Letter to US ambassador Lew: Has your excellency taken new steps to monitor what use is being made of these contributions to support humanitarian efforts of UNRWA that do not further violence and destruction?

By

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April 5, 2024

April 1, 2024

Attn: US Ambassador Jacob J. Lew

Our news agency and research center has been providing news & research concerning  UNRWA since 1987.

Our agency established a special website which focuses on our coverage of unrwa at UNRWA-Monitor.com.

We have produced 25 documentary films shot on location at the site of UNRWA refugee camps: cfnepr.com/205640/movies.

We hired a team of Arabic speaking journalists who have reviewed more than 1000 textbooks used in the UNRWA school system since August 1, 2000: Israelbehindthenews.com/?s=arnon+groiss

We published a comprehensive book: Roadblock to Peace-How the UN perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict: UNRWA Policies Reconsidered. https://tinyurl.com/yv5a2wb2

During the current war, iI has come to our attention that the IDF found ammunition, rockets, missiles, mortars, rifles and other military equipment stored in UNRWA facilities.

UNRWA hospitals, medical clinics, schools, youth clubs, and warehouses have been serving as ‘safe havens’ for these weapons.

The US remains  a prime funder of UNRWA.

Question : Has your excellency  taken new steps to monitor what use is being made of these contributions to support humanitarian efforts of UNRWA that do  not further violence and destruction?

Our agency, which maintains a positive working relationship with the office of the UN Secretary General , will communicate your response to Dr. Darko Mocibob, Assistant Secretary General Middle East,Asia and Pacific.

Sincerely,

David Bedein

Director

Albanese Slammed For Politicising Tragedy, Where’s The Jews & More – 5 April 2024

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

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April 5, 2024

1. AJA STATEMENT: ALBANESE SHAMELESSLY MILKING DEATH OF AUSTRALIAN AID WORKER IN GAZA

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems to be shamelessly milking the tragic death of Australian aid worker, Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom for political gain.

AJA CEO, Robert Gregory, said:

“Two Australians have been killed since Hamas started the war in Gaza.

The contrast with the PM’s response to the death of the other Australian, Galit Carbone, who was actually intentionally butchered is stark. Albanese didn’t bother to call Israel’s Prime Minister for weeks and refused to visit. Now he’s attacking Israel at every moment and making demands. Maybe it’s because Galit was Jewish, and her murderers were Palestinian Arabs.

If he wasn’t already leading the most anti-Israel government in Australian history, before this tragedy occurred, maybe we’d believe that his outrage was genuine.

Albanese and Labor knowingly send money to UNRWA after it was implicated in the murder of Jews on October 7. They don’t have a leg to stand on.

Gaza is a volatile, complex, high-risk war zone. The way to stop civilian casualties is for Hamas to release the hostages and surrender. This is the only demand the Prime Minister should be making. Exploiting a warzone tragedy like this is just repugnant.”

2. Pauline Hanson – Good for the Jews?

AJA Antisemitism Education and Strategies Officer, Adam Kreuzer analyses recent positions taken by Senator Pauline Hanson.

3. Interview with Daniel Luria, Ateret Cohanim – Alan Freedman & Michael Burd

AJA founding members, Alan Freedman and Michael Burd conduct an exclusive interview with Daniel Luria, Executive Director and International Spokesman for Ateret Cohanim.

Ateret Cohanim stands at the forefront of Jewish Land Reclamation in Jerusalem. Beyond ensuring a united Jerusalem, Ateret Cohanim works to redeem property once held by Jews in Israel’s capital as well as reestablishing Jewish neighborhoods in the heart of the Old City and its surrounding areas.

WATCH

4. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Shurat HaDin founder speaks to AJA

This week’s episode of AJA Wednesday Speaker Series is now available online.

AJA hosted Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder and president of Shurat HaDin, which is at the forefront of fighting terrorism and safeguarding Jewish rights worldwide and is dedicated to taking legal action to protect and defend the State of Israel and its citizens.

As president of Shurat HaDin, Nitsana has represented hundreds of terror victims in legal actions against terror organizations and their supporters, including banks. She has had many cases upheld and been awarded many millions of dollars on behalf of victims of terror.

A very large audience joined for an outstanding inspiring talk.

WATCH on AJA YouTube

5. Where’s the Jews?

On the L’Chaim show on 3ZZZ, Morry Frenkel speaks with Daniel Lewkovitz, CEO of the security and life safety provider company, Calamity Monitoring and a committee member of the Australian Jewish Association (AJA), about his involvement with the team producing the very important documentary, “Where’s the Jews”, a film that explores in detail the aftermath of the October 9th antisemitic riots at the Sydney Opera House.

Daniel also discusses an Australian Greens’ media release that paints a totally different picture of what took place at the Opera House. The production costs of the documentary are being crowdfunded, and for more information on the documentary and a link for donations to help complete “Where’s the Jews” go to www.wheresthejews.com

LISTEN

6. AJA Presents: Should Jews be allowed to return to Gaza? with Daniella Weiss & Lital Slonim of Nachala

** AJA Weekly Zoom Speaker Series Presents **

Gaza’s Jewish history stretches thousands of years. Jews were expelled by the Romans, crusaders and British.

In 2005, Israel expelled 10 thousand Jews from 21 communities in Gaza as a gesture for peace. With the takeover by Hamas it had the opposite effect.

AJA doesn’t take a position on this issue, but polls show that almost 40% of Israelis support Jews returning to Gaza.

Daniella Weiss was mayor of Kedumim and founded the Nachala Settlement Movement, which works to create Jewish communities in Judea & Samaria. Lital Slonim is the International Director of the Nachala Settlement Movement.

SET A REMINDER for Wed, 10 April, 8pm (AEDT) (5pm WA, 7pm Qld, 7:30pm SA)
Log in a few minutes prior: http://zoom.us/j/3165713105

Prime Time “Dr Phil show” featuring:..Bedein UNRWA Movies used by Dr. Phil*

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

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April 4, 2024

Prime Time “Dr Phil show” featuring:..Bedein UNRWA Movies used by Dr. Phil*

Response by son of Hamas leader and Palestinian spokeswomen;.

*Authorized use of footage by Nahum Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research which produced these films**

*https://www.cfnepr.com/205640/Movies

“We are Fighting Nazis”: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) After 7 October

By

Center for Near East Policy Research

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April 3, 2024

On 31 October 2023, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wore a Judenstern (“Jew’s star”) while addressing the United Nations Security Council. His provocative adornment of the patch, a symbol of the genocidal marking of European Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, was intended to remind the body of the consequences of “staying silent in the face of evil” in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on 7 October. Erdan swore the ambassadorial team would wear the star “as a symbol of pride” until the body formally condemned Hamas’ actions. In response, Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, vehemently opposed the move saying that the “yellow star symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people”: that Jewish people now have “an independent country and a strong army” and must “place a blue-white flag on the lapel, not a yellow patch.”Footnote¹

Erdan’s performative gesture and condemnatory responses to it can be interpreted as a negotiation and strategic conflation of the two existentially threatening forces at the nucleus of the Zionist political imaginary. Through the discursive entanglement of the Nazi and the Palestinian, we see a political-cultural stage upon which the alienated diasporic European Jew of the twentieth century is articulated as vulnerable to a genocidal annihilation that the contemporary muscular Israeli Jew is no longer.Footnote² Through the evocation of historical Jewish suffering, the Gazan/Palestinian – and specifically, after the October attack, Hamas as a [Sunni] Islamic nationalist group – has been configured by Israel as the new Nazi force whose attempted violent incursion into Israeli territoriality constituted a twenty-first century iteration of an allegedly enduring genocidal threat. The use of aerial tactics, thus, has constituted both a calculated (i.e. purportedly precise) and widely annihilatory means of managing the civilizational threat of a Nazified Hamas/Gaza.Footnote³

Scholarly responses to the ongoing war have been mired in competing historical and socio-legal interpretations of the very concept of genocide, and these fundamental disagreements are partially owed to deep divisions within the field of Genocide Studies itself. On one hand, some claim that Hamas’ massacres and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians constitute genocidal acts in themselves: violences that are inextricably linked to a global rise in antisemitism and the ongoing denial of both Jewish people’s and the state of Israel’s right to existence. While rightfully expressing horror at the brutality of Hamas’ attack, others still situate the enduring armed struggle within an ongoing process of settler colonial violence that has structured Palestinian life since the massacres and mass expulsions of 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Even as Genocide Studies is meant to exist as a transdisciplinary field accounting for a global scope of genocidal atrocities, its disciplinary core remains the Holocaust as an exemplar sine qua non of genocide following relatively conservative interpretations of Raphael Lemkin’s conception and its translation into the United Nations Genocide Convention.

These divergent epistemic structures – a divergence in which orthodox interpretations of genocide proceeding from the exceptionality of Nazi crimes are challenged by more troubled considerations of genocide within histories of colonial race-making and more multidirectional memoryFootnote⁴ politics – represent an overdue disciplinary engagement of the so-called “Palestine Question.”Footnote⁵ This, in turn, bears implications for the overwhelming limitations of international law in questions of genocide and our overreliance on its narrow interpretive power.Footnote⁶

Truncated History of Palestinian Anti-Zionism and/as Nazism

We might understand the genesis of the Palestinian-as-Nazi ontology as the undeniably real but nevertheless oft mythologized 1941 meeting between Adolf Hitler and Amin al-Husseini, by then the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. An Arab nationalist and anti-colonial figure, al-Husseini vehemently opposed both British rule in Mandatory Palestine and the Zionist proposition of a Jewish state. His participation in protests against Jewish immigration eventually led to his emigration to evade arrest by British authorities: first to French Mandatory Lebanon and Iraq in 1937, and then eventually to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1941. A slippage between antisemitism and anti-Zionism troubles al-Husseini’s legacy as his support for the Nazi Party’s ascent to power in 1933 was informed by his desire to curb Jewish immigration to Palestine; his desire for a political axis between the Arab world and fascist European powers, too, was predicated upon their recognition of Arab statehood and diplomatic reversals of the progress made towards the establishment of a Jewish state.

The infamous meeting between the Grand Mufti and Hitler took place on 28 November 1941. During the meeting, al-Husseini reaffirmed his commitment to alliances between Arabs and Nazi Germany because they had shared enemies in “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” In return, Hitler reassured him that Germany stood both “for uncompromising war against the Jews” and in “active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine.”Footnote⁷ This meeting – and an additional telegram from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich HimmlerFootnote⁸ – is taken as evidence of a political commitment and global racialized conspiracy of both al-Husseini and “the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab World” with the Nazis’ aspirations of eliminating global Jewry.Footnote⁹ Many retellings of this meeting, however, over-assert the Grand Mufti’s influence on Hitler’s plan: as told (multiply) by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others, al-Husseini’s rejection of the prospect of Jewish immigration from Germany/Europe is interpreted as ultimately influencing Hitler’s pivot from mass expulsion to mass murder. The genocidal Final Solution, however, had already begun by the pair’s meeting: Hitler had already begun his invasion of the Soviet Union, and gangs of Einsatzgruppen had already begun mass killings of Jews, Roma, and partisans, including the September 1941 massacre at Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine.Footnote¹⁰

This purported Nazi-Arab axis of antisemitism is further articulated by democratic Israel’s existence in a region described as a “hostile neighborhood/environment” because of the antagonisms of neighbouring Arab states (including states whose territories and sovereignties have been undermined by Israeli annexation).Footnote¹¹ This characterization exploits Orientalist characterizations of Arabs as counter-civilizational and anticipates Samuel Huntington’s post-Cold War articulations of an increasingly illiberal and fundamentalist “Islamic civilization” posing a threat to western liberal democracy. In the present (as in the past), Hamas’ attack is attributed to an antisemitism inherent to Islam or Arab nationalism rather than situating it in expressed Palestinian opposition, albeit violent, to unyielding Israeli occupation and dispossession. Comparably labelled as “immoral and terroristic” violence akin to Nazi fascism, Zionist commentators of the time similarly delegitimized the 1936 Arab uprising in Mandatory Palestine rather than engaging how “the parliamentary road to Arab sovereignty was obstructed by the Zionists until 1939,” the year of the revolt’s conclusion.Footnote¹² These characterizations complement the fabrications of Palestinians systemically produced in ethnocratic Israeli society in a way that justifies the state’s drive for permanent security through territorial expansion and carceral controls.Footnote¹³

The seeds that would eventually become Hamas were initially sown out of a frustration with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization’s failure to end the Israeli occupation. The expansion of Islamic political formations was enabled when, in 1976, Hamas’ eventual founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin “applied to the Israeli occupation authorities for a license to establish the Islamic Association” as a cover for its various infrastructural and service work within the Gaza Strip. His application was approved the following year, and the Israeli government “hoped that cultivating the brotherhood would produce a counterforce that could weaken other Palestinian nationalist movements.”Footnote¹⁴ Contra to the Oslo Accords-created Palestinian Authority and the concessions it was willing to make through diplomatic engagement with Israel, Hamas’ political strategy revolved and continues to revolve primarily around rejections of “further concessions from the Palestinian side, including any commitment to disarm the resistance factions or to halt fire.”Footnote¹⁵

From its participation in the First and Second Intifadas to its electoral successes and assumptions of power (particularly after taking control of the Gaza Strip following Israel’s 2005 disengagement),Footnote¹⁶ the party has metastasized into something capable of producing the kind of violent militarized confrontation witnessed on 7 October. Characterized as the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust (and the bloodiest in Israeli history), the language of “pogrom” was used to describe the attacks on the Nahal Oz, Kfar Aza, Magen, Sufa, and Be’ri communities. The Hamas-coordinated aggressive of secular and Islamic resistance groups ossified this anti-Jewish threat whereby the ontological singularities of perceived genocidal antisemitism and Jewish existential possibility are sublimated into Nazism and a twenty-first century re-enfleshment of the Holocaust, respectively. Per this discourse, then, survival of a reiterated attempt at Jewish annihilation necessitates and justifies an unrestrained military response.

Vanquishment by any Means

Following this reparative teleology of the establishment of a Jewish state, the evocation of Israel’s right to self-defenseFootnote¹⁷ operates as a present-day permanent security campaign and a historicized articulation of a protective Jewish fortressing and securitization that was not possible during the Holocaust but has since been actualized by the Israeli state. This is the essence of Dayan’s clarification. Israel swiftly responded to the October attacks with a campaign it has called “Operation Iron Swords,” and as an alternative to ground invasions that would make Israeli soldiers particularly vulnerable, unmanned aerial systems and autonomous weapons systems were paired with conventional manned aerial warfare. But the euphemistically described “surgical strikes” these systems produce utilize a machine learning logic of threat assessment and preemptive striking whose technological evolution has advanced from typical “colonial paradigms of dominion into imperial methods of remote disciplinary control.”Footnote¹⁸ Beyond merely identifying and eliminating threats in the present, Anthony Downey emphasizes that this “neocolonial ‘algorithmic command’” is “crucially and irrevocably implicated in the martial and political will to occupy the future.”Footnote¹⁹ Thus, inhered within this strategy, within Israel’s retaliatory campaign on Gaza, is a transtemporal logic of genocide that attempts to neutralize the Gazan Palestinian in the present so as altogether displace and/or eliminate its presence and foreclose the possibility of its future.

These algorithmic logics operate within a process of always already genocidal statecrafting that is not necessarily illegal because of how coloniality is imbricated within the international legal system: the perpetual war of permanent security, even as it annihilates, is not inherently criminal because it is simply operating in service of the quotidian Euromodern racial order. Notably, Bedour Alagraa describes catastrophe not as a chronology of discrete and individuated events, but as “a structural condition, and a way of life imposed as a form of political and social domination, beginning with the New World colonial encounter(s).” Evoking the “cruel mathematics” that formulate necropolitical calculations, the “smart” calculations of Palestinian military targets are a feature of another structuring process of catastrophe: the Nakba of 1948, literally “The Catastrophe” as proper noun in Arabic, which initiated the present and ongoing colonial epoch of Palestinian elimination.Footnote²⁰

Weeks into the assault, details emerged about Habsora (“The Gospel”), a system of target calculation “which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can ‘generate’ targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.”Footnote²¹ According to the Israel Defense Forces, the system produces recommendations for airstrikes “with the goal of a complete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person.” While the exact calculations for targeting are fairly opaque, the system “typically analyze large sets of information from a range of sources, such as drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data and information drawn from monitoring the movements and behaviour patterns of individuals and large groups.”Footnote²² Coupled with a greater permissiveness for civilian targeting and the claim that Hamas operatives are embedded in civilian infrastructure, this technological production of “legitimate military targets” proceeds also from the political imaginary in which all Gazans – including children, who comprise a devastating proportion of casualties – are collectively rendered as terroristic colluders with Hamas, thus justifying what immediately became a total war against the Palestinian “Other.”Footnote²³ (Despite the use of this “smart” guided technology, unguided “dumb bombs,” whose destructive capabilities pose an even greater threat to civilians, nevertheless comprise nearly half of all aerial strikes.Footnote²⁴)

Because of the legal impunity that Israel has enjoyed, the question of genocide in Palestine transcends the applicability of the Genocide Convention (though, arguably, present violence in Gaza includes nearly every act outlined in Article II) and can be better sociologically understood through the eight techniques of genocide outlined by Lemkin himself: a comprehensive frame of “political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral” destruction that accounts for the more totalized “destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group.”Footnote²⁵ The bombing of universities, cultural institutions, refugee camps, religious sites, hospitals, and entire neighbourhoods; the targeted assassinations of journalists and killings of retreating and fleeing civilians; the deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, electricity, and the enforcement of the ongoing blockadeFootnote²⁶ constitute a wholesale attack of Gazan life far beyond any conceivably proportionate military response.Footnote²⁷ This total war is figured through both infrastructural destruction and spatiocidal attempts to make Palestinian land unlivable,Footnote²⁸ and displacement and forced evacuations per the goals of the originary Nakba.Footnote²⁹

Disciplinary Possibilities

Rather than contending with the materialities of the violence at hand, the casting of Palestinians and Muslim armed resistance as the primary postwar threat to Jewish Israeli existence creates an irresistible maneuver. Capturing Palestine in the ongoing western moral correction of the Holocaust mystifies the geopolitical machinations that produce ordinary processes of “demarcation, exclusion, elimination, and political reassertion” and necessitate mass death for particularly racialized people around the world.Footnote³⁰ With Gaza, and in the broader discourse around Palestine, the coincidental recognition of genocide as the “crime of crimes” and a definitional near-singularity of Nazi violence elides acknowledgement of a constructed asymmetry in genocide recognition: a failure to robustly confront the mass violence intrinsic to the Westphalian order. If “capitalism’s calculus of the necessary destructions of lifeworlds” animates the political economic arrangements of racial capitalism, how does Genocide Studies reckon with “the crime of genocide in a world where masses of people were never meant to survive”?Footnote³¹

The crisis of Genocide Studies, the rationale for its allergy to and general non-engagement of Palestine, lies in its uncritical promotion of legal normativities: a taken-for-grantedness of the delimiting of the “human” in human rights discourses and its de facto non-universality.Footnote³² Mainstream Genocide Studies fails to approach genocide as a productive practice of modern statecraft, meaning that it also often fails to consider how imperial practices and definitions of citizenship and belonging – i.e. quotidian designations of the populations that could be killed and/or enslaved – still inform legal discourses of genocide as the ultimate crime or political transgression. In this vein, rather than being examined as a settler colonial state whose establishment necessitated the elimination of existing populations, Israeli policy is interpreted solely as part of the aftermath of western resolutions of the consequences of the Nazi Holocaust. And in ideological and material relation with other settler statesFootnote³³ (namely, the United States) whose own denunciations or justifications of genocide are a matter of political utility or self-protection, these settler imaginaries at the heart of state formation come to define the legal grounds upon which the crime of genocide is argued. Invoking how the settler geographic imaginary of the American frontier is transplanted upon and duly fashions conceptions of Palestine, Moses writes that the claims made by “Israeli colonists trump the Palestinian right of self-determination in the minds of those who identify the Palestinians with ‘red Indians’ and associate the colonists … with their forebears who conquered the American interior.”Footnote³⁴ The International Court of Justice’s adjudication of South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel, then, is competing with the political understanding that Palestinians can be killed and dispossessed as a necessary consequence of Israeli statecraft and that Israel is within its legal and political right to kill and dispossess them.

The deliberate uncoupling of genocide from the study of [settler] colonialism in the case of Palestine not only produces an ahistorical record of the Israeli state, it also perpetuates an irrefutably exceptional Eurocentric ontology of victimhood in which “the moral caché of indigenous survivors of colonialism is less than that of [Jewish victims of Nazism].”Footnote³⁵ Indeed, Lemkin’s conception of genocidal Nazi occupation is informed by his study of colonization in the Americas: his identified second phase of genocide, the imposition of the colonizer’s “national pattern,” may “be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after the removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”Footnote³⁶

The denazification of the Palestinian, so to speak, can only proceed through the following. First, it must allow a consideration of Palestinians as people with historical agency and a diversity of political goals not defined solely by their interpolation into the afterlife of the Holocaust. And second, it must cease the allowance of any equations of Palestinians (and Arabs) with Nazis as the allegedly natural enemies of Jewish people, as well as Zionism’s forced synonymity of the existence of the state of Israel with the survival of Jewish people. Truly egalitarian assessments of genocide and the ongoing question of Palestine must transcend the moral and historical fixity of victimhood that perpetually immiserates Palestinians of their humanity, rights, and claims to self-determination and aspires, instead, towards redressing the violences of colonial modernity.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoé Samudzi

Zoé Samudzi is the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. A sociologist with a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, her research is primarily concerned with German imperialism, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and the settler international. Her work also engages visuality and violence, human remains and restitution, genocide denialism, and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession.

Notes

1 Jacob Magid, “Erdan tells UN he’ll don yellow Star of David until it condemns Hamas; Yad Vashem fumes,” Times of Israel, 31 October 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/erdan-tells-security-council-hell-don-yellow-star-of-david-until-it-condemns-hamas/. Italics of Dayan’s quotation are my own.

2 For more on the Zionist notion of the “muscular/muscle Jew” as an individual-national conception of a reborn post-World War II masculine Israeli Jew (against the stereotypically “meek, Yiddish-speaking Jew of the Eastern European shtetl”), see Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge, 2007).

3 This notion of Israel waging a war against Nazis has emerged from the statements of Israeli officials themselves. For example, in a Twitter/X post, Galit Distel-Atbaryan (now-former Israeli Minister of Information) wrote that “Gaza should be wiped off the map, and fire and brimstone on the heads of the Nazis in Judea and Samaria.” Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom, positively compared the assault on Gaza to the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II, and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said simply: “We are fighting Nazis.” In a 13 January 2024 statement marking 100 days of the ongoing war against a force attempting “to perpetrate another Holocaust against the Jews,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “Israel, the IDF and our security services are fighting a moral and just war that is without parallel, against the Hamas monsters, the new Nazis”: he claimed the IDF had allegedly “found copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf” in a Gazan tunnel, as well as “a child’s tablet with a picture of Hitler as the screensaver.” He also repeated a statement made by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at a joint press conference in Tel Aviv on 17 October 2023: “Hamas are the new Nazis” (Scholz’s sentence finishes with “Hamas is ISIS, in some instances worse than ISIS”). Prime Minister’s Office, “Statement by PM Netanyahu,” 13 January 2024, https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/spoke-press130424.

4 See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).

5 See Haifa Rashed, Damien Short, and John Docker, “Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli Genocide of Palestine,” Holy Land Studies 13 (2014): 1-23; Haifa Rashed and Damien Short, “Genocide and Settler Colonialism: Can a Lemkin-inspired Genocide Perspective Aid our Understanding of the Palestinian Situation?” International Journal of Human Rights 16, no. 8 (2012): 1142-69. For a disciplinary engagement of Palestine that was denounced as a “minimization of the Holocaust, delegitimization of the State of Israel, and repeat[ing] common themes of contemporary antisemitism,” see Amos Goldberg et al, “Israel Charny’s Attack on the Journal of Genocide Research and its Authors: A Response,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 10, no. 2 (2016): 3-22.

6 On describing the law’s inertia on matters of genocide and how it is “much easier to consider genocide in the past tense rather than contend with it in the present,” Palestinian human rights attorney Rabea Eghbariah poses the always unspoken question: “Is genocide really the crime of all crimes if it is committed by Western allies against non-Western people?” Rabea Eghbariah, “The Harvard Law Review Refused to Run This Piece about Genocide in Gaza,” The Nation, 21 November 2023, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/.

7 Ranier Schulz, “Netanyahu, the Grand Mufti and the Holocaust: Why it is Important to Get the Historical Facts Right,” The Conversation, 23 October 2015, https://theconversation.com/netanyahu-the-grand-mufti-and-the-holocaust-why-it-is-important-to-get-the-historical-facts-right-49617.

8 See Joel Fishman, “The Recent Discovery of Heinrich Himmler’s Telegram of 2 November 1943, the Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, to Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem,” Jewish Political Studies Review, 27, nos. 3–4 (2016): 77-87.

9 In “Collaboration with the Third Reich: The Wider Historical Debate and the Role of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem,” Johannes Houwink ten Cate suggests al-Husseini’s “recruitment of Muslims for the Waffen-SS clearly belongs to the most extreme form of collaboration, namely, unconditional collaboration.” Instead, I am insisting, first, on a largely tactical rather than simply antisemitic consideration of al-Husseini’s proposed collaboration animated by anti-colonial concerns around the establishment of a Jewish state, and second, that al-Husseini’s claim to be a representative of the Arab/Muslim world in toto cannot be used as a means of projecting his political alignments onto all of the region’s Arabs/Muslims and, specifically, onto Palestinians. Johannes Houwink ten Cate, “Collaboration with the Third Reich: The Wider Historical Debate and the Role of Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem,” Jewish Political Studies Review 26, nos. 3–4 (2016): 91-113. For careful historical disaggregation of Nazis’ racial ambitions for conquest from Arab anti-imperialism and how the latter was deployed in Nazi propaganda for Arab audiences, see Thomas J. Kehoe, “Fighting for Our Mutual Benefit: Understanding and Contextualizing the Intentions behind Nazi Propaganda for the Arabs during World War Two,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 137–57. For more on Islamophobic conspiracy thinking (and its racial intimacies with antisemitism), see Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, “When the Elders of Zion relocated to Eurabia: Conspiratorial racialization in antisemitism and Islamophobia,” Patterns of Prejudice 52, no. 4 (2018): 314-37.

10 Schulz, “Netanyahu, the Grand Mufti and the Holocaust.”

11 Following the Six-Day War (5-10 June 1967), the Golan Heights were occupied after capture from Syria, the West Bank (which includes East Jerusalem) was captured from Jordan, and the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip were taken from Egypt.

12 Philip Mattar, “The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Politics of Palestine,” Middle East Journal 42 (1988): 228–40; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 136; A. Dirk Moses, “Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide Studies, Holocaust Historiography, and the ‘Apocalyptic Conjuncture,’” The Historical Journal 54, no. 2 (2011): 553–83

13 While not coined by him, I am utilizing a similar critique of genocide vis-à-vis permanent security offered by A. Dirk Moses. See The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 35–43 (its introduction and definition). For more about the situation of Palestinians into a “usable past” (12) in Israeli education – i.e. a historiographic fashioning that can then be deployed for geopolitical and military ends – see Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).

14 Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 17.

15 Ibid., 80-81.

16 Even though Israel dismantled settlements and withdrew its military from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the blockade it nevertheless has maintained on Gaza’s land, sea, and air plausibly constitutes occupation.

17 While Article 51 of the United Nations Charter upholds “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations” (Israel has been a member since 1949), there is debate over whether Israel’s military actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories constitute legitimate self-defense. There are two main arguments that undermine this claim. First, the doctrine of self-defense does not apply to occupying powers and the blockade of Gaza, to many, constitutes occupation. Second, Israel’s actions in Gaza – namely an overwhelming and disproportionate retaliatory force, the collective punishment of civilians and combatants alike, and the withholding of electricity, water, and other humanitarian resources – constitute a violation of the international humanitarian law that governs military conflict.

18 Anthony Downey, Neocolonial Visions: Algorithmic Violence and Unmanned Aerial Systems (Ljubljana: Aksioma-Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana, 2023), 7.

19 Ibid.

20 Bedour Alagraa, “The Interminable Catastrophe,” offshoot, 1 March 2021, https://offshootjournal.org/the-interminable-catastrophe/.

21 Yuval Abraham, “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza.” 972 Magazine, 30 November 2023, https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/.

22 Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan, and Dan Sabbagh, “‘The Gospel’: How Israel uses AI to Select Bombing Targets in Gaza,” The Guardian, 1 December 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets.

23 Collective punishment, a war crime, describes any kind of non-individual punitive measure or sanction imposed upon all individuals of a group for actions they did not commit. Article 33(1) of the Fourth Geneva Convention states: “Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

24 Natasha Bertrand and Katie Bo Lillis, “Exclusive: Nearly half of the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise ‘dumb bombs,’ US intelligence assessment finds,” CNN, 14 December 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html.

25 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation – Analysis of Government – Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79–95; Rashed and Short, “Genocide and Settler Colonialism.”

26 Since the Nigerian government’s famine-producing blockade of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), the question of whether blockades constitute genocidal action has been a part of scholarly debates given that starvation as warfare was prohibited in Protocol I, the 1977 amendment to the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). See Mary-Noelle Ethel Ezeh, “Genocide by Starvation,” in The Nigeria-Biafra War: Genocide and the Politics of Memory, ed. Chima J. Korieh (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), 91-110.

27 The doctrine of just war theoretically guides wartime actions, in part, by the ethical principles of distinction (discernment between civilians and combatants) and proportionality (attacks should be based on legitimate military objectives and take care to not cause undue or excessive damage to civilian life or property).

28 Sari Hanafi has described the Israeli settler colonial project not as genocidal, but “‘spacio-cidal’ … in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live.” One example of this specific targeting of land is in the Israeli military’s flooding of Hamas’ tunnels near al-Shafti refugee camps in northern Gaza using water pumped from the Mediterranean Sea. This practice will pollute the soil and render it nonarable, and it will further contaminate already barely potable water in Gaza with seawater and untreated wastewater. On the concept of spacio-cide, see Sari Hanafi, “Explaining Spacio-cide in the Palestinian territory: Colonization, Separation, and State of Exception,” Current Sociology 61, no. 2 (2012): 190-205.

29 This notion of a reiterated Nakba has emerged from the statements of Israeli politicians themselves. For example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “voluntary emigrations of Gazans,” and Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter said that Israel is “now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” Summarizing these expressed goals and complementary policy, Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, stated that: “As evacuation orders and military operations continue to expand and civilians are subjected to relentless attacks on a daily basis, the only logical conclusion is that Israel’s military operation in Gaza aims to deport the majority of the civilian population en masse,” a repetition of “a long history of mass forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel.” United Nations Media Center, “Israel Working to Expel Civilian Population of Gaza, UN Expert Warns,” United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, 22 December 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/12/israel-working-expel-civilian-population-gaza-un-expert-warns.

30 Zoé Samudzi, “Against Genocide: Introduction,” The Funambulist, no. 37 (2021), https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/against-genocide/against-genocide-introduction.

31 Zoé Samudzi, “Genocide: When Does State Violence Pass the Threshold?” The Funambulist, no. 50 (2023), https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/redefining-our-terms/genocide-when-does-state-violence-pass-the-threshold.

32 For more on the relationship between juridical conceptions of humanity and imperialism see Samera Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121, no. 5 (2006): 1544-51; Walter D. Mignolo, “Who Speaks for the ‘Human’ in Human Rights?” Hispanic Issues On Line 5, no. 1 (2009): 7-24.

33 The relationship between the United States and Israel (as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and apartheid Rhodesia and South Africa) can be understood within the context of a settler international: the means through which settler colonies with complementary racial orders support one another. This is not simply reducible to good geopolitical relation, but rather an “organization of power informing all settler society policies including foreign policy,” which is how these “white settler colonies form alliances based upon recognizing each other as in a mirror.” Jimmy Johnson, “Settlers Supporting Settlers: Towards an Explanation of the US/Israel relationship,” Mondoweiss, 12 May 2015, https://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/supporting-explanation-relationship/.

34 Moses, The Problems of Genocide, 508-9.

35 A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” in Colonialism and Genocide, ed. A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (London: Routledge, 2007): 148-80. For a consideration of Hamas’ attack in relation to the 1904 uprising of the indigenous Ovaherero people in the German colony of South West Africa (present-day Namibia) and Germany’s annihilatory response, see Didier Fassin, “Le spectre d’un genocide à Gaza,” AOC, 1 November 2023, https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/10/31/le-spectre-dun-genocide-a-gaza/, and his contribution to this forum, “The Rhetoric of Denial,” Journal of Genocide Research (2024).

36 Michael A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, “Raphael Lemkin as Historian of Genocide in the Americas,” in The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence, ed. Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer (London: Routledge, 2009), 57-85.

We are Fighting Nazis Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza ns After 7 October

Irwin Cotler: Canada needs to fundamentally rethink its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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Center for Near East Policy Research

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April 3, 2024

The debate, amendment and passing of the NDP motion on Palestine on March 18 was a perfect representation of the current state of discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Canada today: chaotic, toxic, reactive and polarized; grounded in disinformation and misrepresentations; and performative rather than productive.

From a procedural standpoint, the motion made a mockery of the parliamentary process. After hours of polarized debate, it was amended significantly. These amendments were presented with mere minutes to spare, leading to parliamentarians raising concerns about the lack of debate on the substantially changed motion. Notably, the amendments were initially tabled without any French translation, characterizing the chaotic and ad-hoc nature of the process.

The substance of the debate was similarly flawed. Members of Parliament speaking in favour of the motion consistently relied on statistics provided by the Gaza Health Ministry — an arm of Hamas, a listed terrorist group in Canada. Even the text of the motion itself relies on these flawed statistics. Sadly, this is emblematic of the preponderance of disinformation and misrepresentations in current Canadian discussions on Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The ultimate result — the adoption of a watered-down motion that served primarily to inflame sectarian tensions and incentivize the anti-democratic behaviours of a domestic mob — is representative of Canada’s unproductive, performative and harmful approach to this issue.

It is clear that Canada needs a new framework for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one that is coherent, principled, fact-based and characterized by long-term strategic thinking; one that promotes both coexistence in Canada and peace in the Middle East.

This new framework should encompass four dimensions: (1) it must be informed by, and anchored in, the global context; (2) it must contribute to a new regional reality; (3) it must centre on justice and accountability in Israel and the Palestinian territories; and (4) it must involve responsible leadership here at home.

The first dimension is necessary because the global context plays a substantial role in shaping the conflict and our perceptions of it. We are in the midst of a new global struggle between liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes that are seeking to undermine liberal democracies and dismantle the rules-based international order.

The new authoritarian “axis of evil” — led by Iran, Russia and China — is using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a powerful tool to further their destabilizing agenda. They are spreading Hamas propaganda and disinformation, co-opting international institutions, weaponizing international law and directly funding, arming and supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups.

This facilitates their efforts to weaken and divide liberal democracies, undermine international norms and distract the West from their ongoing crimes — including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Uyghur genocide in China and the horrific repression of Iranian women.

This authoritarian destabilization campaign is aided by pervasive, systemic, global antisemitism, which has been used by autocrats to further their repressive ends for centuries. Antisemitism is responsible for Israel being held to higher levels of scrutiny than any other country, and enables hatred of, and lies about, Israel to spread with unparalleled ease. Canada’s new policy framework on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must both account for, and actively counter, these harmful global factors.

The second dimension is that discourse and policy on Israel and the Palestinian territories must both acknowledge and support the new regional reality in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords provide new opportunities for working towards peace. Canada should encourage these new and potential allies to play a key role in regional peace-building.

As part of this, Arab countries must take greater responsibility for supporting and aiding the Palestinian people, rather than simply criticizing Israel. They should provide funding, humanitarian aid and other forms of assistance to Gaza and the West Bank. Arab countries should also be held accountable for their cynical treatment of Palestinians within their own countries, keeping them stateless and dispossessed as a political tool against Israel.

Crucially, Canada must also work with its regional partners to counter the malign influence of Iran and its proxies — the greatest enemies of peace in the Middle East — which are currently instigating a multi-front war against Israel, an asymmetrical dynamic that is noticeably absent from Canadian discourse.

The third dimension is the most important: ensuring justice and accountability for actors on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The status quo — for international institutions, governments, the media, human rights organizations and grassroots activists — is to hold Israel to an inequitably high threshold of accountability, while allowing the Palestinian leadership to shirk accountability altogether.

While it is true that democracies can be expected to demonstrate greater adherence to international laws and norms, it is an inversion of justice to impose stringent accountability on the lesser rule-breaker, and minimal accountability on the greater rule-breaker. Basic principles of fundamental justice demand the precise opposite — graver crimes and more persistent rule-breaking must result in greater sanctions and more accountability.

In addition to being unjust, the status quo creates perverse incentive structures that facilitate a continuous cycle of hatred and violence. Although, like any other state, Israel must be held accountable for any violations of international law, it is demonized and attacked no matter what it does, which contributes to its threat perception and domestic support for leaders who are obstacles to peace.

Hamas is able to garner global sympathy no matter how abhorrent its crimes, thus enabling its continued criminality, which culminated in the heinous mass atrocities of Oct. 7. Furthermore, Hamas is incentivized to ensure maximum Palestinian casualties and suffering, because it knows that all the blame will be placed on Israel.

This informs and emboldens Hamas’s comprehensive strategy of using its own citizens as human shields, including by placing its headquarters, weapons arsenals and rocket launchers under hospitals, next to mosques and in schools.

To bring justice and accountability, Canada must dedicate vastly more resources and energy towards holding Hamas, other Palestinian terrorist groups and the Palestinian Authority accountable for their contraventions of international law, their role in the continuation and deepening of the conflict, and their repression of their own citizens.

For Hamas, this requires more than lip-service condemnations. It requires pressure to be put on its allies in Qatar, Iran, South Africa and elsewhere; the mobilization of international legal mechanisms to put Hamas, rather than Israel, in the docket of the accused; and combating the spread of Hamas propaganda and disinformation on social media and in the mainstream media.

For the Palestinian Authority, accountability means refusing to accept its continued corruption and refusing to ignore the fact that its leader is in the 19th year of his four-year term and frequently engages in antisemitic incitement and Holocaust denial.

Accountability means ensuring that terrorism is not incentivized through the PA’s infamous “pay-for-slay” program. Accountability means the media shining a light on how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority repress their own citizens. Accountability also means putting strict conditions on funding for organizations such as UNRWA, which was not only complicit in the Oct. 7 crimes against humanity, but has indoctrinated children with hate and helped to keep Palestinians stateless for decades.

The fourth and final dimension is that of responsible leadership here at home. Responsible leadership means actively combating hatred and incitement rather than merely condemning it. A simple way for policymakers, pundits, the media and activists alike to embody responsible leadership on this charged and complicated issue is by always “starting with the endpoint.”

Hopefully, Canadians broadly agree that the ideal endpoint is: (a) peaceful coexistence in Canada, characterized by lowering tensions, reducing hate and polarization, and bridging communities; and (b) peace in the Middle East, characterized by a two-state solution, with mutual acknowledgement of each other’s legitimacy — two democratic states for two peoples.

When making statements or taking policy actions, responsible leadership means stopping to consider whether those statements or actions will bring us closer to that endpoint, or move us further away from it. Divisive and polarizing motions, such as the NDP’s opposition motion, fail this test by creating greater rifts between Canadians and perpetuating the perverse incentives that feed the cycle of hatred and violence in the Middle East.

The NDP was right in one respect: now is the time to reconsider Canada’s existing policy framework on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We need a new framework, one that is focused both on peaceful coexistence in Canada and peace in the Middle East.

National Post

Irwin Cotler is the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a former minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and has been involved in Israeli-Arab peace-building for almost 50 years. Noah Lew is special advisor to Cotler and a director of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Mass Murderers and Bomb Makers: The Prisoners Hamas Wants Israel to Free

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March 29, 2024

TEL AVIV, Israel—On Monday, the U.N. Security Council approved its first resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza after the United States, which had previously vetoed such attempts, abstained from voting. Though the measure separately demanded the release of hostages Hamas abducted from Israel, it failed to condition the truce on their freedom—an omission Israeli officials say strengthened Hamas’ negotiating position and ultimately undermined progress in talks to reach a humanitarian ceasefire.

On the same day, Hamas rebuffed a U.S.-drafted and Israel-supported proposal for a temporary pause in fighting. In exchange for the safe return of 40 Hamas-held hostages, Israel had agreed to release 800 Palestinian prisoners—double the number previously floated—and allow thousands of civilians to return to northern Gaza. But negotiations in Doha, Qatar, have now stalled as Hamas hardens its demands.

In contrast to the temporary truce in November, which saw the release of hundreds of women and underage suspects from Israeli prison, Hamas now wants Israel to free prisoners serving life sentences for killing scores of civilians. Among them are the terror chiefs of multiple Palestinian resistance factions, including Hamas and its competitors.

At the top of Hamas’ wish list is Marwan Barghouti, a nationalist leader serving five life sentences for murdering Israelis and one of the most recognizable figures in Palestinian politics. The 64-year-old is a member of the Fatah faction, the political party that heads the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Barghouti’s popularity has persisted even throughout his two decades behind bars, in large part because of his affiliation with the late Yasser Arafat—the longtime leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization—and leadership during the Second Intifada. The organized wave of terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2005 killed more than 1,000 Israelis and disrupted the path to a two-state solution outlined in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Renewed discussions about a prisoner release, together with international pushes for new Palestinian leadership, have brought Barghouti’s name back to the fore in recent months. A March poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) showed a surge in support for the imprisoned Fatah leader, with respondents in the West Bank and Gaza choosing him over both PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a hypothetical presidential race.

“Barghouti is seen as someone who would not be reluctant to defend the interests of the Palestinian people through armed struggle, as he did during the Second Intifada,” Khalil Shikaki, director of the Ramallah-based PCPSR think tank, told The Dispatch. “That distinguishes him from many other secular nationalist leaders within his own political party.”

Barghouti’s violent reputation particularly sets him apart from Abbas, also a Fatah member, whom many Palestinians regard as an Israeli collaborator. But he’s also picked up followers from among Hamas’ support base in the West Bank, earning him the reputation of a unifier. Some Palestinians, amplified by Western media outlets, have hailed the terrorist leader as their movement’s “Nelson Mandela.”

So why would Hamas leaders want to free a potential political rival? “Because they are interested in being reintegrated into the Palestinian political system. They don’t want to be treated as a pariah,” Shikaki said. “In that respect, Barghouti is a very, very strong, solid ally. His release would certainly create new dynamics that would benefit Hamas considerably.”

Also on Hamas’ roster is Abdullah Barghouti (no relation to Marwan), one of Hamas’ most lethal bomb makers to date. The Kuwaiti-born terrorist was behind a spate of attacks on Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada, including a 2002 bombing at Hebrew University that killed five Americans and four others and a 2001 suicide bombing inside a Jerusalem Sbarro that killed 16 people, including seven children and a pregnant woman. He’s now serving 67 life sentences for the 66 deaths that have been tied directly to him.

“I knew there were more, but those were all we would be able to prove,” Mosab Hassan Yousef, a Hamas militant-turned-Israel Security Agency operative who helped Israel arrest scores of terrorists, wrote of Abdullah in his memoir Son of Hamas. “At his sentencing, he would express no remorse, blame Israel, and regret only that he had not had the opportunity to kill more Jews.”

Hamas has reportedly demanded the release of other key figures from the Second Intifada during the ongoing negotiations. One such terrorist, Hamas operative Abbas Al-Sayed, plotted some of the deadliest attacks of that period, including the 2002 bombing of a Passover celebration in Netanya that killed 30 civilians (several of them Holocaust survivors). Ibrahim Hamed, the former head of Hamas’ military wing in the West Bank, is serving 54 life sentences for his role in planning the spate of terrorist attacks. Ahmad Saa’dat—who from behind bars remains head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization—is serving a 30-year sentence for his involvement in the 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi.

To Yoni Ben-Menachem, an Israel-based Arab affairs expert, many of these names represent “red lines” for Israel, especially Marwan Barghouti. “He’s the symbol of terrorism in the Second Intifada,” Ben-Menachem told The Dispatch.

Along with the return of some of the most dangerous Palestinian inmates in Israeli custody, Hamas’ negotiators are now pressing for nothing short of a permanent ceasefire and Israel’s full withdrawal from the Strip. That the unrealistic demands came amid the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire is no coincidence in Israel’s eyes.

“We had negotiators in Doha trying to get an agreement to release hostages, and it’s not surprising that Hamas decided to reject the latest proposal that was put forward by the Americans,” Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who had previously been tapped to lead since-canceled meetings with U.S. officials in Washington this week, said Tuesday. “Why should they not reject it? They think they’re going to get a ceasefire without giving up the hostages, because that’s what the resolution said.”

Israeli officials and analysts are increasingly convinced Hamas and its leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, are no longer interested in a deal and are now playing for time in the hopes that building international pressure will thwart Israel’s war effort. As time goes by, Hamas is betting that its negotiating position will grow stronger.

“It’s just stalling. Sinwar wants to put the blame for the failure of the negotiations on Israel. Whenever Israel agrees to something, he puts up new demands,” Ben-Menachem said. “What he wants, Israel cannot give him. He wants to stay in power in Gaza. He wants to come out of the tunnels as the victorious hero that Israel could not defeat.”

Grassroots efforts connect Latino community amid Israel-Hamas war – opinion

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March 29, 2024

A strategic collaboration between ISRAEL-is and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) embarks on a poignant mission, extending support to families of hostages of Spanish-speaking origin, while reaching out for the first time to Latino leadership and influencers in Houston, Texas.

Houston, home to one of the largest and most influential Latino communities in the United States, with over 2.3 million individuals comprising 40% of the city’s population, stands as a testament to the cultural, economic, and social prowess of these communities. These leaders serve as pillars of progress for Houston and as beacons of inspiration for Latino communities nationwide.

At the forefront of this mission is Amos Horn (42), a Latino youth educator and tour guide originally from Argentina, who lives in Israel. His efforts to free his two kidnapped brothers, Yaniv (45) and Eitan (37), kidnapped on October 7 from Kibbutz Nir Oz, added a deeply intimate layer to the cause. This double tragedy struck deep, resonating with countless families still grappling with the anguish of hostage situations, sometimes with more than one family member held captive. My personal connection to the cause, through Amos’s father and former colleague of mine, Itzik Horn, at the Sderot Media Center that I led over a decade ago, whose health situation is deteriorating, added an intimate layer to the mission’s purpose.

The fate of the Horn brothers remained shrouded in uncertainty, with sporadic glimpses of life emerging months after their disappearance. Hostage witnesses released towards the end of November spoke of their staggering weight loss (20 kg.), casting a grim shadow over their well-being. Since then, there has been no sign of life. Amos bravely shared his family’s ordeal at various forums, from diplomatic gatherings to meetings with Houston’s legislative and Latino influencers.

He painted a vivid picture of his brothers’ zest for life, reminiscing about their shared love for soccer matches, music concerts, and full-time uncle duties to Amos’s young children, highlighting the infectious joy both brothers brought to Kibbutz Nir Oz.

Israeli soldiers walking next to the destruction caused by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7, 2023, near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, November 21, 2023. (credit: CHAIM GOLDBEG/FLASH90)

Connections with Jewish Latino youth

Despite the primary focus of our mission on engaging policymakers, media outlets, and influential figures within the Latino community, we made a deliberate effort to connect with Jewish teen leaders as well. It was during one of these interactions that Amos shared a touching anecdote about the upcoming Purim holiday. He recounted how his brothers had taken on the responsibility of organizing the Purim spiel – a traditional performance aimed at uplifting the spirits of their community at Kibbutz Nir Oz.

To illustrate this cherished memory, Amos passed around a photograph of his brothers dressed up for the Purim festivities, alongside the Kedem-Siman Tov couple, murdered in the October 7 massacre along with their three young children aged two to five years old.

Reflecting on my experience upon arriving in Houston, a stark reality greeted me as I tuned into the news channels from my hotel room. A vociferous Gaza ceasefire demonstration unfolded during the Houston mayor’s annual tradition of addressing the Muslim community during the iftar of Ramadan, marking the 25th year tradition. The protest, marked by its aggressive interruption of the mayor’s speech, highlighted discontent over the mayor’s stance on refusing to advocate for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Despite the disruptive behavior of some demonstrators, it’s noteworthy that over 2,000 attendees chose not to participate in the protest, underscoring the resilience of the broader community and the significance of the occasion.

The Israeli consul general in Houston, Livia Link-Raviv, emphasized in a recent meeting with diplomats from foreign countries the ongoing challenges facing the consulate, including regular demonstrations outside its offices that disrupt normal operations. These protests have even led to the cancellation of planned events, such as those in New Mexico and during our mission in Houston, where pressure from extreme groups against participation in specific gatherings led to annulments of events, notably an evening with young Republicans.

This mission arose at the same time as increased international pressure, especially emphasized in the statement of US Secretary of State Blinken claiming that 100% of the population in Gaza is at severe levels of acute food insecurity. This is known for a fact to be disinformation, whose sole purpose is to blame Israel for Gazans’ conditions instead of the aid distribution challenges in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas’s terrorist regime.

According to COGAT, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, since the beginning of the war, Israel has allowed the entry of more than 17,400 aid trucks into the Gaza Strip, which include more than 10,300 trucks containing more than 218 thousand tons of food.

For context, the average daily number of trucks carrying food to the Gaza Strip before the war was around 70, and the average since the beginning of March is over 125 – an 80% increase.

Narratives of antisemitism and blood libels

This new blood libel in practice allows for the prolongation of the fighting and the obfuscation of the war crime of holding 134 hostages under inhumane conditions.

The German consul at the meeting of diplomats, after hearing first-hand Amos’s story, emphasized the urgent need to balance the narrative by making the voices and stories of the families of the hostages heard, putting the survivors and witnesses of the events of October 7 at the forefront, to be heard by the general public.

It was emphasized that such narratives often lack the attention needed to provide a balanced perspective – while acknowledging the importance of Holocaust education, where survivors and eyewitnesses play a central role in shaping the narrative and fostering significant change.

Nevertheless, buoyed by the unwavering support of Latino leadership, the mission persists.

Amos’s narrative strikes a chord, prompting advocacy efforts to amplify the voices of hostage families on a national stage.

As Texas’ Hispanic/Latino population continues to burgeon, the significance of such collaborations grows exponentially, promising a future where diverse voices shape the narrative of unity and resilience.

The writer is foreign affairs manager of ISRAEL-is, an NGO.

Role of the Middle East War Correspondent

By

David Bedein

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March 29, 2024

View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building during a strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 26, 2018. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90 *** Local Caption *** אונר"א
עזה
בניין
שביתה

It is the role of a wartime journalist to convey the context of war.

The PLO makes it clear: it is in a full state of war to obliterate the Jews.

The PLO shows no pretense of recognition or reconciliation with a Jewish State in any way, shape, or form.

As a journalist who has covered UNRWA, the PLO, and its administrative arm the PA since 1987, with the assistance of Arab and Jewish reporters who are fluent in Arabic on the Phd level, I have documented that the PLO:

*Never cancelled its 1964 covenant;

*Never ratified the 1993 Oslo peace accord;

*Initiated a new school curriculum in 2000 which indoctrinates total war with the Jews;

*Enacted unprecedented legislation in 2015 that mandates a salary for life for anyone who murders a Jew.

Those who promote a “two-state solution,” which the PLO has rejected, are masters of fraud.

And then there is UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which our news and research agency has also covered since 1987, producing 25 movies shot on location in UNRWA refugee camps, along with our numerous studies of UNRWA education.

UNRWA confines five million descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948 to live the indignity as “refugees in perpetuity”, in 59 “temporary” refugee camps, brainwashed by the premise and promise of the “right of return by force of arms”, funded with a budget of 1.6 billion dollars which flow from 67 nations and 33 relief agencies, with little accountability or transparency, so that every UNRWA penny can be invested in the war on the Jews.

What can be done?

While the PA operates under the terror agenda of the PLO, UNRWA operates under the umbrella of the United Nations.

However, with the funding of the European Parliament, we have documented that the Hamas terrorist organization dominates the UNRWA teachers union and the UNRWA workers union.

Where are the world’s courts of law?

UNRWA, as a UN entity, enjoys immunity from prosecution.

However, those who work for UNRWA can be brought to justice.

I have thoroughly checked out the legalities of UNRWA.

I have been advised by our lawyers that UNWRA does enjoy immunity — as a UN entity.

That immunity does not apply to UNRWA personnel, who can be held liable for criminal prosecution.

Consider UN cars that double-park on Second Avenue in New York City. The NYPD issues tickets to the driver, not to the UN.

We now launch a campaign lawyer to sue UNRWA employees involved with these felonies:

*Murder, kidnapping, and rape.

*Arming underage children.

*Using school books which idolize murderers.

*Storing weapons, ammunition, and missiles in UNRWA schools.

*Allowing terrorists to use schools as launching pads.

*Facilitating the resale of donated medical equipment.

*Overseeing the marketing of weapons and narcotics.

*Allowing a system of UNRWA cash donations to finance organized crime.

*Building terror tunnels underneath UNRWA facilities.

*Witnessing Sex Trafficking of UNRWA personnel.

*Running youth clubs whose theme is the murder of Jews.

*Decorating UNRWA schools with murals that glorify murder.

We are learning from success in the removal of UNRWA high commissioner Peter Hansen.

We covered an international conference for UNRWA donors in 2004 in Geneva.

We asked Hansen to explain why UNRWA allows Hamas on the staff of UNRWA.

We shared with the conference our study, financed by the European Parliament, documenting that between 85% and 90% of the elected UNRWA workers and teachers unions were elected on the Hamas slate.

That trend continues to this day.

Hansen thanked me for our report and said that he saw nothing wrong with Hamas on the staff of UNRWA, saying that he does not check the religious affiliations of UNRWA personnel. Hansen’s response to me was reported on CBC.

We reported Hansen’s response to Kofi Annan and the entire United Nations Correspondents Association.

That resulted in the UN removal of Peter Hansen as the head of the UNRWA.

JUST SHOWS THAT CHANGE IS POSSIBLE AT UNRWA.

From Shushan to Tehran

By

Michael Kuttner

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March 22, 2024

Haman of Shushan and Khomeini and Raisi of Tehran are comrades in arms bound together with the same evil agenda.

The Megillah (Scroll of Esther), which we read on Purim, tells us that on the thirteenth day of the month of Nissan (the first month of the Jewish year) letters were written and sent to all the provinces of the Persian Kingdom granting the populace the right “to destroy, to slay and to exterminate all the Jews, from young to old, children and women, on one day, on the thirteenth of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their possessions.”

On 7 October 2023 (in the civil calendar), the Iranian-sponsored and funded Hamas terror organization carried out an exact replica of this directive.

The Hamas charter makes its intentions crystal clear.

”The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.” (Article 6)

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” (Preamble)

“Palestine is an Islamic land… Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be.” (Article 13)

“Zionism scheming has no end, and after Palestine, they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates River. When they have finished digesting the area on which they have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion. Their scheme has been laid out in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’.” (Article 32)

“The HAMAS regards itself the spearhead and the vanguard of the circle of struggle against World Zionism… Islamic groups all over the Arab world should also do the same, since they are best equipped for their future role in the fight against the warmongering Jews.” (Article 32)

Iranian ambitions are also perfectly transparent.

“When the arrogant powers create a sanctuary for the Zionist regime to continue survival, we shouldn’t allow one day to be added to the ominous and illegitimate life of this regime.”

“The Army will move hand in hand with the IRGC so that the arrogant system will collapse and the Zionist regime will be annihilated.”

Only someone who is completely divorced from reality could fail to perceive a common thread connecting Haman’s agenda and the ambitions of his current successors.

Yet, unbelievable as it may sound, the international community’s reaction is such that one can only conclude some sort of collective mental derangement has subverted them.

What lies behind the frenzy of condemnations, convulsive admonitions and threats of punitive policies pouring forth on a daily basis over Israel’s reactions to genocidal threats and actions?

I suggest that it has to do with the spectacle of Jews fighting back against those who plan and perpetrate pogroms. There is also the sick moral collapse of democracies which rather than standing up to and dealing with jihadist ambitions would rather wave the white flag and allow themselves to be conquered. As far as the irredeemable Jew haters are concerned their ingrained and genetically embedded biases follow an historical pattern which should not surprise anyone.

Cast your mind back for a moment to the Purim episode and recall what happened after Queen Esther “outed” Haman and his cohorts.

Once the royal decree to murder the empire’s Jews was issued at the behest of Haman, it could not, according to Persian law, be annulled. Therefore another decree was proclaimed which gave Jews the right to defend themselves against those who intended to carry out the genocidal action against them.

Thus it came to pass that on the appointed date the Jews took up arms and not only defended themselves and their communities but also took the fight to their oppressors with devastating results. Not only were the nefarious plans of the Jew-haters frustrated, but they also ensured a complete elimination of those involved.

Just imagine for a moment if the likes of Biden, Blinken, Schumer, Cameron, Macron, Wong, Albanese, plus all the other present-day critics had been alive then. They would have been convulsed with issuing indignant condemnations of “disproportionate force” being employed by the threatened Persian Jews. There would have been demands for an immediate cessation of “violence” and urgent calls for the Jews to negotiate with those preparing to carry out massacres.

It is a sign of the morally degenerate times we live in that these very people are spouting this nonsense following the horrendous and murderous events of October 7.

That is what riles and upsets the United Nations and its corrupt enablers. It is the sight of Jews/Israelis fighting back. Not only fighting back but also making sure that those who threaten murder do not live to carry out their intended actions.

Today’s terror groups use civilians as human shields in a shameful and deliberate manner intended to cause maximum casualties. Hostages are kidnapped, food aid is stolen and children indoctrinated. All these techniques are employed in order that Israel can then be subsequently blamed.

The depths to which the international community has sunk can be seen in its demand that the reward for murdering Jews and Israelis should be the establishment of yet another Islamic terror state. Making this even more absurd is the fiction of “illegally occupied territories” which should be made Judenrein and handed over to exponents of recycled revisionist lies.

Imagine someone like Chuck Schumer demanding that Mordechai resign as Prime Minister because he did not conform to what the woke progressives deemed to be acceptable.

Purim is traditionally a time when absurdity is highlighted and skits lampooning politicians are staged. This year, there is no shortage of material to choose from, and therefore, it could very well be a goldmine for fancy dress and biting dialogue.

Truth can be stranger than fiction, and plenty of examples abound.

Take, for example, the USA dropping aid packages over Gaza and killing five locals in the process. If Israel had done this, the UN Security Council would have met in an emergency session, and resolutions condemning the unprovoked aerial bombardment of innocent Gazans would have been passed. The State Department and White House would have issued strong condemnations about disproportionate responses.

Starbucks has been boycotted in Arab and Islamic countries over their perceived support of Israel. The irony, of course, is that this coffee establishment does not have any presence in Israel, but that fact does not register with the knee-jerk haters. As a result of the boycott Starbucks is sacking two thousand workers in Arab/Islamic countries. No doubt these 2,000 people now out of a job will blame Israel rather than their own politicians who managed to shoot themselves in the foot.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has admitted that they have “lost track” of Iran’s nuclear progress.

It has now been disclosed that the Biden Administration held secret talks with Iran in January in an effort to try and persuade them to restrain the Houthis from attacking shipping. We can all see what a spectacular success that has been.

A Hamas leader in Qatar claims that providing aid to Gaza is part of “financial jihad.” Those countries resuming aid to UNRWA are, therefore, assisting this jihad because UNRWA and Hamas are partners.

The lessons of Purim are crystal clear, and we dismiss them at our peril. Ignoring the nefarious plots against us is inviting disaster.

Chag Purim Sameach.

Morally Confused, living with dissonace

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March 22, 2024

I do not watch the news. It was a decision I made early on- in fact, it is just maintaining a habit. I never, ever watch the TV news. I read everything. And listen to podcasts. But I do not see those images you see on your news twice a day. I have learned that the network news is about ratings and so, to keep high ratings, titillating stories that may or may not yet be proven correct get reported. Alot of “allegedly” and “it has been reported but unverifieds” So no thank you.

Maybe then, I am out of the loop, living on another planet and perhaps out of touch. A few days ago I was reading tons of articles about how Gaza is on the verge of a mass starvation situation. Blinken just said that “100% of the Gazan population is at severe levels of food insecurity.” I do not see data to back this up here, but maybe I am the one who is willfully ignorant? Here is a WSJ article that says half of Gazans are starving. But here is another article, from the New Yorker from TWO MONTHS before that, that says 90% of Gazans are starving. These are wildly different statistics two months apart. And that implies it is getting better, not worse. So how does Blinken explain 100%?

I also see images that look like Gaza is the moon- with nothing left. I think I do need to clearly lay out something right now. At the beginning of this war, Israel made a lot of mistakes, and Israel is already admitting this. We bombed buildings, and tunnels, and we used large quantities of firepower. Because of this, most of northern Gaza is a wasteland. What the IDF is doing now, is totally different. We are smarter. There are much fewer civilian losses, despite what you hear, and much less destruction. This is a war unlike any other. We are learning, and we made mistakes. And sadly, those mistakes came at the cost of the enemy’s civilian population. Rafah will NOT end up looking like northern Gaza. There will NOT be the same civilian losses, nor the same structural losses. The IDF has a much better grasp of how to fight this war now. And also, as a general reminder, the ratio of civilian losses to combatants in this war is much lower than other wars elsewhere. And just so you can see how unreliable the news is, here is a BBC article from January stating that at least HALF of all of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed, and here is another article, from a few days ago, from an ARABIC news source that says 35% of Gazas buildings have been destroyed. So how 50% went to 35% another month into the war is beyond me. But this is the sort of mistrust I have of the media.

I have always felt that Israel will tighten the screws on Hamas in myriads of ways, but we would never let an entire population starve. And frankly, I do still believe this. I do not think that starving the Palestinians is a strategy of our government. I do know that we are getting very little cooperation from the UN and UNRWA. I do know that there are armed gangs stealing humanitarian aid. I also know that there are places where there are markets and plenty of food, (Rafah) but Northern Gaza has much worse issues with distribution. Read this. I woke to this article this morning. I read conflicting things. But at the end of the day, I guess I still trust Israel. We do not lie about things like this. At least not that I know of. And we have had to defend ourselves for all sorts of lies and things blamed on Israel that turned out to not be true. So I am reading. And waiting. I will also just suggest here, that this is why a Palestinian state is not possible yet. I honestly believe, that were this us, and the tables were turned, we would have created a civilian mechanism for distribution- the Gazans could have easily said, ok- give the aid to us, we will supervise this, and then said “families with last name letters A-G will pick up aid at this location…” But this is a population that has had nothing but abuse from the ruling clans and powers that be for decades. They only know that if they do not take and grab, they won’t get. It will get siphoned off by the ruling elite and then resold to them at three times the price. It is a self-made disaster for which (again) Israel pays the price.

Heer the IDF says there is no famine now and there will not be. This article, which you should read, says there is no limit to the amount of aid that can go into Gaza. I am remembering as far back as several months ago, that many NGOs were screaming that famine and starvation were imminent. We know why Israel would restrict cooking fuel and gas, because Hamas was using it for sinister things. But I do not really know what to believe anymore. I see both posts on “X” of abundant markets and Iftar fasts being broken with tables laden with food and at the same time children digging in the dirt for mallow. And perhaps both are true and then how do I reconcile that some people in Gaza have plenty and some are actually starving? I do not believe the pictures of skeletal children which are being posted. They are abusing these disease ridden kids and manipulating the media. And that is the other thing that everyone needs to stay aware of. There are no foreign,objective journalists in Gaza. It is a bad war zone and neither the Israeli army nor Hamas can ensure the safety of these journalists. So anything coming out of Gaza, photograph wise, story wise, is given to the world from people living there. And if you are Gazan, then you cannot report the real truth even if you want to.

I also read and saw horrible things about the IDF raid on Shifa hospital, where, just to get our cards straight, it is still a war crime for Hamas to fight and use the hospital- but that is exactly what Hamas has done again. The IDF however, said they are providing food and water to the civilians sheltering in the hospital and the IDF brought in generators for the hospital’s ER . Read this. But no one is hearing that story. And to make this war crime worse, I read this: “He says there is still a group of terror operatives holed up in Shifa’s emergency room, and the IDF is working to evacuate civilians from the area first before battling them.–“

“Terrorists holed up in the Hospital’s Emergency room.” And you and I both know the story will be spun that Israel is preventing civilians from accessing the emergency room at the hospital.

It feels to me, that at this point, no matter what we do, it is not enough, it is covered up, it is misconstrued, or manipulated. My good friend Professor Sylvia Barak Fishman wrote this amazing piece on bearing false witness today and what that looks like in this war.

One by one, Israel is finding each of the Hamas masterminds and heads of divisions. It is slow going. We have heard very little about Sinwar these days, nothing about him, nor about Mohammad Deif. Here is a very interesting article about Sinwar. Gives you a peek into how he thinks.

We have some very mixed signals coming out of America. Attached at the bottom is a NYSun article about whether or not Israel should be listening to the US when they so badly botched Afghanistan. This is an excellent article about the sort of bind the Biden administration is putting Israel in, and how the pressure put on the Biden administration is from folks who believe that October 7 was justified.. and this article that says all the West has to do is to NOT save Hamas… and how that might not be possible. Here is a WSJ article about the Democrats turning on Israel. The latest “Call me Back” podcast has a very good interview with Ron Dermer, who is going to Washington DC next week to negotiate. This is a very interesting article about Shumer’s speech and what it feels like and means to American Jews. And by the way, the last few podcasts of “Call me Back” are very worthwhile listening.

I also just want to go back to the willful acqueince of the West to the facts and figures provided by Hamas. So we know The Gazan Health Ministry is simply an arm of Hamas. In fact, there is no independent anything in Gaza, it is all under the finger of Hamas. So all figures are suspect. But this war has one of the lowest civilian to combatant death ratios and NO ONE is talking about that- instead, even President Biden is whipping out ‘30,000 killed” figures, which we cannot be certain of, when we know over 13,000 of them are terrorists. It feels very duplicitous to me. This is a must-must read article about the rot inside Human Rights establishments… Please read it.

And here is something else you may not know, the Red Cross is complicit in rewarding terror. Read this.

I found this video something that maybe you might find useful for people who know very little about this conflict except for what they see on the news.

This is a short half hour interview with our daughter Dena… talking about what she and her little family have been through. In listening to this, you can now multiply this by 3099- which is how many wounded soldiers we have here today.

This is something. you will not hear on your evening news, and this is the stuff that is keeping Israelis awake at night. Imagine, after all this, in this war, that somewhere north of here- in Israel proper, you hear this at night, under your bed.

And now for something that really messed with my head. A friend of mine and I founded the Jerusalem branch of an international network of women in the arts. It is called Saloon.There are chapters all over Europe, and also South Africa and Montreal. Last Wednesday, we hosted an evening for a new member. A young, Israel woman, working under the radar with Gazan creatives. So far they have made two videos. (well before the war) One of the Gazans, who is the main activist and person who connects the Israelis with the Palestinians, was arrested by Hamas and spent half a year in prison. He is currently in Cairo, waiting out the war with some of his family- the rest are in Rafah. So after viewing the videos we had a zoom call with this Gazan. He was articulate. He was sad. He spoke over and over again of how many Gazans hate Hamas, but have no control over their lives. He spoke about the power of art and creativity and music and dance to bridge wide gulfs between people. He spoke of the massive destruction of Gaza. And I left feeling horrible. Here- speaking to me from hundreds of kilometers away, was a Palestinian who seemed to see things clearly, and believed in working with Israelis. And Instead of hopeful I felt hopeless.

And here is a moving portrait of Michal Lubinov. She delivered a healthy baby boy and… her husband is still being held hostage by Hamas.

I have sent this once before, but it is worth re-seeing… it is four months old and who knew it would still be relevant? Over 100 locations around the world participated.

So now, to end on a lighter note, here are some fun Purim pics… of grandkids and kids.

We take Purim very seriously…

Shabbat Shalom.

Purim Sameach.

Israel Behind the News

Letter to US ambassador Lew: Has your excellency taken new steps to monitor what use is being made of these contributions to support humanitarian efforts of UNRWA that do not further violence and destruction?

Albanese Slammed For Politicising Tragedy, Where’s The Jews & More – 5 April 2024

Prime Time “Dr Phil show” featuring:..Bedein UNRWA Movies used by Dr. Phil*

“We are Fighting Nazis”: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) After 7 October

Truncated History of Palestinian Anti-Zionism and/as Nazism

Vanquishment by any Means

Disciplinary Possibilities

Disclosure Statement

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zoé Samudzi

Notes

Irwin Cotler: Canada needs to fundamentally rethink its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Mass Murderers and Bomb Makers: The Prisoners Hamas Wants Israel to Free

Grassroots efforts connect Latino community amid Israel-Hamas war – opinion

Connections with Jewish Latino youth

Narratives of antisemitism and blood libels

Role of the Middle East War Correspondent

From Shushan to Tehran

Morally Confused, living with dissonace

Column from the Director