Elder of Ziyon 03/16 Links Pt2: The true nature of the BDS movement; Joe Biden: Israel's Fake 'Friend'; Fearing the end is nigh, man returns stolen 2,000-year-old artifact to park
Here's are excerpts from an article entitled "My Journey Through Antisemitism to Supporting Israel" by Zara Shaen Albright, a Muslim-born British lady of Pakistani heritage who converted to her husband's Catholicism.
From a position fot antisemitism and hostility to the Jewish State she came to realise, thanks to an open-minded mother who encouraged her curiosity about the Shoah and matters Jewish, that her previous stance was unjustified. 'For as long as I can remember, I grew up hearing some form of antisemitism. From hearing the casual "let's go shoot some Jews" to being advised not to be open about my support in Eurovision for Israel, to being told that the holocaust was "Allah's way of showing the Jews what would happen if Israel was formed", to being told that I "look like a Jew with a big nose" as an insult, it became so normal to hear such sentiments, that they essentially became background noise....'
A visit to Israel proved seminal. 'Luckily, I ... was able to visit both Israel and Palestinian territories.... I able to see many holy sites that hold a lot of significance for me as an ex-Muslim-turned-Catholic-convert ... I was also able to explore the beauty of Israel's culture, to hearing from Israeli settlers ... to seeing the Kibbutz where cute Winnie-the-Poo murals were painted on and inside bomb shelters so the children would not be afraid, to seeing the celebration of martyrdom in the refugee camps, and the expectations that awaited the little boys when they grew up, I changed from being neutral to being a Zionist, which, as it turns out, is the mere belief that Jewish people should be able to have a homeland....'
Regarding Muslim hostility to Israel Zara writes: 'Remember that Islam once had its own empire, and the existence of Israel is a reminder of the felt pain and anguish over such a great empire now only being a memory.
BDS focuses on the "settlements." By this term, BDS supporters refer to Judea and Samaria Jewish towns, which they blame for the lack of "peace." However, there was no peace before these "settlements" existed.
Why are Jews not to be allowed to live in Judea and Samaria? Jewish settlements in this area were based on virgin lands where no previous Arab homesteading took place. The idea that as Jews multiply, Palestinian Arabs "lose" more land is absurd. The truth is that there should not be any problem with Jewish towns, irrespective of where the Palestinian Arab state could in theory exist, in the same way there is no problem with Arab towns in Israel proper.
"Settlements" are not the cause of the lack of peace. Instead, this is due to the rejection of any Jewish presence at all in the area. BDS supporters do not care that Palestinian Arabs are second-class citizens in many Arab countries. For example, Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs after the First Gulf War. Many Palestinian Arabs are now living under the brutal Islamist dictatorship by the Hamas in Gaza, or under the tyranny of Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority, whose "democratic" term ended a decade ago. Why is BDS not protesting these injustices against Palestinians?
Do Jews have a right to live, build and create on un-homesteaded land? Yes, because they are human beings, and as such they are entitled to homestead any virgin resource. The fact that they chose Israel is due to the millennia-old connection between Jews and Judea.
According to UNESCO, the Temple Mount is actually Al-Haram Al-Sharif. Jerusalem is now Al-Quds, and the Western Wall is Al-Buraq Wall. This nomenclature constitutes a systematic attempt to erase the connection between Jewish history and the Jewish holy of holies. It would be offensive if it was not so transparently inane, even in terms of denying Christian history, and by extension that of the Muslim.
BDS supporters may very well stop buying Israeli products if they want to, and are free to persuade others to do so. However, they cannot legitimately lobby governments to use force against their own citizens who wish to trade with Israelis on a voluntary and mutually beneficial basis.
BDS is not primarily a pro-Palestinian movement, but an anti-Jewish one. Denying one group, and one group only, the right to homestead land is unjust.
The managing director for research and policy of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft appeared to celebrate the draconian measures employed by the Israeli government to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Then she argued that whatever discomforts they impose on Israeli citizens, they are not enough to compensate for the suffering Israel has inflicted on its Palestinian neighbors.
"Such a tiny taste. Missing a tablespoon of blood," Sarah Leah Whitson wrote in a now-deleted tweet.
Whitson was responding to a tweet from the Israeli-American journalist Mairav Zonszein, who wrote, "6 million Jewish Israelis will now get a taste of what around the same number of Palestinians living under occupation have experienced for over half a century." Zonszein was referring to the tactics now being embraced by the Israeli government to reduce transmission of the coronavirus, including antiterrorism measures like cell phone tracking of infected individuals.
Neither Whitson nor the Quincy Institute replied to a request for comment. The Israeli government took drastic action over the weekend, including the closings of restaurants, bars, and gyms. Whitson appeared to be expressing frustration that the measures would not offset the violence perpetrated by the Israeli government on the Palestinians.
"It is stunningly revolting," said Deborah Lipstadt, a scholar of modern Judaism and anti-Semitism at Emory University and the author of a modern history of anti-Semitism.
After facing a flood of criticism on Twitter—as well as inquiries from the Washington Free Beacon—Whitson deleted her tweet and posted a follow up arguing that her previous tweet "didn't come out right" and that she had deleted it "to prevent misinterpretation." She made no reference to the possibility that she had hurt or offended Jews.
The BDS leader in South Africa lied on live Tv. His problem is that i was there to expose it. pic.twitter.com/gd3QJZYury
— יוסף חדאד - Yoseph Haddad (@YosephHaddad) March 16, 2020
Joe Biden has made a habit of describing himself as a loyal, stalwart friend and ally of Israel. At a campaign stop earlier this month, for instance, he declared: "I'm so proud of the Obama-Biden administration's unprecedented support for Israel's security." But a careful examination of Biden's track record reveals his long and extremely troubling history of undermining Israel's security and public image. Some lowlights:
1982: Biden's Angry Exchange with Menachem Begin
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting on June 22, 1982, an animated Senator Biden, banging the desk in front of him with his fist, warned then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin that if Israel did not stop establishing new Jewish settlements in the West Bank,[1] U.S. aid to that country might be cut off.
Begin responded forcefully: Don't threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.
And with regard to Biden's theatrical furniture-banging, Begin said: This desk is designed for writing, not for fists. Don't threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the U.S. lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, the top black politician in America, constantly compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler during Axios on HBO.
He also warned that the U.S. "could very well go the way of Germany in the 1930s."
Axios CEO and founder Jim VandeHei could not hide the look on his face towards the end of the video. He tried to save Clyburn by reminding him that he is comparing Trump to Hitler.
Clyburn said he simply compared "the dynamic," but it does not take a genius to read between the lines.
Clyburn called Trump a racist who has hired white supremacists to work in the White House. He refused to name them, though.
Clyburn then said he often wondered "how could the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist." The way the Republicans join together around Trump makes him "understand how," which is why he is "trying to sound the alarm."
Jim Clyburn is a strong supporter of racist anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, who called Hitler "a very great man." https://t.co/rI5coIf6xi
— Matt Wolking (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@MattWolking) March 15, 2020
"Bernie's notion about how he embraces folks like the Sandinistas, and Cuba, and the former Soviet Union, and he talks about the good things they did in China, is absolutely contrary to every message we want to send to the rest of the world," Joe Biden claimed during Sunday night's debate. To this, Bernie Sanders had an equally forceful response. "I have led the charge against all forms of authoritarianism," he replied, "including America's so-called allies."
But the issue was not the standards Sanders aggressively and consistently applies to America's geopolitical allies but those he relaxes for its adversaries. His failure to address that consistent pattern of behavior in this moment and throughout the debate revealed a fact that Sanders himself does not disguise. Bernie Sanders has spent his career telling you that he is a socialist. Believe him.
Before he became a national political figure, Sanders did not shy away from assuming the mantle "socialist," unmodified by any banal adjectives. In the early 1960s, Sanders volunteered on an Israeli kibbutz—a fact of which he's quite proud and frequently discusses. But after he became a federal politician, Sanders declined to elaborate on that communal farm's location or its political affinities. "Surprise," read the New York Times headline when they solved the kibbutz mystery in 2016: "It's socialist." And hardly the "democratic" sort.
In 1990, Sanders told the Israeli journalist Yossi Melman that, when he worked on an Israeli Kibbutz, he was "a guest of the leftist Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement." That movement, and the pro-Soviet Mapam Party with which it was affiliated, was explicitly socialist. That Kibbutz, Sha'ar Ha'amakim, was co-founded by Aharon Cohen, who was convicted of spying for the Soviets in the late 1950s (though he was later pardoned when the statute he violated was relaxed). "By the time Sanders arrived at Sha'ar Ha'amakim, in 1963, the kibbutz had cooled greatly on Stalin but was still a socialist heaven," the Forward's Nathan Guttman observed.
As a student with the University of Chicago, Sanders affiliated himself with the Young People's Socialist League, an arm of the Socialist Party USA. In 1970, he co-founded the Liberty Union Party—a radical group that called for dramatic federal intervention in the private sector. During his 1976 campaign for statewide office, Sanders argued in favor of seizing utility providers "without compensation to the banks and wealthy stockholders who own the vast majority of stock in these companies."
Sanders was a seasoned political operative when he joined the Socialist Workers Party at the age of 38. He has since downplayed his association with this organization, but Sanders was no passive participant in socialist politics. In 1980, Sanders "proudly" served as presidential elector for Andrew Pulley, a SWP presidential candidate who advocated nationalizing "virtually all private industry" and who had said that American soldiers should "take up their guns and shoot their officers."
ViacomCBS canceled an event last week featuring former Women's March leader Linda Sarsour, who is known for her support of the anti-Israel BDS movement and has been accused of spreading antisemitism.
The Women's History Month event on Wednesday was specifically going to be hosted by the multinational media conglomerate's Office of Global Inclusion, a source familiar with the situation told JNS, which first reported on the scheduled event.
ViacomCBS spokesperson Justin Dini told JNS, "This event was cancelled well in advance of Wednesday."
Dini did not respond to a request for comment as to exactly when and why the event was cancelled.
Viacom's Women's Employee Affinity Group posted on Facebook on March 5, "Join us 3/11 at 4:30 pm EST for a conversation with author and co-organizer of the Women's March, Linda Sarsour! Check your inbox for RSVP details."
"Maybe [Sarsour] was too busy being a surrogate for the [Vermont Sen. Bernie] Sanders [Democratic presidential] campaign to show up, but the fact remains that the folks at ViacomCBS thought that a woman who lauded an antisemite like Louis Farrakhan is a symbol of 'inclusion,' " Dexter Van Zile, a researcher at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), told JNS.
Nonetheless, "they canceled, and they deserve some credit for that," he said.
Yes, they have had to put millions of citizens in bomb shelters due to years of rocket fire on civilians at a moment's notice, so they are good at crisis mobilization. Like the bomb shelters, the virus response protects Arab citizens of Israel too.
Antisemitism and the Labour Party is an anthology of reissued articles and essays which sets out to provide a 'sober examination of the strange events that have warped British politics since 2015.' Most of the pieces were originally published online between 2017 and 2019, although one, an article by Richard Kuper on the University and College Union, dates back to 2011. Also included are 21 testimonies by members of the Labour Party. The collection offers an instructive sampler of a whole battery of arguments and rhetorical moves – some of them mutually contradictory – which have been used to counter or dismiss allegations of antisemitism on the left.
The editor, Jamie Stern-Weiner, sets the tone for the anthology in his lurid and tendentious introduction. Not content with asserting that the allegations against Corbyn's Labour have 'no basis in fact' and are prompted by transparently partisan motives, he conjures up a picture of the crisis as something monstrous and sinister – 'Like a creature from a horror film, the "Labour antisemitism" controversy just won't die' – before aligning it with both the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism.
One of the problems with Antisemitism and the Labour Party is a tendency to cherry pick its examples, avoiding the most challenging allegations. Before I began to read this collection I made a brief note of some of the key episodes which had led to such a lack of confidence in Jeremy Corbyn's ability to identify and tackle the problem of antisemitism. I included some which were more amenable to softening or mitigation – and some which it was more difficult to excuse or explain. Two of the most egregious were Corbyn's associations with Raed Salah and with Paul Eisen's group Deir Yassin Remembered. Not a single mention of either of these was included in any of the collection's 20 essays.
The impact of such omissions on the reader is highly significant. In 'Corbyn Under Fire', Daniel Finn notes that the Labour Party 'is said to have become a party "for the many, not the Jew", with a leader who winks approvingly at bullies and bigots'. The reader who doesn't know the full picture will share Finn's own implied ridicule and incredulity at a position which seems at best paranoid, at worst knowingly malign. However other readers may well think this thumbnail sketch – presented as comically absurd by Finn – not too far from the truth.
Ray was in the media for defending an antisemitic candidate in the local elections, when we also exposed his personal anti Jewish views.#LabourAntisemitism 1/5 pic.twitter.com/8wqYhYyDw3
CAMERA's Israel office today prompted correction of Gideon Levy's March 6 Haaretz article which falsely claimed that the parents of a young cancer patient from from the Gaza Strip were denied permission to travel to the West Bank hospital to be by the side of their dying daughter.
The headline in the English edition had falsely stated: "Gazan Girl Fighting Cancer Died After Israel Denied Her Parents' Visit." The subheadline reiterated the falsely claim that Israel denied Miral Abu Ambsha's parents permission cross through Israel from the Gaza Strip to reach their dying daughter in a Nablus hospital: "Miral, the 10-year-old Gazan cancer patient whose parents weren't allowed to be with her in a Nablus hospital, died last weekend. . . "
The text of the article itself buried the information that, in fact, the mother was granted permission to travel to her daughter in the Nablus hospital, and repeated the false implication that Israel rejected her husband's application to enter: After the [earlier Haaretz] article appeared, her mother was allowed to replace her grandmother, but Miral never saw her father again. He remained in Gaza, unable to be by his dying daughter's side.
In a message sent to CAMERA,Israel's Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) confirmed that Miral's mother was granted permission to travel to Miral, and also noted that, contrary to Haaretz's claim that the father was denied permission, as he never applied for the travel permit. COGAT wrote: First, we must emphasize that in contrast to what the article claims, Ayman Abu Amsha, Miral's father, did not submit any request to depart together with his daughter.
We point out that Miral's mother did receive approval to accompany her daughter, once the erroneous items of information included in her request were corrected.
March 16 UPDATE: AFP Removes Questionable Claim About Live Fire
In response to communication from CAMERA, AFP yesterday removed the disputed claim that the Israeli army fired live ammunition during the March 11 clash in Nablus. See below for a detailed update.
Multiple AFP captions last week stated as fact that the Israeli army fired live ammunition during a March 11 clash in Nablus, despite the fact that Palestinian witnesses and the Israeli military agree that only rubber bullets and tear gas were used. The captions claim: "Clashes broke out from early morning, with Israeli forces firing tear gas, live ammunition and rubber bullets to break up the demonstration." Yet, according to the Associated Press ("Palestinians: 15-year-old killed in clash with Israeli army," March 11): Palestinian witnesses said the Israeli military arrived to disperse the protest, and the protesters began hurling stones at the soldiers. The witnesses said the Israeli forces responded with tear gas and rubber coated bullets.
In addition to the Palestinian witnesses, the Israeli military has also said that that it used only rubber bullets, and not live fire. IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus told CAMERA that the army used only rubber bullets.
After having presented a detailed translation of Independent Arabia's article ("Between Hebrew and Arabic — Roots and Similarities, but…," December 20) in our first post, in this second part we share with readers our personal, wider perspective of contemporary Arab-nationalist propaganda, using the article as an example of the genre.
The article's view of Hebrew's revival as a microcosm of the entire Zionist project leads to grim conclusions regarding the problematic way the author of the article, 'Izz ad-Deen Abu-'Eisheh, as well as his interviewees, perceive their respective fields — journalism and scholarship — inside Arab societies.
The Independent newspaper is hence complicit in the perpetuation of their unprofessional conduct via its subsidiary, Independent Arabia.
The article's view of Zionism is a part of a long Arab-nationalist tradition
In order to draw the connection between Abu-'Eisheh's portrayal of modern Hebrew and the contemporary Arab-nationalist narrative purporting to explain modern Jewish history (and especially Zionism), we'd like to evoke a certain figure that is often recited in this context (either correctly or incorrectly) by Arab and Palestinian nationalists themselves.
That figure is Egyptian Abdel-Wahab el-Messiri (1938-2008), a researcher of English literature who published his eight-volume Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism between 1975 and 1999. Although he and his encyclopedia are quite unknown to most English readers, in the Arabic speaking-world, they are considered rather influential, so much so that an episode of Al-Jazeera's latest literature magazine, Outside the Text, was dedicated to them just last October (it was subtly entitled "Don't let them deceive you — How to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism").
El-Messiri was one of the first and most prominent Arab thinkers who opposed Zionism and the State of Israel, while making a conscious effort not to engage in overt antisemitism, including Holocaust denial — although, admittedly, his success at this task was at best weak.
To put it in Al-Jazeera's words, "some still blame him for exonerating the Jews of Zionism and of many crimes that are historically attributed to them."
In this profile of two young Australian Jews 'returning' to Egypt for the re-opening of the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue in Alexandria, BBC Arabic seems to have taken on the role of promoting Egypt's tourism industry. In a trend noted here and here, it misleads on the ethnic cleansing of Jews whose numbers have reduced from 80 -100,000 to fewer than 10, and vaguely blames 'wars and politics'. In fact, Egyptian Jews were victims of state-sanctioned antisemitism. (With thanks: Tarek)
Egypt is now witnessing what may appear in the eyes of some to a change in the nature of the relationship between the Jews and Egypt, in which tens of thousands of them lived in the first half of the twentieth century before politics and wars interfered and spoiled their lives.
Alex and Jack March, following in the footsteps of their grandfather
This change prompted the numbers of Egyptian Jews who left nearly 70 years ago and their families to return - albeit at least to visit - the motherland.
Among them are descendants of Egyptian Jews visiting Egypt for the first time. The two Australian brothers, Alex and Jack, went to Egypt for the first time early this year to visit the home of their Egyptian Jewish grandfather, Nissim March, whose family left the country and left after the flare-up of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 and none of them ever returned since then.
The March brothers say that they have long heard about Egypt and about Alexandria, in which their grandfather founded a house whose name is still engraved on it until now. Therefore, the visit was postponed until the opening of the "Eliyahu Hanabi" temple on Prophet Daniel Street in central Alexandria after the restoration.
A March 14th Independent op-ed by the leader of the Israeli women's party, Kol Hanashim (Voices of Women), titled "The sad lesson I learned when I ran for Israeli parliament", included the following claim, in the context of lamenting her party's failure to gain any Knesset seats in the recent election.
We thought we could capitalize on discontent with the system and channel a message of new leadership. After all, the number of women parliamentarians is decreasing, the sole female prime minister was elected in 1969, and not a single woman participated in any of the failed coalition negotiations.
Her claim that "the number of women parliamentarians is decreasing" is not true.
The March 2nd elections actually saw a record number of women (30) winning seats to the Knesset. This represents 25% of the total seats, which is actually a higher percentage of female legislators than in the US and in several EU member states. Moreover, there has been a steady and nearly uninterrupted increase in the number of female MK's since the 1970s.
Additionally, the writer complains that Israel's "sole female prime minister [Gold Meir] was elected in 1969". Yet, through 2018, more than 100 countries had never had a woman at the top job. They include Spain, Japan, The Netherlands, Belgium, and the US. In fact, in 1969, the year Meir became prime minister, she was one of only two female leaders in the world.
In the first episode listeners heard from a variety of contributors who were introduced using their full name and with details of their professional background or relevance to the topic provided in all cases – except one.
02:14 Atwal: "But it's never just the epic heft of history that is problematic in the telling of a national story for the classroom. Here's Aviv [phonetic] remembering the Israeli story he was taught."
Aviv: "Hardly any discussion; either reading from the book or just talking about what was written in the chapters in the book. The history of the State of Israel is a project and it's bound up in the project of the creation of the myth of Israel. So the whole Palestinian narrative did not exist. History was a justifier and it was not taught in a way that had multiple sides. It was taught as a truth." [emphasis in italics in the original]
So who is Aviv? What are his expertise, affiliations and "particular viewpoints"? And – beyond the fact that his statements obviously fit in nicely with Priya Atwal's agenda – how accurate and representative is his subjective account?
Radio 4 listeners will never know because once again the BBC chose to ignore the very editorial guidelines which are meant to ensure that the corporation provides "impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them".
They did, however, hear unquestioned amplification of the notion of "the project of the creation of the myth of Israel".
Australian police charged a man with alleged neo-Nazi interests on terrorism offenses, officials said Monday, just weeks after the country's top spy warned of the growing danger of far-right militants in the country.
The 21-year-old man from a town south of Sydney was arrested Saturday for allegedly planning terrorist acts, including by trying to purchase online weapons and materials to make bombs.
He was due to appear in court later Monday and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for the charges, police said.
Several other people were being questioned in connection to the case, but have not been charged.
"What we know is this person had anti-government sentiment, he was anti-Semitic, he has Neo-Nazi interests and he has anti-Indigenous interests," said Mark Walton, head of the New South Wales police counter-terrorism force.
"Unfortunately, he has evolved with an ideology that really is one of hate against a lot of different groups," he told reporters.
The Argentine soccer player who made an anti-Semitic gesture after being ejected by a referee from a game against a team with many Jewish supporters was let go by his team on Friday.
New Chicago midfielder Arnaldo "Pitu" González on March 8 put his hand on his head, imitating a yarmulke, and pointed to his genitals in front of the fans of the Atlanta team.
Founded in 1904 in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Atlanta has historically received support from Jewish fans in that area and featured several Jewish players and administrators.
González had previously been ordered by the Argentine soccer association to miss the last matches of the season.
He apologized after the incident in a video posted on New Chicago's Twitter account, saying he was "very ashamed."
The league's ruling in its disciplinary case involving González expressed "concern" about the infiltration of racist elements in soccer, and specifically its negative effect on teenagers.
González had also violated an Argentine law which prohibits actions carried out based on ideas or theories of superiority of a race, or a group of people of a certain religion, or origin.
Oxfam — a confederation of 19 independent charitable organizations that focuses on the alleviation of global poverty — removed antisemitic books from sale on its website after an Israeli diplomat drew attention to the matter on Friday, The Telegraph reported.
Israeli Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev tweeted a screenshot of the Oxfam website with the caption, "Why is @OxfamGB selling antisemitic literature?"
The image showed books available for sale including the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has described as "a classic in paranoid, racist literature."
The post garnered hundreds of retweets and likes, and sparked outrage among Twitter users, including from the Sussex Friends of Israel group, which tweeted, "We can tell by the price of one of the items (£100) that someone researched and identified the product. How the hell did it end up on their website? Did no one stop to question the content or did they just not care?"
The Portuguese parliament has approved the passage of a law to officially commemorate the inquisition of Jews in the country on March 31 every year.
The law, passed earlier this month, received broad support from across the political spectrum.
The date March 31 was chosen as the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Inquisition because it was on that day in 1821 that the Inquisition in Portugal was officially disbanded.
The expulsion of Jews from Portugal in 1497, subsequent massacres of the the Jews there, and the Portuguese inquisition which began in 1536, brought Jewish life in the country to a catastrophic end, with tens of thousands of Jews fleeing the country.
Some Jews, despite being forcibly converted to Christianity, preserved their Jewish practices and traditions in secret throughout the intervening centuries.
The Portuguese expulsion and inquisition followed similar events in Spain which began with the inquisition there in 1478 and the subsequent expulsion in 1492 in which tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jews fled Spain.
Reconectar, an organization which seeks to reconnect the descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jewish communities with the Jewish world, welcomed the passage of the law.
LATAM, Latin America's largest airline group, will be able to fly over Sudan in its direct flights between South America and Israel, after Egypt's southern neighbor authorized direct flights to Israel over its territory for the first time.
The move by Sudan comes after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Sudanese leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in February and announced that they would take steps toward normalization.
Kharthoum's authorization to use the country's airspace is expected to significantly shorten flights between Israel and Latin America. Flights to or from Brazil, for example, will be two hours shorter.
The airline normally operates direct flights from Tel Aviv to Sao Paulo in Brazil and Santiago de Chile three times a week, but its operations have been scaled back due to the spread of the coronavirus.
LATAM announced on Thursday that it will cut international flights by up to 30% in light of the outbreak.
Some of Israel's finest musicians have performances that will be coming soon – to your living room.
Following the past week of government regulations limiting gatherings due to concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus – culminating in the announcement Saturday night that all cultural events would be canceled until further notice – some Israeli musicians will be performing for the millions stuck at home via streaming on various outlets.
The missile barrages last November that drove residents of the south into shelters were a good dress rehearsal for the current health crisis. In that case, musicians went to the shelters and played for small audiences. But this time, even small numbers of spectators are not permitted so the musicians are performing in empty auditoriums.
Zappa and the Keshet group broadcast a show by Idan Raichel on Saturday night, live on Channel 12 and the N12 website, which is just the beginning of its corona crisis programming.
In their "The Show Must Go On" series, Zappa and Keshet, partnering with a number of corporate sponsors, will be hosting dozens of Israel's top musicians on Zappa social media channels, Channel 12, Mako and N12. The diverse group of performers includes Harel Skaat, Eviatar Banai, Amir Dadon, Maor Cohen, Asaf Amdursky, Dudu Aharon, Danny Robas, Knessiat Hasechel, Netta Barzilai, Marina Maximillian, Monica Sex, Natan Goshen, Idan Habib, Miki Gavrielov, Elai Botner, Amir Benyun, Kobi Aflalo, Karolina, Keren Peles, Rami Kleinstein, Shuli Rand, the Shalva Band and Shimon Buskila.
Golan Einat, owner of the Zappa Group, said: "In these difficult days, it is a great privilege for us to try to bring Zappa's live performances directly into the homes of hundreds of thousands of people in Israel."
Like many people, I've sometimes fantasized about being shut up at home with nothing to do but read. Of course, now that the COVID-19 outbreak is threatening to make that a reality for many Americans—as it already has for millions of people from China to Italy—it doesn't seem quite as romantic a prospect. If days or weeks of quarantine are in our future, I'm sure I'll be tempted to spend the whole time refreshing Twitter.
Even in good times, it's easy to get addicted to the ephemeral. In Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Charles Swann, the novel's Jewish man about town, remarks that it would be a good thing if the books we seldom take down from the shelf were filled with the news of the day, while the newspapers we tear open each morning (or did, in the 1890s) devoted their columns to classic works like Pascal's Pensées. "The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance," Swann observes.
For me, In Search of Lost Time is one of those books. People often say that they want to read Proust but don't have the time; I hope no one is going to be shut in long enough to get through the whole thing, but Swann's Way by itself would be a good quarantine read. It's a relatively self-contained story about Swann's unhappy love affair with Odette, a courtesan who inspires a jealous obsession even though, as he muses late in the book, she's not really even his type. And the book's long "overture" section, which introduces us to Proust's fascinatingly self-obsessed narrator, includes some of the work's most famous images—such as the madeleine dunked in tea that unlocks the narrator's buried memories.
On Twitter (see?), a few readers have suggested that the book to read now is the 2014 novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, set in a post-apocalyptic world in which 95% of humanity has been wiped out by an airborne virus, the Georgia Flu. In flashbacks to the last days of the pre-plague world, Mandel powerfully captures the eerie way that epidemics creep up on us—how they are negligible news items until they become the only thing that matters.
Fearing the end of the world, an Israeli returned a 2,000-year-old catapult bolt to the City of David National Park — 15 years after he'd absconded with it. "The time has come to clear my conscience. It feels that the end of the world is near," the anonymous citizen said in an Israel Antiquities Authority press release on Monday.
While the jury's still out on whether the world is ending — due to the current coronavirus pandemic or any of the other pressing existential threats — the IAA took advantage of the opportunity to call on citizens to return archaeological finds to the State Treasury, so that the entire public can benefit from them, it said.
The citizen did not deliver the bowling-ball sized stone directly. Rather, he used as a go-between a man called Moshe Manies, who agreed not to divulge the thief's identity. According to Manies, the original theft occurred when two mischievous youths touring the park 15 years ago saw a display of ballista stones, which had been catapulted at fortifications.
The IAA's Jerusalem Region Archaeologist Dr. Yuval Baruch explained in the press release that ballistae are a form of ancient weapons, which were used by forces besieging a city, and were used to hurl stones to cause forces on fortress walls to flee.
"The ballista stones which were uncovered at the City of David are most likely connected to the harsh battles between the besieged residents of Jerusalem and the soldiers of the Roman Legion, from around 70 CE – the year of the destruction of Jerusalem," said Baruch.
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I love Matti Friedman and decided I want to read all of his books. I had already read "Spies of No Country," although I didn't review it, and I recently ordered The Aleppo Codex and Pumpkinflowers.
The Aleppo Codex, circa 930 CE, is one of the most important books ever written. It was an attempt to codify the entire Hebrew Scripture, with all vowel marks and cantillation marks, as a single standard, since Torahs are written without vowels and they were only known by tradition.
Friedman's book runs through two parallel histories. One is the actual history of the codex, as it was written in the Galilee and then traveled to Jerusalem, where Crusaders held it for ransom which was paid by rich Egyptian Jews. It was then brought to Cairo, used as a reference by Maimonides, and then made its way to Aleppo, Syria, where the community zealously guarded it for centuries. Friedman brings the details to light, including the theory that the writer of the Codex was in fact a Karaite and not a Rabbinic scholar.
The other history is what happened to the codex in the days and years after the UN voted to partition Palestine. The official story is that crazed Arab antisemites destroyed the synagogue and burned its contents, including the Codex, and the surviving pages were smuggled to Israel where it was entrusted to the State.
The reality is much more complex, and much messier. Friedman spent a great deal of time trying to break the wall of silence by the Syrian Jewish community surrounding the codex. They regarded the book as a talisman that would protect them.
Friedman unravels much of the mystery, but not all of it.
The story is not complimentary to the State of Israel. The Syrian community did not want to part with the book and Israel managed to take it from their members with a combination of subterfuge and an unfair, secret trial. Anti-Mizrahi racism underlies a lot of the plot.
The remaining mystery is what happened to most of the missing pages. They were not burnt, as had been assumed, but nearly all of the Pentateuch is missing - yet the book appears to have been largely intact with perhaps only a few missing pages when it was retrieved after the pogroms. The Syrian community remains mum on that issue, with rumors of some people having individual pages that they still use as a mystic protection.
The one man who may have possessed the bulk of the missing pages, a haredi rare book dealer, was murdered in 1989. The trail goes cold after that.
Friedman is a gifted storyteller as well as a dogged reporter. He brings to life the Crusader siege of Jerusalem, with Muslims and Jews both defending the city, as much as he describes the events of 1947 and later. Although much of the mystery remains, he has brought to light a great deal about the Aleppo Codex that was hushed up by both Israel and the Syrian Jewish communities of Israel and abroad. As always with Friedman, The Aleppo Codex is a very worthwhile read.
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However, that doesn't mean Levitt is dismissive of the precautions being put in place by governments around the world.
"You don't hug every person you meet on the street now, and you'll avoid meeting face to face with someone that has a cold, like we did," Levitt said. "The more you adhere, the more you can keep infection in check. So, under these circumstances, a carrier will only infect 1.5 people every three days and the rate will keep going down."
Isolation and limiting social contact is not the only factor at play, however. In Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, the whole population theoretically was at risk of becoming infected, but only 3% were.
The Diamond Princess cruise ship represented the worst-case scenario in terms of disease spread, as the close confines of the ship offered optimal conditions for the virus to be passed among those aboard. The population density aboard the ship was the equivalent of trying to cram the whole Israeli population into an area 30 kilometers square. In addition, the ship had a central air conditioning and heating system, and communal dining rooms.
"Those are extremely comfortable conditions for the virus and still, only 20% were infected. It is a lot, but pretty similar to the infection rate of the common flu," Levitt said. Based on those figures, his conclusion was that most people are simply naturally immune.
Looking at the picture globally, Levitt was reticent to make predictions country-by-country as to when the spread of the virus will slow. China is nearing the point at which the number of new infections will be zero, while South Korea had already moved past the median point, and was starting to see a slow down in new infection rates.
Italy's higher death rate, he said, was likely due to the fact that elderly people make up a greater percentage of the population than they do in other countries such as China or France. "Furthermore, Italian culture is very warm, and Italians have a very rich social life. For these reasons, it is important to keep people apart and prevent sick people from coming into contact with healthy people."
Israel doesn't have enough cases to provide useful data from which to make predictions, Levitt said, although he praised the government for its preventative measures. "The more severe the defensive measures taken, the more they will buy time to prepare for needed treatment and develop a vaccine," he said.
The IDF will continue conducting regular situational assessments and will limit the movement of military personnel as necessary.
The IDF's Home Front Command is assisting the Ministry of Health and civilians as needed. On March 15, 2020, the IDF Home Front Command opened a joint information center with Magen David Adom—Israel's national emergency medical service—in order to act as a source of information for civilians who may have questions about the virus and increase the response to those infected.
In order to limit the spread of coronavirus in neighboring countries and in the Palestinian territories the IDF has:
- Closed Allenby Bridge border crossing (with Jordan), Erez border crossing (with Gaza), and Bethlehem except for emergencies. - Conducted joint medical training sessions with the Palestinian Authority. - Transferred test kits and disinfectant materials to the Palestinian Authority.
The IDF remains committed to protecting the people of Israel and its soldiers from any and all threats, while ensuring continuous and full operational capabilities.
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion expressed solidarity with the people of Italy during the coronavirus pandemic on Sunday when he said "Italy! Jerusalem is with you!" a press release on behalf of his office reported.
The walls of the Old City of Jerusalem were lit with the colors of the Italian flag in a show of support to the hardest hit nation after China with COVID 19.
Lion wished a quick recovery and plenty of health to the people of Italy and everyone in Israel and the world.
Rome and Jerusalem have a long mutual history, one of the founding texts of modern Zionism is the 1862 work by Moses Hess Rome and Jerusalem in which he framed the Jewish question in the framework of modern European, including Italian, nationalism.
It is worth noting that Egypt, which has a shared border with the Gaza Strip, did not send any test kits or disinfectant materials to the Palestinians living there.
"After more than seventy years, Lebanon remains the country where Palestinian refugees suffer the most, where they are deprived of many of their economic and human rights, including working in certain professions, procedural complications in obtaining work permits, and denial of the right to own property." — Dr. Mohsen Saleh, Director-General of the Zaitouna Center for Studies in Beirut, arabi21.com, July 20, 2019.
Assad Abu Khalil, a Lebanese-American professor at California State University, who claims to be "pro-Palestinian," does not seem concerned about the severe restrictions imposed on Palestinians by his own country -- Lebanon. Nor does he seem bothered that a Lebanese (and not Israeli) official is the one who is actually calling for placing Palestinians in "mass prisons."
Egypt, for its part, long ago abandoned the Palestinians by essentially sealing its border with the Gaza Strip. The Lebanese, Egyptians and most Arabs perceive the Palestinians as Israel's problem. When the current virus crisis has passed, it is to be hoped that the Palestinians will remember that one country alone came to their rescue: Israel. They might also remember that their Arab brothers betrayed them -- not for the first time, and no doubt not for the last.
Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz vowed on Monday to cobble together a coalition "within days" after President Reuven Rivlin tasked the centrist alliance leader with forming a government in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
"I give you my word: I will do everything to establish within days — as few as I can — a national government, one that is as patriotic and as broad as possible," Gantz said in an address from the President's Residence in Jerusalem.
He specified that the government he would form would "protect the interests of the residents of Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Arab citizens of Israel, of the residents of the periphery and those in the center."
"A government that I'll lead will help Israeli society recover from the coronavirus, as well as the virus of schism and hatred," he continued.
Gantz said repairing Israel's healthcare system would be a top priority of his government. Commenting on reports that medical staff in Israel has been battling the coronavirus with insufficient protection gear and supplies, the Blue and White chairman said, he "sincerely hoped" they were "purely a rumor and not a managerial omission."
He vowed that his government would discuss the "lessons [that must be] learned and the urgent need to restore the public medical system in Israel."
Gantz then appealed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who ran a blistering campaign against the Blue and White leader over his his willingness to cooperate with the majority-Arab Joint List party.
Avoiding a handshake metaphor in the social-distancing days of the coronavirus, Gantz said, "I extend my elbows to all the elected factions in the Knesset, including Benjamin Netanyahu, and urge them to put aside the devastating verbal weapons and baseless hatred" in order to join him.
"I've always wanted [a] unity [government]," Gantz continued, "unity that comes not at the expense of Israeli democratic and state values."
When is 61 not a majority of the Knesset? Blue and White leader Benny Gantz may be about to find out.
The Joint List, including the long-reticent Balad Party, and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman put an end to speculation about their next moves when they met with President Reuven Rivlin on Sunday and recommended Gantz to form the next government.
This means Gantz received the recommendations of 61 out of 120 MKs, making him the candidate with the first shot at forming a coalition.
Without the rest of the details, that seems like relatively smooth sailing for the prime ministerial hopeful.
But Gantz's majority is an illusion. There may be 61 MKs committed to getting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of office, but there are not 61 MKs to form a coalition with agreed-upon guidelines.
At most, those 61 MKs – and maybe a 62nd if you count Gesher's Orly Levy-Abecassis – agree to pass a law that would make it illegal for someone who's been indicted, like Netanyahu, to be prime minister.
But there are major obstacles on the way to forming an actual government.
If Gantz is aiming for a "coronavirus emergency government," then the big questions are about Netanyahu.
"The Shaheed is the highest form of glory. There is nothing loftier than martyrdom in the name of Allah. The Shaheed opens the way and outlines the route, to liberty and freedom with his blood…blessings to the thousands of Shaheeds in the homeland and abroad, blessings to our Shaheeds and yours within the Green Line, those whom the occupier wanted to term 'terrorists'," .
The above ode to murderous terrorists was recited in Ramallah.by none other than Ahmed Tibi, Member of Israel's Knesset . This is not the speech of a political opponent – it is the inciteful rhetoric of an avowed enemy, and that, by the way, is just fine, because beyond the hypocritical words declaimed by the politically correct, everyone knows exactly who is against whom.
And Tibi is not alone, Joint List head Aymen Odeh. filled with admiration and praise for master "Hassan Nasrallah" because his "resistance" forces won a victory over Israel and forced the IDF to leave Lebanon, places himself in an identical position. These are only two examples of the iniquities of the "moderate" faction of The Joint Arab List, known by that unsuitable adjective only because the Balad faction has included MKs who were arrested and imprisoned for actual terrorist acts.
The tendency to separate Balad from the rest of The Joint List (although they recommended Gantz today for PM, ed.) is a media spin that is meant to clear the rest of the list so that they can be accepted as legitimate members of a coalition government. However, even if we put aside the "extremists" from the Balad faction and turn only to the "moderate" and "legitimate" members of the Joint Arab List, it is clear that we are dealing with an avowed enemy.
This is the reason that during the election campaign, the heads of the Blue and White Party promised over and over that they would not cooperate in any way or by any means with the the Joint Arab List, because they knew that without that promise they would have been defeated in the ballot box. They well know that It goes without saying that the people of Israel is fully aware of the chasm dividing an enemy from a political rival.
Now that Gantz, Ya'alon, Ashkenazi, and Lapid really do have to "Choose between Bibi and Tibi (as the Likud election slogan claimed voters did)", they have decided, against the wishes of many of their voters, to choose Tibi.
The Health Ministry confirmed Monday that the number of coronavirus patients in Israel jumped to 255 on Monday.
At one point on Monday it said that the number spiked to 344, but then quickly retracted that figure, saying there was a glitch in the reporting system.
The now-retracted spike was the most dramatic daily increase so far in Israel. It was initially speculated that it could be attributed to more testing rather than a higher incidence of COVID-19, the respiratory disease linked to the novel strain.
Two patients are in serious condition and the rest are said to be showing little to no symptoms. So far, four Israelis have recovered from the COVID-19 virus.
Over 50,000 Israelis are currently under home quarantine, as are thousands of healthcare workers, including 950 doctors.
A ministry official said Sunday that there are concrete fears that over 2,500 Israelis have yet to be diagnosed. As the disease spreads, Health Ministry Director General Moshe Siman Tov told Army Radio on Monday that stricter limitations will have to be imposed on the public to stem the outbreak.
"I wouldn't necessarily use the term 'closure' but we are going to spend a lot more time indoors. Our lifestyle has to change. Things we think are impossible now will seem routine in a few weeks," he said.
Israel is expected to receive advanced testing kits on Wednesday, which would allow laboratories to perform 4,000 coronavirus tests a day, compared to the hundreds they can currently perform.
The Israel Defense Forces indicated Monday its primary foe in the region, Iran, was curbing its activities as it grapples with a major outbreak of the coronavirus.
IDF Spokesperson Hidai Zilberman told reporters that the military noted a decrease in the amount of activity in the region by Israel's enemies, without specifically naming Iran.
"There are countries who have gotten it way worse than us with this corona[virus] story, and as a result their activities are at a slower pace," Zilberman said.
Iran is among the countries hardest hit by the coronavirus, with hundreds of people reported killed, including a senior cleric on Monday, and at least another 14,000 people infected with the disease.
The real numbers may be even higher, as some have questioned the government's reporting.
Cabinet ministers, members of parliament, Revolutionary Guard members and Health Ministry officials have been infected, compounding fears about Iran's response to the global pandemic, which has infected nearly 170,000 people worldwide and killed more than 6,500.
Iran is widely considered Israel's main enemy in the region, controlling and funding terror groups across the Middle East, notably the powerful Hezbollah terrorist militia in Lebanon.
First, the entire Reuters article on the closing of the Temple Mount/Haram A-Sharif:
Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque shut as precaution against coronavirus by Muslim clericsAli Sawafta, Ammar Awad
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque and Dome of the Rock will shut their doors until further notice, religious authorities said on Sunday, in a move to protect worshippers at Islam's third holiest site.
Prayers will still be held on the huge open area around the two shrines and other Muslim prayer sites on the sacred compound known to Muslims worldwide as al-Haram al-Sharif, or The Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as Har ha-Bayit, or Temple Mount.
Questions:
1. If there area is huge, why cannot space for Jewish prayer be located?
It was a spontaneous singalong from the balconies of a Jerusalem block on Sunday evening, as musician Ran Yehoshua led his neighbors in a round of "Bashana Haba'a" (Next Year), the classic Israeli song of hope amid crisis.
Bashana haba'a, neshev al hamirpeset venispor tziporim nodedot. Next year we will sit on the balcony and count all the migrating birds
Yehoshua had his guitar in hand and amplifier plugged in, and brought his neighbors out to their balconies on their cul de sac in the neighborhood of San Simon.
His street, Ben Tabai, is ringed by apartment buildings, and many of the 1970s-era block apartments have balconies overlooking the interior street.
"We're really a village on this block," said Yehoshua, who lives at 8 Ben Tabai.
There are 120 neighbors in their neighborhood WhatsApp group, with lots of young families, sharing information about babysitters and pediatricians, "all the usual stuff," said Yehoshua.
The idea of hosting a balcony concert came to Yehoshua last week, when the activities he runs through the non-profit that he manages — Latet Pe, helping children who have suffered sexual abuse — were being canceled in schools.
Israelis couples held impromptu weddings in the streets, on rooftops and even in a supermarket on Sunday, a day after the government restricted all gatherings to 10 people to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The new Health Ministry orders on Saturday dashed the hopes of many couples who were set to get married in the coming days and weeks, prompting mass cancellations of weddings.
Some, however, deftly improvised.
At the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, guests staggered on the building's numerous balconies overlooking the courtyard to celebrate with the newlyweds.
Israelis, forbidden from coming within 2 meters of eachother and from gathering more than 10 people in one place, find a way to hold a wedding in #Jerusalem anyway.
In Jerusalem's Rechavia neighborhood, another ceremony took place with the band placed on a separate balcony as the bride and groom, according to footage shared online.
Others simply got married in the streets.
And shoppers in one Osher Ad supermarket took a pause from their coronavirus panic shopping to extend their well-wishes to another couple that walked down the (supermarket) aisle.
Since Israel's ban on gatherings of more than ten people does not apply to a grocery store, this couple decided to get married in the produce aisle. 🤪😜🤪😜 pic.twitter.com/NObeHKudDd
A year ago, on this blog, we posted a rueful summary of events that had taken place since the unsealing of US Federal charges against our child's killer on March 14, 2017, two years earlier.
It's at "14-Mar-19: Two years after Federal charges are unsealed, Ahlam Tamimi remains free. How is this happening?" And while it describes some important speeches by US justice officials, along with some meaningful decisions that were years in coming, the bottom line is that the justice process was and is stuck.
Ahlam Tamimi remains today, as she has since October 18, 2011, free in Jordan, living a dream life, unrestricted in her movements. She's able with ease to publish her terror-advocacy views widely, undisguisedly contemptuous of the efforts made by the United States and her victims to see her brought to American justice.
The grotesque savagery of which she openly boasts and to which she confesses has had not the smallest negative impact on her celebrity. Without the smallest doubt, Tamimi is a famous and admired Jordanian today because of the people she killed and not in spite of the killings. That so many of the victims are children (our daughter among them) enhances her fame and standing.
A Christian high school in the Israeli-Arab city of Shfar'am held a "Heritage Day for the Palestinian People" this week which denied Israel's right to exist, the newspaper Makor Rishon has reported.
El Oscopia school, which has full control of its own syllabus, put the day aside last week on which students took part in a range of events, including hosting a Palestinian wedding, and cooking Arabic food.
However, despite receiving government funding, the day also included anti-Israeli activities, such as encouraging students to paint the Palestinian flag across a map of the whole of Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The word 'Palestine' was written onto the map in English lettering.
Also included in the event were drawings of "Handala," a well-known symbol of Palestinian defiance created by Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali.
Local council members and political activists attended the event. Activist Murad Hadad wrote on social media that he "could not describe [his] excitement after we entered the school and saw the children at the activity stations."
One of the key pillars of "resistance" is to "cleave to Arab heritage," Hadad said, and thanked the school's headteacher, Farouk Farhad for organising the day.
Three years ago, El Oscopia School was named as an outstanding school by Israel's Education Ministry "in the field of values, social and learning," according to Makor Rishon.
Zionist watchdog Im Tirtzu has called on the Ministry to take immediate action.
"It is inconceivable that an Israeli high school under the supervision of the Education Ministry is brainwashing its students into thinking that they are Palestinians and must hate Israel," said Im Tirtzu CEO Matan Peleg.
"This phenomenon in which Arab youth are being brainwashed to oppose the very country that they live in must end," added Peleg. "We are calling on the Education Ministry to immediately take action."
Gazan Poet Rihab Kanaan Honors Female Terrorists, Suicide Bombers on International Women's Day, Recites Poem: "Blessed Are Your Wedding Garments, Which Were Scattered with the Shreds of Your Body" pic.twitter.com/bYkrhkKETR
Alongside the dramatic coronavirus and political developments in Israel, there are also developments on the Palestinian side that may not be as dramatic, but they are worth watching. The coronavirus scare has captured the mind of Palestinian public opinion.
Aside from the obvious issues of Palestinian anxiety about the spread of the disease, according to sources in Ramallah, there are also political concerns related to Mahmoud Abbas' health, mainly since he is in the highest risk group. The octogenarian receives treatment that weakens his immune system.
According to our sources in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas does not receive audiences, and his discussions with operatives in the field are made via telephone. Fatah institutions also do not convene, and their power and coherence weaken; their connection with the district offices grows weaker. The municipality of Jenin, for example, refused to receive a delegation from Ramallah to coordinate the popular struggle against the Trump Plan. Now, the entire "Popular Struggle" program is crashing, including the active participation of Europeans on Friday marches.
On the Temple Mount, the coronavirus is also part of a theological debate. According to sources in east Jerusalem, the Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party), which is an anti-Jordanian radical party that also opposes the Palestinian Authority, planned to send a delegation to meet Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Ben Salman (and possibly the King) to request that Saudi Arabia replace Jordan as the "guardian" of the al-Aksa compound (Temple Mount). The Hizb ut-Tahrir is considered to be robust with strong influence among many of the mosques' activists. It became clear to Jordan that among the members of the delegation were also Waqf personnel. The Kingdom threatened them that it would immediately stop their salaries if such a delegation visit took place. Several heads of the Waqf rushed to Jordan to wash their hands of the expedition. Then the coronavirus story broke, and the matter was frozen.
Leaders of the Islamist terrorist group that governs this coastal territory have begun to implement measures to limit the spread of a deadly pandemic, including a cap on the number of violent protesters that may participate at once in a given confrontation with Israeli soldiers guarding the frontier.
Hamas officials warned residents of the Gaza Strip today not to exceed one hundred rioters hurling firebombs, rocks, and other projectiles at armed IDF soldiers at a time, and gave notice that anyone found in violation of the limit will face fines or imprisonment for endangering the others present by increasing the risk of exposure to coronavirus.
"We cannot allow citizens to shirk their responsibility to the community by inviting undue harm," stated Deputy Minister of Public Health Ighwa Waba. "We have therefore posted enforcers near every flashpoint of violence with the enemy to ensure that no one provoking the Jews into shooting at the protesters will put everyone at risk by increasing the danger of infection."
Waba noted that Palestinian preventive strategies have so far kept coronavirus cases to a minimum throughout the areas they control. "Now that it's a useful thing, we will take credit for isolating the Gaza Strip from the outside world," he explained. "Whereas before this, the Zionist siege was the worst phenomenon in the world and rendered our land the world's largest open-air prison, worse that Auschwitz, in that Auschwitz never had to deal with a naval blockade. Also, the Holocaust never happened – that's all a pretext for Jewish dispossession of indigenous Arabs in a place that isn't Arabia."
As the coronavirus outbreak spreads through the Middle East, areas of eastern Syria have begun reporting multiple cases of COVID 19 among Iranian and Iraqi nationals serving in Iranian-backed militias in the area.
In Deir Ezzor, a region of eastern Syria near the Iraqi border, six infections were reported at one of the hospitals in Al-Mayadeen, according to Deir Ezzor 24, a local news source. Four of those infected were Iraqi. The other two were Iranian.
On Friday, Abeer Mohammed Al-Salem, a woman from Deir Ezzor, died due to COVID 19, according to Deir Ezzor 24. The news source confirmed that Iranian militia members have died due to the virus as well.
The Assad regime has not officially reported any cases of the coronavirus.
Iranian-backed militias and the IRGC operate bases in the Deir Ezzor area, including the large Imam Ali military base, located near a strategic border crossing between Iraq and Syria.
While Iran is one of the countries being hit the hardest by the outbreak, movement in the Islamic Republic and between Iran and Syria remains largely open, with fears that the virus may be widespread in the Deir Ezzor area. Iranian militia members entering the area are reportedly not being tested before entry.
Beirut's usually congested streets were largely free of cars and pedestrians stayed away from its seafront Corniche as government measures to curb the spread of coronavirus took effect with varying degrees of success on Monday.
Police ordered closed several shops that were open in Beirut in violation of the shutdown order, and a group of swimmers were cleared from the beach in the southern city of Sidon, Reuters journalists said.
The government declared a medical state of emergency on Sunday, announcing a shutdown that included most public institutions and private companies as it looks to rein in the virus that has infected 109 people.
It also also ordered the closure of borders, ports and airport from March 18-29 and said Lebanese are obliged to remain at home except for matters of "extreme necessity."
Beirut traffic was unusually light on typically heavily congested roads.
A security official said compliance with the government decision was still lacking, noting that some people had no choice but to go to work.
"The traffic is definitely less but there are still cars in the streets," he said "There are awareness campaigns but they are not reaching all parts of society."
All political parties in Austria's federal parliament on Tuesday passed a resolution calling on Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's government to exhaust all legal methods to stop Hezbollah's criminal and terrorist activities.
However, the parliament measure stopped short of urging a total ban of Hezbollah's entire movement within the EU and the central European country.
Austria's National Council—the formal name of the country's parliament—asked the federal government to "to take suitable and effective measures to continue to take decisive action against terrorist and criminal activities by Hezbollah supporters in Austria using the entire rule of law; to prevent Hezbollah from being financed through money laundering activities; to re-asses the question of how to deal with Hezbollah within the European Union."
Reinhold Lopatka, an MP for Kurz's Austrian People's Party and Ewa Ernst-Dziedzic, an MP for the conservative chancellor's coalition partner, the Green Party, announced in connection with the anti-Hezbollah resolution that they "recognize the historical responsibility of Austria toward the State of Israel. The existence of Israel should never be questioned.
In order to guarantee the security of the State of Israel in the future, the European Union must once again deal with Hezbollah."
The resolution was titled "Effective action against Hezbollah."
Hezbollah demanded in its 1985 manifesto Israel's "obliteration from existence."
Ayatollah Hashem Bathaei-Golpaygani, a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, died of coronavirus on Monday morning, Iranian news outlets have reported.
Bathaei-Golpaygani was being treated for the illness in Shahid Beheshti Hospital, where he was taken on Saturday.The country's death toll from Covid-19 has now reached 853 in total, with 129 new deaths in the past 24 hours, a health ministry official tweeted on Monday, adding that a total of 14,991 people have been infected across Iran.
"In the past 24 hours we had 1,053 confirmed new cases of coronavirus and 129 new deaths," Alireza Vahabzadeh tweeted.
A number of politicians, doctors, commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guards and clerics have been infected with the virus in Iran, several of which have died. These include Nasser Shabani, a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Farhad Tazari, the former head of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps' Political Bureau, and Seyed Mohammad Mir-Mohammadi, a member of Iran's Expediency Discernment Council, a body that advises Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
To contain the outbreak in Iran, one of the deadliest outside of China, officials have called on people to stay at home.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Ministry of Intelligence and Security have taken charge of dealing with the coronavirus by cracking down on any individual or institution that attempts to reveal accurate information about the origins of the virus or how Iran has become an epicenter of the virus which spreads to other nations.
Massoud Pezeshkian, an Iranian reformist politician, pointed out: "We should have quarantined Qom from day one... This disease is not a joke, which is the way we are dealing with it... The economy and everything will be ruined; it is no joke. What would have happened if they shut down the country for 15 days? If we had done so on the first day, it would not have spread...."
The regime has also threatened to imprison people who provide news about the actual scope of the crisis. Hassan Nowrouzi, the Speaker of the Judiciary Committee of the Parliament, said on February 26 that those who "disseminate fake news regarding coronavirus" will be sentenced from one to three years of imprisonment and lashes.
Strange sentence in AP story on Iran & coronavirus: "US says it has offered humanitarian aid but that Iran has rejected it."
Not question of US says. It's a fact. We offered & Iran publicly rejected calling it "ridiculous" & "political-psychological game" https://t.co/AifrJIVOIe
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
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