The War of Return — A review | Quillet

[NZFOI has recently acquired this book for the members’ library.]

In a story that may be apocryphal, the late Christopher Hitchens claimed that he had once seen legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban comment that the most striking aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict is how easily it can be solved: It is simply a matter of dividing the land of Israel into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The only thing standing in the way of this solution is the intense religious or nationalist attachment of both sides to the idea of an undivided nation between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, this assumption that partition alone can bring peace has been the foundation of all of the international community’s peace efforts since the 1967 Six Day War. The only difficulty, it is believed, is persuading the two sides to agree to it.

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Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jews burn masks in violent protests as New York cracks down on rising coronavirus cases |Washington Post

Brooklyn Jews protest against COVID-19 restrictions

Jacob Kornbluh was just three blocks from his home in Brooklyn, documenting a protest against coronavirus restrictions on Wednesday evening, when the demonstration suddenly turned toward him.

The 39-year-old journalist found himself pinned to the wall of a store, he said, as dozens of fellow Orthodox Jews began yelling and calling him a “moyser” — Yiddish for “snitch” — in a confrontation captured on video. Then a few maskless men spit onto his face.

“These were members of my own community with hatred in their eyes, flipping the finger toward me, calling me a Nazi, saying I deserve to die,” Kornbluh, a politics reporter for Jewish Insider, told The Washington Post. “All these months I keep a distance, wear a mask not to get sick, advocate for measures that save lives, they disrespect my space and do something horrifying.”

The attack underscores the escalating tensions playing out this week in many of Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. As a surge in coronavirus cases has prompted government authorities to issue new lockdown orders, including restrictions on houses of worship, some in this mostly insular community have turned their skepticism of public health measures into open defiance.

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Jewish poet Louise Gluck wins Nobel Prize in Literature | JTA

Louise Gluck

Louise Gluck, the American granddaughter of Hungarian Jews, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Gluck, 77, was awarded “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal,” the Nobel committee wrote in its announcement.

Her collections of poetry — which explore broad and painful topics, such as family life, trauma and aging — include the books “The Wild Iris,” “Meadowlands,” “The Triumph of Achilles” and “Ararat.” For “The Wild Iris” she was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

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Palestinians Can’t Stand In the Way of Israel’s Regional Integration | FP

Mahmoud Abbas

More and more Gulf Arab state officials recognize that the Palestinian people, the Arab states, and the United States (not to mention Israel) would all be better off if new, more constructive Palestinian leaders came to power. At the same time, there is less and less adherence to the conventional view that Israel must make peace with the Palestinians before it can make peace with the Arab states.

By noting that greater strategic cooperation between Israel and the Arab states against Iran would “set the stage for diplomatic breakthroughs,” the Trump peace plan anticipated the UAE-Israel and Bahrain-Israel accords. It implied that such deals could usefully increase pressure on the Palestinians to reform their politics, which is the key to a breakthrough on the issue of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

The message to the Palestinians from yesterday’s White House signing ceremony is that they need a political upheaval—new leaders, new institutions, new ideas—or they are going to become utterly irrelevant in the eyes of the world, including the broader Arab world. As they lose attention, they will lose diplomatic support and economic aid. If they cannot make war and they will not make peace, their hopes to shape their own future will diminish to nothing.

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Doctor who said she would give Jews wrong medications loses medical license | Forward

Lara Kollab

The State Medical Board of Ohio permanently revoked the medical training certificate of a doctor who was fired from two residency programs after old anti-Semitic tweets surfaced — including one in which she threatened to give Jews the wrong medications.

Lara Kollab is permanently prohibited from practicing osteopathic medicine or surgery in Ohio, Cleveland.com reported. She surrendered her certificate prior to its revocation Aug. 12, according to the report, and cannot participate in another medical training program in the state.

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What are Jews who embrace the Black Lives Matter movement endorsing? | JNS

More than 600 Jewish groups placed this ad in the form of a letter in “The New York Times” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The pro-Black Lives Matter letter isn’t so much a defense of a movement as a not-so-subtle attempt to cancel, shame and silence anyone with the temerity to point out the danger in the cause the signatories have embraced.

As such, it’s clear that Jewish supporters of the BLM movement aren’t trying to help unite us against hate. Instead, they are choosing a side in a culture war that is cruelly dividing a wounded country struggling to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. In doing so, it is they who are choosing to be on the wrong side of history, not their opponents.

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Qassem Soleimani deemed ‘unlawful’ | Stuff

Qassem Soleimani funeral procession

The drone strike that had the stamp of approval from US President Donald Trump and killed Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani​ has been labelled “unlawful”.

A report conducted by the United Nations said the targeted drone strike near Baghdad International Airport on January 3 that killed 10 people violated a UN charter that prohibited the threat or use of force against other states.

After claiming responsibility for the attack, the US asserted it was “in response to an escalating series of armed attacks” spanning months.

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I’m an Israeli settler. American Jews are debating my future, but here’s what they don’t understand. | JTA

Uri Pilichowski

It’s been surreal watching from Israel as Americans discuss my future. I’ve gotten used to presidents spending years developing plans for my neighborhood and other towns in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank — they mean well and I truly appreciate their efforts. But recently I’ve been thrown by all the attention we’ve been receiving from the American Jewish establishment. 

I’ve watched Zoom panels, Facebook Lives and read countless op-eds about my future and Israel’s annexation plan for parts of the West Bank. All the attention is gratifying, but I have noticed that many of the discussions, panels and debates have been missing some important nuance. 

I’ve also noticed that many of these panels don’t include any speakers who are Jewish settlers or Palestinian residents of the area, which made it feel like I was watching an all-male panel discuss women’s issues or three white people discuss Black Lives Matter.

I believe the Palestinian people are peaceful and want a high standard of living for their family just as I want for my family. Predictions of a rise in Palestinian violence should Israel go through with annexation are based on a view that Palestinians are incapable of reacting without violence. I don’t think of Palestinians this way and neither should you. 

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Does Israel train America’s police forces? | Spectator

Show me who you lie about and I’ll tell you what you are. The big lie in this, our season of historical illiteracy and gratuitous destruction, is that the Jews are responsible for police killings of black Americans. How? The racist police of Amerikkka are trained by the Zionists.

That’s right. America has no history of violence against blacks and no history of anti-black policing. In the new blood libel, America was one big interracial paradise before the Jews taught Derek Chauvin to put his knee on George Floyd’s neck.

‘Israel security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,’ tweeted Charlotte Greensit in 2017. Greensit, an editor at the left-conspiracist website the Intercept, was promoting a demi-literate promotion of this conspiracy theory by Alice Speri. Greensit is now the managing editor of the New York Times’s opinion page. As she slithered up the greasy pole, Greensit deleted thousands of old tweets, this one included. But the snail-trail of slander is quite clear, and not at all new.

As soon as the Ferguson, Missouri protests began in August 2014, the slogan ‘Ferguson is Palestine’ appeared on the placards. When the Movement for Black Lives, a group affiliated with Black Lives Matter, promulgated a common platform in August 2016, its only foreign policy was that Israel must be shunned and destroyed as an ‘apartheid state’ that commits ‘genocide’ against the Palestinians. Another big lie.

In the same month, Amnesty USA claimed that ‘hundreds’ of American law enforcement officials from many states had received ‘training on crowd control, use of force and surveillance’ from Israel’s ‘national police, military and intelligence services’. That’s not true.

Amnesty’s claims are routinely cited as fact by the hard left and radical black identity groups. Its report and the libel it fosters have filtered into outlets as varied as the the British communist newspaper the Morning Star, the Washington Post and the website of the New York Review of Books.

‘The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets Black and Brown bodies,’ tweeted the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which rejects Israel’s existence, in late May.

This is also inaccurate. As Amnesty itself admitted, the programs that took American officers to Israel were for ‘police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and captains’. Amnesty’s report contained no evidence that American officers received any information, let alone ‘training’, from their Israeli peers on relevant matters such as the militarising of the American police, targeting minorities for traffic stops and minor violations, or using deadly force in routine encounters.

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Netanyahu vows all settlements will be annexed July 1, but other lands may wait | Times of Israel

US President Trump and Israeli PM Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told settler leaders on Sunday that he still intends to annex all West Bank settlements on the July 1 date that is the earliest allowed by his coalition deals, but he acknowledged that annexing other lands allocated to Israel under the Trump peace plan will likely take more time, several participants in the meeting told The Times of Israel.

The remarks reaffirmed Netanyahu’s self-declared July 1 target date for extending Israeli sovereignty to all West Bank settlements but also appeared to mark the first time he has admitted to long-reported delays by the joint US-Israeli team tasked with mapping out the further territories to be annexed, mainly in the Jordan Valley.

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