| Most Arabs still oppose normalization with Israel, but there are pockets of hopenoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 05 Jan 05:45 AM Arab Barometer releas | | Arab Barometer released the results of a survey of selected Arab countries last September. One of the questions was about whether the people supported their country normalizing relations with Israel. As one may expect, the percentages of supporters of normalization were quite low. I'm not quite sure why this was not widely reported.
Even though the numbers are generally quite low, I find it interesting that Lebanon, traditionally extremely anti-Israel, was in third place behind Morocco and Sudan which had already started normalization. My guess is that with Lebanon's economy is a dumpster fire, a significant number of Lebanese think peace with Israel could help them out.
Egypt and Jordan, as well as the Palestinian Authority, all of which have peace agreements with Israel, are among the least interested in full normalization. Their leaders keep using Israel as a convenient scapegoat. But Israel trades with all of them and the Egyptian and Jordanian leaders have steadfastly resisted demands from their people to cut off relations - because their own basket-case economies need Israeli gas and/or water.
The leaders will continue to insult Israel while quietly making sure that the relationship endures.
Israelis might want it, but they don't need to be loved. In the Middle East, it is more important to be respected. * * * * * * Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern...Read More |
From Ian: Stephen Daisley: Challenging anti-Semitism is a moral imperative for non-Jews They are not the only British Jews to be acknowledged on the New Year Honours list but they have in common a commitment to confronting anti-Semitism and a record of making people in power take notice of the problem. In recognising their efforts, the honours committee is expressing admiration for their public service and an affinity with the cause of fighting anti-Semitism. This is all well and good but it's not enough. It's not enough to give recognition or solidarity to Jews then go back to letting them tackle anti-Semitism on their own. Anti-Semitism and its suppression is not a 'them' thing but an 'us' thing. The first six months of 2022 saw 786 anti-Semitic incidents in the UK, four in five of them taking place offline and one in ten involving assaults. Although this marked a reduction on the first half of 2021, another disturbing trend emerged: where age could be ascertained, one in five perpetrators were under the age of 18. Between 2020 and 2021 there was a 59 per cent increase in anti-Semitic incidents on UK university campuses, taking the total to the highest in the 20-year history of recording this statistic. The CST has also documented how the Covid-19 conspiracist movement has laundered tropes like the blood libel, Jews poisoning the well, and secret Jewish plots into...Read More |
Abdullah Barghouti—Hamas commander and bomb-making expert responsible for killing 66 Israelis and injuring hundreds more—is slated for release to Jordan in an upcoming prisoner exchange. It was his guitar bomb that was used in the Sbarro attack that took the life of Malki Roth. Rehavam Ze'evi may have been in favor of transfer—but not the kind where the mastermind of his own murder gets transferred from Israel to Jordan. A member of Knesset, Ze'evi, also known as "Ghandi," was gunned down in 2001. The man who planned his assassination, Majdi Rahima Rimawi, was sentenced to life in 2008. Now Rimawi's name appears on a very long list of prisoners with blood on their hands, said to be slated for release to Jordan in exchange for four Israeli captives in Gaza, two of whom are dead. MK Rehavam Ze'evi, assassinated in 2001. This is difficult to fathom. How has it come to the point where the Israeli government would even consider releasing the man behind the murder of one of their own: an Israeli member of parliament? In fact, in their sentencing of Hamid Quran, a member of the team that assassinated Ze'evi, the three-judge Israeli panel pointed out the exceptional...Read More |
First photo of the Temple Mount
The Arab Center in Washington, DC published a paper by Mounir Marjieh that described the "status quo" on the Temple Mount, and of course accused Israel of violating it.
Marjieh's honesty is suspect from the start: Since the 19th century, the Al-Aqsa compound has been governed by a Status Quo arrangement, a modus vivendi that prevents discord among conflicting parties. Accordingly, Al-Aqsa's administration belongs to a Muslim institution, the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, which is under the custodianship of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This custodianship has repeatedly been reaffirmed and recognized by the international community, including the United Nations, UNESCO, the Arab League, the European Union, Russia, and the United States, and was officially recognized in the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Actually, Israel 's treaty with Jordan doesn't say anything about "custodianship," only that Israel will "respect" Jordan's "special role" in Muslim (not Christian) holy sites in Jerusalem. The language makes clear that Israel is the one that makes decisions, not Jordan. Furthermore, the language implies that Jews can pray in the Temple Mount by referring to " freedom of access to places of religious and historical...Read More |
From Ian: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can't be solved, only ended - opinion It's not about what Israel does, but about what Israel is and represents. That's why many oppose Israel and support its enemies. Attempts to find "solutions" were based on leftist assumptions that in order to have peace, Israel must make compromises and concessions. This was the basis of the Oslo Accords that legitimized the PLO and created the Palestinian Authority. The "peace process" was a hoax, a hype to bring Arafat and the PLO back to Israel and empower them. This confused way of thinking persists. It is the basis of what is called the "two-state-solution," (2SS) an independent Arab Palestinian state based on the 1949 Armistice lines, and support for United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). In response to threats from the EU, UN, and even the Biden administration, Israel concedes, which always leads to more problems. The IDF, COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories) and police destroyed Jewish property for no rational reason and restrict building in settlements. Israeli leaders (including Netanyahu) went along with the fraud of trying to appease the Palestinians and those who supported them. Why should this absurdity continue? Who does it serve? Jews who live in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem are not "occupying Palestinian territory." It is not "illegal," and there is no basis for this accusation...Read More |
Yesterday I mentioned the Palestinian organization Maata that keeps track of - and brags about - Palestinian terror attacks.
They just issued their report bragging about "resistance activities" for 2022: The year 2022 witnessed a remarkable and qualitative escalation in the forms of popular and armed resistance, especially in the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, as the Palestinians united on the option of all kinds of resistance. The popular and armed resistance, represented by the Jenin Brigade and the "Black Den" in Nablus, embodied a model of resistance and an icon of challenge in the West Bank for the year 2022, where hundreds of resistance and armed clashes were carried out, and the occupation soldiers and settlers were killed. The Palestine Information Center - Maata - monitored the killing of (31) Israelis, most of them soldiers, and the injury of more than (525) others, during the year 2022, as a result of carrying out more than (12188) resistance actions, including (848) shooting operations, and (37) attacks. (18) a stabbing or attempted stabbing operation, and (18) a run-over or attempted run-over attack, in addition to one double explosion. It is interesting that they claim that most of the dead Israelis were "soldiers...Read More |
It is important to examine two events in recent days, as they both severely limit the freedom of Westerners - and signal far worse things that could come. The first is the visit by Israeli minister of security Itamar Ben-Gvir to the Temple Mount.
The second is the publicizing of the removal of an instructor at Hamline University for including depictions of Mohammed in his art history course.
In both cases, nobody did anything wrong by any reasonable metric:
- Even though many would say that he has the right to pray on Judaism's holiest site, Ben-Gvir did not. He did exactly what tens of thousands of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Christians have done in 2022 and earlier - he took a quiet stroll on the Temple Mount, without even reporters. There was no violation of the (illusory) status quo.
- In the case of Hamline University, the instructor told the class ahead of time - in both the syllabus and verbally - that two medieval images of Mohammed, painted by Muslims, would be shown to the class, and he gave any Muslims the opportunity to not look at them.
In both cases, there is no consensus that even Islamic law was violated...Read More |
| | | |
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה