuesday, "There are a lot of people who have observed that UNRWA is not working. How many refugees were there at the end of World War II in Europe? Tens of millions. How many refugees are there today? Zero."
"Take Palestinian refugees just a few years later. How many were there? Six hundred thousand? Today how many are there, according to UNRWA? Five million. This has to do with the fact that UNRWA has different "accounting" rules than any other refugee organization in the world. The United States has a right to raise questions like that."
"In previous Israeli operations in Gaza - which came about because there were rocket attacks on us - what did we find in various UNRWA facilities? We found Hamas weapons. That's unacceptable. There are standards for how organizations like UNRWA should be run. Meet the standards and get the money."

The US government decision to suspend funds to UNRWA schools until reforms take place in UNRWA has raised some eyebrows.

Why did the US suspend funds to UNRWA in the first place?

Since 1999, Hamas has been chosen in successive internal UNRWA elections in Gaza to lead the workers union and teachers union of UNRWA, as mentors who influence generations of Palestinian refugee descendants to launch a violent Jihad for the 'right of return' to Arab villages lost during the 1948 war.

In that context, the first comprehensive study of UNRWA school books, completed in July 2017, reflects the terrorist domination of UNRWA schools. This study found UNRWA texts to be characterized by de-legitimization of Israel, rejection of the Jews’ very presence in the country, demonization of Israel and the Jewish people, while promoting the violent liberation of all of Palestine – including Israel’s pre-1967 territories – instead of adhering to UN values of peace and co-existence.

Moreover, UNRWA schools encourage children to engage in acts of war by way of presenting war against Israel as an inevitable necessity, including the violent return of the descendants of Arab refugees to a liberated pre-67 Palestine, through veneration of Jihad, martyrdom and Palestinian individuals who participate in the armed rebellion (called Fidais – those who sacrifice themselves, or martyrs and prisoners-of-war when killed or imprisoned). A decisive element in the UNRWA indoctrination is the inclusion of the official anthems of both the Palestinian Authority and its dominant body – the Fatah organization – which are taught to students of the lower grades:

Top executives of 21 prominent aid groups have written a letter to senior officials in US President Donald Trump’s administration, urging them to restore funds for the United Nations agency aiding Palestinians, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

The US State Department last week put on hold two planned payments of more than $100 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which supports more than five million Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East.

The State Department denied that the aid cut to UNRWA was to punish the Palestinian Authority, which has cut ties with Trump’s administration following his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. A spokeswoman said it was linked to necessary “reform” of the agency.

The non-governmental organizations whose leaders signed the letter included Save the Children, Oxfam America, CARE USA, Refugees International and the International Rescue Committee.

In their letter, the aid groups’ leaders voiced concern that if maintained, the freeze would “disrupt Palestinian access to food, health care, education ‘and other critical support to vulnerable populations,'” the paper reported.

Jerusalem, the German Colony: Israel’s capital (Yeah, we said it.) experienced quite a scare today as a clearly agitated man was taken into custody for his own safety. At approximately 10 AM this morning, an older gentleman wearing a disheveled suit wandered into traffic and attempted to enter a private vehicle that he described as “my town car“. At this point the driver’s owner got into an altercation with the gentleman, who insisted that he had “an important message for Abu Mazen” [Momentary Real World Buzzkill: Yes he DID actually say this today]. After the vehicle’s irate driver pushed him away, the pensioner walked over to a local convenience store, where he patiently discussed with a confused Dati woman the best places to park your yacht on Martha’s Vineyard during the winter months. After several minutes, the gentleman exited the shop and jumped onto the Jerusalem light rail, describing the movement of the train as being “not unlike windsurfing” before exiting at the Machane Yehuda Market. As the retiree wandered the Shuk’s confusing alleys, he told a man selling cactus fruit that “this place is more confusing than Dizengoff Center“. The man then stopped at a pastry shop, where he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and told customers that within a year there was a good chance that Trump would not be in the White House and that he was “seriously considering running for president in 2020.” [Real World Alert: Yes he really said this]. It was at this point that concerned bystanders feared that the man was suffering from the delusions of grandeur symptomatic of “Jerusalem Syndrome” and stepped in to help. As one man distracted the pensioner by entering into a drawn out negotiation over a carpet, a woman slipped away to call for medical help. Magen David Adom personnel quickly arrived on the scene and gently escorted the confused man into a waiting ambulance that they described as his “personal limousine” that would bring him to meet “the important people“.

South Africa accused Israel of being the world’s only apartheid state, triggering an angry Israeli reaction.

At a standard review of Israel’s human rights record at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva Tuesday, a South African official said the term formerly used to describe black disenfranchisement in South Africa could now be applied to Israel because of its policies toward the Palestinians and other non-Jews.

“Israel is the only state in the world that can be called an apartheid state,” diplomat Clinton Swemmer said. “We remain deeply concerned at the denial of the right of self-determination to the Palestinian people, in the absence of which no other human right can be exercised or enjoyed.”

South Africa itself was an apartheid regime between 1948 and 1991. The word, from the Afrikaans, was generally only used to specifically denote South Africa’s racial separation under white minority rule, but it has seeped into criticism of the Jewish state with increasingly regularity in recent years.

Israel has long bristled at use of the term to describe Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, and officials regularly point out differences between South Africa’s policies and Israel’s, dismissing use of the word as calumny meant to defame the Jewish state.

The founder of the Tzohar association of moderate Orthodox rabbis in Israel spoke out this week against Holocaust survivors who compared the deportation of illegal migrants to their experiences during WWII.

In a letter to Holocaust survivors seeking to preserve the residency status of migrants in Israel, Rabbi David Stav wrote, "I think we need to treat Holocaust survivors with a lot of respect for their determination and heroism, but nevertheless, it is inconceivable to compare the murder of children, women and men in crematoria and in gas chambers and a political, moral and social issue. This comparison is particularly outrageous."

The letter comes after a nationwide campaign tried to pressure the Israeli government into reversing its policy of deporting African migrants from Israel to third party countries in Africa.

Stav said that with all due respect to the survivors, the state of Israel needs to act on its national interests and not its emotions. He argued that the policy ensured that migrants would not be deported to countries where their lives would be in danger. If that were the case, "then certainly they could not be transferred to such a country," he emphasized.

Stav cautioned that "if we start to compare the actions of the Nazis and the handling of the refugees, then others will begin to compare the [Israel's] control over Judea and Samaria to the Vichy regime [that collaborated with Nazi Germany in World War II]." He said that within the national discourse, it must be clear "that the Holocaust was something unique and beyond compare."

The president of a Florida-based public relations company and president of his Tampa synagogue was one of four Americans killed in an attack on a hotel in Kabul.

Glenn Selig was one of 22 people killed in a 13-hour siege by the Taliban on Saturday on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, the State Department announced in Wednesday. The Afghan Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and said their target was foreign forces, including U.S. troops.

Selig was in Kabul to explore a potential counter-extremism project for his public relations agency, Selig Multimedia, the Tampa Bay Times reported. He reportedly was staying at the Intercontinental Hotel.

“Glenn was in Kabul on a potential success story involving Afghanistan and its steps to battle extremism. The focus was highlighting the country’s new president and constructing a democracy forum event for Afghani women,” his company said in a statement, according to CNN.

Prior to working in public relations, Selig was a reporter and anchor in Florida markets, including Fox 13 in Tampa and WNEM-TV, a CBS affiliate in Michigan. In recent months he served as spokesman for Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates, who faces criminal charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Gates has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Senior Palestinian Cleric in Lebanon, Bassam Al-Kayed: European Jews Committed the Worst Sins; TV Host: MLK Said Jews Were Shedders of Blood, Slayers of Prophets https://t.co/X12lKEWxVt

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 25, 2018

In the wake of the anti-government protests in Iran, the United States government could show its support for the protesters by targeting the vast financial empire controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mark Dubowitz and Saeed Ghasseminejad argued in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal.

Dubowitz, the CEO of Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and Ghasseminejad, a researcher there, wrote that President Donald Trump could target Khamenei and the foundations he controls under provisions of the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which allows the president to target individuals involved in corruption and human rights abuses.

Khamenei controls an empire that is worth an estimated $200 billion and has “an interest in nearly every Iranian industry.” The three main organizations in the Supreme Leader’s empire are Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order, or EIKO ; the Mostazafan Foundation; and the Astan Quds Razavi. All three have built up their value by through the “systematic confiscation of private property.”

According to a 2013 investigation by Reuters, EIKO, is worth about $95 billion. EIKO consists mostly of real-estate holdings and has “dozens of subsidiaries and front companies” so it is difficult to assess the full extent of its impact on Iran’s economy.

A social media campaign has taken off to identify and locate an Iranian woman who was filmed waving a hijab from a pillar box in Tehran—a punishable offense in the Islamic Republic—who has gone missing, The BBC reported on Tuesday.

The news outlet said that renowned human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh confirmed to them on Monday earlier reports of her arrest on December 27. According to her, the woman is 31 years old and mother of a 20-month-old child.

A video of the woman, whose identity remains unknown, was widely shared on social media during anti-government protests in recent weeks. She protested against Iran’s strict modesty dress code, in place since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which dictates that women need to cover their hair in public.

The woman is thought to have staged the protest on 27 December, a day before violent demonstrations broke out across the country, but has not been seen since, sparking fears that she may have been arrested.

“Our investigations confirm that the young woman, whose name we still do not know, was arrested on that very same day,” Sotoudeh wrote on Facebook on Sunday, along with a picture from the same location where the woman was first arrested. She added: “She was released shortly afterwards but was arrested once again.”

Credulous inhabitants of Pharaoh’s kingdom continue to maintain that the dramatic departure of the Israelite slave population from the country could be observed from outer space, local sources report.

Social observers and skeptics bemoaned the disturbing phenomenon in Egyptian media in a series of articles this month, giving voice to their dismay that such an advanced society still harbors primitive, uncritical thinking, and too readily accepts urban legends as fact.

“We have progressed so far since the Mesopotamians introduced astrology,” wrote veteran hieroglyph skeptic James Randi. “Our civilization can only be held back by the silliness our people betray each time some amazing new ‘discovery’ occurs. They must have had their brains addled by the so-called ‘plagues’ they experienced. No human phenomenon is visible from space, at least not at this point in world history. Anyone who claims otherwise is a charlatan.”

Other advocates of critical thinking seconded Randi’s concerns. “Ever since that Moses character came along, with his staff-serpent shenanigans and his turning water into blood, we’ve had or hands full with people reporting or believing ‘supernatural’ events,” remarked Phil Plait, who runs the Bad Astronomer series of monoliths. “So of course the culture is now primed to believe almost anything – certainly the seemingly plausible idea that a mass of millions of people could be visible from miles up in the sky. The problem is we’ve no way to test those ideas, and people just kind of accept them because they sound right and resonate, but not because there’s anything empirical to back them up.”

That deeper element is worldview, exposed by 9/11 and exacerbated over time by increasing partisan bickering over Islamic terrorism. From 1978 through the Oslo Accord, support for Israelis declined while support for the Palestinians stayed approximately even. About as many Americans said they supported “neither party” or “both” as said they supported the Israelis. That’s because the United States faced virtually no threat from Islamic radicalism. After Oslo, support for Israel jumped, particularly as Israel was hit by wave after wave of Palestinian terrorism.

Then, after 9/11, support for Israelis jumped among Republicans and never stopped growing. Conservative Americans, who had been more likely to draw a moral equation between Israel and her enemies, identified with the Israelis — they saw Israel as an outpost of Western civilization in a region rife with Islamic terrorism. They saw Palestinians handing out candies as the World Trade Center towers fell, and they knew that Israelis had been facing down the same threat. The real, meaningful conflict between Islamist barbarism and Western liberalism was thrown into sharp relief.

Democrats, too, initially responded to 9/11 with more support for Israel. But as the war on terror progressed, Democrats began to see Western civilization as the provocative agent. Too many on the left saw Islamic terrorism as a response to Western cruelty — cruelty to which Israel was supposedly a party. Nowhere was this clearer than in the media coverage of the Gaza War, which glorified Hamas at the expense of Israel, even as Israel tried to avoid civilian casualties and Hamas tried to inflict them. The Obama administration reflected that viewpoint, which is why it pursued Iranian regional growth with alacrity. The West, Obama and the Democrats thought, had to withdraw from the Middle East in order to empower dispossessed Islamists (hence State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf’s asinine suggestion that ISIS be given jobs to help them avoid terrorism).

Unfortunately, the gap yawns ever greater. Republicans live in a post-9/11 world; Democrats live in a pre-9/11 world. That has dramatic, unfortunate implications for Israel: In a polarized political environment, the historic bipartisan support for the Jewish state is quickly eroding. That’s not a bipartisan problem. That’s a specifically Democratic problem, and one that should encourage Jews to examine whether the Democratic Party ought to re-evaluate its moral worldview in the Middle East.

In April 2017, Politico published “The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin.” How are they connected? Well, Putin is close to several Chabad supporters, as well as Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, Russia’s chief rabbi. Trump worked with some Russian emigres who are active in Chabad, including a convicted felon, Felix Sater. In Florida, Trump hosted the wedding of the daughter of a Chabad supporter he knows to an associate of one of the Chabad supporters who is close to Putin.

What does all this tell us about the alleged relationship between Trump and Putin?

“Their respective ambitions led the two men,” writes Politico, “to build a set of close, overlapping relationships in a small world that intersects on Chabad, an international Hasidic movement most people have never heard of.”

You see—they’re furtive. Almost no one has heard of them. The only people who appear to understand Chabad’s role in the secret Trump-Putin collusion conspiracy are the author of the story and Glenn Simpson, who came back to this insane theory again in his testimony before Congress. Yet this lunacy was evidently plausible enough to the editorial staff at Politico, whose headline is the only thing that actually connects Trump and Putin in a story insinuating a secret Jewish plot to undermine American democracy.

In the past, it was Russian intelligence that trafficked in disinformation operations tagging Jews as the engine of instability in Western countries. The most famous specimen was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And previously, the ethics and institutional structures of the mainstream American press prevented conspiracy theories from polluting the country’s public sphere. Today, by contrast, American journalists congratulating themselves for their ever-vigilant stance against Russian encroachment on our democratic institutions willingly usher in updated versions of the Protocols. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

In all my discussions with the high-ups of the Pakistani security establishment, politicians and diplomats there is a high acceptance and willingness to engage with Israel. The problem is that nobody wants to take the lead and responsibility fearing a backlash from the right-wing religious hawks that wrongly put it as a religious issue. The result is that Pakistan’s foreign policy has continued to suffer due to its shortsighted and spineless leadership that fears mullah more than Allah.

Pakistan’s stale Israel policy reflects a deeper level rot in its governance, inability to change and non-strategic personalised foreign policy. Take for instance Pakistan’s bi-relations with Saudi Arabia. It’s more of a House of Saud and House of Sharif relation than a state-to-state level relation. The US-Pak relations are in reality Pakistan military and US relations. Same is the case with Pakistan’s relations with Turkey, Iran and the UK. Essentially, the ruling elite in Pakistan have used the state to garner and develop its personal interests at the expense of national interests — a tragedy that inhibits Pakistan from any real policy change.

Make no mistake; Pakistan’s Israel policy is not driven by any grandiose ideas of human rights or Muslim solidarity, and especially not out of any national interest. The senseless policy on Israel continues to exist because the elite don’t see any personal or institutional benefit in the relation. The day our leadership sees a personal financial or military benefit, no fear of mullah or Allah can stop. Until then, Pakistan will continue with its senseless policy expecting a different result in its global standing. (h/t Solomon2)

The essence of antsemitism, is to believe that everything positive about Jews should be interpreted negatively. Consider the hard left’s absurd accusation against Israel of “pinkwashing.” Those who accuse Israel of pinkwashing acknowledge that Israel has among the best records in the world of supporting the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Certainly they have the best record in the Middle East.

Yet the antisemites who accuse Israel of pinkwashing claim that the only reason Israel supports the rights of sexual minorities is to cover up — to whitewash, or in this case pinkwash — how badly they treat the Palestinians. This perverse accusation fails to consider the reality that Israel supports these rights because it is the right thing to do. Indeed, within Israeli society those who support gay rights are more likely to support Palestinians than those who oppose these rights. But these facts are irrelevant to the antisemites who believe that the nation state of the Jewish people can do nothing good, except for bad reasons.

The other lie that follows from “The Jews control the world,” is that individual Jews who happen to have succeeded and are in positions of authority, always work together on behalf of Jewish control of the world. The reality is quite different. Consider, for example, the alleged Jewish control of the media. It is true that Jewish families have ownership interests in The New York Times and other newspapers. But those newspapers don’t promote Jewish “control” of the world. Indeed, they are often at odds with Jewish public opinion. The same is true of Wall Street, Hollywood and academia, where individual Jews hold diverse opinions on issues of Jewish concern. But to the antisemite, all Jews are the same and their goal — to control the world — is identical.

So, no — Jews do not control the world. Many contribute to the world through their individual accomplishments, but that is true of members of every religion, ethnic and racial group. The world would be a poorer place — intellectually, artistically, charitably and in many other ways — if there were no Jews. Many European countries that were complicit in ridding themselves of their Jewish populations have come to regret their actions. So let’s make sure that Europe’s remaining Jews remain safe from the antisemites who spread the lie of Jewish control of the world.

In short, Israel maintains enviable support among Americans, but “the partisan divide in Middle East sympathies, for Israel or the Palestinians, is now wider than at any point since 1978.”

There is probably not much to be done in the near term about liberal Democrats, who demand concessions from Israel in the absence of any well-founded hope, much less a guarantee, further concessions will bring peace. Yet, as we may well learn if the Democrats are in control come 2021, there are dangers in having one’s future tied to a party whose ascendancy may prove to be very brief.

Conservative and moderate Democrats still sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians by a 2-to-1 margin, but that support has fallen sharply since 2016. The usual caveats about over-reading a single poll apply, but it is nonetheless striking that what was a 53 percent to 19 percent margin is now 35 percent to 17 percent. Like the movement of the party overall, the change reflects movement into the “both,” “neither,” and “don’t know” columns, rather than a definite anti-Israel trend. There is no decisive reason to believe that these people cannot be won back or that some semblance of the long-enduring bipartisan consensus on Israel cannot be restored.

Of course, those who love Israel should not be shy about welcoming many aspects of President Trump’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But one should be wary of hugging him or the present incarnation of the Republican Party too hard.

We need to paint Israel not as a heaven or a hell, but a normal country just like every other, that is sometimes faced with dilemmas, sometimes makes mistakes, and does the best it can with the situation it’s been given, even if sometimes it has to do things it doesn’t particularly enjoy as the lesser of evils. As a country that just wants to be treated equally, that should not have an entire topic at every UN General Assembly dedicated to finding things wrong with it. Not only does tempering our message make it easier to relate to us on an emotional level, and more approachable, it also makes us appear more transparent. Transparency, or at least the illusion therof, is a value very important to information-savvy millennials.

However, we also hope to captivate. To move, to inspire, with the rugged, raw truth, the good, the bad, and the ugly, that demonstrates not perfection, but doing the best we can with what we have. We know that in order to move minds, we have to move hearts first, and people aren’t moved by stories of effortless success, rather struggles grappled with, obstacles overcome against the odds, humanity at its most vulnerable. Our story of defeating those who sought to destroy us against the odds is what so enchanted people in the 1960’s, that some Arabs in Egypt founded the PLO to quash our success, with a narrative that we have allowed to leech in the mainstream due to apathy. Our story represents an identity we shed in favour of one of having “made it,” that while impressive, is not particularly likeable. People yearn for catharsis, a character they can relate to that makes mistakes and is imperfect just like them, stories of messing up and seeking to correct it, of having flaws yet good intentions, of having a loving, beating, albeit broken heart.

Baring our souls is not airing our dirty laundry, but opening our hearts to both emit and absorb. We are not looking to be worshiped or even revered, rather be treated the same as everyone else. There is a struggle inside every Israeli – one that is as beautiful and captivating as it is at times tragic and brooding. It’s time to set that struggle free to truly connect with the world.

Last night at SOAS in London another journalist came to the rescue of Israelis when Donald Macintyre – contributor to the Guardian and The Independent’s former Jerusalem correspondent – said he wanted his new book Gaza: Preparing for Dawn to be translated into Hebrew. He said that while Israeli intelligence has a good idea about the situation in Gaza “the Israeli public” didn’t which was made worse by Israeli journalists being banned from Gaza in 2006.

This reminds me of Tariq Ali’s “The end of Israel would benefit all Israelis.” Thank goodness for these wise men who can help the Israeli people!

Maybe Macintyre is unaware that Israelis have access to the internet and even have TV and radio.

He was speaking to the London Middle East Institute as well as the Centre for Palestine Studies, which are both based at SOAS.

He said his book was written to “challenge the myths” about Gaza. For example, that Arafat got a good deal at Camp David and that Israel had left Gaza in 2005 (because it still retains control over Gaza’s airspace and waters).

Another “myth” was that “the settlers’ installations had been destroyed by the Palestinians” after Israel withdrew. Macintrye said that there had been some looting but that it was “quickly brought under control” and there had been a successful harvest that year.

However, he said, only 4% of the harvest was able to leave Gaza with the remainder rotting or being sold on Gaza’s markets “at knock down prices”.

Macintyre said that Hamas were “a relatively pragmatic Islamist regime”. He also said that the conditions imposed on Hamas after their election win in 2005 were impossible for Hamas because they would overturn their “raison d’etre”.

He didn’t tell us what this “raison d’etre” was but judging by the wording in their 1988 Charter Hamas’ “raison d’etre” is to murder Jews and annihilate Israel.

While Al-Qaeda and Isis have been the subject of well-deserved scorn amongst the British people, Hezbollah still cuts something of a more tolerable figure. Many on the left seem to regard the group as a reputable component of some anti-globalisation coalition. At a recent pro-Palestinian march, participants had to be reminded not to fly the group’s flag. Any effort to afford the group such sympathy is shameful. Hezbollah has become the world’s premier terrorist entity – the only group of its kind capable of starting a major conventional war.

If the UK wishes to be taken seriously as a major player on the world stage, it should move quickly to reverse the advances it has made, as part of a full-throated effort to prevent renewed conflict in the region. Placing much more severe conditions on the dispatch of international aid to Lebanon – much of which winds up in the group’s hands – would be a useful start.

However, things are far too advanced for a ‘softly, softly’ approach to carry with it hope of success. The only logical next step can and must be the proscription of Hezbollah in its entirety as a terrorist group. Taking that step would not only give much needed momentum to the efforts being considered by Britain’s international partners in curtailing Iran’s regional expansion and Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon, but would also give the group pause for thought before using its newfound strength to initiate hostilities. This could potentially avert a conflict that would be both a disaster for an already reeling region and gravely detrimental to our own interest in a stable Middle East.

Britons are four times more likely to support the proscription of Hezbollah’s political wing as to oppose it.

The views of the country are laid bare for the first time today in an exclusive ComRes poll for the Jewish News, as MPs prepare to debate whether the government’s ban should extend beyond the military wing.

In a representative poll of 2,038 adults, forty-four percent said they would support or strongly support the political wing being designated a terrorist group, compared with just 10 percent who were opposed. With forty-six percent answering ‘don’t know’, it means a staggering 81 percent of those expressing a view backed its designation as a terrorist organisation.

Young people are most likely to oppose, with 23 percent of 18-34-year-old who express a view opposing the proposal compared to 17 percent of over 55s.

Among Jewish respondents, 91 percent were in support, with nine percent who ‘don’t know’. Muslims were more than twice as likely to support an extension of the designation as be opposed to it.

Labour MPs have been advised not to push for Hezbollah to be banned in Britain because party leaders want to “encourage” the terrorist group “down an effective democratic path”.

The advice came ahead of a backbench debate on the issue on Thursday organised by Joan Ryan, a Labour MP and chair of the party's Friends of Israel group.

The briefing advises backbenchers: “There is a balance between making absolutely clear our abhorrence of using violence to achieve political ends and at the same time encouraging organisations down an effective democratic path.

“Full proscription could be a move against dialogue and meaningful peace negotiations in the Middle East.”

Ms Ryan will move a motion in the Commons noting Hezbollah’s “antisemitic ideology that seeks the destruction of Israel” and urging the government to add the group’s political wing to the list of proscribed organisations.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, described Hezbollah, and the Hamas terror group, as “friends” during a parliamentary meeting in 2009.

Remarkably, neither of these reports makes any mention of Hizballah’s criminal activities abroad that fund its terrorism. The only oblique reference to Hizballah’s violations of UNSC resolutions – a topic serially avoided by the BBC – comes in the vague statement “UN Security Council resolutions call for armed militia groups like Hizbollah to disarm”.

Hizballah’s manipulation of internal Lebanese politics (a subject similarly under-reported by the BBC) is also sidelined in the report, as are the effects of its terror activities on the Lebanese banking system. Like the BBC, this report also ignores the issue of Hizballah’s attempts to set up terror cells inside Israel.

Given that these two research briefings are lacking much of the information relevant to an informed discussion of Hizballah, it would be natural for members of the British public and MPs alike to turn to their publicly funded national broadcaster in order to look for more in-depth information.

Unfortunately, however, the BBC has itself spent years cultivating the myth of separate ‘wings’ of Hizballah and whitewashing the fact that it is a terrorist organisation through use of euphemisms such as “Lebanese Shia group” as well as misrepresenting its terror designation by numerous countries and misleading audiences with regard to its activities.

And another question: if BDS’s methods cannot change Israelis’ behavior, if their lack of empathy and curiosity about their enemy leaves them bereft of any clear grasp of their own strategy, then what good are they to Palestinians? In BDS’s ignorance is laid bare yet again the deeper Palestinian predicament, the one that sustains the imbalance with Israel: their continuing unwillingness to grapple seriously and strategically with the hard and unpleasant fact of Israel’s permanence.

The battle between Israel and BDS is one of those political fictions that only make sense if you don’t look at them too closely. In the end, BDS is fighting an Israel that only exists in its imagination. It is not curious enough, not serious enough, or perhaps simply too innately prejudiced, to take up the much harder challenge of seeking to affect the real living society whose behaviors it ostensibly seeks to change.

Of course, that’s not a moral defense of Israel. Even if Israel really is as bad as BDS claims, and even if it is worse, that doesn’t change the point that BDS is not really interested enough in what drives Israeli behavior to construct the strategic capabilities to begin to change it. BDS is thus an exercise whose ultimate end is its means; it seeks not political reform, but the exclusion itself — a permanent response to an innately perfidious enemy.

And what of Israel’s war against so oafish an enemy? What of that tiny corner of Israeli officialdom that, with unclear purpose, charges so gleefully into this odd battle? Here we find neither the bigotry of BDS nor any great wisdom or understanding. Israel, too, did not set out to battle a real enemy in the real, hard, intimate ways of war, but crafted out of its actual opponent a tailor-made stand-in, constructed for purposes less noble and entirely less interesting than it pretends.

The heads of Israel and Jewish societies have condemned University College London’s (UCL) decision to restrict attendance to an upcoming talk with a former Israeli soldier, saying the move failed to demonstrate the school’s commitment to free speech.

Hen Mazzig — who facilitated humanitarian projects in the West Bank while completing his IDF service — was invited to speak at UCL by administrators, after a talk he gave in October 2016 was interrupted by students. A university investigation into the incident found that “hostile and abusive protestors” gathered near the room where Mazzig was speaking, then forcibly entered through the windows and used loudspeakers and chants — including some “that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic” — in an effort to drown him out. Mazzig eventually had to be escorted out of the building by police.

While university spokesperson Charles Hymas told The Algemeiner that Mazzig was invited to speak this upcoming Thursday “to reaffirm our commitment to free speech,” administrators have been called out for limiting attendance to UCL students and staff — a restriction critics suggested was a capitulation to the protesters that first impeded Mazzig’s talk.

A petition signed by over 2,800 people accused the university of failing to publicly advertise the event, and noted that as the majority of individuals affected by the 2016 disruption were not affiliated with UCL, and rather hailed from the wider Jewish student community in London, they will once again be unable to hear Mazzig speak.

Students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada voted last week to ratify their student government’s board of directors — including a peer who claimed to have been targeted for removal over his Jewish identity and pro-Israel views.

The online referendum comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) Judicial Board, which found that a General Assembly (GA) decision in October to split the vote on the directors — which led to the failed ratification of three — was unconstitutional.

One of these directors, Noah Lew, wrote shortly after the GA meeting that he was “blocked from participating in student government because of my Jewish identity and my affiliations with Jewish organizations.” He added that Alexander Scheffel and Josephine Wright O’Manique — two non-Jewish directors who also failed to be ratified by the SSMU in October — were voted down “because they opposed the [boycott, divestment, and sanctions] movement and because they had attempted to support McGill’s Jewish students.”

It is true that criticism of Israel is not tantamount to anti-Semitism. However, there are anti-Zionists who are anti-Semitic. An example would be the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. He told a Chicago mosque that “there were many Israelis and Zionist Jews in key roles in the 9/11 attacks.” Farrakhan is a Jew-hater through-and-through. Not coincidentally, he and Sarsour have crossed paths with one another. Along with Tamika Mallory and Carmen Perez, two of the other co-chairs for the 2017 Women’s March, Sarsour developed a friendly relationship with Farrakhan many years ago. She delivered a speech at a rally organized by Farrakhan in 2015.

Rebecca Vilkommerson, director of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace, called Lewis Farrakhan an anti-Semite during The New School’s 2017 panel on anti-Semitism. Sarsour allegedly responded by saying, “If what you’re reading all day long, morning and night, in the Jewish media, is that Linda Sarsour and Minister Farrakhan are the existential threat to the Jewish community, something really bad is going to happen and we’re going to miss the mark on it.” The implication in this statement was that, by focusing on Farrakhan and Sarsour, Jews ignore the more pressing concern of right-wing anti-Semitism. While Bernie Sanders would never let a neo-Nazi like Andrew Anglin campaign for him, he did just that with Linda Sarsour. Nazis are generally rejected by both liberals and conservatives, but Sarsour is a hero to the progressive left despite the fact that she, like Anglin, believes in the basic immorality of the Jewish media.

Sarsour’s anti-Semitism is not the only thing that diminishes her credibility as an activist. She has made several defenses of Sharia law, which she claims is misunderstood and has been pushed as some evil Muslim agenda. All attempts by religious authorities to make scriptural morality into law should be condemned. Otherwise, one ends up with a world in which countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Palestine can mandate that an alleged rapist cannot be sentenced for a crime if he marries his victim.

But it appears that Sarsour has little intention of combating sexism in the Muslim world. In reference to anti-Islam activists Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarsour said on Twitter that she wanted to “take their vaginas away” because “they don’t deserve to be women.” When asked during an appearance at Dartmouth whether she thought that Tweet was acceptable, Sarsour would not admit that she ever published the tweet. Worse, she implied that question did not deserve to be answered because it was posed by “a young white man.” Considering Sarsour’s defense of Sharia law, it is unironic that she picked Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be the subject of the tweet about not deserving to be a woman. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s grandmother had some of Sarsour’s ideas in mind when she had her granddaughter subjected to female circumcision at the age of five.

Where do newspaper editors draw the line when it comes to publishing controversial advertisements?

What line exists for a Jewish or Israeli media outlet?

The January 24 print edition of the Haaretz English edition ran this ad on page three. It was sponsored by a group of organizations recently blacklisted by Israel for supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Leaders of the banned groups are barred from entering Israel.

If Haaretz wishes to publish ads critical of Israel’s policies concerning the Palestinians, it has every right to do so. Likewise, Haaretz is at liberty to publish an ad attacking the recent Israeli blacklist itself.

But the ad goes beyond criticizing the ban with a direct call for “BOYCOTT.”

Where does freedom of speech end and responsible judgment begin?

Haaretz claims to be a Zionist newspaper despite its often dissenting and controversial contents. So why publish a boycott call and promotion for a movement that, despite the naivety of some of its followers, has, at its core, the desire to see the destruction of the Israeli state?

More than 100 international film directors, producers, actors and industry workers have signed an open letter to a French film festival to protest against its decision to highlight Israeli films.

Signatories including British directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki and English-Australian actress Miriam Margolyes on Wednesday expressed "deep concern" over the festival's decision "to associate with the Israeli government as it is intensifying occupation, settlement policy and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people."

They urge the festival management to withdraw its partnership with Israeli authorities.

The FIPA festival this week in Biarritz, in southwestern France, aims to give the public the "opportunity to appreciate Israeli content and talent and to increase the sharing of experiences within the domains of writing, digital creation and training. Israel displays a remarkable expertise, a unique model of production, a stimulating artistic approach, and widely exported content," the festival's website said.

New Zealand singer/songwriter Lorde faced a pro-Israel heckler on Wednesday night at a charity concert in New York City.

Last month, the 21-year-old singer canceled a scheduled concert in Tel Aviv after facing protests from the boycott movement. The decision placed her in the eye of a firestorm of controversy that extended for several weeks.

At one point in the show Wednesday night, which was a fund-raiser for The Ally Coalition, a nonprofit that supports LGBTQ equality, Lorde said the crowd that turned out was "so nice."

"In Israel they're nice," a man shouted out from the crowd, in clear reference to the canceled show. "I know, I know," Lorde responded.

But her friend musician Jack Antonoff, who was seated next to her (and whose sister, Rachel, is one of the founders of the nonprofit), was less amenable.

A Jewish student at Moscow State University was barred from taking an exam because he refused to remove his kippa.

Lev Boroda, a film student, has filed a complaint about the incident with the university administration.

He was asked by his geography professor, Vyacheslav Baburin, to remove his kippa or leave the auditorium where the exam was being administered. Boroda later found another professor willing to proctor him for the exam.

The incident was reported Tuesday by the SOVA Center, a Moscow-based nongovernmental organization and think tank that focuses on nationalism and racism.

Boroda also told SOVA about a prior incident in which the university’s gym teacher told him to “cross himself” and “get baptized” when he asked for permission to skip a class for Yom Kippur.

Sergei Dobrolyubov, the dean of the geography department, said the professor was following the university’s rules, which prohibit head coverings to be worn indoors on campus. He said that last year, Baburin ordered female Muslim students to remove their headscarves before exams.

French lawmakers have been banned from wearing religious symbols in parliament under a proposal submitted by a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s party.

On Wednesday, the National Assembly’s administrative office adopted the proposal of En Marche’s François de Rugy, which states that in an effort to “maintain an atmosphere of neutrality” in the parliament does not permit the wearing of “ostensible” religious symbols, the AFP news agency reported.

Also forbidden are any kind of uniform, logos, or commercial messages or political slogans.

In 2004, parliament passed a law forbidden the wearing of religious symbols in public schools. It is only partially enforced, with many pupils wearing Muslim head covers and kippahs.

In 2016, Meyer Habib, a French Jewish lawmaker, and Claude Goasguen, a non-Jewish one, were filmed wearing the Jewish head covering briefly in the corridors of the National Assembly after a Jewish community leader from Marseille called on Jews to remove their kippahs as a security measure following a spate of anti-Semitic stabbings in the southern city.

Last year, Ali Ramlati, a Muslim woman from Macron’s party, was pictured wearing a head covering in her official picture on the website of the National Assembly. The picture exposed the party to criticism by people who said it obscured France’s strict separation between religion and state.

So it is possible. There's no cosmic force, no unbreachable journalistic rule, preventing mainstream American publications from focusing on Mahmoud Abbas's indiscretions.

We know this because The Atlantic did just that — addressed vile rhetoric by the Palestinian president — and nothing happened, aside from the expected: Readers were told what the Palestinian president said, and ended up more fully informed about the man and the conflict he has failed to resolve.

Forthright reporting on Abbas shouldn't be so hard. But too many in the media have struggled with the task. The ugliest of utterances from his mouth have been concealed by those tasked with reporting on them, those same journalists who otherwise seem to believe the Arab-Israeli conflict is the epicenter of world news. So when Abbas recently said, in reference to Jews, that there is "no one better at falsifying history or religion than them," citing God himself to substantiate the anti-Semitic libel, the media silence was deafening.

The New York Times covered the Dec. 13, 2017 meeting at which Abbas made the statement, but decided the anti-Semitism by a head of state wasn't news fit to print.

The Times wasn't alone. The Washington Post, Associated Press, NPR, Reuters, and BBC, were likewise mum about Abbas's recitation of anti-Jewish verses from the Koran, which he used to make the point that Jews falsify the scriptures and history.

Austria's main Jewish body (IKG) will boycott a parliamentary Holocaust commemoration event because of the rise of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) which entered government last month, the IKG's chief said on Thursday.

The Freedom Party, junior coalition partner to Sebastian Kurz's conservatives, was founded by former Nazis and has repeatedly excluded members in Nazi scandals. It says it has left its Nazi past behind.

Kurz has vowed to focus on fighting anti-Semitism after Israel said it would not have direct contact with Freedom Party officials although the Foreign, Interior and Defense Ministers all entered cabinet on the far right ticket.

"We do not want anything to do with such people and we do not want to commemorate the people who died in the Shoah (Nazi holocaust) with such people," IKG chief Oskar Deutsch said on ORF radio.

"One should think about what kind of people are sitting in a government and what kind of people get voted into a parliament."

The Freedom Party gained third place with 26 percent of votes in parliamentary elections in October.

The conservative president of parliament, Wolfgang Sobotka, said he could understand the IKG's behaviour but also felt it was "a pity that some people are not coming."

A Budapest church said Thursday it had canceled a controversial mass and memorial for Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime leader Miklos Horthy scheduled for the United Nations Holocaust day.

The event is scheduled for January 27, designated by the UN in 2005 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date marks the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the Nazi death camps.

“It didn’t enter our heads when we began organizing that it fell on that date,” Zoltan Osztie, parish priest at the church and leader of event organizers the Association of Christian Professionals (KESZ), told a religious affairs website.

Hungary’s main Jewish organization Mazsihisz criticized KESZ Wednesday as well as Sandor Lezsak, a lawmaker with Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling Fidesz party, who was scheduled to make a speech there.
Hungarian Prime minister Viktor Orban speaks during a press conference at the Hungarian Embassy on September 25, 2015 in Vienna. (AFP Photo/Dieter Nagl)

Mazsihisz said the participation of Lezsak, also a deputy speaker of the Hungarian parliament, “tramples on the memory of all the Hungarian victims.”

Paul Nehlen is not an important political figure. According to his LinkedIn account, he’s had a successful career working in equipment manufacturing. He ran against Paul Ryan in the Wisconsin Republican primary in 2016 and got trounced; the speaker of the House won nearly 85 percent of the vote. And now, having declared for a second time his intention to unseat Ryan, Nehlen has become a caricature of an anti-Semitic Twitter troll.

The catalog of his absurd comments is too long to detail in full. Better to visit his feed and Ctrl+F search for “Jew” or “JQ”—an abbreviation for “Jewish Question,” a phrase that white supremacists and neo-Nazis use to refer to their paranoid analyses of Jews’ control over society.

But here’s a taste. After BuzzFeed published an article documenting Nehlen’s mobilization of online followers against the “Jewish media,” he tweeted out pictures of top media executives at CNN, NBC, and The New York Times with little stars of David superimposed on their faces. “Do the people pictured seem to have anything in common?” he wrote, before apparently deleting the tweet.

He claims that his views align with Christianity. “Jesus is the Messiah. He is One with the Father and the Holy Ghost,” he tweeted. “Jews (and others) who do not acknowledge this fact will burn in hell.”

And he loves making odd generalizations about what Jews are like. “Poop, incest, and pedophilia. Why are those common themes repeated so often with Jews?” he tweeted. One of Nehlen’s 89,000 followers declared that “@pnehlen is one of the few American Christians courageous and honest enough to defend the Faith against Islamists and Talmudic Pharisees alike even when it’s unpopular. God bless you, Paul!” Nehlen hit retweet.

Nearly 18 years after a bombing at a German commuter rail station targeting Jewish immigrants, the alleged neo-Nazi accused of the crime will go on trial on Thursday.

Ralf S., 51, stands accused of 12 counts of attempted murder and causing an explosion for the attack in the western city of Dusseldorf on the afternoon of July 27, 2000. Prosecutors say he had a “racist” motive.

The accused was known to police as a right-wing extremist at the time and ran a military surplus store near the scene of the crime, which drew international condemnation.

Ten eastern European migrants — six of them Jews from the former Soviet Union — were injured in the bombing.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt had harsh words for singer Erykah Badu on Wednesday following her interview with Vulture where she appeared to defend not just Louis Farrakhan, but Hitler.

In the interview with David Marchese, which created immediate and intense buzz on social media, Badu said she was able to find good in anyone, even Hitler.

When Marchese asked her about her controversial support of Farrakhan, Badu said she’ll “follow anyone who has positive aspects... I see good in everybody. I saw something good in Hitler.”

Marchese responded, in perhaps the only possible way: “Come again?” But the 46-year-old singer was not deterred.

“Yeah, I did. Hitler was a wonderful painter,” she replied.

“No, he wasn’t! And even if he was, what would his skill as a painter have to do with any ‘good’ in him?” Marchese responded.

Badu was still determined to find a sympathetic side to the mass murderer of millions: “Okay, he was a terrible painter. Poor thing. He had a terrible childhood. That means that when I’m looking at my daughter...I could imagine her being in someone else’s home and being treated so poorly, and what that could spawn. I see things like that. I guess it’s just the Pisces in me.”

Ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Diaspora Ministry unveiled on Thursday what it said was new technology for detecting anti-Semitic content on the internet.

The software, called the Anti-Semitism Cyber ??Monitoring System, or ACMS, is “the most advanced development in the world for monitoring anti-Semitism in real time,” the ministry said in a statement.

According to the ministry, the ACMS tracks anti-Semitic posts on social media and can detect how widely they’ve been shared, who is sharing them, and which cities and countries produce the most anti-Semitic content.

The system uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism when scanning for content, and will initially monitor posts in English, Arabic, French and German on Facebook and Twitter before expanding to other platforms and languages.

In addition to the system itself, the ministry will operate a “war room” to analyze the anti-Semitic posts and will share the content with internet companies so they can be removed.

During a month-long trial of the ACMS, the ministry said it detected a total of 409,000 anti-Semitic posts by 30,000 users.

In a survey conducted online among hundreds of respondents who identified as Jews, 27 percent of Europeans and 11 percent of Americans said they felt unsafe.

In the World Zionist Organization survey, which was conducted last year among a total of 1,361 respondents, 51 percent of those in Europe said that wearing Jewish symbols in public made them feel unsafe. In North America, that figure was 22 percent.

A press statement by WZO about the survey was conducted among Jews not living in Israel but it did not say how many of the 1,361 respondents were from Europe, North America and beyond. The statement also did not specify which countries in Europe the respondents on that continent came from.

Nearly a third of European respondents said they had experienced or witnessed an anti-Semitic event featuring vandalism, compared to 11 percent worldwide.

In honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, Tablet’s podcast, Unorthodox, spoke with Sandy Myers and Desiree Nazarian of Selfhelp, a New York based non-profit dedicated to “maintaining the independence and dignity of seniors and at risk population through a range or housing, home health care, and social services.”

The organization was founded in 1936 under the name “Selfhelp for German Refugees” by a group of recently arrived German refugees in New York, with the mission of offering support to others who had been forced to flee. Providing services to survivors continues to be at the forefront of Selfhelp’s mission.

Who is eligible for services? And how is a survivor defined? Beyond those who survived concentration camps, the term survivor extends to anyone who disguised their Jewish identity, fled their home, went into hiding during the period of the war, or experienced persecution because of their Jewish heritage. Even those in utero until 1945 qualify as survivors.

Now located in 27 sites in Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Nassau County, 25 percent of Selfhelp’s services go to to assisting the 43,000 survivors currently living in New York. A staggering 50 percent of these survivors are living at or below the federal poverty line. The Russian speaking population has faced severe difficulty, with 80 percent living at or below federal poverty line. The Russian population has faced challenges not only due to aging and lingering physical trauma, but lack of steady employment and negotiating language barriers.

A renowned Holocaust survivor from Italy was appointed last week as senator for life, a great honor granted only to citizens who have made outstanding contributions to society.

Liliana Segre, who was deported to Auschwitz from Milan when she was 13, was one of few to make it back home. She began telling her story in the 1990s, and has since become one of the most public witnesses of the Shoah in Italy, bringing her testimony into many Italian schools.

Italian president Sergio Mattarella called her on Friday to announce the appointment. Segre said the phone call came as “a bolt from the blue.” The survivor, who is now 87, said that she’s never been an active politician; her goal, she continued, will be to “pass on the memory” and to bring to life the voices of the thousands of Italian Jews who suffered the humiliation of the Racial Laws in 1938. After the Nazis occupied the country, about 10,000 Jews were deported, mainly to Auschwitz, nearly 8,000 of whom died.

Liliana Segre was one of 25 lucky Italian children deported to Auschwitz to return home at the end of the war. Her father and her paternal grandparents were killed upon their arrival to the camp.

Over the last decades, Segre has been committed to sharing her testimony with the younger generations, visiting schools to meet with students. “Knowing I’ll be among senators-for-life is an honor and a great responsibility,” she said. Yet, she told Pagine Ebraiche that teaching children about the Holocaust will remain her main commitment. “My duty is to speak to the young people, and I won’t stop doing that.”

Regular Tablet readers know that I loathe most Holocaust media for kids: apps that are flippant or misguided; slim, pornographically violent volumes of poetry featuring mental monologues by bloodthirsty Nazis; richly illustrated fables queasily blending history and legend; wide-eyed, manipulative middle-grade weepies; YA novels using the Holocaust as a jumping-off point for teen shapeshifter fantasy. And then there are the horrifying old black-and-white movies we were shown in Hebrew school, spotlighting silent footage of bulldozers pushing mountains of corpses and hollow-eyed, emaciated survivors peering blankly at their liberators from stacked wooden bunks. None of these is a good introduction to one of history’s great horrors.

But attempting to shield children from the Holocaust doesn’t work, either. I tried to keep my older daughter in the dark until she was in third grade when I thought she’d be old enough to read Number the Stars, still the best Holocaust introduction for young readers. (Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, as Camus put it.) Lois Lowry’s novel is exciting, based on historical fact, scary but not too scary, distressing but not paralyzingly so. Unfortunately, Josie found a Holocaust novel in second grade, in a book bin at school, with no input from me. It could have been worse: She could have started her Holocaust education at 7 with Maus, or via gory misinformation from another kid on the playground. But I wish I’d talked to her earlier.

There are fine picture books out there that can serve as a good introduction for kids under 9 to the Holocaust; families can pore over the pages and discuss them together. But not every kid is drawn to books. That’s where The Number on My Great-Grandpa’s Arm can come in. This new HBO documentary, which debuts on Saturday—International Holocaust Remembrance Day—is perfect family viewing. It dovetails with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s guidelines for teaching kids about the Holocaust and does so in a visually enticing, engaging way that neither sugarcoats nor terrorizes. And, bonus, it’s only 19 minutes long.

What does Chelsea Football club have in common with Tel Aviv University’s new Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology? The answer is Roman Abramovich, who despite his many business interests is best known as the owner of the football club. Abramovich also happens to be the mystery donor of TAU’s new Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology scheduled to open in 2020.

Abramovich made his $30m. commitment to the project in 2015, but the identity of the founding donor remained secret until now.

Shimon Peres, Israel’s ninth president, was one of the most ardent proponents of nanotechnology – long before TAU launched its current Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in 2000, when it was the first Israeli institute of its kind.

Today the center is affiliated with more than 90 research groups from varying disciplines, and works in close collaboration with industry and research groups worldwide.

Constant growth has created a need for a newer, larger and more ambitious nanotechnology center, something that was made possible through Abramovich’s $30m. gift.

Once completed, the center will be one of the leading facilities of its kind in the Middle East.

Elbit Systems Ltd., Israel’s largest non-government-owned defense company, said Thursday a unit has won a $150 million deal with the Australian Department of Defence to provide support services to the Australian Defence Force for its battle management systems.

The contract won by Elbit Systems of Australia Pty Ltd. is for five years, with optional extensions of up to seven years.

“The ADF is a strategic partner of Elbit Systems and this contract represents the long-term commitment of Elbit Systems to support the ADF digitization effort,” said Yehuda (Udi) Vered, general manager of Elbit Systems Land and C4I. “This is a major contract for Elbit Systems of Australia that will significantly enhance and strengthen its local engineering and support capabilities.”

Elbit Systems is an international high-tech company that develops a wide range of products and systems used for both homeland security and for civilian purposes.

A record number of Chinese tourists — more than 113,000 — visited Israel in 2017, the Xinhua state news agency reported on Tuesday.

According to the report, China is the Jewish state’s fastest-growing source of visitors.

“Israel is likely to see 150,000 Chinese tourists in 2018, and that is an achievable target,” Bora Shnitman — the director of the Israeli government’s China Tourism Office — was quoted as saying.

Shnitman, the report noted, “attributed the surge in the number of Chinese tourists to more targeted promotion campaigns, streamlined visa applications as well as increasingly convenient transportation with more direct flights.”

It’s been years since filmmaker Amos Gitai — that lover of trilogies and difficult films about his country’s geopolitical realities — made a film in Jerusalem, but he’s back.

This time it’s “Light Rail in Jerusalem,” a film about the mosaic of people riding Jerusalem’s light rail, the “whole mix,” said Gitai, of religious and secular, Palestinians and Israelis, making their way on the mode of transportation that did not even exist the last time Gitai shot a film in Jerusalem.

“I like metaphor,” said Gitai, sitting outside, at the main train depot in northern Jerusalem, on his last day of filming.

Much of the movie was filmed here, in this depot north of French Hill, where the trains are parked when they are not running.

“We had to do this pretty quickly,” said Gitai. “They were letting us use a train, after all.”

Gitai’s last film in the holy city was “News from Home/New from House” (2005), the third part of his trilogy about the German Colony home abandoned during the 1948 war by its Palestinian owner, and later lived in by Israeli Jews. The films were rejected and censored by Israeli television.

“‘House’ was the destruction of metaphor and the development of the Palestinian diaspora,” said Gitai.

Ibrahim “Abe” Ayad, a Dearborn, Mich. born and raised American patriot, has decided to convert a parcel of land in Israel, which his family has owned for decades, into a living memorial to the 34 Americans needlessly slaughtered and 174 wounded, while serving aboard the USS Liberty (AGTR-5), by Israeli air and naval forces on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War.

“When [my dad, a US army soldier] got wounded [in Italy in WWII], he was lost for three days at a MASH unit during the air war,” said Ayad. “So the Army, in its infinite wisdom, had sent my grandmother a letter telling her he was dead. My grandmother couldn’t read English, so she took it to the village elder [who] told her, ‘Your son is dead.’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. If he was dead I’d believe it.’ ”

Refusing to believe her only child was dead, she prepared for his return from the war.

“She was working as a nurse at a local hospital and they were trying to trick an old lady whose son they thought had died. They’d come and they’d pawn their land to her,” said Ayad, “and she’d buy it and put it in his name.”

When Ayad’s father eventually returned home, “everybody thought he was a ghost.” As his grandmother had accumulated a significant amount of land, the illegal occupation government of Israel began to make moves on it. [What happened between 1945 and 1967 is a bit unclear since the land was in Beit Hanina....]

“All of a sudden Israel starts confiscating this land, doing all kinds of stuff to it,” said Ayad. It “was illegally confiscated even according to Israeli law, because it’s occupied territory. It can’t be taxed, and they confiscated it for tax purposes.”

Ayad tried to fight them, but Israel sicced its U.S.-based public relations firm on him.

“I’ve been fighting the Anti-Defamation League for 20 years,” he said, “and they wielded their influence over the [U.S.] Department of Justice. Even James Comey came down personally to oversee their raid against me. They robbed me of over $3 million—and this is my own government, who I pay taxes for, doing all this to me.”

Ayad then discussed his plans for the Liberty memorial, which he first started thinking about five or six years ago.
“I don’t see any memorials in Israel: not for World War I, not for World War II,” he explained. “[Israel owes] the United States so much from two world wars, not counting all the financial and military hardware [it’s] getting from America. I would love to see a USS Liberty Memorial Hospital for all the victims of the Liberty, her crew, and all the victims that suffered after and all the victims that have suffered in two world wars and since. And it’s about time they honor America.”

Referring to a recent “hate-filled” speech given by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which he declared the Oslo Accords dead, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told the UN Security Council Thursday, “A speech that indulges in outrageous and discredited conspiracy theories is not the speech of a person with the courage and the will to seek peace.”

Haley, who was addressing the Security Council during its monthly meeting to address the Middle East, said that she would “set aside her usual practice” of highlighting the Iranian threat to the Middle East and instead address what she called the “important element” of making peace, specifically “leaders who have the will to do what’s needed to achieve peace.”

Haley cited the example of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who addressed Israel’s Knesset and told Israel, “You want to live with us in this part of the world. In all sincerity, I tell you, we welcome you among us, with full security and safety.” The words, Haley said, made “Israel understand that it had a partner with whom it could make those painful compromises” that were necessary for a peace deal with Egypt.

In contrast, in his recent speech to the Palestinian Liberation Organization Central Committee, Abbas “declared the landmark Oslo Peace Accords dead. He rejected any American role in peace talks. He insulted the American President. He called for suspending recognition of Israel. He invoked an ugly and fictional past, reaching back to the 17th century to paint Israel as a colonialist project engineered by European powers.”

“A speech that indulges in outrageous and discredited conspiracy theories is not the speech of a person with the courage and the will to seek peace,” Haley observed. And while she said that the United States “remains fully prepared and eager to pursue peace,” which would require compromise, but “hate-filled speeches and end-runs around negotiations take us nowhere.”

Trump addressed the United Nations vote from December to condemn the planned embassy move in which only a handful of countries voted in favor of the U.S. decision. He noted that the United States was "out in the wilderness by ourselves."

"We give billions of dollars away every year to countries and in many cases those countries don't even support us, they don't support the United States," Trump said. "Israel has always supported the United States, and so what I did with Jerusalem was my honor, and hopefully we can do something with peace."

Trump went on to say that the Palestinians, who received hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aide and support, disrespected Vice President Mike Pence when their leaders said they would not meet with him during a recent visit to the Middle East.

"That money is on the table and that money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace," Trump said beside Netanyahu. "Because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace and they're going to have to want to make peace, too, or we're going to have nothing to do with it any longer."

Prior to Trump's remarks, Netanyahu also commented on the historic nature of the administration's commitment to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Pence announced on Monday the move is planned for 2019.

"I want to say, this is a historic decision that will forever be etched in the hearts of our people for generations to come," Netanyahu said of Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. "People say that this pushes peace backward; I say it pushes peace forward because it recognizes history, it recognizes present reality. And peace can only be built on the basis of truth."

The prime minister also said the Israeli people support Trump completely, especially regarding his stance on backing out of the nuclear deal with Iran if "fatal flaws are not fixed."

Vice President Mike Pence gave an epic speech at the Knesset this week. His was the most powerful embrace of Zionism and the Jewish people any foreign leader has ever presented. Pence’s fluency in Jewish history, and his comprehension of the centrality of the both the Bible and the Land of Israel in the vast flow of that history in far-flung-exile communities across time and space was spellbinding. He touched the hearts of his audience, causing knots in the throats of most of the people sitting in the Knesset on Monday afternoon.

Pence’s speech was rendered poignant and the friendship he bore became tinged with urgency with the publication, the very next day, of the latest Pew Center survey on American views of Israel.

Speaking in the name of the American people he represents, Pence said on Monday: “The friendship between our people has never been deeper.”

And when it comes to the Republican voters who elected President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence a year and two months ago, Pence is certainly correct. But the Pew data showed that on Israel, as on so many other issues, the cleavage between Republicans and Democrats is vast and unbridgeable.

Most of the coverage of the Pew survey focused reasonably on its main finding. The good news is that overall American support for Israel over the Palestinians remains more or less constant, and overwhelming. Forty-six percent of Americans support Israel over the Palestinians while a mere 16% of Americans support the Palestinians against Israel. The numbers haven’t changed much since polling began in 1978.

But then the news becomes more fraught. The disparity between Republican support for Israel and Democratic support for Israel has never been greater. Whereas 79% of Republicans support Israel over the Palestinians, only 27% of Democrats do. Moreover, the further one goes to the Left among Democratic voters, the more anti-Israel the respondents become. Liberal Democrats are now nearly twice as likely to support the Palestinians over Israel as they are to support Israel over the Palestinians. Thirty-five percent of liberal Democrats support the Palestinians against Israel. A mere 19% support Israel more than the Palestinians.

In Israel, Pence’s last stop, the existential issue remains Iran’s nuclear-weapons threat, complicated by North Korea’s rapid progress toward achieving a delivery capability for thermonuclear warheads that would almost certainly be available to the ayatollahs for the right price. Most immediately, the vice president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the chance to consult on the urgent need to encourage and assist (publicly or behind the scenes) Iran’s opposition, whose recent demonstrations threatened the very existence of the Tehran regime.

The recent revelation of yet another secret Obama administration deal with Iran, with additional unilateral American concessions, pledged Washington not to sanction the International Republic of Iran Broadcasting (“IRIB”), Tehran’s state monopoly of broadcast radio and television. Reached within the framework of the Intelsat telecommunications treaty, this agreement should either be abrogated or ignored, as allowing Iran’s opposition to communicate more effectively across Iran, and limiting IRIB’s pro-regime propaganda would be powerful tools to weaken the ayatollahs further.

The United States and Israel must also avoid the latest snare set by the Europeans, who are desperately seeking to prevent the Trump administration from doing what Trump has repeatedly said he wants to do, namely exiting the failed Iranian nuclear deal. An American-European “working group,” announced while Pence was in Israel, is the latest idea, as if anything will at this point persuade Iran (backed by Russia and China) to give up any concessions won from Obama.

Instead, the working group will divert attention from the intense allied consultations that should be underway, namely on increasing the pressure on Tehran once Washington formally withdraws from the deal in May. Israel, of course, will welcome the withdrawal, but there must be diplomatic preparation both for such an announcement and the West’s follow-up actions that will make clear that denuclearization is Iran’s only way forward.

Throughout his trip, Vice President Pence proved adept at navigating the complexities of Middle Eastern politics, while also providing a reassuring contrast to the ongoing obstructionism in Congress over keeping the US government operating. It would not be surprising to see Pence taking a larger international role in advocating Trump administration foreign policies on the international stage.

I've been privileged to attend the two great speeches of this decade in the Knesset plenum: that of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (exactly four years ago, January 20, 2014) and that of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (this week). Two uplifting experiences: one moral and one spiritual.

I felt that each speech was an epoch-making event that perhaps transforms the course of history. I felt in the presence of something momentous.

In his soaring speech to the Knesset, Harper articulated a principled approach that calls out the hypocrisies and shames the injustices of what too often passes as "politically correct" policy regarding Israel. He savaged the campaign to boycott and isolate Israel.

"In the world of diplomacy, with one, solitary, Jewish state and scores of others, it is all too easy 'to go along to get along' and single out Israel. But such 'going along to get along,' is not a 'balanced' approach, nor a 'sophisticated' one; it is, quite simply, weak and wrong. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a world where that kind of moral relativism runs rampant. And in the garden of such moral relativism, the seeds of much more sinister notions can be easily planted.

"As once Jewish businesses were boycotted, some civil society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel. On some campuses, intellectualized arguments against Israeli policies thinly mask the underlying realities, such as the shunning of Israeli academics and the harassment of Jewish students. Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state.

The U.S. has no interest in an open breach with Turkey. Any such breach will only strengthen Erdogan’s position at home and in the wider region. And given Turkey’s military weakness and the Kurds’ military power, America’s best bet is to keep its head down as Turkey insults it, while supporting the Kurds on the ground as they supplant the Turks as America’s partners in the field.

Rather than express dismay as Turkey moves further and further into the Russian-Iranian camp and away from the U.S., the administration can simply shrug its shoulders and let the chips fall. In this context, it makes sense that the administration did not try to prevent Turkey from purchasing the S-400 anti-aircraft system, which endangers the F-35 program.

Rather than trying to convince Erdogan not to walk out of NATO by rendering his weapons systems incompatible with NATO systems, last November, Assistant Undersecretary of Defense for International Affairs Heidi Grant simply let it be known that Turkey’s decision would have consequences for its planned purchase of 100 F-35s.

Speaking to Defense News, Grant said that the Turks “are a sovereign nation. They can choose to go with other partners. But I have made it very clear that it makes it a little more difficult for our partnership as a coalition because we will not be interoperable. As of right now, our current policies are, we would not be interoperable with Russian equipment.”

Turkey’s invasion of Afrin, like so many of its other actions in recent months and years, make it clear that it can no longer be considered a U.S. ally.

And a close examination of the Trump administration’s actions and statements indicate that not only is the U.S. no longer treating Turkey like an ally. It is also taking steps to neutralize the threat Turkey poses to American interests while cultivating a new alliance with the Kurds that will survive Turkey’s current slide into irrelevance and grow stronger in the coming years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a new political model that does not exist anywhere in the world so Israel could peacefully coexist with the Palestinians.

During the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Netanyahu touted the possibility of a peace deal between Palestinians and Israel based on his proposed political model, Israel Hayom reported Friday.

The prime minister said the model would allow Palestinians full authority to handle their own affairs, except when it comes to security. He further explained they would be able to govern themselves, have their own flags, and establish their own embassies, as long as they did not pose a threat to Israel.

In this never-before-seen political model, Israel would have full control over security in Israel, including in the Jordan Valley.

Despite sharing his ideas, Netanyahu wants to wait and see what sort of peace proposals come out of the Trump administration. He said it was a "fantasy" to think any other entity than the United States could broker peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Netanyahu made sure to reiterate that any deal going forward or any peace talks had to acknowledge that Jerusalem would remain the capital of Israel.

On the topic of the Palestinian ally Iran, Netanyahu said under the Iran nuclear deal, the "preeminent terrorist state" has the ability to produce up to 200 nuclear bombs and he "won't let that happen."

"I don't particularly care if they [the U.S.] fix the deal or if they cancel the deal,"Netanyahu said. "The important thing for me is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear arsenal, because Iran not only spreads terrorism worldwide, Iran openly says it's going to use those weapons—and use every weapon they have—to annihilate Israel. We're not going to let that happen."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday that Israel would retain control over Jerusalem’s holy sites in any peace deal, while ensuring “complete religious rights for those of all faiths.” His comments came amid speculation over the content of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan.

“We’re keeping the holy sites and the status quo, and I want to stress that under any arrangement that we have, we will always keep the status quo at the Temple Mount and all of the holy sites,” Netanyahu said. “Our position is that Jerusalem should remain united under Israel’s sovereignty with complete religious rights for those of all faiths.”


By “holy sites,” Netanyahu was presumably referring in particular to sites of religious significance in Jerusalem’s Old City, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war and subsequently annexed. These include the Temple Mount, the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

In an onstage interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria at the World Economic Forum, Netanyahu also praised Trump’s announcement December 6 that his administration formally recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and rejected speculation that the declaration would embolden Israel to annex territory in the West Bank.

The Palestinians rejected US President Donald Trump’s fresh threat to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid on Thursday, saying peace talks are “off the table” if the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital isn’t reversed.

Ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Davos, Trump said the US would no longer provide aid to the Palestinians if they refused to engage in US-brokered peace talks with Israel. He also said he’d taken Jerusalem “off the table” with his December 6 recognition of the city as Israel’s capital — a move that led the Palestinians to freeze ties with the US.

Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said in response that the president’s latest remarks showed “the US has disqualified itself from playing a role in achieving peace” and that his Jerusalem decision was a “wake-up call” to Arab leaders.

“Jerusalem is not off the negotiations table, rather the US is outside the international consensus. Those who say that Jerusalem is off the table are saying that peace is off the table,” said Erekat. “There will be no peace without East Jerusalem being the sovereign capital of the State of Palestine.”

President Donald Trump’s recognition last month of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital amounted to “backstabbing,” the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) envoy to Washington said.

Husam Zomlot delivered his first remarks Thursday since the Dec. 6 recognition, addressing the Middle East Institute, a think tank. A main contact between the Trump administration and the Palestinian Authority, Zomlot conveyed a measure of the fury with Trump that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas delivered at a PLO Central Council meeting last week.

But he also recommitted the Palestinians to the two-state solution and to continuing to seek engagement with Israelis.

The remarks, while defiant, also underscored a key Palestinian weakness, one Zomlot said his side must take blame for: They had failed to make their case to the American people, while domestic support for Israel in the United States remained strong.

“We need to start the real process of either removing Israel-Palestine [as a domestic issue] or making Palestine a domestic issue,” he said. “But just to keep Israel as a domestic issue and not Palestine — that hasn’t worked for 26 years.”

He said Palestinians might target Congress, the elites, the media and the Jewish community.

The US is reportedly considering shutting down the offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington, the de facto embassy of the Palestinian Authority in the US, if Ramallah continues to refuse to take part in peace talks.

Israel’s Hadashot TV news reported Thursday that the step is being considered as part of the Trump administration’s steady ratcheting up of pressure on the Palestinian leadership amid growing tensions between the PA and Washington.

The report, by the network’s senior diplomatic correspondent Dana Weiss, did not cite a source and could not be immediately confirmed.

If the US is considering such a step, it wouldn’t be the first time.

In mid-November, the US State Department informed PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki that the PLO office in DC would be closed because the Palestinians had violated a 2015 US Congressional mandate.

Knowing Donald Trump, he won’t give anyone an early warning. He’ll just deliver a festive speech and present his “ultimate deal” for the Middle East.

There won’t be long negotiations with the two parties, and he won’t convene a conference, like American presidents have done in the past. He’ll simply present everyone with a fact: This is the deal. Take it or leave it.

Eight months ago, the US administration declared that the Trump plan would be presented in March 2018. On Tuesday, a senior American official said ahead of Vice President Mike Pence’s departure back to the United States that the plan would likely be unveiled this year and that “both sides have to be ready for it.”

It’s no wonder, therefore, that the apprehension of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah keeps growing. There’s a reason why Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is shooting uncontrollably, cursing Trump and trying with all his might to get the Europeans to influence the expected declaration’s content.

In recent months, the Palestinians collected information, some of it based on rumors, from every possible source. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, compiled the information into a pessimistic document assessing what would be included in Trump’s plan. As far as the Palestinians are concerned, it’s a train which is quickly headed in their direction, and they are unable to stop it or change its route.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri heard “disturbing” news from Jordanian King Abdullah II, who warned him of the danger of resisting President Trump’s peace plan, the Beirut-based daily Ad-Diyar reported on Friday. The meeting between the king and the PM took place on the sidelines of the Davos summit in Switzerland, and could mean a “black cloud for both countries’ attempts to deal with both the Syrian and Palestinian refugee crises,” Ad-Diyar noted, quoting Jordanian senior officials.

In the meeting, Abdullah alerted Hariri to the danger of losing the Trump administration’s funding for Palestinian refugee camps in both their countries, insisting that the president does not want to continue paying. For both Lebanon and Jordan, being able to fund the refugee population is an existential problem, as both host countries have been torn in the past by uprisings of their “Palestinian guests.”


According to Ad-Diyar, the king, who told Hariri he was “appalled” by what is being waged in the “closed rooms” in Washington DC, spoke frankly, warning that Trump will not give anyone an early warning. He will simply take a public stand when the conditions are ripe to impose the “huge deal” without being interested in “deep” negotiations with the parties. The Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority will simply be told to put up or shut up, this is the plan and you have to implement it.

According to Ad-Diyar, the Jordanian side expects that the Trump deal will be ready for prime time in March 2018. The Jordanian king described Trump’s plan as a speeding car without brakes, advising Hariri not to believe those who tell him Trump doesn’t have a plan.

Following VP Pence's visit to Jordan, former Jordanian minister Saleh Al-Qallab slammed Trump's Jerusalem announcements, said Israel will eventually disappear like previous occupiers of Palestinehttps://t.co/IgggWEVghxpic.twitter.com/vegVBbL9XN

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 25, 2018

For the first time in its history, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Thursday, called for the Palestinian Authority to halt its payments to incarcerated terrorists and their families.

Israel swayed the council to include a denunciation of terrorist payments as part of its passage of an overall resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The bulk of the resolution was critical of Israeli actions over the pre-1967 lines and denounced US President Donald Trump’s declaration that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“After a persistent effort we succeeded for the first time to include in the final report [resolution] a clear call to stop support for terrorists and their families,” said Yesh Atid MK Aliza Lavie, who addressed the council in Strasbourg, France.

But the bulk of the debate dealt with Trump’s Jerusalem statement.

Palestinian representative Muhammad Faisal Abushahla said the US president ignored Israel’s “occupation of Jerusalem” and that his declaration denied “Palestinian rights in Jerusalem as their capital for thousands of years.”

UNRWA’s leadership and supporters are now howling with displeasure. A campaign is now underway to portray the U.S. as taking food and medicine out of the hands of children and the elderly. It’s worth noting here that this would be the case only if UNRWA has already burned through the $60 million the U.S. doled out a few weeks ago. But also: Since when does a United Nations-run agency have the right to demand an annual gift from the U.S. taxpayer, let alone dictate the schedule on which those gifts are made? These are voluntarily charitable donations, not mandatory assessments.

If the U.S. is expected to continue as UNRWA’s biggest benefactor, the management of the agency needs to fundamentally change. The U.S. should assume a permanent role in the agency’s governance. This could include the installation of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, or (more realistically) one of America’s other capable diplomats at the U.N. in New York, as its chair. With that title ought to come the basic oversight prerogatives reserved for any nonprofit’s board of directors and top donors—establishment of performance metrics, evaluation of key staff, freedom to audit any program or expenditure, and the ability to shape the mission, mandate and future of the organization.

This does not mean that the U.S. should halt funding for those most in need. On the contrary. But there must be a plan to move UNRWA’s 5 million dependents from international welfare to self-sufficiency.

The culture of hopelessness and permanent dependency in the Middle East breeds terrorism and violence. By contrast, economic self-sufficiency and advancement produce peace and tolerance. Today, UNRWA stands for the former; under American leadership, it can transform to the latter.

In countries where Palestinians have been granted citizenship, the refugee status should be revoked and aid should instead be provided to the host country to assist in their absorption and acclimation.

Similarly, countries that have not yet granted citizenship to Palestinians who have lived there since 1948, should be incentivized to finally end their refugee status. In territories where neither of these policies is an option, existing UN agencies can step in to ease the plight and provide essential services for those in need.

FINALLY, there is absolutely no justification for UNRWA’s operation in areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. The PA receives almost $700 million in foreign aid annually. Half of this sum is spent paying stipends to convicted murderers and other terrorists.

If the international community were to insist that its aid be used for actual humanitarian purposes, and even supplement it with aid rerouted from UNRWA, then those who have called Ramallah, Nablus and other Palestinian cities their home for almost seven decades could be incentivized to finally relinquish their refugee status.

The new American policy provides the UN and international community with the opportunity to institute some fresh thinking into the quagmire that is the issue of Palestinian refugees. The naysayers and alarmists are sure to reject these recommendations out of hand and demand that UNRWA continue to operate under its current mandate.

Those, however, who really care about the plight of Palestinians should insist that the real danger lies in continuing to pursue policies that have failed to bring peace, tranquility or prosperity to the Palestinian people.

Attempts have been made to justify the favoured treatment the UN gives to descendants of refugees who happen to be Palestinian. It has been argued that if Jews have returned to their land with international endorsement after 1,800 years of dispersion, the Palestinians should have the same right after 70 years. This just does not stand up to scrutiny. Jews returning to their ancient homeland have never claimed to be exercising an individual right of return as refugees. They have never claimed to be returning to their individual homes. Rather, they have claimed a collective right of national self-determination which entitles Jews, wherever they may live, to return to their national home, the State of Israel.

For the 99% of Palestinians classified by UNRWA as "refugees" who are in fact descendants of refugees, and have never fled from their homes, Israel has long accepted that they too have a collective right of national self-determination which would entitle them, wherever they may live, to return to a future State of Palestine, but not to Israel. Israel has also long accepted that they have a right to be compensated for the property they or their forebears lost in the 1948 war. The Arab states have yet to make a similar commitment to compensate the 820,000 Jews they expelled from their own countries after 1948.

There appears to be no good reason why there is one UN agency and one set of rules for Palestinian refugees and another agency and another set of rules for all of the world's other refugees. UNRWA explains this anomaly thus: "As UNRWA was set up in 1949, Palestine refugees were specifically and intentionally excluded from the international refugee law regime established in 1951."

However, this explanation only provides the historical reason for the existence of the two agencies, not a justification, and does not give a reason why the two agencies should not be merged, and why the criteria for determining who is a refugee should not be standardised, so that the same rules apply to everybody.

Actors Hugh Grant and Viggo Mortensen are among more than 25 celebrities and public figures expressing “horror” over President Donald Trump’s decision to cut funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, an advocacy group said Thursday.

“The real target of this lethal attack is the Palestinian people themselves,” the group said in a joint statement. “It has been launched with the clear aim of dismantling their rights, by dismantling the institution that is charged with protecting them.”

Actresses Gillian Anderson, Olivia Wilde, Emma Thompson and Tilda Swinton were also among the signatories.

The letter was released by the Hoping Foundation, a London-based group that assists Palestinian children.
[run by Karma Nabulsi, PLO representative from 1977-90 to the UN and PFLP fangirl]

Expressing frustration with a freeze in Mideast peace efforts, Trump this month blamed the Palestinians for the deadlock and threatened to cut U.S. funding. Washington subsequently suspended a $65 million payment to UNRWA, the U.N. agency that provides education, health care and other social services to over 5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants scattered across the Middle East.

On Thursday, Trump said in Davos, Switzerland, that the Palestinians must return to peace talks to receive U.S. aid money.

The United States is the largest single donor to UNRWA, and the agency has launched a global fund-raising appeal in hopes of closing the gap. In all, it provides hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the Palestinians.

During 2017, Israel secured a series of unprecedented diplomatic achievements, reflecting a growing global and regional recognition of a shared threat from totalitarian Islamism, as well as an appreciation of Israel's capacity to contribute in a variety of fields.

President Trump's declaration on Dec. 6, 2017, that the American administration recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and is planning to move the American embassy there constitutes a significant landmark in the struggle, which has been ongoing since 1949, over the formulation of the U.S. position on Jerusalem. For the first time since Israel's founding, the president has recognized that Israel is the sovereign in Jerusalem.

The willingness to present reality as it is, after two generations of succumbing to Arab and Islamic pressures and threats, constitutes a first-rate Israeli diplomatic achievement. The American move reflects the president's decision to abandon the patterns of appeasing Palestinians and deliberately creating a position gap with Israel.

In May 2017, an American president chose Israel as one of the destinations for his first trip abroad. In his meeting with Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, President Trump publicly demanded that the PA should end the extensive financing of families of Palestinian prisoners and "martyrs" (terrorists).

In June, Prime Minister Netanyahu was the sole non-African speaker at the summit of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia. Later that month was the tripartite Israel-Greece-Cyprus summit in Thessaloniki to discuss the production of energy in the eastern Mediterranean.

In July, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi came for a three-day visit to Israel (and to Israel alone). Israel's relationship with India is rooted in both countries' self-image as democracies opposed by ruthless Islamist enemies.

In September, Netanyahu met Egyptian President el-Sisi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, their first public meeting since Sisi came to power in 2013. The mere fact that a public meeting took place - let alone in a relaxed mood and garnering positive coverage - illustrated the vast transformation in Israel's standing in the region.

The Geneva-based, 47-member United Nations’ Human Rights Council working group has just sent Israel a list of 240 human rights issues it must correct, AP reported Thursday.

The list was compiled from the working group as well as the recommendations of several member states, including the UK, which advised “immediate action to cease the policy of demolitions of Palestinian properties and buildings,” and reversing “policy on settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

The German delegation recommended Israel end the “practices of collective punishment such as the demolition of homes, revocation of residency permits in East Jerusalem, and the closure of entire areas.”

Even the “State of Palestine” had ten recommendations for Israel, to which Israel responded by suggesting to entity by that name does not “satisfy the criteria for statehood under international law.”

According to AP, the US did not add its recommendations.

Israel’s ambassador to the UNHRC Aviva Raz Shechter on Wednesday condemned the “unparalleled number of one-sided biased and political resolutions adopted regularly by the automatic majority […which testifies] not only to the unfair treatment of the State of Israel, but also to the deficiencies of the Council itself and its agenda.”

The Jerusalem District Court sentenced three Israeli Arabs to lengthy prison sentences for killing Alexander Levlovitch back in 2015 by throwing rocks at his car. The attack was considered the first of 2015's 'knifing intifada' terror wave.

Abed Dweiyat guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to him 15 years in prison. Muhammad Abu Kaf and Elul Atrash were found guilty of aiding and abetting and received eight years in prison.

The suspects had been convicted back in September after lengthy deliberations. The three defendants had argued that the suspects could not be tried for manslaughter as they had not intended for Levlovitch to drive into a ditch.

However, Judge Rafi Carmel ruled that the defendants were fully aware of the potential consequences rock-throwing might bring. "They knew that it could lead to such results," wrote Carmel.

The three had killed Levlovich, 64, by hurling rocks at his car, as he passed through Pisgat Zeev on the way back from his festive Rosh Hashana meal. After being hit by the stones, the car swerved and hit a power pole before landing in a ditch.

Turkey extradited the main suspect in a bombing in Lebanon targeting a senior Hamas militant despite an explicit request from the Mossad not to, Lebanon's Addiyar newspaper reported.

According to the report, Turkey ignored Israel's request and handed over Mahmoud Battiya, seen by Lebanon's security services as the main suspect in behind last week’s attempt on the life of senior Hamas official Mohammad Abu Hamza Hamdan. Battiya was allegedly recruited by the Mossad in Holland and has since made several trips to Lebanon for Israel's intelligence agency.

Hamdan was moderately injured in a car explosion in the southern Lebanon city of Sidon and was evacuated to the hospital.

Hamas and Hezbollah have blamed Israel for the attack, and Lebanese media has been rife with details regarding the bombing. According to one report, sources in the area saw an Israeli plane circling the sky during the explosion, which occurred at the same location in which Islamic Jihad members, the al-Majdoub brothers, were killed in 2006 in an operation allegedly carried out by Israel.

There is no way to gloss over this reality: According to an assessment from a senior security official, some 420 of the 1,027 terrorists imprisoned in Israel released as part of exchange deal for captured IDF Cpl. Gilad Schalit in November 2011 have found their way back into the circle of terrorism and violence. Some 210 were re-arrested, and 100 were put back behind bars. Terrorists freed in the Schalit deal have directly or indirectly been involved in the murder of seven Israelis, including the three teens abducted in Gush Etzion in June 2014, as well as Rabbi Michael Mark and Baruch Mizrahi.

But the major, aggregate damage, with which Israel is finding it hard to contend, comes from the freed prisoners who were deported to or sent back to the Gaza Strip. Now it is becoming clear that it's easier to handle the ones who went back home to Judea and Samaria, within Israel's reach, than the terrorists who are across the border in Gaza.

As if that weren't enough, a group of the prisoners released in the Schalit deal have seized control of Hamas in Gaza. The group has established a mechanism whose purpose, at least for now, is to keep things quiet in Gaza to give them a chance to rebuild themselves, while hatching plans for terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria, all while continuing to shake up the regime of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

According to reports out of the PA security establishment, this mechanism has a well-ordered hierarchy: The man in charge of terrorist attacks in Judea and Samaria is Maher Obeid, an associate of Saleh Arouri, who replaced him as commander of West Bank activity from abroad. Obeid and Arouri are believed to be in London. Obeid, who used to be charged with raising funds for Hamas and recently represented the group in its contact with Iran, denies these reports. It's possible he simply fears for his life.

Residents of the Gaza Strip are growing increasingly desperate over food shortages, with some saying it’s only a matter of time before Palestinians march on the Erez crossing that straddles the border with Israel “just out of distress.”

“Gaza is heading towards famine,” a longtime friend of this reporter said. “It is only a question of time, and we will get there.”

He added, “There are already cases of families who simply don’t have anything to eat, and the UNRWA budget cuts will only make things worse” — a reference to recent US cuts to the UN Palestinian aid agency.

Recently, nearly every day has seen semi-spontaneous protests, mostly by civilians, who have no livelihood and are seeking to raise international awareness of their plight.

This week, a news agency broadcast an interview with a Khan Younis resident who was offering to sell his son, held in his arms.

“Every day his mother tells me to get him something to eat,” the man said, “and I have nothing to give him.” Behind him were dozens of residents protesting the economic situation in Gaza.

Iraqi Official Hamid Al-Husseini: The Goal of the Resistance is to Preserve the Current Regimes; The Factions in Palestine Are Under the Command of Qasem Soleimani https://t.co/sAGSuHYpwt

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) January 26, 2018

In testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee last November, I raised some doubts about U.S. military aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). My main concern was that the LAF "is increasingly intertwined with Hezbollah."

Now there is another reason to doubt that American military aid to Lebanon can be justified. Hanin Ghaddar, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, has been convicted by a Lebanese military court for the "crime" of defaming the army. After a closed trial held in absentia, she has been sentenced to six months imprisonment. The sad story is told by the Washington Institute here, and relates to comments she made at a conference in Washington in 2014.

There has been a very wide and powerful outpouring of support for her, and rightly so. But Americans should realize something about that kangaroo court: we are paying for it! As I noted in my testimony, "We’ve given the LAF over a billion dollars in military aid, including $123 million in FY2017, and Lebanon is the fifth largest recipient of foreign military financing (FMF). Our ambassador to Lebanon, Elizabeth Richard, said publicly on October 31 that total support for the LAF from State Department and Defense Department accounts totaled $160 million over the previous year."

Whatever we think we are supporting with that aid, surely we do not wish to help pay for a system of military courts that suppress freedom of speech and seek to punish someone for speaking in Washington. It's worth adding that what Ghaddar said that elicited these attacks on her was the simple truth: as the Washington Institute described it, "that the Lebanese military targets Sunni groups while showing preference to Shiite groups, such as Hezbollah."

When Congress next takes up military aid for Lebanon, this effort to suppress free speech--and to make telling the truth about Hezbollah's role in Lebanon illegal--should be item number one.

A Saudi panel debated possible Saudi measures against Hizbullah on Rotana Khalijiyya TV on November 8. Saudi political commentator Mobarak Al-Atty said that he hoped for a "direct military operation that will annihilate Hizbullah," either by the Islamic Military Alliance or by the international coalition. Retired Saudi General Shami Al-Dhaheri, former head of the Saudi Command and Staff College, reiterated that there was no option other than a military operation against Hizbullah, which he called "Iran's model organization."

An American counter-terrorism expert has accused supporters of Lebanese group Hezbollah of “engaging in criminal conduct” in the capital, ahead of a new parliamentary attempt to ban the organisation in its entirety.

Dr Matthew Levitt, director of the counter-terrorism programme at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that “London has a Hezbollah problem” and the current partial British ban was not working.

He said the result was that Hezbollah was carrying out illegal activities here — including drug running and fundraising for military campaigns — as well as undermining British interests abroad.

The warning, in a guest post published by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, came ahead of a parliamentary debate today on whether the existing curbs on Hezbollah should be tightened.

At the moment, British law bans Hezbollah’s terrorist and military wings, but permits its political wing, despite the US banning the organisation in its entirety and Hezbollah’s promotion of armed resistance against Israel.

The partial ban means that Hezbollah flags are flown on London’s streets during the annual Al Quds march.

Dr Levitt states in his article: “London has a Hezbollah problem. Hezbollah continues to engage in terrorist and criminal activities — within the UK and the EU more broadly — despite the partial ban

A backbench motion was debated in the House of Commons yesterday urging the British Government to proscribe the entirety of Hizballah as a terrorist organisation, and not just Hizballah’s fictitious “military wing”. The motion was organised and moved by Joan Ryan, the Labour MP for Enfield North and Chair of the Party’s Friends of Israel group. Several MPs questioned the government’s ongoing distinction between Hizballah’s military and political wings.

The full motion stated: “That this House believes that Hizballah is a terrorist organisation driven by an antisemitic ideology that seeks the destruction of Israel; notes that Hizballah declares itself to be one organisation without distinguishable political or military wings; is concerned that the military wing of that organisation is proscribed, but its political wing is not; and calls on the Government to include Hizballah in its entirety on the list of proscribed organisations.”

In March last year, Campaign Against Antisemitism submitted a report to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in which we called on the the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to drop its opposition to the total proscription of Hizballah under the Terrorism Act, which is enabling Hizballah supporters in the UK to freely fly the Hizballah flag at demonstrations such as the “Al Quds Day” march through central London, and even to fundraise for Hizballah. Whilst the authorities should prevent this, they use the fact that Hizballah is only partially proscribed as a loophole to avoid taking action.

In December last year, we initiated a private prosecution against Nazim Ali, the leader of the “Al Quds Day” march, after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) declined to prosecute him. We allege that Mr Ali bellowed through his megaphone that: “It is the Zionists who give money to the Tory Party to kill people in high-rise blocks.”

Banning all of Hizballah should be non-partisan and it was pleasing to hear sympathetic and passionate speeches from MPs from across the political divide representing Labour, the Conservatives, Democratic Unionist Party and Scottish National Party.

Jeremy Corbyn accepted £20,000 from the Iranian propaganda outfit Press TV. He has referred to Hezbollah as his “friends” he was never going to be in favour of proscribing Hezbollah.

The moment the al Jazeera documentary directed at employees of the Israeli embassy and parts of the Jewish community The Lobby came out he called for a parliamentary inquiry claiming Israel posed a “national security issue”. In Jeremy Corbyn’s world an organisation that bombs and murders indiscriminately needs to be mollycoddled whereas Israel poses a national security issue.

In the USA there is an investigation into President Trump’s connections with Russia, when will there be anything like the same amount of controversy surrounding Jeremy Corbyn and the many connections he has with people, organisations and countries who hate the United Kingdom and every value it holds dear?

Across Britain, at respectful ceremonies, we stand silently to remember the victims of the Holocaust. Some are fortunate enough to hear the testimony of the courageous Holocaust survivors who brave their pain to recount their experiences during the Holocaust, day after day at schools around the country so that our children may grow up understanding the barbaric terrors that bigotry can unleash.

The message from Holocaust survivors has always been simple. Evil always lurks just below the surface. It thrives on indifference. We must never forget. We must never again permit evil to come to power. It is a message that drove the decades-long anti-racist campaigns that established the tolerance and equality that underpins Western society.

Yet at Holocaust remembrance ceremonies, we will permit some to go through the motions of commemorating the Holocaust, whilst openly and fiercely supporting those whose goal is to perpetrate a new one.

Take for example Jeremy Corbyn, who, as an avowed “anti-racist” and Leader of the Opposition, has a prominent place at Holocaust remembrance ceremonies. Last year, as in every year, he says the words, this year managing to do so without mentioning Jews or antisemitism: “We should never forget the Holocaust: The millions who died, the millions displaced and cruel hurt their descendants have suffered.”

But whilst Mr Corbyn goes through the motions, I cannot believe that he has learned the lessons that Holocaust survivors have so desperately and resolutely tried to instil. For this same Mr Corbyn spent decades in political obscurity hosting and consorting with antisemites and terrorists. He was not merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, he sought them out, hosting blood-libeller Raed Salah for tea in Parliament after he slipped into the country despite an exclusion order, and writing to the Church of England to defend the notorious Reverend Stephen Sizer, who had claimed that an Israeli conspiracy was behind 9/11.

In the Israeli–Palestinian conflict nothing can be done that’s good for both sides, whatever is
good for one side is bad for the other side: agree or disagree?

President Reuven Rivlin is not a lone voice in the wilderness when he insists the creation of the State of Israel was not compensation for the Holocaust.

He is supported in this belief by Prof. Dina Porat, the chief historian at Yad Vashem.

Rivlin was speaking on Thursday to foreign diplomats who braved the inclement weather to attend the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day event for the diplomatic corps at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Rivlin noted that his own family came to the Land of Israel well over a century before the Holocaust and said other Jewish families were already living here long before the arrival of his own ancestors. “The State of Israel is not a colonial project, and not compensation for the Holocaust,” he declared. “The State of Israel came into being from the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in its own homeland.”

Porat, in a video presentation, explained how Holocaust denial can be manipulated to delegitimize Israel’s existence. She said former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust ever happened as a pretext for saying if there was no Holocaust there was no legitimacy for the State of Israel.

Then, endorsing Rivlin’s contention, Porat stated: “The State of Israel did not come out of the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad ignores the fact that the State of Israel came out of Zionism that was there 70 years before the Holocaust.”

Members of Parliament on Thursday supported a non-binding resolution in the House of Commons to proscribe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization under UK terrorism legislation.

There was widespread support for the move to proscribe the political wing of Hezbollah. Currently, only the military wing is defined as a terrorist organization in UK law. The full text of the resolution said: “This House believes that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation driven by an antisemitic ideology that seeks the destruction of Israel; notes that Hezbollah declares itself to be one organisation without distinguishable political or military wings; is concerned that the military wing of that organisation is proscribed, but its political wing is not; and calls on the Government to include Hezbollah in its entirety on the list of proscribed organisations.”

During the debate, Labour MP Joan Ryan, who proposed the motion, said: “Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, driven by antisemitic ideology, which seeks the destruction of Israel. It has wreaked death and destruction throughout the middle east, aiding and abetting the Assad regime’s butchery in Syria and helping to drive Iran’s expansionism throughout the region. It makes no distinction between its political and military wings, and nor should the British Government.”

Ahead of the debate, the Labour Party sent a briefing note to Labour MPs urging them to oppose the motion, claiming it would hinder peace talks in the Middle East. The briefing made no mention of Hezbollah’s involvement in the ongoing conflict in Syria or its long history of carrying out terrorist attacks. The briefing said: “There is a balance between making absolutely clear our abhorrence of using violence to achieve political ends and at the same time encouraging organisations down an effective democratic path.”

A journalist announced last week that he will publish a photograph of then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D) and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan that he took in 2005 at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting, but did not make public because he believed it would have “made a difference” to Obama’s political future.

The photographer, Askia Muhammad, told the Trice Edney News Wire that he “gave the picture up at the time and basically swore secrecy.”

“But after the nomination was secured and all the way up until the inauguration; then for eight years after he was President, it was kept under cover,” Muhammad said.

Asked whether he thought the photo’s release would have affected Obama’s presidential campaign, Muhammad said, “I insist. It absolutely would have made a difference.”

Reached by TPM on Thursday, Muhammad said a “staff member” for the CBC contacted him “sort of in a panic” after he took the photo at a caucus meeting in 2005. TPM has published the photo above with Muhammad’s permission.

“I sort of understood what was going on,” Muhammad told TPM. “I promised and made arrangements to give the picture to Leonard Farrakhan,” the minister’s son-in-law and chief of staff.

Last January, Donald Trump infamously omitted mention of the Jews from his Holocaust Memorial Day statement, provoking a national scandal and withering criticism from liberals. Today, Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist leader of the U.K. Labour party, released his Holocaust Memorial Day statement—and did the exact same thing.

As has been widely reported, Labour under Corbyn has been rocked by escalating anti-Semitism scandals, leading to the suspension of dozens of officials, and extending all the way up to Corbyn himself. Before the 2017 U.K. election, just 13 percent of British Jews said they would vote for Corbyn’s Labour, the same as the percentage of Muslims who voted for Donald Trump. This Holocaust statement, then, offered Corbyn an easy opportunity to mend some fences with British Jews and show that he takes their concerns into account.

Instead, he managed to erase Jews from the story of their own genocide. Here is Corbyn’s statement in its entirety:

We should never forget the Holocaust: The millions who died, the millions displaced and cruel hurt their descendants have suffered.
We should understand the way fascism arose in Germany and the circumstances that gave space for the Nazis to grow.
At this, and at all other times, we should reflect and make sure succeeding generations understand the power of words.
Their power to do immense good and inspire; and their power to promote hate and division.
Let us use their power to educate to inspire but above all to build values of trust and respect.

Corbyn was seemingly unaware of the irony of calling for people to be circumspect in using their “power of words” while utterly effacing the Holocaust’s primary victims from his account of their murder. The Times columnist Hugo Rifkind, among others, expressed his disbelief: (h/t Elder of Lobby)

When President Donald Trump left Jews out of his remarks for International Holocaust Remembrance Day last year, he inadvertently gave the relatively new commemoration an unprecedented amount of publicity. Ahead of this Saturday’s observance, the annual tribute is already drawing headlines, from an Israel-related show-down in South Carolina’s legislature to Jewish leaders preparing to boycott Austria’s official observance in parliament.

The day of Holocaust memory was proposed at the United Nations by Israel in 2005. In addition to encouraging education about the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, the authors of Resolution 60/7 sought to push back against denial of the genocide. January 27 was chosen because on that date in 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews from all over Europe were murdered during World War II.

With last year’s tribute notable for what was not said, activists around the world are drawing battle-lines in anticipation of this Saturday’s observance. In a climate of far-right political parties gaining sway across Europe, leaders of Austria’s tiny Jewish community said they will not attend the parliament’s Shoah observance because legislators of the Freedom Party are set to participate. Founded by a former Nazi SS officer in 1956, the party is opposed to anti-Nazi legislation and has sparked protests among Austrians alarmed by its nationalist agenda.

“If there will be ministers there from the Freedom Party, and I’m sure there will be, I will not be able to shake their hands, so the Jewish community will not attend,” said Oskar Deutsch, president of Vienna’s Jewish community, in an interview last week.

Austria has punished very few Nazi perpetrators compared to Germany and other countries, and there is not a strong culture of “memory work” with regards to the past, as in Germany. The Freedom Party has been in power before, and the Jewish community has officially maintained a no-contact policy with it for 17 years.

Across the pond in South Carolina, Saturday’s commemoration has been declared the deadline to pass a bill that would codify a universal definition of anti-Semitism among state institutions. For several weeks, Governor Henry McMaster has been calling on the senate to pass the codification measure before January 27. The bill would make South Carolina the first state to define anti-Semitism as per the US State Department’s guidelines, which include Holocaust denial and the rejection of Israel’s right to exist among forms of anti-Semitic expression.

US President Donald Trump released on Friday the second International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement of his presidency. This time, however, he mentioned anti-Semitism and the Jews.

“We take this opportunity to recall the Nazis’ systematic persecution and brutal murder of six million Jewish people,” he said for the annual day of remembrance that is marked January 27.

It marked a stark difference from last year, in which he failed mention that six million of the victims of the Holocaust were Jewish.

Trump’s 2017 omission prompted widespread criticism and anger. The Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called it “puzzling and troubling,” while the White House rationalized that it was more inclusive of other communities who were also targeted by the Nazi regime.

Trump’s 2018 statement also mentioned the other groups beyond Jews who were victims of the the Holocaust.

First lady Melania Trump remembered the millions of victims of the Nazis, with a visit Thursday to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the people whose lives and families were broken by the horrors of the Holocaust,” the first lady said in a statement. “My heart is with you, and we remember.”

The first lady later tweeted that the visit was “a powerful & moving tour that honors the millions of innocent lives lost, and educates us on the tragedies and effects of the holocaust.”

US President Donald Trump was at a global economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

Mrs. Trump was originally scheduled to accompany her husband to Davos for the World Economic Forum. But Tuesday, her chief of staff said Mrs. Trump would not make the trip to the summit, citing unspecified scheduling and logistical issues.

Mrs. Trump on Thursday said she was visiting the museum in advance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday to honor millions of people who were victims of the Nazis. Accompanied by Director Sara Bloomfield, Mrs. Trump visited exhibits that recounted the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, its policies toward Jewish people and the liberation of concentration camps in 1945.

The Saudi Arabia-based Muslim World League this week characterized the Holocaust as “among the worst human atrocities ever,” and condemned efforts to deny the Nazi crimes.

“True Islam is against these crimes. It classifies them in the highest degree of penal sanctions and among the worst human atrocities ever,” wrote Dr. Mohammad Alissa, secretary general of the Muslim World League, to Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, on Monday.

“One would ask, who in his right mind would accept, sympathize, or even diminish the extent of this brutal crime,” he wrote.

The letter to the museum director, which came ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, did not explicitly mention the murder of Jews.

But Alissa expressed “our great sympathy with the victims of the Holocaust, an incident that shook humanity to the core, and created an event whose horrors could not be denied or underrated by any fair-minded or peace-loving person.”

The Muslim World League is a non-government organization of Sunni scholars, based in Mecca. Its primary donor is the Saudi Arabian kingdom, according to its website.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which falls on Saturday, was designated by the UN General Assembly in 2005 to commemorate the Allied Forces’ victory over the fascist Axis nations. It was on January 27, 1945, that Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest German concentration and death camp, was liberated by the Red Army. It was chosen as a fitting date for the world to remember the dangers of fascism as an ideology capable of justifying and carrying out genocide.

The battle against the fascist Germany, Italy and Japan is what brought together a totalitarian Soviet Union and the democracies of America, Britain and other Anglo nations, which otherwise were deeply divided ideologically.

Yet, 73 years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, far-right and radical-right parties are enjoying a resurgence on the same continent that so recently fought the deadliest war in human history to eradicate fascism.

Of course, the vast majority of popular right-wing parties that have taken power in Hungary, Poland and Austria and that have seriously challenged ruling parties in Germany, France and the Netherlands are hardly comparable to oldschool German or Italian fascism. They do not profess an anti-democratic ideology, let alone advocate genocide.

Rather, they tend to receive most of their support from (mostly white) Europeans who are concerned about (a mostly Muslim) immigration threat.

Right-wing leaders of Europe talk of strengthening “Christian values.” They tend to advance a “nativist” agenda that strives to ensure the state remains inhabited by ethnic natives and that views aliens as a threat.

And in reaction to the Brussels-based elitist EU rule, they tend to be populist, which means they portray their societies as composed of two warring groups: a corrupt elite, and honest and good common folk.

What’s more, many of these right-wing parties are pro-Israel, due in large part to the perception that Israel and Europe confront a common radical Islamist threat.

This is not to say that right-wing antisemitism has passed from Europe. There are occasional reminders that prominent right-wing European leaders can be prone to espousing classical antisemitic tropes.

Not satisfied with proclaiming the imminent death of Israeli democracy, some on the Israeli left have begun warning that the country is sliding into fascism. One recent headline read, “In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.” To Ofir Haivry, these arguments are nonsense, and not only because they confuse off-the-cuff statements of fringe politicians with actual policy or depict fairly modest proposals as outrages against human decency:

Israel is certainly not a perfect place. Like any democratic state, it has its fair share of problems, conflicts, and quirks. But a democratic society with problems is a far, far cry from a non-democratic one; and an even farther cry from a fascistic one. But this basic category error—that a democracy with a few problems is equivalent to fascism—is not [new]. In fact, those who oppose democracy have often used a democracy’s compromises to claim a moral equivalence between those democracies and the deliberate evil of dictatorships.

The actions of democracies during World War II, such as the British “area bombing” of German cities and the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans, were and still are used quite often by spokesmen for dictatorships to allege a moral equivalence between the Western democracies and the Nazis. Maybe, so the narrative goes, the Nazis weren’t so bad if Churchill and Roosevelt were just as bad as Hitler? This equivalence is not only a misunderstanding of history; it’s a misunderstanding of what morality is.

To try to claim moral equivalence between the Nazis and even the most controversial actions taken by democracies defending themselves against mortal attacks—actions that, however misguided, are altogether of another order of magnitude than the deliberate planning and executing of genocide—is to erase the distinctions that make some humans into murderers. . . .

The use and abuse of the Holocaust era, the exploitation of the Nazi experience to dent Trump’s legitimacy, was widespread. It could be seen on demos against Trump, too, on which placards depicted him in a Hitler moustache or warned us against ‘a repeat of the 1930s’. On a London march, one group of people held placards showing Trump dressed like Hitler alongside the words: ‘We’re history teachers — we know how this ends.’

Let’s hope these people aren’t teaching your kids. For it is hard to think of anything more historically illiterate, and more dangerously cynical, than the casual branding of Trump as Hitler and the widespread hints over the past year — the predictions, even — that his rule would end the same way Hitler’s did: with death camps, presumably, and millions dead, and global war, and the absolute destruction of liberty, political freedom and the rule of law. None of that has happened, of course. The Hitler talk was so much steam, with observers rummaging around in history for the strongest political terms with which Trump might be branded and condemned. This has made it more difficult to see what is new and different and, yes, problematic about Trump’s administration. The unhinged Nazi talk discourages reasoned analysis in favour of chasing the cheap thrill of yelling ‘fascist!’ at someone you don’t like. It is profoundly anti-intellectual.

But it does something worse than muddy the present and harm rational debate about politics today; it also ravages the past; it relativises the Nazi experience and, unwittingly no doubt, dilutes the savagery of the Holocaust through comparing that immense crime with what is simply an elected American administration many people don’t like. This might not be Holocaust denial, but it is certainly Holocaust dilution. It is Holocaust relativism. And as some historians have been pointing out since the 1970s, Holocaust relativism, the treatment of the Nazi era as just a wicked brand of politics that crops up every now and then, including now, is the foundation stone of the vile prejudices that underpin actual Holocaust denial. It ‘minimises Nazi atrocities’, as one guide to the Holocaust put it, which in turns fuels the conviction of many Jew-haters: that the Holocaust and the events that nurtured it were not that a big deal. Calm down, Jews.

This is why we cannot forget or forgive what they said about Trump — not because we need to protect Trump from insult, but because we need to protect historical memory from destruction. This is the terrible irony of the worst outbursts of anti-Trump hysteria over the past year: it presented itself as a challenge to an ascendant neo-Nazism, yet its casual, thoughtless use of the Nazi spectre promoted a history-rewriting view of the Nazi era that benefits no one except neo-Nazis.

Just as his new television series "B'zehut B'duyah" ("under a false identity") was wrapping up, reality became stranger than any fiction Zvi Yehezkeli, a veteran Arab affairs correspondent, could ever have imagined when he and his crew were arrested in Turkey.

"When we were shooting the show, I changed clothes in the car and passersby reported seeing someone go into a vehicle wearing one thing and come out wearing something different," he recalls. "Turns out that we were covertly put under surveillance since then, culminating in our arrest on our last day in Istanbul. We were arrested by the local counterterrorism unit."

Q: Were you scared?
"My friend, it wasn't easy. I also had a fake Syrian passport, which I had used to enter Germany while impersonating a refugee for the show. Our vehicle was full of disguises, and they came looking for terrorists. I was scared they would confiscate all the footage we had shot.

Q: Forget about the footage. What about prison?
"There were thoughts about what a bummer it would be to end up in a Turkish prison. One of my crew members said to me, 'That's it. We're done. We're going to rot in jail and no one is going to get us out of here.'" (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Last night, 25 Jan, Hen Mazzig returned to University College London (UCL) for a talk. Hen has uploaded his discussion with the UCL Provost on Facebook. Hen had been invited there following the disgraceful scenes that faced him upon his first visit in 2016. For those that do not remember, anti-Israel protestors attempted to no-platform Hen. The event went ahead in a different room, with Jewish students penned inside and surrounded by screaming haters. The protest was intimidating, violent in places, and the Jewish students needed to be escorted off campus by police. The University brought some students up on disciplinary charges (the demonstrators yesterday, kept referencing ‘five Muslim students’ – I am assuming this is accurate).

The ‘Return of Hen’, to UCL has not been without controversy. Worried about another demonstration, either through a deliberate disruption inside, or mass protest outside, the University clamped down on both attendance and advertising. Even Jewish students from another campus were not permitted to register.

As was predicted, the anti-Israel crowd organised a protest. ‘UCL Friends of Palestine Society’ uploaded a call to their Facebook page. And followed up with some hard-hitting adverts, trying to drum up support:

In truth, it didn’t seem to have as much of an impact within anti-Israel groups as last time. Many of the ‘shares’ were from Zionists, who were discussing this activity on their own pages. Many of the comments were from Hen and his supporters. Pro-Israeli students, arranged a counter protest at UCL, wavering between a simple counter demonstration or a more positive ‘Tel Aviv takes the Quad‘ event, that would see them hold a small party and share food and drink with other students.

In the end, about 50-60 anti-Israel activists showed up at the UCL Quad, which is a central area just inside the main gates onto the UCL campus. A group of about 20 Jewish students were there to meet them.

The Eternal City may never have been more contested than it is today. As many across the globe continue to challenge Israel’s right to claim Jerusalem as its capital, US Vice President Mike Pence‘s delicate visit to the Middle East came at a critical time.

Palestinian rhetoric, triggered by US President Donald Trump’s announcement to move the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv, has been magnified by the President’s recent decision to sever $65 million in US aid to the Palestinians. Elsewhere in the region, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, staunch US allies, must acknowledge Palestinian outrage without alienating the United States.

In his 2011 book, Jerusalem: The Biography, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore captures the theological mystery within which Jerusalem remains suspended, describing it as “the house of one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and she is the only city to exist twice — in heaven and on earth.”

But as a believing Muslim observing Islam, I am compelled by the Quran to support Israel’s sole claim to the Holy Land; the Quran says it is so.

The 80,000-word document 1.6 billion Muslims accept as the revealed word of God, the Quran, is categorical about the destiny of Israel and the people who can claim its ownership.

The Quran states: “Moses said to his people: O my people! Remember the bounty of God upon you when He bestowed prophets upon you, and made you kings and gave you that which had not been given to anyone before you amongst the nations. O my people! Enter the Holy Land which God has written for you, and do not turn tail, otherwise you will be losers.”

In the aftermath of all three sermons, I want to stress, I came across some reassuring signs that in America, we deal with these issues with an honesty that is absent in much of Europe and certainly the Middle East. In the New Jersey case, Sen. Cory Booker quickly issued a thundering denunciation of Elkasaby’s anti-Semitism, at the same time telling his friend, Islamic Center President Ahmed Shedeed, to “publicly and unconditionally denounce Imam Elkasaby’s hateful rhetoric, which was delivered at your house of worship before your congregants.” In the case of Al-Rousan, the Islamic Society of Greater Houston condemned him for making “inflammatory remarks about our Jewish community in a deeply disturbing tone.” In the case of Khadra in Raleigh, an email exchange I had with him revealed some awareness on his part of the negative impact of his remark, and a desire to meet with local Jews to mend fences and restate the non-discriminatory principles of interfaith dialogue.

In each of these cases, I spoke to Muslim leaders who expressed some degree of remorse or condemnation, and did not deny—as would often be the case in Europe—that such rhetoric is judged in the American context as an actual threat to the Jews living here, and therefore a potential threat to most precious norms and conventions of the nation at large.

That this recognition exists strikes me as a decent enough foundation for a more transparent dialogue between Judaism and Islam in America. As a country with no official religion, whose citizens nonetheless embrace different faiths in vast numbers, America is the ideal location for such a conversation. And it needs to begin by recognizing that there is, as Nirenberg says in his book, a strong message in the Quran and in other key Muslim texts that “Islam, like Christianity, staked its claims in the name of Jewish truth, but guaranteed those claims with Jewish falsity.” Hence the temptation for Muslim preachers to address contemporary issues like Jerusalem through the filter of Jewish deceit and Jewish disobedience—“they believed, then disbelieved, therefore a seal was set on their hearts so they do not understand,” the Quran says—that permeated the depiction of the Jews in the early world of Islam.

Nobody can pretend that these anti-Jewish texts, beliefs and traditions do not exist. But the experience of Jews with the Catholic Church during the last half-century—in which fundamental doctrines about the demonic nature of the Jews dating to the time of St. Paul have been dispensed with—suggests that there is very little in this world that is immovable. Certainly, those of us who believe that Jewish-Muslim coexistence can only be achieved on the basis of mutual respect, as well as mutual commitment to civic, secular government and society, should aim for nothing less.

“He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.” — Benjamin Franklin

Recently Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Columbia/Barnard Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) launched a petition to boycott a small New York City bookstore chain called Book Culture. So far the petition has attracted the usual suspects, including SJP and JVP students and 18 anti-Israel Columbia/Barnard professors including Katherine Franke, Brinkley Messick, Joseph Massad and Hamid Dabashi.

It is a natural impulse of all people of good conscience to come to the aid of a bookstore attacked by bigots and radical extremists. However, I must urge all to consider the wider context before rushing to Book Culture’s defense.

As it happens, Book Culture’s owners are far from being innocent victims in this widely-eported story. Ironically, they are in fact Palestinian sympathizers who actually financed and promoted the now notorious children’s book that started it all, P is for Palestine. Only when community backlash to the book threatened their business did they attempt to moderate their position in some clumsy damage control. It was in response to their subsequent disavowal of support for terrorism against Israeli civilians and their rejection of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel that SJP and JVP subsequently turned on them and initiated their boycott.

Ever since he got burned by the parody Mossad account, DouchebloggerTM Richard Silverstein has had a soft-on for them, and has tried to find get revenge against them for making him look as stupid as he actually is.

Over a month after the parody Mossad account made this (valid) point
(yes, a month later. He clearly has issues)

self-proclaimed “journalist” Silverstein responded

Dare challenge accepted. And actually, it took me about 2 seconds.

That photo of Leonard Cohen with the IDF is from the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Now kindly delete your account, Dicky. It is way past time.

The New Orleans City Council on Thursday unanimously rescinded a resolution concerning the city's investment policies after it sparked accusations that members had unwittingly played into the hands of international anti-Israel extremists.

The Jan. 11 resolution states that the city has "social and ethical obligations to take steps to avoid contracting with or investing in corporations whose practices consistently violate human rights, civil rights or labor rights" and it "encourages the creation of a process" to avoid such investments.

While the resolution did not name any specific nation, it was decried by the Anti-Defamation League and the Greater New Orleans Jewish Federation as anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.

Members of the New Orleans Palestinian Solidarity Committee and boycott, divestment and sanctions movement activists later admitted that the process targeted Israel, but said other nations would be affected by it as well.

Immediately after the measure was rescinded, demonstrators broke into songs of protest, prompting a half-hour recess. Outside the meeting room, resolution supporters who had been unable to enter because of space limitations held protest signs up against the glass wall while chanting.

This was sent to the NY Times:

Your editorial, "Mike Pence’s Self-Serving Trip to the Holy Land ​" (January 23), accused Vice-President Pence of choosing "to ignore Israelis’ shared history with the Palestinians" in his Knesset speech earlier this week.

Did you really want him to recount the murderous pogroms Arabs committed against Jews in Hebron, Gaza, Jerusalem during 1920-1947 which caused an ethnic-cleansing of those Jews from homes in which they resided, in some cases for centuries and over 1000 dead Jews? The war of aggression initiated by Arabs of Mandate Palestine in 1947 in violation of the UN's Partition recommendation? The decade of fedayeen terror until 1956? The founding of the PLO in 1964, three years prior to the so-called 1967 "occupation" and the construction of any Jewish civilian resettlement homes in Judea and Samaria or Gaza?

On January 24th Israel’s Ministry of Defence published a summary of its Crossings Authority’s activity during 2017. In the section relating to the Kerem Shalom crossing the report states:

“The movement of Israeli goods that entered Gaza via the Kerem Shalom crossing grew and reached some 160 thousand lorries. The peak of the year was recorded in April when in one day over 1,000 lorries carrying goods crossed the crossing.”

The report also states that in 2017 there was a rise of 15% in the amount of goods transported and in the number of people using the various crossings to the Gaza Strip and Judea & Samaria administered by the authority, with 15 million crossings by Palestinians recorded.

Obviously a media organisation seriously committed to accurate and impartial reporting would not portray, or facilitate portrayal of, 160,000 truckloads of supplies in one year as a “siege”. The BBC, however, continues to do just that.

The principal of a Catholic high school in Rhode Island resigned after a short video surfaced showing him slurring Jews and blacks.

Jay Brennan, the longtime principal of Bishop Hendricken High School, resigned Friday over the video.

The all-boys school is 13% minority, WPRI TV reported, citing statistics released by a board member.

The six-second video that was secretly recorded in the principal’s office comprises one sentence that is disparaging of both Jews and blacks, according to the report.

Brennan said in an apology released on Friday: “I first apologize to our Hendricken families and in particular our young men who I have hurt. I love all the Hendricken students and tried to show that every day when I entered the school. I would never intend to hurt any of our young men, of any race, color or creed. I am so sorry for the hurt for which I am responsible. I wish there was a way that you could know that in my heart, I am not a racist, I am not an anti-Semite and that I truly care for each member of the Hendricken community.”

Brennan has worked at the school for 40 years.

Anti-Semitic abuse is "part of everyday Jewish life in Germany", the head of the Central Council of Jews has said.

The council's president, Dr Josef Schuster, made the claim in an interview with the founder of the Faces of Democracy initiative, Sven Lilienström, published in The Local Germany.

Schuster said it was impossible to speak of "individual cases of verbal attacks" against Jewish people in Germany.

"It is part of everyday Jewish life that our institutions are under police protection, Jewish pupils are under police protection and we are increasingly reluctant to make ourselves known as Jews in public," he said.

Anti-Semitic views were more openly articulated now than several decades ago because of the internet. "In the social networks we find a verbal lack of inhibition which is dangerous, especially on the far-right of the political spectrum," he said.

An "anti-Israel attitude is spreading in society," he added.

"Israel's right to exist is called into question, or Jews in general are held liable for the policies of the Israeli government. That's anti-Semitism," he told Lilienström.

Lazio has been fined 50,000 euros ($61,000) but avoided a stadium ban over posters created by their fans featuring Holocaust victim Anne Frank, the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) announced on Thursday.

FIGC prosecutor Giuseppe Pecoraro had demanded a fine and for two games to be played behind closed doors after Lazio’s infamous ultra fans fly-posted photographs of Anne Frank on a shirt of bitter city rivals Roma during a game against Cagliari last October.

But the FIGC said in a statement Thursday that its sporting tribunal had decided on a “partial acceptance” of the prosecutor’s requests.

Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day. Although the event is not remotely comparable to the mass extermination of six million Jews, it is also 49 years since the Ba'ath party regime hanged nine innocent Jews in Baghdad's Liberation Square. Half a million Iraqis came to sing and dance under the corpses. Of the nine victims, four had their ages falsified because they were under the legal age for hanging of 18.

A few days ago, Richard Atrakchi appeared on the Israeli Arabic Channel to recall his memories of that fateful time. You can see his interview (Arabic) from 16:47 minutes into the video below. The clip has some rare footage of the scenes in Liberation Square on 27 January 1969.

Near the end of Jerusalem-based exhibition “Flashes of Memory: Photography During the Holocaust,” is a glass case containing a loose pile of postcard-size photographs of scenes from the Dachau concentration camp. Some show inmates shoving dead bodies into crematoria. Others show torture scenes, with prisoners’ bodies hanging from nooses.

These images in Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center’s new show are horrific, but they are not here merely to shock. Rather, they — like the other more than 1,500 others — are meant to provoke questions about who took them, where, when, how, and why.

The Dachau photos are authentic, but not in the usual sense of the word. They were taken by US Signal Corps troops who liberated the camp in April 1945, and the scenes depicted in them are reenactments staged with the help of former inmates. The images were captured, printed and disseminated widely throughout Allied-occupied Germany for the purpose of reeducating the German population.

They also ended up in the hands of historical commissions set up by Jews in displaced persons camps throughout Europe, and in those of US soldiers who took them home with them. More than 70 years later, people are still discovering them in old shoeboxes and albums and regularly offering them to Holocaust museums. Most of the donors are ignorant of, or mistaken about, the true context of the photos’ creation.

Virtually none of the still and moving images made by the Nazis, Jews and liberating Allied forces displayed in “Flashes of Memory” are revealed here for the first time. They were previously published or shown elsewhere, with some, like “The Warsaw Ghetto Boy” photo having achieved iconic status. Most are from Yad Vashem’s collection of over half a million Holocaust-related photographs (originals and copies).

NASA honored the seven astronauts killed aboard shuttle Columbia 15 years ago, with a special musical tribute Thursday by the son of Israel’s first astronaut.

Singer and songwriter Tal Ramon joined a few hundred others at Kennedy Space Center to remember the Columbia crew and other astronauts killed in the line of duty over the decades.

Seven astronauts — including Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon — died Feb. 1, 2003, when Columbia shattered in the skies over Texas, just minutes before a Florida touchdown.

Ramon performed two of his own songs, singing in Hebrew and playing the keyboard. Later, he and relatives of other astronauts killed in action, placed long-stemmed, yellow, orange and pink roses at the Space Mirror Memorial. In all, 24 names are engraved in the large granite monument.

“I’m just so emotional to be here with you,” Ramon told the crowd before performing at the first Kennedy memorial he’s attended.

It was also difficult for forest ranger Gregory Cohrs, who was among the first on the accident scene in Hemphill, Texas. Cohrs worked for three months scouring the area for shuttle debris and the astronauts’ remains. He now serves at Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana.

A British family has launched a final appeal to raise funds to bring their six-year-old daughter to Israel for special surgery that will allow her to keep her leg.

Kyra Warrell of Brighton, located on the south coast of England, is afflicted with proximal focal femoral deficiency, which will leave her left leg about 8 inches shorter than her right if left untreated.

A crowdfunding campaign, Step-By-Step with Kyra: The First Hurdle, has so far raised nearly £44,000 ($62,000) out of £58,000 ($82,000) needed for the critical surgery due to take place next week, the first of three procedures that will take place before Kyra is 16.

Doctors at Britain’s National Health Service decided that an above-the-knee amputation, to allow for a prosthetic limb, is the best option.

But Kyra’s parents, Rima and Neil Warrell, want their daughter, who loves dancing and gymnastics, to be able to keep her leg and have turned to the internet for assistance in funding a unique medical procedure.

They have discovered a special leg-lengthening surgery performed by an Israeli-born physician, Dror Paley, who is internationally recognized for his expertise in limb lengthening and reconstruction. Paley, the director of the Paley Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida, has performed more than 20,000 limb lengthening and reconstruction-related procedures, according to the institute’s website.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic have agreed to push forward with a sale of Israel Air Force F-16 fighter jets to Croatia which has been upgrading its air force.

Croatia has been considering plans to purchase the Israeli jets in order to replace their fleet of 12 Soviet-designed Mikoyan MiG-21 fighter jets to be delivered by late 2020.

The value of the deal is worth some $500 million subject to the conditions of the tender. The final decision on the bid winner is set to be made by the end of the year.

“This development is another expression of the deep ties between the two countries,” read a statement by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Other contenders for the design deal include secondhand Lockheed Martin's F-16 offered by the US and Greece, or Saab's JAS-39 Gripen from Sweden. A report by the Defense News website said that Croatian government had initially considered purchasing the French Mirage and a variant of South Korea's T-50 when the plan was first unveiled in 2015.

The number of Arab students in Israeli universities grew by 78.5% over the past seven years, according to new research by Israel’s Council for Higher Education (CHE).

According to the survey, Arab students accounted for 16.1% of undergraduate students in Israeli universities, up from 10.2 % in 2010.

This increase has carried over to graduate programs, where the percentage of Arab students since 2010 has doubled from 6.2% to 13%. In postgraduate programs, the proportion of Arab students rose 60% from 3.9% to 6.3%.

The survey, which was reported Wednesday in the Marker business daily, was tracking the success of a CHE program aimed at better integrating the Arab Israeli community into higher education. The government spent NIS 300 million ($88 million) on the program in 2012-2016.

Safest countries for women, based on % of female pop. that have been a victim of serious crimes in past year

1 Australia
2 Malta
3 Iceland
4 New Zealand
5 Canada
6 Poland
7 Monaco
8 Israel (nowhere else in Mideast is close)
9 US
10 S Korea

(New World Wealth)

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) January 25, 2018

A jawbone found in a cave in Israel’s Mount Carmel region has reset the clock on human evolution.

The fossil, the earliest known record of Homo sapiens outside of Africa, was discovered in 2002 during an excavation of the prehistoric Misliya Cave. After 15 years of intensive research by an international team of multidisciplinary scientists, the unique remains of an adult upper jawbone, complete with several teeth, has been dated to 170,000-200,000 years ago.

“This has changed the whole concept of modern human evolution,” said Prof. Israel Hershkovitz of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine. The research was published Thursday in the prestigious Science magazine.
Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Israel Hershkovitz (left) and University of Haifa’s Prof. Mina Weinstein-Evron. (courtesy)

Based on fossils found in Ethiopia, for the past 50 years scientists have believed that modern humans appeared in Africa, the “cradle of humanity,” roughly 160,000-200,000 years ago. The earliest record of migration outside of Africa was dated to around 90,000-120,000 years ago, through fossils discovered at digs in Israel’s Skhul and Qafzeh caves almost 90 years ago.

With this Misliya cave jawbone, however, the history of human evolution is being rewritten.

Holocaust survivor reunited with American soldier who liberated him from Nazi concentration camp after 70 years. pic.twitter.com/MVOO7tims9

— Military Support (@MilitaryEarth) January 24, 2018

We don’t know what world leaders whisper about him, but love him or hate him, they know that President Trump has returned America to its standing as the world’s colossus.

At the economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump faces what are known as the elites, who never liked him much. But in Trump they’ll be facing the Lion in the room.

America once again strides the global stage and It started Wednesday, December 6, 2017, when from the White House, Trump announced the following: “I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.” Since that moment, that big shining moment, nothing has been the same.

In reaction to those words – sweetness to lovers of Liberty and Zion, bitterness to the others -- tyrannies (like North Korea and Iran) trembled, alliances (between the European Union and the Palestinian Authority) were shattered, and more of our enemies went scattering for refuge among think-alike regimes, or anyone who would take them in from the cold.

They did not believe he would do it…but he did…with no thought to their “feelings.” They’d gotten so used to Obama, that imposter from Kenya, a weakling, a Quisling, that it came as a shock to find that here was a man. Here was a man who kept his word. Here was a man of action. Here was a man of honor. Here was a man who could not be played.

If he could do something so courageous to some, so outrageous to others – what else would he do, and to whom?

Trump’s Jerusalem bequest upended thousands of years of global politics. No wonder they were scared.

President Donald Trump “burst the Palestinian Arabs' bubble”, Middle East expert and regular Arutz Sheva contributor Dr. Mordechai Kedar said on Thursday.

“The Palestinians are very disappointed because they built an entire house of cards by claiming they will get a Palestinian state. Who will give them such a thing? Nobody. They dream about the 'return' of the 'Palestinian refugees' not to 'Palestine' but to the same villages in which they lived in Tel Aviv, in Netanya. These are all pipe dreams, and now Trump came and took out the Jerusalem card from the building, as well as card with the issue of the refugees which they kept alive for 70 years, and now the whole thing is shattered to pieces,” said Kedar.

“They've lost all direction, they have no idea what to do now, because they have no agenda. Everything in which they believed turned out to be nothing.”

“This frustration,” he opined, “will bring about the end of the Palestinian Authority.”

Asked if the current situation could cause Palestinian Arabs to carry out more terrorist attacks, Kedar said, “Terrorists never need another reason [to carry out attacks]. The mere fact that we Jews have a state made us a target. They don't really need Trump to encourage them to wage terror against us. We suffered terror during the 1990s and during the 2000s without Trump. Trump is only a fig leaf to cover the real motivation to wipe us all out from this country.”

“I support the move of not only the American embassy but of all embassies to Jerusalem because this will contribute to peace. When our neighbors – Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims – understand that they've lost the fight against us, peace will come,” Kedar declared.

Britain is the historic crucible of political freedom and tolerance; America is the greatest champion of those values in the world. Only by loving Britain and America will their people love Israel, the nation whose ancient culture gave Britain and America their foundational values.

Anti-Semitism never goes away. All such extremism erupts, however, not when people feel confident in their shared culture but when they feel it’s being taken away from them. That’s why Britain and Europe are witnessing the emergence of rampant anti-Semitism and the rise of some truly neo-fascist groups. And of course, the EU itself is deeply hostile to Israel.

The left’s animus against Israel goes hand-in-hand with its disdain for the idea of the nation. This is surely at root why Orthodox Jews support Trump: because Orthodox Jews identify as a nation.

As a result, they not only love Israel, but they also love America. They realize that both are under attack from the left, and they realize that Trump offers perhaps the only chance America has of surviving as recognizably itself.

British Jews labor under a different difficulty: their knowledge that British society thinks identifying as a Jewish nation is incompatible with loyalty to Britain.

Britain’s failure to grasp its deep connection to the Jewish people is one reason why the U.K. is in such deep civilizational trouble. Trump, by contrast, has joined up the dots and reaffirmed the spiritual bond between America and the Jews.

That’s the only way the West will be saved—and illustrates why, despite his manifold failings, Trump is probably the only person who can do it.

On the Friday edition of his show Real Time, HBO host Bill Maher defended President Trump's decision to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel's capital, giving legitimacy to the country's claim to the city. Maher said while he understands there will be repercussions, when you win wars you get land.

"I hate to agree with Donald Trump, but it doesn't happen often, but I do. I don't know why Israel -- it has been their capital since 1949, it is where their government is. They've won all the wars thrown against them. I don't understand why they don't get to have their capital where they want," he said.

"When you win a war you don't get to take the other side's land," newly-minted New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg said.

"Actually, you do," Maher responded.

"Especially because they were attacked. I mean the country was divided, which they were okay with. They were attacked more than once and they took land in those wars that they won and there has been peace offers on the table ever since to give part of that land back," he added.

Maher asked why is it always up to Israel to come up with a two-state solution, and when they do it is rejected and blamed for making it "impossible." He said what is making a two-state solution impossible is the "perpetually hostile,""coiled snake" that is Palestinian leadership.

Boy, when I’m wrong on the Middle East, I’m really wrong.

Almost from the beginning of the Trump administration, I predicted with the certainty of a believer that within a year, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu would be annoying the hell out of one another.

My logic was based on the simple proposition that two big and prickly egos can hardly occupy the same space at the same time—and who are two bigger egos than Trump and Netanyahu? And there were other factors, including an Israeli right wing eager to push Netanyahu ever rightward and the prime minister’s preternatural tendency to overdo things. All that, I figured, would sooner rather than later create a great deal of tension between America’s new president and Israel’s canniest political survivor, and make Trumpland an inhospitable place for Netanyahu’s politics and policies.

By the end of 2017 and the president’s announcement declaring Jerusalem the capital of the state of Israel—a decision largely explained by Trump’s need to cater to the Republican base and his lack of respect for foreign policy elites—I should have gotten the message there would be no train wreck coming.

Just watch the vice president’s recent trip to Israel—a mutual lovefest like nothing I’ve ever seen in some 40 years of watching American leaders interact with their often irascible Israeli counterparts. Mike Pence’s trip was less important for what it accomplished than what it reflected and represented: Under Trump: the U.S.-Israel relationship has undergone a transition from a valued special relationship to one that’s seemingly exclusive. The need for “no daylight” between the U.S. and Israel used to be a talking point wielded by staunchly pro-Israeli supporters against Democratic and Republican presidents alike; Trump has turned it into official policy, and many foreign policy hands worry that the U.S. interest is being lost in the process. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

The Pew poll, released Tuesday, shows that partisan polarization around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is starker than ever in the United States. While 79 percent of Republicans sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians, that number is only 27 percent for Democrats. Twenty-five percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only nine percent of Republicans did. Overall, 46 percent of Americans sympathize more with Israel, and 19 percent with the Palestinians.

Since 2001, the share of Republicans who sympathize with Israel has increased 29 percentage points, from 50 percent to 79 percent, says Pew. Over the same period, the share of Democrats sympathizing more with Israel has declined 11 points, from 38 percent to 27 percent.

As recently as two years ago, 43 percent of Democrats sympathized more with Israel. And the drop for Israel this year is especially steep among liberal Democrats: 35 percent said they sympathized more with the Palestinians — nearly double the 19 percent who sympathize more with Israel.

The worriers see this as another crack in the bipartisan support that Israel has long enjoyed in the United States.

“The numbers are worrying for anyone like me that cares about the US-Israel relationship,” Dennis Ross, a former American peace negotiator for presidents of both parties, wrote in an email to JTA. “Israel has been and must remain not a Democratic or Republican issue but an American issue. That is a challenge now, especially with the attitudes of the progressive side of the Democratic Party, the alienation of the majority of the Jewish community from the Trump administration, and the administration’s strong symbolic support for Israel.”

The trend, according to one theory, was exacerbated by eight years of feuding between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which, according to whom you ask, showed either that Democrats couldn’t be trusted on Israel or that Netanyahu stumbled in associating Israel so closely with the Republican side.

Earlier this month, Mahmoud Abbas called together a meeting of the PLO’s Central Council, and delivered a speech marked more by its rancor than by its accuracy. For well over two hours Abbas ranted against a whole range of characters, both historical and contemporary, whom he blamed for the dire situation of his people.

According to Abbas, the trouble all began with Oliver Cromwell, who “staged a coup against [King Charles I of Great Britain] and became the head of a republic.” According to Abbas, it was Cromwell who “came up with the idea of transferring the Jews from Europe to the Middle East … because they wanted this region to become an outpost to protect the interests and the convoys coming from Europe to the East.” According to this twisted narrative, Jews were the expedient pawns of colonialist expansion.

Next up on the blame list was Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in Abbas’ alternative universe, had declared that “a Jewish state must be established in Palestine,” and was only thwarted in this aspiration when he “failed at the walls of Acre,” — a victory that Abbas claimed for the Palestinians, even though no such national entity appeared until the second half of the 20th century.

This fantasy thesis, popular among anti-Zionist pseudo-historians, is based on a French newspaper report of May 1799, which claimed that Napoleon had invited “all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to re-establish the ancient Jerusalem.” Most respectable historians dismiss this as a wartime rumor, and even those who take the report seriously consider it a tactical gesture by Napoleon, who hoped that such a declaration would help tip the Battle of Acre in his favor. In short, no serious academic believes that Napoleon was a proto-Zionist.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told Meretz party leader Zehava Galon Friday that “the Oslo Accords are dead,” Channel 10 news reported.

Abbas, speaking with Galon to express condolences on the death of her father, said US President Donald Trump had, in several past conversations, “promised a good deal to [resolve] the conflict, and then came this unfortunate surprise, which we cannot accept.”

Palestinians froze their ties with Washington, and said they would not accept the administration as a peace broker, following Trump’s December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The US has reacted to the boycott by threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars it provides in aid.

Galon recounted that Abbas told her: “We are prepared for negotiations, and we never intended to leave the talks, but regrettably no one is offering us talks, especially not the Americans, who now wish to punish us.”

He added, she said, that “The Oslo Accords are dead, and even though Israel has not lived up to its obligations, we have so far not halted security cooperation. We are waiting to see if there can be negotiations under fair mediators.”

But he stressed that that term no longer applied to the US, and expressed hope that Europe, the Middle East Quartet (which includes the US) and Arabic countries could come together to provide such mediation.

Palestinian television on Saturday aired a video of Palestinians carrying out a mock-execution of US President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.

Effigies of the US leaders were hanged and then burned in a street in the Aida refugee camp north of Bethlehem.

Palestinians froze their ties with Washington following Trump’s December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The US has reacted to the boycott by freezing payments worth $100 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) earlier this month, and the White House and Congress are threatening to further cut aid to the Palestinians.

Wattan TV said the action was intended as a “rejection” by protesters of US cuts to UNRWA. Wattan is an independent TV station based in Ramallah.

Before the “execution” protesters held up Palestinian flags and various placards, including one with pictures of Trump, Pence and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, all with ‘X’ marks on them. Above them was written: “Zionism = Nazism = fascism. USA = ISIS = terror.”

Arab countries recently made contact with prominent personalities and Palestinian officials who live in Jerusalem with the goal of changing the Palestinian leadership to one that would accept the Trump administration’s Mideast peace deal, an official from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party claims.

The countries made the contact “in order to build a Palestinian leadership in Jerusalem prepared to accept the American suggestion for compromise over Jerusalem like accepting the town of Abu Dis next to Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state,” Fatah’s representative in charge of Jerusalem, Hatem Abdelkader (pictured), claimed to Breitbart Jerusalem.

“We warned all of these individuals not to cooperate with this initiative when we learned that they had been contacted,” said Abdelkader.

The Palestinian official refused to say which Arab countries allegedly tried to establish an alternative Palestinian leadership in Jerusalem, but Palestinian sources in the city claimed that they are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Palestinians declared a general strike in Jerusalem on Tuesday in protest of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to the Western Wall.

According to Abdelkader, “Pence is Trump’s deputy and we believe that under their leadership the U.S. has lost its ability to be the sponsor and mediator for the peace process. The U.S. under Pence and [Donald] Trump has gone from sponsor to active collaborator with one of the sides in negotiations – and I mean Israel of course – and as such they are no longer worthy of cooperation from us.

“There is no more credibility with the U.S. Jerusalem is one of the issues in a final agreement and when the Americans prematurely give Jerusalem to Israel as its capital, that means that they have interfered with negotiations and decided on the results of one of the most complicated issues if not the most.”

Abdelkader failed to mention the Palestinian Authority walked away from numerous U.S.-brokered peace talks over the past 17 years, with statehood offers that included a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.

A day after US President Donald Trump declared that he had taken the vexed issue of Jerusalem’s fate “off the table” for peace negotiations, Israel’s next goal is to have the US similarly make plain that it rejects demands for a so-called “right of return” of millions of Palestinians to Israel, a TV report said Friday.

Quoting what it said were diplomats who are following the process, Hadashot TV news said that now that Trump has declared Jerusalem to be Israel’s capital, “the assessment is that the next step will be to remove the ‘right of return'” from the list of final status issues to be resolved.

After that is done, the TV report said, Trump will present the “proposal for peace” that he spoke of on Thursday — a proposal, the Hadashot TV reporter remarked, that might better be described “perhaps as the Netanyahu plan” since it is expected to meet many of the Israeli prime minister’s demands.

The Palestinian Authority has been boycotting the Trump administration since December 6, when Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and said he would move the US embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv. In that address, the president said the boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem would still have to be negotiated by the two sides, and thereby did not negate Palestinian claims to East Jerusalem. Sitting with Benjamin Netanyahu in Davos on Thursday, however, Trump said: “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” He added, turning to Netanyahu, “You won one point, and you’ll give up some other points later on in the negotiation.”

The administrator of the US Agency for International Development said Friday that the Trump administration had not yet made decisions regarding cuts in humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

“This process is ongoing, and no funding decisions have been made. As the President said, the United States expects the Palestinian leadership to work with us,” USAID’s Mark Green told The Times of Israel on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“While I have not spoken directly to the President about this issue, my teams at USAID remains in close consultation with the White House and Department of State on this issue,” he said.

Earlier, Green said the Trump administration had not consulted with his office regarding plans to cut the funding to the Palestinians, but later clarified to The Times of Israel that he had “misspoken.”

Less than 24 hours earlier, US President Donald Trump suggested that Washington’s aid to the Palestinians — over 40% of which goes toward USAID projects — was on the chopping block following the angry reaction from Ramallah to his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last month.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama this week addressed a Reform synagogue in New York City, telling the audience that he would joke with his staff that he was “basically a liberal Jew.”

In the speech, which was held at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side this past Wednesday, the former president insisted he was not anti-Israel, telling the audience his administration gave Israel more military aid than any other previous administration.

“It is not a subject for dispute,” Obama said in comments quoted by The Daily Mail.

The former president also defended his decision not to veto UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which condemned Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria, and which was approved in December of 2016, weeks before he left office.

Obama said he allowed the resolution to go forward because “the pace of [Israeli] settlement construction skyrocketed making it almost impossible to make any kind of Palestinian state.”

“Voting against the resolution would have damaged our credibility on affirming human rights only when it's convenient not when it has to do with ourselves and our friends,” Obama further claimed, according to The Daily Mail.

While Israeli officials criticized Obama for choosing to abstain and allowing the resolution to pass, the former president insisted in the past that his actions did not trigger a significant crisis in relations with Israel.

In his comments at the synagogue, Obama opined that domestic politics in the U.S. makes it hard to speak truths about Israel.

Slovenia's president cast doubt on Friday on his country recognizing “Palestine” as a state in the near future, days after the foreign minister had talked up the chances of such a move.

President Borut Pahor's office said in a statement to AFP that he would only back the recognition of a Palestinian state "in circumstances that would contribute to the solution of its bilateral issues with Israel but not to the worsening of relations".

The statement added that for the moment, "those circumstances (contributing to a solution) are not in place".

Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec had said on Monday he hoped Slovenia would officially recognize a state of “Palestine” in March or April and that this would "strengthen Palestine's negotiation in the Middle East peace process".

Erjavec's comments came a day after senior officials in Jerusalem told Israel’s Channel 10 News that Slovenia is expected to recognize the “state of Palestine” in the coming weeks and that three other European countries are considering the same move.

Slovenia would be only the second of the EU's 28 member states to recognize Palestine while a member of the EU. Sweden did so in 2014.

Iran has ordered Hamas to establish a base of operations on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights from which to fire rockets, Israeli media reported on Tuesday.

According to the report in the daily Maariv, seeing impending victory in the Syrian civil war, Iran told Hamas to maintain a military force on the northern front in the Golan Heights region to contribute to the military effort if a conflict erupts in the north.

An Arab intelligence source has confirmed to Breitbart Jerusalem that Iran did indeed ask Hamas to join Iran and its allies in Syria.

The source noted that on a military level, Hamas’ contribution isn’t critical due to the presence of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard as well as forces from Hezbollah and other groups allied with the Syrian regime. “But there is an Iranian attempt here to tell Hamas that if they want to get out of the difficult financial crisis haunting the organization, Iran expects Hamas to be completely bound to Iranian interests and Iranian needs in the region,” he said. “The economic crisis in Iran isn’t affecting Iranian policy but Hamas’ financial crisis is likely to force the group to give in to Iran’s orders.”

“Iran needs a Sunni player at its side that is openly present in its axis. Hamas can fulfill this role and the Iranians are focusing their efforts on it. They don’t really need Hamas’ rockets, they don’t need a few dozen Hamas fighters, they need Sunni legitimization that Hamas can give Iran and its allies in Syria,” concluded the source.

Palestinian security forces on Saturday uncovered and dismantled at least 12 roadside bombs on a road connecting two Palestinian villages near the city of Tulkarem in the West Bank.

A Palestinian driver noticed suspicious objects on the road, located in the West Bank’s Area A which is under full security control of the Palestinian Authority, and alerted PA security forces, a source with the security forces told Israeli news site Ynet.

Members of the security forces’ engineering department scrambled to the scene and found 12 improvised explosive devices placed into the road, the source said, each weighing between 20 and 30 kilograms. The source added it appears the bombs were there for some time.

The road is mainly used by Palestinian civilians although Israeli military vehicles have been spotted on it, said the PA source.

Members of Parliament on Thursday supported a non-binding resolution in the House of Commons to proscribe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization under UK terrorism legislation.

There was widespread support for the move to proscribe the political wing of Hezbollah. Currently, only the military wing is defined as a terrorist organization in UK law. The full text of the resolution said: “This House believes that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation driven by an antisemitic ideology that seeks the destruction of Israel; notes that Hezbollah declares itself to be one organisation without distinguishable political or military wings; is concerned that the military wing of that organisation is proscribed, but its political wing is not; and calls on the Government to include Hezbollah in its entirety on the list of proscribed organisations.”

During the debate, Labour MP Joan Ryan, who proposed the motion, said: “Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, driven by antisemitic ideology, which seeks the destruction of Israel. It has wreaked death and destruction throughout the middle east, aiding and abetting the Assad regime’s butchery in Syria and helping to drive Iran’s expansionism throughout the region. It makes no distinction between its political and military wings, and nor should the British Government.”

Iran has aggressively pursued its ballistic missile program since agreeing to the 2015 nuclear deal, regularly launching nuclear-capable missiles in what critics consider a violation of the spirit of the deal, according to a report obtained by Fox News.

The report shows Iran has fired some 23 missiles since signing the deal, as many as 16 of them nuclear-capable. The controversial deal reached with the Obama administration did not include a ban on missiles, and Iran and European signatories to the agreement stress international inspectors have certified Iran in compliance.

But critics say the robust missile program shows the Islamic republic is bent on intimidating its enemies and preparing for the day when it can do so with the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

“Out of all the ballistic missiles Iran fired in 2017, only four or five missiles can be considered nuclear-capable. In 2016, Iran fired 10 to 11 missiles than can be considered nuclear-capable,” according to a report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It is highly likely that the administration’s threat intimidated Tehran, altering its flight-testing calculus.”

The report also cites an Iranian outlet quoting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as it complained of testing delays over concerns of a potential response by the United States.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, is to head a delegation of Security Council diplomats visiting Washington, DC on Monday, as part of a continued push by the Trump administration to emphasize its concerns about Iran’s supply of missiles to proxies in the Middle East.

The US Mission to the UN said on Friday that Haley would lead the diplomats on a tour of the Iranian weaponry supplied to the Shi’a Islamist Houthi militias in Yemen. The weapons were first unveiled in December by the Pentagon at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, near the nation’s capital.

The diplomats will also hold a lunch meeting with President Donald Trump on Monday, before accompanying National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition on crimes against humanity committed during the war in Syria.

The weapons that the diplomats will view were originally provided to the US by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi-led forces, which back the Yemeni government, have been fighting the Shi’a Houthi movement in Yemen’s civil war, now entering its third year.

“These are Iranian made, these are Iranian sent, and these were Iranian given,” Haley said at the time of the weapons’ unveiling, which included the remains of a Qiam-1 ballistic missile built by the Tehran regime using a North Korean prototype.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered that $2.5 billion should be transferred from the nation’s reserve fund and to its military, continuing a trend that has been ongoing since the nuclear deal was implemented two years ago, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty/ (RFE/RL) reported Thursday.

The decision to increase the military budget comes in the wake of demonstrations across Iran spurred by economic concerns, especially military spending in conflicts across the Middle East. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, described the demonstrations as being driven “by price hikes but also word of a draft government budget that earmarked major funding for religious institutions and the clerically dominated country’s armed forces.”

Anger against the regime was heightened earlier this month when the government unveiled a golden ship engraved the Koran, prompting criticism on social media for failing to address economic problems while producing an expensive object of art.

A study in June 2016 determined that Iran’s economy would grow at a rate of 4% a year over the next five years driven by the ending of sanctions as part of the nuclear deal. But rather than spending the infusion of billions of dollars into the economy on domestic needs, the money has been going to boost Iran’s military spending, which increased 90% from 2016 to 2017. Last year, Iran’s parliament voted to designate $7.4 billion of Iran’s defense budget to the IRGC, marking a 24% increase in spending on the powerful institution.

Anti-Israel campus groups have launched a campaign to defame the Jewish state and compel universities to adopt blacklists of Israel and of American companies that do business in Israel as part of a virulently anti-Semitic campaign known as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, according to sources monitoring the situation.

As spring semester ramps up at most American universities, a coalition of anti-Israel activists known for denying the Holocaust and promoting anti-Semitic materials is demanding that university endowments and pension systems divest from Israel-linked U.S. companies. They accuse Israel of war crimes, and have condemned the Trump administration's recent recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

President Donald Trump's announcement has roiled pro-Palestinian activists and galvanized anti-Israel agents on U.S. college campuses who are working to forward boycott measures and force their student governments to sign off on what observers have described as a series of vulgar, anti-Semitic resolutions.

The effort, which comes ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is being spearheaded by Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP, an anti-Israel student organization that has emerged as one of the most prominent promoters of anti-Semitic materials and other efforts targeting Jewish students.

The Undergraduate Student Government at Ohio State University has come under sharp criticism for a rushed, irregular secret ballot vote Wednesday night that rammed through a resolution in support of an anti-Israel boycott.

A six-hour long meeting culminated in a half-hour of rapid-fire amendments to the "Resolution to Establish a Committee to Investigate OSU's Investments in Companies Complicit in Human Rights Violations."

As the USG was being expelled from the room at midnight, two secret ballot votes were quickly cast within minutes—the first attempt returned more ballots than senators present—and it was announced that the motion calling for the University Senate to create an ad-hoc committee to review OSU investments in companies complicit in human rights abuses had passed.

USG chair and vice president Sophie Chang refused to state how many senators voted in favor of the motion. (Chang said the official breakdown would be included in the minutes, which will be published on the USG website.)

Max Littman, who served as an alternate senator for an absent representative, called Wednesday's meeting "one of the most confusing USG sessions I've been in."

"I firmly believe many senators voted without knowing exactly what was stricken, and what was left in at the end of the night," said Littman. "There was only a few minutes of discussion about each amendment, and I still don't know what some of them were talking about."

PayPal closed its account with one of France's most powerful boycott Israel organizations — The Association France-Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) — The Jerusalem Post learned on Friday.

As part of the Post's investigative series into funding streams for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) organizations targeting Israel, it contacted PayPal on Tuesday regarding AFPS's account with the US-owned e-commerce company.

The Post asked: Is the AFPS account with PayPal in violation of France's anti-discrimination law? Is the AFPS account with PayPal in violation of the company's anti-hate policy?

France has one of the most robust anti-BDS laws – the Lellouche Law – in Europe that bans discrimination based on national origin. Paul Furia, a spokesman for the French foreign ministry, told the Post that " I can't comment specifically on AFPS PayPal account neither speak on behalf of the company to tell you whether or not the account should be cancelled."

"However, I want to recall that calling to boycott of Israel is indeed illegal in France," he continued. "Several decisions of the highest criminal court (Cour de Cassation) confirmed that calling to boycott breaks the law and constitutes an '[incitement] to discrimination or hate based on national origin or religion.'"

A former professor at the University of Maryland has filed a federal charge of discrimination against the College of Education, alleging that her termination from the institution was retaliation by her superiors for her extramural pro-Israel advocacy.

Melissa Landa initiated the investigation Tuesday with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, cross-filing with the Maryland Commission on Human Relations, after an internal Title IX investigation completed in November found no evidence that university officials discriminated against Landa on the basis of political affiliation, religion, or national origin.

In her filing, Landa cited a string of incidents running through 2016 and 2017, leading to her termination last summer. She alleged that she was discriminated against based on her religion, political affiliation, and gender identity.

She claimed repeated confrontations erupted across a two-year period with the chair and associate chair department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, Francine Hultgren and John O'Flahavan, over Landa's pro-Israel, anti-boycott activities and her taking time off to observe religious holidays.

Did you hear the one about the major US city that accidentally endorsed a possible boycott against Israel? On January 11th, the New Orleans City Council passed a resolution that called on the city government to “protect, respect, and fulfill the full range of inherent human rights for all, as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other international human rights instruments,” milquetoast and bureaucratic language that made no specific mention of Israel and effectively masked the legislation’s actual intent. The resolution asked the city government to consider “the creation of a process to review direct investments and contracts for inclusion on, or removal from, the City’s list of corporate securities and contractual partners.” This call for a mechanism to end unspecified city investments and contracts was reportedly “drafted by the New Orleans Palestine Solidarity Committee,” according to JTA. On January 26th, the City Council unanimously repealed the resolution, as protesters chanted and sang from an adjacent hallway.

Credit to New Orleans Palestine solidarity activists: It’s impossible to ignore the humor of an entire legislative body being duped into weighing in on a far-away international conflict without their consciously even realizing it. The resolution itself was so remote from the actual intents and beliefs of the New Orleans City Council that the chamber had no apparent idea of what it was really voting for, and reversed itself as soon as the origins and intentions of the resolution were exposed. Getting one over on an entire municipal government for a city of 400,000 people is an impressive accomplishment and reflects a mastery of the democratic process that even a Naftali Bennett fan probably couldn’t help but admire.

On the other hand, this success resulted from a cheap sleight of hand: Again, the City Council didn’t know that they were voting for a stealth Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions-movement (BDS) resolution. With Israel’s economy, foreign trade, and international relations expanding in recent years, the BDS movement has had to satisfy itself with such Potemkin successes of dubious long-term importance. In a time when nearly half of US states have some kind of anti-BDS law on the books, the movement’s victories have been limited to non-binding campus votes, furtive procedural maneuvers, and pressure campaigns aimed at people who are uninvolved with the conflict’s politics or distant from any actual political power .

The British government has appointed a lead commissioner for the new Commission for Countering Extremism. She is Sara Khan, a British Muslim human rights activist and the chief executive of Inspire, an organisation she founded in 2008 to fight extremism and gender inequality.

The decision to set up this commission followed the Manchester bombing, one of five terror attacks in Britain in 2017. The commission’s remit is to identify and challenge all forms of extremism, advise ministers on anti-extremist policies and promote “pluralistic British values”.

Sara Khan has a track record of promoting social justice and harmony in the face of those who would destroy them. She encourages Muslim integration into British society. She says Muslims should obey the same laws as everyone else and has called for honesty among Muslims about hateful ideologies and intolerant practices amongst their number. Her opposition to the government’s badly flawed counter-extremism bill, meanwhile, showed that she’s no government patsy.

Sara Khan would therefore seem to be an excellent choice to advise the government on countering extremism. Her views couldn’t possibly be considered controversial except by extremists and their apologists.

So what’s the reaction of numerous supposedly moderate British Muslim organisations and individuals? Horror!

The problem seems to be that she has supported the government’s Prevent programme. Prevent is designed to counter Islamic extremism. It would therefore seem somewhat appropriate for the newly designated anti-extremism commissioner to have expressed support for the government’s anti-Islamic extremism programme, no?

No! A number of Muslim organisations are calling for her to be sacked and saying they won’t work with her.

The chorus of disapproval and contempt which greeted the appointment of Sara Khan as the new Commissioner for Countering Extremism was perhaps, sadly, predictable.

The skewed coverage of her appointment in the mainstream media was really outrageous, and very well covered in this article.

Frustratingly it is of course impossible to express support for this excellent appointment without offering fuel to her opponents, given most of them are unlikely to be any keener on Harry’s Place than they are on Sara Khan. One of her critics for example, noted meaningfully that the appointment had the support of Quilliam, the Henry Jackson Society and the National Secular Society.

Of course some Muslims welcome the appointment, but it’s still genuinely dispiriting to reflect that someone who has always seemed to me measured, reasonable, constructive, very actively opposed to the far right, and very clear in her focus on Islamism, not Islam, should be seen as beyond the pale. (By contrast, while I like Maajid Nawaz, I can at least see why he might put people’s backs up.)

Elderly survivors were gathering Saturday at the former Auschwitz death camp and political leaders warned that the Nazi genocide must continue to serve as a warning as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In Warsaw, Poland, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson paid his respects in a solemn ceremony at a memorial to the Jews who died revolting against German forces in the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.

Tillerson trailed two uniformed Polish military officers and readjusted a wreath underneath the monument, a hulking structure located in what was once the Warsaw Ghetto.

The head of Warsaw’s Jewish community read a prayer and Tillerson made brief remarks about the importance of not forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust.

“On this occasion it reminds us that we can never, we can never, be indifferent to the face of evil,” Tillerson said.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday condemned the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust, in a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Tomorrow marks the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death and concentration camp in Poland. We take this opportunity to recall the Nazis’ systematic persecution and brutal murder of six million Jewish people. In their death camps and under their inhuman rule, the Nazis also enslaved and killed millions of Slavs, Roma, gays, people with disabilities, priests and religious leaders, and others who courageously opposed their brutal regime,” said Trump.

“Our Nation is indebted to the Holocaust’s survivors. Despite the trauma they carry with them, they continue to educate us by sharing their experiences, strength, wisdom, and generosity of spirit to advance respect for human rights. Although they are aging and their numbers are slowly dwindling, their stories remain with us, giving us the strength to combat intolerance, including anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry and discrimination,” he continued.

“Every generation must learn and apply the lessons of the Holocaust to prevent new horrors against humanity from occurring. As I have said: 'We will stamp out prejudice. We will condemn hatred. We will bear witness, and we will act.'”

“In this spirit, we must join together across our nations and with people of goodwill around the world to eliminate prejudice and promote more just societies. We must remain vigilant to protect the fundamental rights and inherent dignity of every human being,” the president said.

“On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we acknowledge this dark stain on human history and vow to never let it happen again,” Trump's statement concluded.

One-third of Holocaust survivors in the United States continue to live at or below the poverty line, according to an aid organization.

The Blue Card, which provides financial assistance to survivors, reported the statistic ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday. Last year, the same proportion of survivors were at or below the poverty line, according to CNN.

The 2018 report also said that 61 percent of the 100,000 survivors in the United States live on less than $23,000 a year, or double the poverty line. The median income for individuals in the US was about $31,000 in 2016.

Blue Card said it sees requests for aid grow 20 percent annually. Three quarters of the approximately 3,000 survivors the group aids are older than 75, and saw a 10 percent increase this year in aid requests for survivors battling cancer.

“For those senior citizens that survived the atrocities of the Holocaust, many are struggling to make ends meet in the face of a growing number of medical issues, the rising cost of living and challenges navigating the health system,” said Blue Card Executive Director Masha Pearl. “The time to help is now.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned of rising anti-Semitism in her country on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, calling the need to protect Jewish buildings “a disgrace.”

It is important to remember the millions of Holocaust victims because recently, “anti-Semitism, racism, and the hatred of others are more relevant,” Merkel said in her weekly podcast on Saturday.

She said that schools, which already teach about the country’s Nazi past, need to work harder at that, especially so immigrant students from Arab countries will not “exercise anti-Semitism.”

She called it “incomprehensible and a disgrace that no Jewish institution can exist without police security —whether it is a school, a kindergarten, or a synagogue.”

The chancellor also reaffirmed her support of creating the position of anti-Semitism commissioner in the next German government, if her party can finalize tortuous negotiations to forge a coalition.

The commissioner would be appointed to counter growing hate speech against Jews and Israel in German from both its home-grown far-right and some recent migrants in the Muslim community.

Israeli flags were burned in Berlin in December to protest the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Both the chief rabbi of Britain and the leader of its Labour Party omitted any direct reference to Jewish victims or anti-Semitism from statements they made just ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’ address Friday on the BBC was greeted by respectful silence. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s statement, meanwhile, touched off a cascade of condemnations that above all demonstrated again that when it comes to the genocide, context is everything.

Coming at a low point in the relationship between British Jews and the party that used to be their political home, the brouhaha this week ahead of Saturday’s memorial day echoed the controversy that erupted in the United States over last year’s commemoration when President Donald Trump was widely condemned for leaving the Jews out of his Holocaust memorial statement.

Large segments of American Jewry, suspicious of Trump and his “America First” nationalism, were outraged, although even institutions like the Israel Defense Forces have used similar formulations in their official proclamations.

While Corbyn’s statement recalls the “millions who died, the millions displaced and cruel hurt their descendants have suffered,” it does not mention Jews by name.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism group called on Corbyn, a left-wing politician who has been accused of tolerating and whitewashing his party’s anti-Semitism problem, to apologize for writing a statement that “outrageously omits Jews and anti-Semitism.”

The lower house of the Polish parliament approved a bill Friday that proscribes prison time for defaming the Polish nation by using phrases such as “Polish death camps” to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II.

The bill passed Friday is a response to cases in recent years of foreign media using “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz and other Nazi-run camps.

Many major news organizations are sensitive to the issue and ban the language, but it nonetheless crops up in foreign media and statements by public officials. Former US President Barack Obama used it in 2012, prompting outrage in Poland.

Many Poles fear such phrasing makes some people, especially younger generations, incorrectly conclude that Poles had a role in running the camps.

The legislation calls for prison sentences of up to three years. It still needs approval from Poland’s Senate and president.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday called for an urgent meeting between Israeli diplomats in Poland and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki to express his “strong opposition” to a bill passed on Friday by the lower house of the Polish parliament criminalizing statements suggesting Poland was responsible for crimes and atrocities committed by Nazi Germany on its soil during the Holocaust.

In a Hebrew post on social media on Saturday evening, Netanyahu called the Polish bill “absurd” and said “history cannot be re-written.”

“The Holocaust cannot be denied,” Netanyahu wrote, adding that he instructed the Israeli embassy in Poland to “meet tonight with the Polish prime minister to relay my firm stance against this bill.”

The deputy Polish ambassador to Israel was summoned to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs for talks on Sunday, the ministry said. The Polish ambassador is currently not in the country.

The new bill prescribes prison time for allegedly defaming the “Polish nation” by using phrases such as “Polish death camps” to refer to the killing sites Nazi Germany operated in occupied Poland during World War II. The bill is a response to cases in recent years of foreign media using “Polish death camps” to describe Auschwitz and other Nazi-run camps.

Netanyahu’s statement came on the heels of a heated exchange over the bill between Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid, a member of the Israeli opposition, and the Polish embassy in Israel.

Lapid, the son of a Holocaust survivor, took to Twitter on Saturday to slam the bill, characterizing it as an effort to rewrite history. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

Seventy-five years after he helped a group of over 1,000 Jews fleeing Italian-occupied France, 98-year-old Jewish-Italian Enzo Cavaglion was honored in his hometown of Cuneo on Sunday.

Cavaglion was presented with the Jewish Rescuers Citation by B’nai Brith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jews who Rescued Fellow Jews During the Holocaust at his residence, surrounded by family and friends.

He still lives in the same village from which he helped organize the 1943 rescue effort.

“Enzo was really moved by the award,” said Alan Schneider, director of B’nai Brith World Center-Jerusalem, who attended the presentation.

“He’s 98 years old — frail in body, but his mind is sharp, and it was an opportunity for him to remember those awful days when he assisted these 1,000 Jews who escaped over the Maritime Alps from France into Italy,” Schneider said.

The Jewish Rescuers Citation was established in 2011 to help correct the common misconception that Jews didn’t significantly help rescue other Jews during the Holocaust.

In an otherwise darkened theater, viewers gasped when they saw what appeared to be a seated 83-year-old man wearing a light green button-down shirt and khaki pants.

Aaron Elster of Chicago seemed to be answering questions about his unbelievable escape from the Sokolov ghetto in Poland as a 10-year-old. Elster was forced to hide in a dark, filthy attic for two years during World War II.

“Why didn’t your sisters run away with you [from the ghetto]?” asked Suri Johnson, 11, of Wisconsin. A docent repeated the question into a microphone.

“It was an impossibility,” Elster responded. “There were hundreds of people guarded by Ukrainian soldiers with rifles… There was no way they could have run. I crawled behind the people on my stomach. They didn’t see me.”

The testimony was remarkable, moving. But Elster wasn’t in the room. Instead the audience was interacting with a holographic image of the Holocaust survivor that was created two years before.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, located in this suburb about 15 miles north of Chicago, is the first to permanently showcase the New Dimensions in Testimony oral history project, which has created holographic images from extensive interviews of 15 Holocaust survivors shown on rotation. Seven of the survivors are from Chicago.

"I forget - is this the 392nd Day of Rage, or the 393rd?"

In the name of Allah the Most Gracious the Most Merciful ....

O rebellious rebels in the face of the occupiers in all parts of the occupied land, angered in the face of the occupiers and gangs of settlers and we do not have pity on them until we have defeated them from the land of Isra and resisters . Fatah is the owner of the first bullet, which was fired for the sake of Jerusalem and the return of the refugees with the unforgettable blood of martyrs and the wounded and the victim, a thorn in the throat of all the losers since its inception, because its goal is the liberation and the establishment of the state of Palestine .

The Fatah Movement has consistently rejected any violation of the rights of our people baptized by massive sacrifices based on the resolutions of international legitimacy and international law, foremost of which is the right of return of refugees, the right to self-determination and the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and its rejection of the American position against the rights of our people, The eternal right of our independent Palestinian state or an attempt to violate the right of sacred return through the rumors about the resettlement and the severance of aid funds for UNRWA the witness to uprooting our people from their homes and cities They were defeated by Zionist gangs and deported to exile.

The Fatah movement also affirms that the recent statements by US President Trump is the continuation of his declared war against our people and the promotion of the possibility of launching the so-called deal of the century, which represents the liquidation of our national cause and an insult to the Palestinian people and its leadership and historical rights...we refuse to exchange material support for these rights .

- Tuesday 30/1/2018 will be a day of solidarity with the Palestinian people within the territories occupied in 1948, which will involve marches in all towns and cities and points of contact with the occupation .

- Friday February 2, 2018 is a day of popular anger in all the occupied territories and in the refugee camps and Diaspora and Arab and Islamic capitals and capitals of the world to emphasize that Jerusalem will be only the eternal capital of the independent state of Palestine .

...It is a revolution until victory