RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/sex-the-jewish-agency-and-israels-clueless-intelligence-minister-opinion-682078  

Israeli politicians and pundits have been pretty preoccupied this week with the self-inflicted dashed hopes of Intelligence Minister Elazar Stern to become the next head of the Jewish Agency.

Stern, a member of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party, was the government’s candidate for the post, which means that he was also acceptable to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, head of Yamina. Stern was an example of one of those so-called compromises that the motley left-right coalition was able to reach with ease.

For one thing, Bennett keeps telling himself that he has to pick his battles, not stand on principle over the more minor issues. And though he’d be the last to admit it, the Jewish Agency isn’t a body that he or his peers consider to be as important as they purport it to be. Nor do they consider it particularly controversial.

For another, Stern himself is a kind of nonentity, despite his years in the military – as a commander of the IDF officers’ school, head of the Education and Youth Corps and chief of the Manpower Directorate – before becoming a member of Knesset in 2015.

It was kind of startling, then, when he caused a stir of his own making on Sunday, for what appeared to be no good reason – certainly not where his own career was concerned.
In an interview on Sunday morning with 103FM Radio, Stern announced that during his tenure as IDF Manpower Directorate, he had “shredded many anonymous complaints” from soldiers, including, perhaps, ones involving sexual harassment and/or assault – though he couldn’t exactly remember.

HIS INTERVIEW came on the heels of and in response to an investigation into an anonymous letter alleging some sort of misconduct on the part of “R,” the top pick to replace Nadav Argaman as the head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency). By Monday, when the cabinet approved his nomination, he had been cleared and his name, Ronen Bar, was revealed.

Stern, on the other hand, was in the dog house, though mainly put there by members of the opposition. The men and women in his own camp were maneuvering the embarrassing mishap by reiterating their usually very loud #metoo stance: that all sexual accusations must be taken seriously, no matter when, where or how they are made.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/10/12/no-time-for-guilt-over-israels-self-defense/

This month’s anniversary of the 1953 battle of Qibya has triggered yet another outpouring of Jewish guilt. But Israel has no more reason to feel guilty about Qibya than the Allies do for bombing Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki.

The Biblical book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) was read by Jews during Sukkot. Even non-synagogue-going Jews know it’s verse “a time of war, and a time of peace” — thanks to the 1959 Byrds hit “Turn! Turn! Turn!” But it should be made clear that nowhere in Kohelet does one find a verse declaring that there’s “a time of guilt.” And there’s good reason for that.

In the early 1950s, Palestinian Arab terrorists based in Jordan frequently crossed into Israel and perpetrated savage attacks against Israeli civilians. Instead of hitting back, Israel’s leaders first tried diplomacy. On June 8, 1953, they signed an agreement with Jordan that was supposed to prevent the cross-border attacks. How did that work out? Each evening for the next three days, Palestinian Arab terrorists coming from Jordan murdered Israeli civilians, including children, in Jerusalem, Lod, Mishmar Avalon, and Kfar Hess.

The Israeli cabinet met in an emergency session. Jordan denied responsibility, claiming the terrorists were actually just burglars. That was, of course, a blatant lie: throwing grenades through the windows of homes, and not stealing anything, is not the way burglars operate.

Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett pleaded with the United Nations to do something. Long weeks passed, as Israel waited in vain for the international community to respond. There were crickets.

The final straw came when terrorists from Jordan slaughtered an Israeli mother and her two young children in the town of Yehud. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion decided to stop waiting for international sympathy, and to undertake a military response. So he sent an Israeli army unit headed by Ariel Sharon to hit the nearby Jordanian town of Qibya on the night of October 13, 1953.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17859/palestinians-work-israel

The fact that a large number of Palestinians are desperate to work in Israel is a sign of the failure of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to improve the living conditions of their people despite the massive sums of money they receive from various sources, including the United States, European Union and United Nations.

Instead of holding Hamas responsible for what he called the “tragedy” in the Gaza Strip, al-Amsi and other Palestinians choose to blame Israel.

This view is in keeping with the longstanding habit of the Palestinian leadership to evade their responsibility for thievery and non-governance by blaming Israel for everything.

Many Palestinians and Arabs, however, are no longer buying this nonsense and know exactly who is trying to help and who has not done a thing to end their suffering.

“Thousands of Palestinians, including those with [academic] degrees, are fighting for a job in Israel. I guarantee you that if Israel announced that it wants workers from Algeria, they would cross the Sahara [Desert] on foot to work in Israel to escape the hell they are living in at home.” — Hoda Jannat, Syrian journalist and political analyst, Twitter, October 7, 2021.

As has now become embarrassingly clear for all to see, Israel has become the only hope for the hungry workers in the Gaza Strip — who have been abandoned not only by their leaders, but by the rest of their Arab brothers as well.

Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip are excited. Israeli authorities have decided to allow thousands of them to work in Israel. The news about the Israeli decision spread like wildfire, prompting tens of thousands of Palestinians to converge on the offices of the chambers of commerce throughout the Gaza Strip in the hope of obtaining a permit to work in Israel.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/bidens-jerusalem-embassy-dodge/91687/

In the next big engagement in what we like to call the Battle of Jerusalem, it looks like the lineup will be President Joe Biden against — wait for it — Senator Biden. The question is whether Mr. Biden will take care that the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 is faithfully executed, as it was — and for the first time — by President Trump. Or will Mr. Biden seek to undercut the law by opening a separate consulate in Jerusalem to deal with the Arabs?

What stands out for us in this situation is the fact that Mr. Biden was the first co-sponsor of the Jerusalem Embassy Act. He signed onto the bill the day it was introduced by a Republican, Senator Dole. Yet now Mr. Biden is maneuvering to undercut the very law that he cosponsored (and that passed the Senate 93 to five). It’s doubly dastardly because the implementation has vindicated those who helped get it passed.

The latest piece on all this is from one Eugene Kontorovich, the law professor at George Mason who has emerged as a sage on international law. His piece, in Israel Hayom, is on Mr. Biden’s scheme to open in Jerusalem a consulate for the Palestinian Arabs. Our embassy in Jerusalem “already provides consular services to the Palestinians,” Mr. Kontorovich notes. “Why do they need an independent consulate in the same city?”

Mr. Kontorovich suggests that it is “unheard of” to have an independent consulate in the same city where a country has an embassy. He reckons that the point is “to undermine former US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem.” Why, though, would he want to do such undermining if he, as Mr. Biden unambiguously was, a cosponsor of the Jerusalem Embassy Act to begin with?

Writes Mr. Kontorovich: The U.S. “does not want to open a consulate merely to have a place for diplomatic liaisons” with the Palestinians. “If that is all they wanted, they could easily do this by opening a mission in Abu Dis or Ramallah — where most other countries conduct their relations with the PA. Or they could reopen the Palestinian mission in Washington,” which Mr Trump also closed.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-latest-target-of-anti-israel-academics-the-negev/

The same leftist activists who demand that Israel expel “illegal” Jewish settlers simultaneously insist that Israel not expel Bedouin squatters.

Critics of Israel on America’s campuses have a new battle cry: Israeli development of the Negev Desert is a war crime!

On Oct. 27, two prestigious institutions—the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies—will host a Zoom program called “The Negev Bedouin: Emptied Lands and Displaced People.”

If you knew nothing else about the program, the title alone makes it obvious that a verdict of “guilty” has been decided in advance by this academic kangaroo court. Without even presenting and weighing the evidence, the organizers and speakers have already declared Israel is guilty of cruelly “displacing” the local residents and “emptying” the region.

To make matters worse, the CUNY division that has organized the program is its Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. The center has decided that Israel’s development of the Negev is a deed so foul that it deserves to be included under the rubric of “the Holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity.”

https://www.facebook.com/StandWithUs/videos/nfl-quarterback-kirk-cousins-loves-israel/781457105723506/

NFL Quarterback Kirk Cousins talks about his love for the
Jewish people and Israel while congratulating graduates of the Jewish Student Union.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/unrwas-deceitful-ploys-to-silence-erdans-truths-on-israel-opinion-681411
Given the nature and mission of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan was prevented on Monday from entering the General Assembly hall with a prop proving the point he intended to make at a meeting about the organization.
The item was a poster illustrating the antisemitic views of an UNRWA school teacher in Gaza by praising Adolf Hitler. Erdan had equipped himself with the placard to refute the statements he knew were going to be made by UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

He had good reason to want to come prepared with visual evidence. The corrupt body, whose ill-deserved status as an agency for “refugees” keeps it in financial cover, continues to employ educators who regularly incite terrorism against Jews, both in the classroom and on social media.

This was one key impetus for the decision by the administration of former US president Donald Trump in 2018 to cut America’s entire aid budget to UNRWA. In the first place, the bloated agency has spent the many decades since its inception perpetuating the “refugee crisis,” rather than using its mandate to settle the approximately 600,000 “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict [Israel’s War of Independence].”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/meretzs-pilgrimage-to-ramallah/

 If anything illustrates the farcical nature of the current makeup of the government in Jerusalem, it’s the parley in Ramallah on Sunday evening between Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and a delegation of Israel’s Meretz Party, headed by Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz.

Horowitz didn’t even bother to obscure his exit from a meeting of the ministerial committee on fighting the coronavirus, which hadn’t convened since the end of August, in order to make his appointment at the Muqata. But then, his role as the country’s most senior official charged with handling the pandemic is secondary to his true ambition: Palestinian statehood by way of an Israeli withdrawal to the 1947 armistice lines.

Ditto for the two Meretz members—Regional Cooperation Minister Esawi Frej and faction head Knesset member Michal Rozin—who accompanied him. The purpose of their little gathering was twofold.

Firstly, it was to show their voters that, despite their party’s sitting in a coalition with and under politicians traditionally from the right, it’s still committed to Israeli capitulation at all costs. Secondly, it was to signal to Abbas that he has the power to achieve their shared goal.

In one respect, he’s correct. Every party in the coalition possesses the leverage to cause it to fall.
But just like any of the strange bedfellows able to use this option as a threat, none has the desire to follow through with it. They all realize that in such an event, what awaits them on the “day after” is political exile.
In the meantime, each enjoys a degree of freedom from facing the electorate for a fifth time in two-and-a-half years. And Meretz is milking its ability to go against the wishes of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and discuss policy with Holocaust denier Abbas—a “pay for slay” terrorism instigator who’s been refusing to engage in talks with Israel since 2014.