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→ 8 May 2020
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Incitement amidst cooperation | AIR

Abdul Azim Salhab

By all accounts, cooperation between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli government and military to deal with the coronavirus crisis has been very good. Amos Harel, the veteran military correspondent and defence analyst for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper recently wrote that “Cooperation with the Palestinians is at its tightest ever.”

This is all the more notable because as recently as February, Israeli-Palestinian relations seemed to be unprecedently precarious. In the wake of the release of the Trump Administration’s peace plan in late January, PA President Mahmoud Abbas promised to withdraw all cooperation with Israel, including the vital security cooperation. While similar threats had been made before, this time Palestinian anger seemed more palpable and serious. Israeli government plans to annex the Jordan valley or other parts of the West Bank, as the peace plan allowed, looked set to deepen the crisis in relations. 

Now, that is all gone. No one is talking about the Trump plan or annexations. Coronavirus has swept all such issues aside, as the two sides seek to manage the pandemic which threatens both Israelis and Palestinians who live intermixed with each other. There is even reportedly an Israeli-Palestinian “joint operations room” to oversee the shared response to the pandemic threat. 

Amid the pandemic doom and gloom, this at least is good news, right?

Yes. However… why is it that even in this shared medical emergency the PA cannot stop its official media from engaging in ongoing incitement against Israel?

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→ 5 May 2020
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Mayor de Blasio and ‘the Jewish community’ | RNS

Hundreds of mourners gather in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Tuesday, April 28, 2020, to observe a funeral for Rabbi Chaim Mertz, a Hasidic Orthodox leader whose death was reportedly tied to the coronavirus. The stress of the coronavirus’ toll on New York City’s Orthodox Jews was brought to the fore on Wednesday after Mayor Bill de Blasio chastised “the Jewish community” following the breakup of the large funeral that flouted public health orders.(Peter Gerber via AP)

Jews went a little bit nuts this week.

Not because two and a half thousand of us turned out for a funeral at the epicenter of this country’s coronavirus pandemic but because after the cops broke things up New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted:

“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Whereupon the Twitterverse exploded.

“Hey @NYCMayor,” tweeted ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt, “there are 1mil+ Jewish people in #NYC. The few who don’t social distance should be called out — but generalizing against the whole population is outrageous especially when so many are scapegoating Jews. This erodes the very unity our city needs now more than ever.”

“This has to be a joke,” tweeted New York City Councilman Chaim Deutsch, a Brooklyn Democrat who is an Orthodox Jew. He added, “Every neighborhood has people who are being non-compliant. To speak to an entire ethnic group as though we are all flagrantly violating precautions is offensive, it’s stereotyping, and it’s inviting anti-Semitism. I’m truly stunned.”

“So, as has been true with moral ciphers from time immemorial, you decided to seek your jollies by attacking Jews,” wrote John Podhoretz in the “New York Post.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, File)

Really?

An old (Jewish) friend of mine likes to say that Jews consider any statement by a non-Jew that begins with the words “Jews are” to be anti-Semitic if it’s not followed by something like “a community that puts a high value on learning and supporting the arts.” In other words, just about whenever a gentile lumps us all together it’s (for historically understandable reasons) a trigger — one that de Blasio certainly pulled.

But there’s more to it than that.

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→ 29 April 2020
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From San Remo to 72nd Birthday, Israel displays rare and robust resilience | Melanie Philips

NZFOI: Mentioning the San Remo Conference often draws blank stares because it seems like an artefact of the past and its relevance is not apparent. But San Remo begins a chain of events that legitimizes the existence of the modern state of Israel in today’s international law. Consequently when the ignorant or the disingenuous say that Israel has no standing in international law and its existence is a contravention of international law, they are wrong. Here is an easy to digeset article from Melanie Philips that sets out the facts. April 26 marks the centenary of this remarkable conference.

One hundred years ago this Sunday, the four principal allied powers involved in World War I signed a resolution at San Remo. Next week, Israel celebrates Yom Ha’atzmaut, the 72nd anniversary of the state’s declaration of independence.

Typically, the world thinks that the key step towards the establishment of the State of Israel was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the statement in which the British government committed itself to work for the establishment of a Jewish home in what was then called Palestine.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the more important milestone in that story: the San Remo resolution signed on April 26, 1920.

For it was at San Remo that Britain, France, Italy and Japan turned the Balfour Declaration into an internationally binding treaty to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, with Britain being given the mandate to facilitate Jewish immigration there.

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→ 28 April 2020
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Israel briefs UN Security Council on COVID-19 co-operation with Palestinians | NY Times

Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN

…Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon nor acting U.S. deputy ambassador Cherith Norman Chalet mentioned annexation in their briefings to the council, instead focusing on the fight against COVID-19 in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Chalet said the United States “has been heartened to see signs of good will, humanity and unity between Israelis and Palestinians,” highlighting Israel’s training of four teams of Palestinian health care workers on the COVID-19 response and establishment of a control room by Israeli and Palestinian leaders to enhance coordination and communications.

She said urged the council “to help the parties choose true leadership over politics as usual, and to work together to ensure that the prospect of peace remains within reach.”

Danon said that “Israel has chosen to put aside politics” and has strengthened cooperation with the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority to mitigate the effects of COVID-19.

Israel is helping fund a U.N. emergency plan, has granted permits allowing thousands of Palestinians to work in Israel and has donated large amounts of equipment to the Palestinian Authority, he said. “In the past weeks, over 600 tons of medical supplies, 25,000 tons of food and 60,000 tons of building materials have entered the Gaza Strip.”

But Danon accused the Palestinians of accepting aid while it “spreads lies and incites against Israel in the media and in official letters to the council.” including blaming Israeli soldiers for the virus.

Addressing the Palestinian ambassador, he said, “The Palestinian Authority must decide if incitement against Israel is more important than the fruitful cooperation intended to save Palestinian lives.”

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→ 28 April 2020
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Isolated by pandemic, Israelis have record-high ‘sense of ‘belonging’ | Times of Israel

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, a survey published Sunday by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) ahead of the country’s 72nd Independence Day traced a surge in the number of Israelis who identify with the state and view its problems as their own.

The increase in the sense of belonging was particularly significant among two groups that are normally sidelined but have now been hit relatively hard by the COVID-19 outbreak: ultra-Orthodox Jews and Arab Israelis.

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→ 24 April 2020
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Poll: 75% among Arab sector define themselves as Israeli | Israel HaYom

A recent study has found a substantial shift in the perception of identity in the Arab sector, as [nearly] three of every four Arabs – 75% – living in Israel define themselves as Israeli.

According to the 2020 Pluralism Index composed by the Jewish people’s Policy Institute, 23% of the Arab sector’s members define themselves as “Israeli” and 51% as “Arab Israeli.”

Only 7% of those polled in this segment defined themselves as “Palestinians.”

Still, about 50% of Arab Israelis and 59% of the Muslims living in Israel said they do not believe a Jewish temple ever existed on the Temple Mount.

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→ 23 April 2020
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Pandemics, Palestinians Incitement and Peace | Glick

A few weeks ago, officials in Israel’s Health Ministry were calling for Israel to “medically annex Judea and Samaria” for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. The notion was that while Israel and the Palestinian Authority are separate political entities, from a public health perspective, they are indivisible.

On a practical level, the call was superfluous. From the moment the virus arrived in Israel, the PA’s Health Ministry began cooperating in an unprecedented manner with its Israeli counterpart. The Palestinians followed Israel’s lead on virtually all aspects of the coronavirus fight. Palestinian medical teams received training in Israeli hospitals. Israel provided the PA with testing kits, protective gear, respirators and other vital equipment for fighting the pandemic. Even the Hamas regime in Gaza viewed Israel as the authority for dealing with the virus.

But with all due respect to “medical annexation,” the collaboration between medical professionals didn’t indicate any change of heart on the part of the Palestinian leadership. Both the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas regime in Gaza are fully capable of simultaneously taking advantage of Israel’s help in fighting the pandemic and using the pandemic as a means to harm Israel. And that is precisely what they are doing.

PA Prime Minister Mohamad Shtayyeh has long been considered a moderate. He was a member of the Palestinian negotiating team with Israel. He is a Western educated academic and a favorite of the European Union. Many viewed PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to appoint Shtayyeh prime minister last year as a sign of moderation.

Alas, the optimism was misplaced.

At a press conference in Ramallah in late March, Shtayyeh propagated multiple blood libels against Israel.

Against IDF soldiers, Shtayyeh alleged, “We have heard testimony that some soldiers are trying to spread the virus through the door handles of cars. It is a case of racism and hatred by people who hope for the death of the other. We will add this to the list of crimes they’ve committed.”

As for Israel as a whole, Shtayyeh accused Israel of using Palestinian workers in Israel as a biological weapon against the Palestinians as a whole. He said Israel wants the thirty thousand Palestinians working for Israeli employers to keep working so that they can get infected with coronavirus and then go home and infect their fellow Palestinians. He added that a resident of his village who worked in Israel returned to the village infected and proceeded to infect twenty of his neighbors with the pandemic.

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→ 23 April 2020
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Outrage Greets Danish Lutheran Group’s Rewrite of Bible to Omit Word ‘Israel’ | Algemeiner

NZFOI: Disturbing…

The news that a Danish Lutheran group had rewritten the Bible in order to omit the word “Israel” has been greeted by outrage, with critics calling it a “surreal revision” and a gift to “Jew-haters and Israel-bashers.”

The Danish Bible Society’s translation of the New Testament refrains from using the word “Israel” and instead substitutes “Jews” and variations thereof — such as “land of the Jews” for “land of Israel.”

The words “Jews” and “Israel” both appear in the original text of the Bible as separate and distinct words.

The group claimed the move was to avoid identifying ancient Israel with today’s State of Israel, although other ancient names with modern equivalents, such as “Egypt,” are not omitted.

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→ 22 April 2020
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‘Plague on a Biblical Scale’: Hasidic Families Hit Hard by Virus | NY Times

In the New York area, the epidemic has killed influential religious leaders and torn through large, tight-knit families.

Neighborhoods in Brooklyn with large Hasidic populations have some of New York City’s highest levels of positive Covid-19 test results.Credit…Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

One of the first people Shulim Leifer knew who died of the coronavirus was his great-uncle. Then his grandmother fell ill, as did two of his cousins. The man who lived next door to his childhood home died on a Tuesday, and by Friday the neighbor on the other side was dead as well.

Each neighbor was given a small funeral, with a handful of mourners standing six feet apart on their front lawns in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park.

“There is not a single Hasidic family that has been untouched,” said Mr. Leifer, 34. “It is a plague on a biblical scale.”

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→ 21 April 2020
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Netanyahu and Gantz sign agreement for ‘national emergency government’ that keeps Netanyahu as prime minister for now | JTA

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz signed a deal Monday to form a “national emergency government” that keeps Netanyahu as the prime minister for now.

Israel has spent more than a year under a caretaker government as neither Netanyahu, who heads the right-wing Likud party, nor Gantz of the center-left Blue and White could assemble a coalition government. With the agreement, the country avoids a fourth national election in less than a year and a half.

The agreement also accedes to Likud demands that Israel annex parts of the West Bank, according to an Israeli TV report. That could happen as early as July.

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