NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Last night the Zionist Federation of New Zealand organized a memorial service to honour the victims of the Holocaust.
In case you missed it, you can catch the service here:
NZFOI: As New Zealand considers how technology can be used to combat COVID-19….
“All means will be used to fight the spread of the coronavirus,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 14, “including technological means, digital means, and other means that until today I have refrained from using among the civilian population.” As Haaretz reported, this means Israel will now unleash cyber tech “usually used for counter-terror” to enforce quarantines and to check the movements of people testing positive for the virus.
Following the announcement, the country’s Attorney General “approved the use of cyber measures to track patients’ phones,” essentially green-lighting Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, to actively track citizens by geolocating their cellphones and, one can assume, to build a database of where and when. The same intel can also be used to determine who else was in the vicinity of a known patient on a timeline, establishing potential infections, although such measures were not spelled out in any of the announcements today.
And, just like, that Israel joins Iran and China in the deployment of state-level intel gathering tools to track its population as it tries to prevent its coronavirus outbreak from getting out of control. Geolocating phones is a simple tech—in tandem with the carriers, the granularity can be pretty precise in urban locations. The fact this is being presented as a counter-terror intel tool suggests it is more than just a basic policing-level solution, more than just simple geofencing.
Anti-Semitic graffiti has appeared atop an Auckland maunga targeting the Tūpuna Maunga Authority chair Paul Majurey in what has been called an “abhorrent act”.
Since October, protesters have been occupying Ōwairaka/Mt Albert to prevent the removal of hundreds of exotic trees as part of a major cultural and native restoration project that has the backing of the city’s mana whenua and Auckland Council representatives.
Marilyn Garson has taken her anti-Israel rhetoric to the NZ International Review, where she repeats her accusations of Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza.
To be fair, the NZIR has also published a rebuttal from David Cumin and Dov Bing.
Here Sheri Oz reviews both articles.
