Israel HaYom, Abed Almaala, September 6, 2016:

As a Jordanian politician, I feel obligated to speak out against the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and its effect on ‎the Middle East and the world.‎

I represent the point of view and interests of the Jordanian people. ‎By doing so, I have freedom that many others may not. My views on ‎BDS are unbiased and balanced because I am not an Israeli and ‎nobody could accuse me of being anti-Arab.‎

Let me be clear: BDS is a reckless act of hatred that threatens the ‎security and stability of not only Israel, but also my country, Jordan, and the ‎entire Middle East.‎

BDS seeks to attack and isolate Israel. But what is Israel’s importance to Jordan, and to the world? Why should anyone care if Israel is hurt?

This is what the president of the Jordanian opposition, Mudar Zahran, wrote last year in Israel Hayom: ‎”If the day were to come when Israel falls, Jordan, Egypt and many others would fall, ‎too, and ‎Westerners would be begging Iran for oil. ‎

“We can hate Israel as much as we like, but we must realize that without it, we too ‎would be ‎gone.‎‏”‏

Israel is at the front of the war against terror in our region, ‎and if Israel is hurt, we all will suffer, and Jordan will suffer the most.‎

Therefore, BDS is a threat to us all — a threat to America as much as it is a threat to ‎Israel, Jordan and our Palestinian brothers.‎

BDS claims to target Israel because Israel oppresses the Palestinians. If so, why does BDS never target Jordan’s government, which oppresses and destroys the lives ‎of the majority of Jordanians of Palestinian origins, and where many of my own people, the Bedouin Jordanians, go hungry?‎

Why does BDS never boycott Lebanon, where Palestinians are banned from working ‎as taxi drivers? Why does it not boycott Syria, where President Bashar Assad has killed thousands of Palestinians ‎in Yarmouk camp?‎

BDS, admit it: You are racists and anti-Semites.‎

Your activities are a threat to Jordan, and it is my mission as Jordan’s shadow commerce secretary to enhance, expand, strengthen and promote trade ‎between my country and Israel.‎

But BDS is not alone. It could not survive without support, both ‎financial and political, and we in the Jordanian opposition ‎have information that BDS receives support of various kinds from Arab dictators.‎

From day one, Arab rulers have been telling us that Israeli is the enemy, and that we ‎should forget about our own hungry children and our ruthless governments and focus exclusively ‎on hating and killing Jews.‎

BDS promotes the very same bankrupt concepts.

I say, BDS: Shame on you.

Shame on you for attacking the only country that offers jobs to my Palestinian brothers.

Shame on you for attacking the country that provides free health care for Palestinian ‎cancer patients.

Shame on you for selling your souls to Arab regimes.‎

As a Muslim, I know that since my Prophet Muhammad was welcomed in Medina ‎by the Arabs and the Jews, he traded with and even signed ‎a mutual defense agreement with the Jews.

And as a Jordanian and a member of Jordan’s opposition, it is time we stopped ‎talking about peace and began living peace through economic prosperity; this is ‎our promise and our mission.‎

BDS is not only hateful and shameful, but also strengthens Arab dictators who hypocritically criticize Israel for alleged human rights violations when they, themselves, are the world’s top ‎human rights violators. ‎

A man is known by the company he keeps; if the biggest supporters of BDS are Arab and Muslim dictators, ‎what does this say about BDS?‎

We Arabs have boycotted Israel for 70 years. Where has it gotten us? We are ‎light-years behind Israel in technology and the economy. We will stop this in ‎Jordan and begin learning from our Israel friends.‎

This dream is not new. It was the dream of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who ‎saw economic prosperity as the road to peace. That is why I was honored to organize a memorial event for him in the U.S. Congress when he ‎was killed, more than 20 years ago.

Let us make his memory live through action. Let us turn the lost hopes into a ‎beautiful reality, and disappointment into happiness. And let us all put BDS ‎where it belongs, in the dust bin of history.‎

Someday soon, Jordan will be free and we will build ‎a new system that will work closely with Israel, through partnership, not ‎competition, and through true cooperation rather than just a cold peace.‎

And we will turn Jordan into a model for Arab countries to follow through ‎cooperation with our Israeli brothers and sisters and the blessings of our ‎American friends.‎

Am Yisrael Chai. Am Yarden Chai.

Source: Israel Hayom | BDS: A threat to the entire Middle East

Karl Du Fresne, Feb 7, 2017:  Is there any more intractable issue in international affairs than that of Israel and Palestine? Offhand, I can’t think of any.

It’s tricky for a whole lot of reasons. One is that the competing claims of the two sides, Israel and the Palestinians, both have some weight.

The Jews, having suffered centuries in exile, mostly in countries where they experienced relentless discrimination and persecution, have a right to a homeland where they can feel safe and secure. But the Palestinians feel aggrieved because to provide that Jewish homeland, they were displaced from land that they regarded as theirs.

Another complicating factor is that both sides are capable of behaving badly – sometimes very badly.

Palestine shelters terrorist groups dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, and one where Arabs enjoy rights of citizenship.These fanatics think nothing of killing innocent civilians. In their eyes, no Jew can be innocent. The very fact of being Jewish is a crime that warrants their extermination.

Groups such as Hamas are indifferent even to the suffering of their own people, cynically exploiting children and other civilians as human shields.When it suits them, the Palestinians make noises about negotiating a settlement. But whenever a deal looks within reach, they pull back or impose new conditions that they know will be intolerable to the Jews. It was said of the late Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

For their part, the Israelis don’t always make it easy to support the Jewish cause.

They have occasionally been guilty of gratuitously brutal reprisals. The 1982 Shatila and Sabra massacres, when Israeli forces turned a blind eye to the slaughter of civilians in Lebanese refugee camps thought to harbour terrorists, remains a terrible stain on the country’s reputation.

Aggressive territorial expansion by Jewish hardliners is another factor that troubles people who might otherwise support the Israeli cause. The widely held religious conviction that the Jews are “God’s chosen people” is no help either. It encourages Jewish zealots to believe they have divine endorsement in whatever they do.The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not a likeable man. He gives the impression of being arrogant and belligerent.

But Netanyahu is strong, like his predecessor Ariel Sharon, and the Israelis have a history of supporting leaders who uncompromisingly defend their country’s right to exist. You can hardly blame them, when their tiny country – less than half the size of Canterbury – is surrounded by 22 hostile Arab states, many of which would cheerfully see Israel obliterated.

This is the backdrop against which New Zealand strangely co-sponsored a recent United Nations resolution condemning as illegal Israeli settlements in territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War – a war started, and quickly lost, by the Arabs.

I say “strangely” because the Israel-Palestine question is one on which New Zealand has previously taken a prudently cautious approach. This is in line with our international reputation as an honest broker that seeks honourable and sustainable solutions to problems rather than taking sides or adopting provocative stances.

Our support for the UN resolution was a dramatic departure from this approach. It came as a bombshell just two days before Christmas. You have to wonder what’s changed?

The picture is made more opaque by the involvement of our slippery foreign affairs minister Murray McCully, a man who could make a stroll to the corner dairy for a bottle of milk look suspicious.

McCully claimed New Zealand’s support for the resolution was all about promoting the so-called two-state solution, under which Israel and Palestine would peacefully co-exist. But the obvious suspicion is that we were doing a favour for the White House.

Barack Obama had a notoriously strained relationship with Netanyahu and may have wanted to score a diplomatic blow against him before his term expired. To have moved directly against Israel, however, would have risked a damaging domestic political backlash within the US.

Was New Zealand, then, leaned on to do Obama’s dirty work, with the US playing its part by refusing to exercise its usual veto against the resolution? In the absence of any convincing alternative explanation, it seems plausible.

Even if we accept McCully’s assurance that our intentions were honourable, why should New Zealand so suddenly take an active and provocative stance on such a volatile issue? After all, it’s not as if there’s any shortage of countries willing to pillory Israel.

The backing of a respected democracy like New Zealand gave the resolution a force that it would not otherwise have had. The Jew-haters will have taken great encouragement from our support and could well use it to justify further acts of terrorism.

Is this what New Zealanders want? I doubt it. It’s a nightmarishly complicated issue and we’re probably better off trying to work constructively from the sidelines. But if we’re forced to take sides, I know which one I’d opt for.

Source: New Zealand’s latest Middle East move not in keeping with our history | Stuff.co.nz

The Trump Administration appears to be easing away from longstanding US support for Palestinian statehood as the preferred outcome of Middle East peace efforts, which may please some allies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

But the alternatives are few, and each comes with daunting and combustible complications, including for Israel itself.

The idea of two states in the Holy Land – a Jewish Israel and an Arab Palestine – rests on a particular logic: There are two quite different peoples of roughly equal size living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River; each wants their own nation-state to control and dominate numerically; each has shown tenacity toward this goal.

Source: No simple solution for a deal in Middle East – World – NZ Herald News

A UN Security Council resolution, calling for a ban on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, has passed, with NZ taking a major role. Phil Smith outlines the background and the blowback.New Zealand has dared to go where even Egypt’s strongman, President el-Sisi, feared to tread.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi put a forward a resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlement building, but after an incredibly inappropriate call from Donald Trump, el-Sisi withdrew it again. Exactly how Trump achieved that is anyone’s guess, but America’s $1.5 billion aid package to Egypt may have been threatened.

Source: NZ’s Israel resolution: Peacemakers seldom win friends

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of NZFOI.

Below is an extract from the Koren  Sacks Yom Kippur mahzor. To those who fully open themselves to it, Yom Kippur is a life-transforming experience. It tells us that God, who created the universe in love and forgiveness, reaches out to us in love and forgiveness, asking us to love and forgive others. God never …

Source: Yom Kippur – How It Changes Us – Rabbi Sacks

Below is a transcript of a speech by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks at “The Future of the Jewish Communities in Europe” Conference at The European Parliament on 27th September 2016 in Brussels. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. That is what I want us to understand today. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under …

Source: The Mutating Virus: Understanding Antisemitism – Rabbi Sacks

Naz Shah, a Labour MP for Bradford in the UK, has been suspended from the party, accused of anti-Semitism over a post she shared on Facebook two years ago.

It showed a map of Israel super-imposed on a map of the United States. The headline said “The solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict – relocate Israel into the United States. Problem solved.”

As tends to happen, that comment was spotted by someone and brought to the media’s attention in Britain, and she’s been stood down because the party believes it is offensive and unacceptable.

Shah has apologised. She said she never meant to cause offence, and it was foolish to share that post.

It was really foolish – she’s an MP. The Middle East peace process is not something you can make fun of when you’re a politician.

However, I would question whether her “crime” in this case is so severe that she should be stood down.

Read more

Desecrated tombstones of the Sarre-Union Jewish cemetery in France February 17, 2015. “Across Europe, Jews are leaving.” Reuters/Vincent Kessler

On March 27, speaking to the Sunday Times, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams expressed his concern at rising levels of anti-Semitism on British university campuses. There are, he said, “worrying echoes” of Germany in the 1930s. Two days later, in The Times, Chris Bryant, the Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and a senior member of the British Labour party, warned that the political left was increasingly questioning the right of the state of Israel to exist, a view he called a “not too subtle form of anti-Semitism.”

Across Europe, Jews are leaving. A survey in 2013 by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights showed that almost a third of Europe’s Jews have considered emigrating because of anti-Semitism, with numbers as high as 46 percent in France and 48 percent in Hungary.

Read more: Newsweek, 3 April 2016