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→ 18 May 2018
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Dead baby strategy | Gatestone Institute

If this were the first time that Hamas deliberately provoked Israel into self-defense actions that resulted in the unintended deaths of Gaza civilians, the media could be excused for playing into the hands of Hamas. The most recent Hamas provocations — having 40,000 Gazans try to tear down the border fence and enter Israel with Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons — are part of a repeated Hamas tactic that I have called the “dead baby strategy.” Hamas’ goal is to have Israel kill as many Gazans as possible so that the headlines always begin, and often end, with the body count. Hamas deliberately sends women and children to the front line, while their own fighters hide behind these human shields.

Hamas leaders have long acknowledged this tactic. Fathi Hammad, a Hamas Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, stated as far back as 2008:

“For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘we desire death like you desire life.'”

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→ 18 May 2018
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Mideast conflicts connected by vying powerbrokers | NZ Herald

The modern Middle East has been plagued by ruinous wars: country versus country, civil wars with internecine and sectarian bloodletting, and numerous eruptions centered on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But never in the last 70 years have they seemed as interconnected as now with Iran and Saudi Arabia vying for regional control, while Israel also seeks to maintain a military supremacy of its own.

Russia, the United States and Turkey make up the other powerbrokers in a region where not only wars but proxy battlefields within those wars are on a feverish and hostile footing.

The ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen, this week’s mass killing of Palestinians by Israel in Gaza, Turkish-Kurdish hostilities, and the potential for an all-encompassing war sparked by an Iranian-Israeli conflagration in Syria or Lebanon, all have tentacles that reach across borders and back again.

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→ 16 May 2018
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Israel at 70: Contrasting images of victory and violence | NZ Herald

JERUSALEM (AP) — Seventy years since the day of Israel’s founding, wildly contrasting images of victory and violence showcased the contradictions that bedevil the Jewish state.

Deadly protests flared along the Gaza border, where troops killed dozens of Palestinians, while politicians feted the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem as a symbol of ironclad alliance with Washington. And with improbably odd timing, seemingly oblivious to both, crowds gathered in liberal Tel Aviv to exult over the winner of a campy European pop contest.

Nahum Barnea, Israel’s leading columnist, said the events highlighted the country’s fragmented nature and how even after seven decades it still cannot escape its conflict with the Arabs or its unquenchable thirst for recognition.

“This is a small country that typically lives only one story, usually either that of readiness for battle or bereavement,” he said. “This was really an unusual example of the mythological national campfire coming apart.”

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→ 15 May 2018
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Everyday, a Nakba; and response | Jerusalem Post

On May 11, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion piece by a university student living in Ramallah.  Later a Facebook poster responded with his own views of the Nakba.  Both make for fascinating reading:

For Palestinians, the Nakba is every day, not just once a year

This might be Israel’s day of independence, but for the Palestinians it is known as al Nakba, ‘the catastrophe’

Palestinian protestors look toward Israeli forces during clashes following a demonstration near the West Bank city of Nablus in February 2018
Palestinian protestors look toward Israeli forces during clashes following a demonstration near the West Bank city of Nablus in February 2018 (Photo: Getty Images)

This might be Israel’s day of independence, but for the Palestinians it is known as al Nakba, “the catastrophe”, marking 500 ruined Palestinian villages and millions of refugees. It is a reminder of the misery and suffering of a nation, generation after generation.

I believe I am right in saying our Nakba is every day, not just once a year. I would like to tell you a little bit about the life that I and millions of other Palestinians endure every day in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Nakba today is the hundreds of checkpoints in the West Bank that are manufactured to treat humans like caged animals. It is the people killed in Gaza — medical staff, journalists and UNRWA employees — who are not safe from Israeli attacks.

It is the thousands of houses, mosques and charities destroyed by air strikes. It is the innocent people living in the streets, each with enough misery and experience to fill the pages of a book.

You may not have heard of the woman giving birth at a checkpoint because soldiers did not allow her through to a hospital. Or the whole family who had to enter and leave their house through a window because the Israeli army blocked their door.

There are constant, unending restrictions: you aren’t allowed to look through this window, you may not access your own rooftop, you cannot step out of your house after five in the evening.

Today, Israel is deliberately concealing the realities of day-to-day life in the West Bank and Gaza.

Settlements are increasingly taking away what is left of my country’s land. The number of checkpoints is rising, some of them resembling military bases and with specific opening and closing times.

In Hebron, Palestinians have to go through multiple cages and electronic gates and are body-searched three times in five minutes — simply so they can pray. While Israelis celebrate their independence with parties on the streets of Tel Aviv, their fellow soldiers are proudly stopping frail old men from crossing a checkpoint to get to the Ibrahimi mosque.

In Gaza, youthful soldiers — themselves with no experience of life — film themselves shooting dead Palestinians.

This is the victory of hatred and insanity over morality and compassion.

There is a huge difference in the narratives that Israelis and Palestinians tell their respective sides but I think there are some basic points about the situation today that we should all accept are true.

I do not understand why this situation is called a “conflict”. A conflict requires some sort of power clash, a semblance of parity, but in Palestine and Israel this is not the case.

We have two different sides: one powerful, the other powerless; one armed, the other punished for peaceful resistance; one an occupier and conqueror, the other the occupied and conquered.

If you ever come to Palestine, you will see how there are borders everywhere that we do not control. The West Bank is divided into three zones: Zone A under Palestinian control, Zone B shared by both sides and Zone C under total Israeli administration — and it is the last of these that covers most of the West Bank.

Just anybody can visit, but not every Palestinian can exit.

In its 70th year, Israel is a deeply contradictory country. I hope that, in time, its actions in Palestine today and the steps it took to reach this stage will be fully revealed to the world. I hope that the Palestinians will reverse their situation.

The author is a university student who lives in Ramallah.

Source

Please keep reading:

David Collier’s Response

Last week the Jewish Chronicle ran a piece titled ‘our Nakba is every day, not once a year’. It was penned by a Palestinian, Ehab Naser, a university student who lives in Ramallah. I asked the Jewish Chronicle if I could receive a comment as a ‘right to reply’, they chose to turn me down. This is what I had sent them:-

I don’t intend to address all the fallacies within Ehab Naser’s article, but I will say this. Naser’s description of Palestinian life uses worst case examples of life during conflict in Gaza and then conflates it with Palestinians living everywhere. People unable to look through windows or climb on a roof do not exist in Ramallah.

As it happens I was in Ramallah last week. A bustling, lively city with many large houses and flashy cars. I did not see any sign of occupation there at all whilst I was there, and the only weapons I saw were in the hands of the Palestinian police.

I spent the rest of my time in the West Bank, visiting the new Palestinian city Rawabi, eating lunch in Berzeit and walking through an exhibition in Banksy’s ‘Walled Off’ hotel in Bethlehem. I had the same problem viewing the exhibition in the hotel as I did reading Nasser’s comment piece. Neither are trying to tell the truth.

The ‘Nakba’ was the result of a civil conflict between the Jews who wanted to create the state the UN had promised them in 1947, and an Arab front that wanted to stop them. The local Arab communities received the help of irregular Arab forces that entered the Mandate areas as early as January 1948 and then by May from the forces of several armies of regional Arab states. The Arabs failed in their attempts to destroy the Jewish enclave and Israel survived its war of independence.

The Nakba is the price the Arab communities paid for this loss. I agree with Ehab that the price was heavy, but it was one that did not have to be paid. The Jewish side did not ask for the Arabs to oppose partition. The Jews did not want Arab irregular forces to enter the fight and they certainly had no desire to fight the forces of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq.

The Jewish community lost 1% of its total population in this battle. The alternative, defeat, would have led to a far greater loss.

What Ehab experiences everyday is not a ‘nakba’, but rather the result of his own Arab community still unable to come to terms with the presence of a Jewish state. More importantly, and it is why I have such trouble with his article and the Banksy exhibition, there still does not appear to be any acceptance at all, of the responsibility his own community must also take in having helped to create the environment in which he lives. In the stories they tell, everything is Israel’s fault. For as long as this remains the case, there will be no progress.

When I first went to Israel before the first Intifada, people moved about freely. Then the stabbings started. During the Oslo peace process, as I tried to work with Palestinians on building joint ventures, the buses started exploding. The cooperation between my own business and the PA stopped, when the violent second Intifada started. Then the wall went up as a way of protecting Israeli communities from terrorists infiltrating from PA areas.

Finally, there was the election, that saw Hamas receive the largest number of votes. Israelis didn’t vote for Hamas, Palestinians did. The result of voting for terrorists is the situation we see in Gaza today.

At every turn, Palestinians have been let down by their own leadership, their own extremists and the way they vote when given the chance. Israel cannot, nor should it be expected to take responsibility for these contributing factors.

If a Palestinian leader was to stand up tomorrow and recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, if Palestinians were able to unite and reject the extremism of groups like Hamas and if they really sought to co-exist with Israel, peace would quickly follow.

It doesn’t mean Israel doesn’t make mistakes. Nor does it mean the Palestinians are not suffering. It only points out that the beating heart of the conflict is in Palestinian attitudes towards Israel and not the other way around.

At one-point Ehab rejects the term ‘conflict’ as a description because Israel has the power and the Palestinians do not. He is mistaken. Almost all the power in this conflict is with the Palestinians. They just need to do what they have not been able to do for a hundred years. Accept the right of the Jewish state to exist. Once they do this, peace will quickly follow and Ehab’s ‘Nakba’ will come to an end. That step isn’t ours to take.

DC”

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→ 14 May 2018
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COLUMN ONE: Netanyahu’s finest hour | Jerusalem Post

At the start of his cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Donald Trump discussed his announcement Tuesday afternoon that he is removing the US from his predecessor Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and reinstating the nuclear sanctions that were suspended with the deal’s implementation in January 2016.

European and other international leaders responded angrily to Trump’s move. The EU’s foreign policy commissioner Federica Mogherini was downright indignant.

Apparently unaware that the US is a more important EU ally than Iran, Mogherini insisted, “The European Union is determined to preserve it. Together with the rest of the international community, we will preserve this nuclear deal.”

The liberal US media outlets were also aghast. Commentators joined the chorus of former Obama administration officials condemning Trump and insisting his move will isolate the US from the international community.

Trump brushed off his critics by noting, “You saw [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu get up yesterday and talk so favorably about what we did.”

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By Caroline Glick

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→ 7 May 2018
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Saudi Journalist: The Arab Countries Oppressed Their Jews, Failed To [Recognize] Benefit From Their Presence | MEMRI

In his March 18, 2018 column in the London-based Saudi Al-Sharq Al-Awsat daily, journalist Hussein Shubakshi wrote about the situation of the Jews who had lived in the Arab countries.

He noted that they suffered discrimination and prejudice, despite the fact that they were “pillars of the economy and of culture and art in their countries.”

For example, they were accused of treachery and their property was seized in order to prompt them to emigrate. 

Presenting examples of several prominent Jewish families that left Iraq, Syria and Egypt and went on to prosper elsewhere, Shubakshi points out that this was a loss to the Arab societies and economy.

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→ 2 May 2018
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Sheree Trotter: Exploring the Kiwi connection as Israel turns 70 | NZ Herald

Last week Israelis began a series of events in celebration of 70 years of statehood since the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

While New Zealand’s relationship with Israel has in recent years been frosty, history reveals a relationship that was not always so fraught. Indeed, this region of the Middle East has held a special place in the Kiwi imagination.

From as early as 1903, groups were established in New Zealand to support the “upbuilding of Palestine”, as it was then known. The land was under the control of the Ottoman Empire and although there had always been Jewish presence there, from the 19th century Jews began returning in greater numbers, largely in response to the persecution they were suffering in Russia and Eastern Europe.

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→ 2 May 2018
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Israel’s Mossad spy agency shrouded in mystery and mystique | NZ Herald

Israel’s seizure of Iran’s purported nuclear programme archive and the dramatic display of the documents taken from a facility in the heart of Tehran marked a rare case of Israel going public about the operations of its top-secret Mossad spy agency.

Mossad, long shrouded in mystery and mythology, is legendary in international intelligence circles for being behind what are believed to be some of the most daring covert operations of the past century. Only a few have come to light and often only years later. Israel is typically wary of exposing the exploits of the global arm of its vaunted intelligence community out of fear of revealing its well-cultivated sources or undermining its mystique.

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→ 22 April 2018
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Israel at 70 | NZ Herald

JERUSALEM (AP) — Is Israel a success as it turns 70? As Israelis commemorate the milestone this week, satisfaction and a grim disquiet share the stage.

It has a standard of living that rivals Western Europe, though it lacks significant natural resources. It can boast of scientific achievements and military and technological clout beyond its modest size. It controls most of biblical Israel, and despite widespread criticism of its policies toward the Palestinians, it has cultivated good diplomatic ties with most of the world.

But it’s also a country that is weary from decades of conflict with the Palestinians. It is riven by religious, ethnic and economic divisions. It is still seeking recognition in a region that has not fully come to terms with the presence of a Jewish state.

Israeli leaders have described it as a “light unto the nations,” but the country still is regularly accused of war crimes against Palestinians, millions of whom it has controlled for decades without the right to vote. There is no end in sight to its occupation of the West Bank, or to its crippling blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza.

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→ 19 April 2018
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Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: Israel, the Heart of Judaism

Seventy years since the establishment of the modern State of Israel is a fitting moment to remind ourselves of a mystery at the heart of Judaism.

Why Israel? Why does the Hebrew Bible so resolutely and unerringly focus on this place, what Spinoza called a mere ‘strip of territory’? The God of Abraham is the God of the whole world, a God unbounded by space. Why then does He choose any particular space, let alone one so small and vulnerable?

The question, ‘Why Israel?’ is the geographical way of asking ‘Why the Jews?’ The answer lies in the duality that defines Jewish faith and constitutes one of its most important contributions to civilization. Judaism embodies and exemplifies the necessary tension between the universal and the unique, between everywhere in general and somewhere in particular.

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