RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is not a single issue associated with the UN- a tribunal for tyrants and war criminals- that does not bash Israel. rsk

TEL AVIV—The United Nations’ cultural agency on Thursday passed a draft resolution that played down Jewish ties to religious sites in Jerusalem, in a decision Israel called “absurd.”

The resolution from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, heavily criticized Israel’s actions toward holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City.

The resolution omitted the Jewish name for a shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims. Instead, it referred to what Jews call the Temple Mount as the Haram Al-Sharif, as it is known to Muslims.

A 58-member committee passed the draft resolution, put forward by Arab states at meeting in Paris, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the resolution isn’t official yet.

It will be referred to Unesco’s executive board for formal approval next week and isn’t expected to be challenged, the person said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the failure to acknowledge the Jews’ connection to the Temple Mount was “absurd” and called the U.N. and Unesco a “moral farce.”

“What’s next? A Unesco decision denying the connection between peanut butter and jelly? Batman and Robin? Rock and roll?” he said in a statement posted to Facebook.

Its 27th September 2016. Summer is over and the new academic year begins. Across the country, political activists such as those in the SOAS Palestinian society hold ‘freshmen’ sessions to attract new recruits to their cause. Everyone knows SOAS is important to BDS and Palestinian activism. When you walk into SOAS you enter the BDS UK student stronghold. But I am used to being inside the SOAS halls now. The atmosphere and venomous tone no longer intimidate me. I come so often they should consider presenting me with a special award.http://david-collier.com/?p=2315

Today’s talk, was part of a BDS workshop for new recruits. The person leading the talk was Riya Hassan, a SOAS alumni, who now works for the BDS central committee. Although she didn’t tell the crowd, Riya was apparently born in Lakiya (Laquia) in the Negev. That being the case, Riya failed to tell the audience that she is one of the only Arabs in the Middle East who can vote. Part of the most liberated Arab community in the entire region.

The format is typical of a BDS recruitment session. They spend the first 30 minutes or so, engaging with the crowd, asking them what they already know of BDS, where they are from, why they are here and most importantly what criticisms of BDS they have heard.

Then Riya began to speak. The first thing that Riya wanted to impress on those listening was that:

“BDS is a tactic. A tactic within a broad spectrum of tactics that an indigenous people who are fighting for liberation deploy”.

BDS: Flattening the conflict

This means that to understand BDS we need to recognise it is not alone, but rather part of the arsenal. It lines up alongside Hamas rockets, knives, suicide belts and terror tunnels, Arab violence, another ‘tactic’ that is ‘deployed’ to destroy Israel. Like ‘lawfare’ or attempts to delegitimise Israel at the UN, BDS does not oppose violence, it operates alongside it.

Riya is desperate to skip to talking about what BDS wants these students to do, but first she needs to circumvent the small issue of why Israel is so evil it needs to be (B)oycotted, (D)ivested from and of course (S)anctioned.

This is always an incredible element of any session. And it invariably follows the same pattern of history.

Firstly, 1917. Balfour. The idea that the British gave away the land of the indigenous people to European colonists. In line with this, Riya managed to discuss Balfour without even mentioning the word ‘Jewish’.

Then they skip to 1948. As if the week after 2nd November 1917, was 9th November 1948. This is done for a simple reason. For the Palestinian narrative to hold true, European colonists simply turned violent against an indigenous civilian population so as to ethnically cleanse the villages because they had to make room for more European colonists. It was as Riya suggested a ‘pre-planned expulsion’.

Halfway to the sky sits a tiny village of little white houses that has attracted the ire of the White House.

The village of Amona with its small white houses and red roofs could easily be mistaken for some lost Italian village or a dusty California town. But the White House would not have “boiled in anger”, as one anonymous official claimed, over the doings of some Italian village.

There’s only one place on earth that makes Obama’s blood boil. It isn’t Iran or North Korea. It’s Israel.

Amona’s small scattering of houses have a fraction of the square footage of the White House. The 40 families living there in defiance of Islamic terrorists and left-wing lawfarers would hardly be noticeable if they all crowded into the White House foyer. And yet they’ve been condemned by the State Department in more virulent tones than most Muslim dictators.

What is it about this handful of Jews caught between heaven and earth that outrages so many?

That may be the great question of history. It will not be solved among the sheep pens and orchards, the little white houses of Amona and their inhabitants, who despite the rage of the big White House, continue to go to work each day, to raise their children and to worship in the way of their ancestors.

In the official parlance of the media, Amona is a “settlement”. That is to say it dates back a mere 3,300 years to the time when Joshua, born a slave in Egypt, commanded the Jews, “’Go and walk through the land, and describe it, and come back to me, and I will cast lots for you here before the Lord in Shilo.”

Today Shilo is a city of some 3,500. Like Jerusalem, it is also deemed a settlement. But on the list of places described by Joshua’s men, the mere speck of Amona appears before Jerusalem.

But then Amona, unlike Jerusalem, vanished from history. For thousands of years the name would have only meant something to the most dedicated biblical scholars. And then the left went to war against Amona. And out of that hatred the forgotten town was raised up from its forgotten place in history.

The handful of families living in Amona have been the subject of more legal proceedings, international debates, threats and international outrage than most genocides. 3,000 feet above sea level, its residents look up at a kind blue sky and down at an angry world that is unwilling to let them live in peace.

They meet the challenges of gravity and rage with simple faith. Asked about the threat of Islamic terror, a 5-year old girl answered, “As God helped Joshua, so he will also help us.”

Amona and its residents need all the help they can get. They have been under siege for decades. What the Islamic terrorists couldn’t do to the residents, lawyers and activists who receive funding from the Soros network and assorted international left-wing billion dollar organizations, strive to accomplish.

The Jewish people and the Jewish state face extraordinary challenges today. Luckily, we can handle all of them. But to do so, we need to be capable of judging ourselves fairly.

Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year because it is the day that the Torah sets aside for us to reckon with ourselves. We are commanded to give an accounting – before our fellow men and before God – for our actions in the previous year. We must make amends to both for our misdeeds. And since none of us is perfect, every one of us has things to atone for.

Yom Kippur’s power stems from a basic assumption that forms its core. That assumption is that we are all moral agents. We all have to make an accounting.

This basic assumption is the most liberating notion ever created. Moral agency is what makes us free. It doesn’t matter how wretched or rich our external circumstances, the fact that the Torah enjoins all of us to take responsibility for our behavior means that as far as God is concerned, we are not slaves and never will be slaves.

The converse is also true.

We are only free for as long as we are capable of accounting for our actions. This means that preserving our ability to properly judge ourselves is the key to preserving our liberty.

This is true not only for the Jewish people as individuals. It is true as well for the Jewish state, Israel.

The question then is how do we do that? As far as Israel is concerned, the answer to this question has become one of increasing urgency over the past generation or so.

Over the past couple of decades, we have seen the world – and more importantly our own elites in Israel – rushing to judge our society and find it lacking seemingly on a daily basis.

Our journalists, professors, judges and generals routinely tell us what is wrong with our society. And each year, their harangues become shriller and angrier.

Indeed it is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that for our elites, Israeli society is morally irredeemable.

Consider the behavior of our generals in the IDF. Sunday night, after the terrorist attack in Jerusalem, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot spoke at a memorial ceremony for the armored corps. There he restated for the umpteenth time in recent months that the key to defeating terrorism is maintaining the IDF’s values.

At least two people have been killed and six injured in a drive-by shooting in Jerusalem, Israeli police said. The shooting is preliminarily being considered a terrorist attack, according to a police spokesman.

The incident took place near Israeli police’s National Headquarters located near the Ammunition Hill memorial site, according to Israeli police. A perpetrator was shooting from a car.

BREAKING At least 5 Israelis wounded in drive-by shooting attack in Jerusalem
1 critical terrorist shot & wounded. pic.twitter.com/vJqGYlHHSA

The attacker escaped and headed to the tomb of the Hebrew prophet Samuel, 1.3 kilometers north of Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood.Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that the attacker has been identified as a 39-year-old man from the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

The injured victims were taken to Hadassah Hospital Mt. Scopus, the hospital said, as cited by the Times of Israel.

The attacker was due to start a four-month jail sentence next week for assaulting a police officer, a spokeswoman for Israel’s Prisons Service said, as cited by Reuters.

Hamas has claimed responsibility for the attack. According to the organization’s spokesman, the attack was “a natural reaction” to the occupation “against our people.”

At least 218 Palestinians have died in attacks in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip since 2015. Israeli authorities claim 147 of those were assailants, while the others were killed during protests or clashes.

Palestinians have killed least 33 Israelis and two visiting Americans, estimates from Reuters show.

However, Palestinians have accused Israel of constantly using excessive force, claiming that some of those killed had no intention of attacking and posed no threat. In some cases, Israel has opened investigations into whether excessive force was used.

This week in Paris, the executive board of Unesco, the United Nations entity charged with looking after matters related to education, science and culture, will vote on a resolution called “Occupied Palestine,” which attempts to redefine the capital of Israel as a supranational city to which Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal claim.

Perhaps not coincidentally, an exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes the same case. For the sake of Jerusalem, both need to be exposed as the attempts at historical revisionism that they are.

Jerusalem has been a busy patch of earth over the course of its history and a magnet for people of many faiths—first Jews, then Christians, then Muslims—becoming over the millennia a location of cultural fascination. The “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven” exhibition at the Met is a case in point. The show highlights the spectacular objects produced in and around the medieval city that continue to inform its modern aesthetic. It is in many ways a curatorial tour de force and must have entailed all manner of diplomatic wrangling to garner so many loans of such delicate, irreplaceable objects.

But there is an elephant in this tastefully curated gallery. At its heart, this is a show about the identity of Jerusalem, as contentious a topic a thousand years ago as it is today, as is evidenced by the Unesco resolution. The exhibition’s premise, as is encapsulated in its title, is that during the medieval period, all claims to the city were equal and inhabitants were uniformly defined by their participation in this unique community.

This interpretation is implicitly projected onto the modern Jerusalem as photographs of the contemporary city appear on the gallery walls next to the explanatory texts. The visitor is encouraged to conclude that if only adherents of the three major religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—would understand themselves as citizens of Jerusalem, a city transcending national boundaries, this utopia could be recaptured. The organizers are careful to mix up the order of the three religions as listed in written materials to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment.

An uneasy subtext to “Every People Under Heaven” is that during the exhibition’s time frame Jerusalem was completely dominated by Christians and Muslims, successively. These four centuries spanned one of the sparsest Jewish presences in Jerusalem’s history, beginning as they did with the wholesale slaughter of Jews at the hands of the Crusaders in 1099, after which their population dwindled to as few as 200. The Mamluk conquest of 1260 marginally improved conditions, but a significant increase in the Jewish population would have to wait for the 18th century.

This reality is apparent in the show’s makeup, with Jewish objects being largely confined to books and jewelry, and Jewish issues to their longing for the “absent” Temple of Solomon, a longing that is treated as a somewhat quaint anachronism not as an expression of the enduring spiritual connection of Jews to Jerusalem. Jews, we are told, prayed outside the old city walls. Occasionally a Jew appears in the labels for the Christian or Islamic objects, as when one “Stella” reportedly declared that the Dome of the Rock and the al Aqsa mosque are “as radiant and pure as the very heavens,” as if to give the Jewish stamp of legitimization to the structures built on the Temple Mount.

Again, visitors may well ask themselves from this evidence, why can’t we all just get along today as well as we seem to have done in 1000-1400?