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Thursday, July 21, 2022 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
Human Rights Watch and Lawyers for Justice submitted an overview of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment by Palestinian government authorities in the West Bank and Gaza to the Committee Against Torture. Years of research indicate that the PA and Hamas authorities routinely mistreat and torture Palestinians in detention. A range of security services have used beatings, including lashing and whipping of the feet of detainees, and forcing detainees into painful stress positions for prolonged periods, including using cables or ropes to hoist up arms behind the back. Security forces mistreat and torture both in order to punish and to intimidate critics and opponents, including those detained for social media posts, critical journalism, or membership in rival political movements or student groups. The habitual, deliberate, widely known use of torture by Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and in Gaza has been used over the years with no action taken by senior officials to stop these abuses, make these practices systematic. They also indicate that these practices amount to government policy. (Human Rights Watch) Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer said on Monday, "I do not believe the policy of the Biden administration is to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. I think it is to contain a nuclear armed Iran." "The deal was so bad because it leaves them with the nuclear infrastructure, doesn't remove it....At the end of the day, you only have two choices: either Iran gets nuclear weapons, or you take military action to stop them." "Israel has taken out two nuclear programs [in Iraq and Syria], and it's Israel 2, the rest of the world 0. And unfortunately, I don't see that the United States is going to take care of this situation in Iran for us, so it comes down to really one of two choices: either we're going to have to take action, or the people of Iran are going to rise up and throw out this regime that they despise." (JusttheNews) Iran's intelligence minister and the Revolutionary Guard's intelligence chief this month decided to curb their rivalry and posed for a joint photograph, speaking to the anxiety at the highest levels of the Iranian establishment about an uptick in attacks in Iran attributed to Israel. "It feels as if Israel has established a large-scale organization in Tehran and freely runs its operations," said a reformist politician. "Israel is clearly targeting Iran's 'highly secure' image." Israel's national security adviser Eyal Hulata said last week, "We've acted quite a lot in Iran over the past year." "Iran's policy remains to work with its proxy forces and we will not initiate any attacks against Israel if Israel doesn't attack Lebanon [Hizbullah is Iran's main proxy force]," said a regime insider. "It's not wise for us to fight with Israel. And Zionists also show teeth to attack." Former Guards commander Mohammad-Ali Jafari last month referred to the enemy's "psychological operations" that create the perception of Israeli involvement in attacks "that have not been carried out by them." "Who gives information to Israelis? Those inside the system must be doing it," said Ali, a bazaar merchant. "We feel safe but then who knows; maybe the system is falling apart from inside similar to the USSR." (Financial Times-UK) Alexander Dobrindt, who heads the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), told Bild on Wednesday: "Putin's brutal missile fire on Ukraine shows Germany needs an Iron Dome based on the Israeli model as soon as possible, offering maximum protection against air attacks." The CSU has 45 seats in the Bundestag and is aligned with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). (Daily Express-UK) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Ismail Nimer, 44, a Palestinian from the West Bank city of Ramallah who holds a permit to work in Israel, stabbed an Israeli man with a screwdriver on a bus in Jerusalem on Tuesday. Ynet news photographer Meshi Ben Ami, who was passing by, shot and neutralized the attacker. Prime Minister Yair Lapid said, "I congratulate the Ynet photographer who happened to be at the scene and acted resolutely to neutralize the terrorist and prevent injury to other people." (Times of Israel-Ynet News) Israeli security forces have broken up a Palestinian terrorist network in the West Bank's Nablus region in recent months, the IDF said on Thursday. Among those arrested is Aalam al-Raee, 42, a member of Fatah's militant Tanzim faction, who was involved in the killing of Israeli soldier Staff Sergeant Osher Damari in Jenin in 2006. Al-Raee took part in dozens of shootings targeting IDF troops and setting up remote-controlled explosives against security forces. He was also involved in shooting attacks at the ancient Jewish shrine in Nablus. (Ynet News) Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz toured the Lebanese border with the IDF Northern Command on Tuesday. Prime Minister Lapid said, "Israel is interested in Lebanon being a stable and prosperous neighbor that is neither a platform for Hizbullah terrorism nor an Iranian tool....Hizbullah's aggression is unacceptable and is liable to lead the entire region into an unnecessary escalation....The State of Israel is taking action against all of Iran's proxies in the region and beyond, and will continue to do so." Defense Minister Gantz said, "Israel is ready to do much for its neighbors' prosperity and is prepared to take action at any time to protect its citizens....Lebanon and its leaders know very well that if they choose the path of confrontation, they will be hurt and get burned severely." (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) President Biden's visit to eastern Jerusalem, without Israeli accompaniment or an Israeli flag on his car, was not meant to send a political message about the status of Jerusalem, U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides said on Monday. "The capital of Israel is Jerusalem. The president said it, I said it, it is the position of the U.S." Biden's visit to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem on Friday was "a healthcare event....It had nothing to do with the status of Jerusalem....Those who want to make it political, that's their problem. It was about giving money to these hospitals." (Jerusalem Post) The foreign ministers of the EU member states agreed on Monday to renew the EU-Israel Association Council, an annual high-profile meeting between European foreign ministers and their Israeli counterpart to promote partnership on trade and foreign relations. The meetings stopped in 2013 due to pressure from pro-Palestinian groups. (Ha'aretz) A Swedish court on July 14 convicted former Iranian regime official Hamid Noury, 61, for his part in the mass execution and torture of political prisoners in 1988 at the Gohardasht Prison in Karaj, Iran. Noury, who was arrested at a Stockholm airport in 2019, was sentenced to life in prison. This verdict opens the door for the families of the victims of the 1988 massacre to seek justice in the courts of Western countries against other perpetrators. (Jerusalem Post) As of the end of June 2022, inflation in Israel was 4.4%, the highest rate since 2008, but less than half the 9.1% in the U.S. and 9.4% in the UK. The Bank of Israel found that when natural gas prices began rising on world markets in the second quarter of 2021, the energy component rose in Israel more moderately because the price of Israel's natural gas is fixed in long-term contracts. (Globes) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Iran Prime Minister Yair Lapid said last week, "Iran says we can bring the war to your doorstep, because you will never bring it to ours....This is not how it's going to play [out]....If the Iranians are bringing war to our doorstep, then they're going to find war at theirs." Dr. Thomas Kaplan, noting that Iran's revolutionary regime is prone to overreach, contends that credible capability backed up by straight talk would work best with today's Iran. Israel should tell the Iranians, in a language they understand: "We are as much a part of the Middle East as you are. And we know the rules. We shall do to Iran as Ashurbanipal did to the Elamites. And as the Babylonians and Medes did to Nineveh. Many Jews may no longer get the references to dismantling empires, but I'm quite confident the Iranians will." "The smart move for Iran is not to play chess with Israel, but to throw away the chessboard and come to a 'grand bargain' with the Jewish state. It's obvious. Iranians and Israelis are natural allies, and the benefits to Iran would be enormous." (Ha'aretz) Iran will roll back its nuclear program only if convinced that it is futile to seek a nuclear bomb because the U.S. military will ultimately prevent Tehran from succeeding. Iran's nuclear program is reportedly now so advanced that it needs less than a month to produce sufficient highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. The relationship between an explicit U.S. military option and successfully halting Iran's nuclear program diplomatically was elaborated in a December 2021 joint statement by seven experts including former Obama defense secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta and former Obama CIA director David Petraeus. They declared that "[w]ithout convincing Iran it will suffer severe consequences if it stays on its current path, there is little reason to hope for the success of diplomacy....We believe it is vital to restore Iran's fear that its current nuclear path will trigger the use of force against it by the United States." The statement called on the Biden administration to undertake military exercises, pre-positioning, and other "steps that lead Iran to believe that persisting in its current behavior and rejecting a reasonable diplomatic resolution will put to risk its entire nuclear infrastructure." Congress must quickly urge Biden to demonstrate a more explicit U.S. military threat that Iran rejecting a reasonable diplomatic resolution will result in the destruction of Tehran's current nuclear infrastructure, rather than in Tehran gaining a nuclear weapon. The writer, a former U.S. State Department attorney, is a law professor at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (National Interest) Many people who should know better assume that political leaders obscure the goals they wish to achieve, even though the historical record suggests the wisdom of taking them at face value. Clearly the world should have heeded Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitism during his rise to power in Germany in the 1930s, and Osama bin Laden's declaration of jihad against America in 1996. Despite the sheer volume of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements emanating from Iran's two supreme leaders in the 43 years since the Islamic revolution, the notion that Tehran's rulers seek the destruction of Israel has often been belittled. The Islamic Republic emblazons "Death to Israel" on banners in official processions, fires ballistic missiles against targets shaped like the Star of David, displays and flight-tests ballistic missiles with genocidal slogans against Israel in Hebrew, and struck a mock-up of Israel's nuclear reactor with drones and ballistic missiles in a military drill. Some Iranian media outlets have even taken to calling the country's medium-range ballistic missiles "Israel-hitting missiles." The name of the foreign-operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the Quds Force, with "Quds" meaning "Jerusalem" in Arabic. In the 1980s, Ayatollah Khomeini created Quds Day, a holiday to celebrate the impending liberation of Jerusalem, filled with parades and fiery speeches against Israel. The writer is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (Atlantic) Palestinians When Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed during Palestinian firefights with Israeli forces in Jenin, where were the Palestinian police? Jenin is in Area A, under full Palestinian security control. No one is supposed to be brandishing weapons besides the Palestinian police, under signed agreements with Israel. Israeli security forces only go into Jenin because the Palestinian Authority security forces aren't doing their job. The West has paid millions to bolster the Palestinian security forces for nearly 30 years since Oslo. Yet there were no Palestinian police securing the scene where Shireen Abu Akleh was shot. The PA has abdicated its role to provide security in all of Area A, and has let Jenin and other areas turn into hotbeds of terrorism. If the PA had taken responsibility for the security role it had agreed to take, Shireen Abu Akleh would likely still be alive today. (Algemeiner) During his four-day visit to Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia, President Biden effectively shelved any efforts at actively pursuing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the duration of his presidency. The U.S. has all but uncoupled Israel from the Palestinians, following President Trump and centering Israeli policy around Arab normalization and regional integration. (Ha'aretz) Promises to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have bedeviled many recent U.S. presidents. On his first trip to the Middle East since taking office, President Joe Biden has made clear he is not planning to repeat the same mistake. "When Biden talks about Israel, his focus is not on Israel's relationship to the Palestinians, it's about Iran" and other issues, said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. "Palestinians are an afterthought in the region." "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict sort of gets left behind in that broader message, not in a sense that it's ignored, but it falls further down the list of priorities," said Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, director of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Program at the U.S. Institute for Peace. The Palestinian Authority hoped Biden would reopen the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, closed in 2018, that had provided diplomatic and humanitarian services to the Palestinians. More importantly, it symbolized America's recognition of Palestinian claims to eastern Jerusalem. But the plan to reopen the consulate appears to have stalled. The move is opposed by Israel, which views Jerusalem as its capital, and the Biden administration has said it can't reopen the consulate unless Israel signs off on the plan. "They don't want to wade into those waters. They view it as too much of a headache," said a person familiar with the matter. Senior White House officials "learned their lesson from the Obama administration in terms of losing political capital [on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], and they want to invest their political capital elsewhere." (Newsweek) The Palestinian Authority's security forces are no match for those of Hamas, which easily booted the much larger PA/PLO/Fatah forces out of Gaza in 2007. That is why calls for an independent Palestinian state are empty gestures unless they confront the security challenge. PA security forces combat Hamas' efforts in the West Bank but could not do so alone, without Israeli intervention. Without IDF activity in the West Bank, there's little doubt that Hamas would steadily gain power. Hamas control of the West Bank would mean that Islamists in Jordan would have a base for political and terrorist activities that would quickly threaten stability there. And just as Gaza is a base for terrorist activities against Israel, so would the West Bank become one. That would be far more dangerous due to the geography: the West Bank is adjacent to Israel's international airport and it looks down on the coastal plain where most of Israel's population and industry are located. The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. (Council on Foreign Relations) A new public opinion poll from Gaza in June shows 74% of Palestinians oppose sharing Jerusalem with Israel. Almost two-thirds of Gazans believe they cannot count on the U.S. and should turn to Russia or China instead. 63% believe that maintaining good relations with Iran is important. 55% say the top Palestinian priority is to reclaim "all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea." 58% assert that the conflict with Israel should not end, even if a two-state solution is achieved, and should continue until all of historic Palestine is liberated. 73% agree that any compromise with Israel should be temporary until the restoration of historic Palestine. (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) Other Issues They said the Abraham Accords were an empty PR stunt by the Trump administration, and that once someone else was in charge in the White House, the old diplomatic orthodoxy would return, whereby any real engagement between Israel and the Arab states would be conditional on the Palestinian issue. During his visit to Israel last week, President Biden made it clear that regional cooperation between Israel and the Arab regimes was at the top of his agenda. The Jerusalem Declaration he signed Thursday called "to expand the circle of peace to include ever more Arab and Muslim states." There will be those who will continue to think that normalization is reversible and that at some point the Emiratis and Saudis will walk away. But in the last two years, we've had periods of tension around the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount and an all-out war in Gaza, and not a peep has been heard from that direction. So far, it seems they are not conditioning ties with Israel on the situation of the Palestinians, and there's no indication it will change in the foreseeable future. In the real world, the Israeli-Arab conflict is over and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict no longer warrants the support, sympathy and political capital it may once have enjoyed. (Ha'aretz) The new UN Commission of Inquiry report on human rights violations committed by Israelis and Palestinians makes no serious attempt to document war crimes committed by Hamas-led militant organizations, such as the use of human shields and child soldiers. UN investigators have difficulty processing any information that points toward misconduct by Palestinian armed factions. The writer is a research analyst at the Long War Journal, a project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. (1945) Nine European countries declared on July 12 that they would continue backing the Palestinian NGOs designated by Israel last year as terrorist organizations. Prof. Gerald Steinberg, founder of the NGO Monitor, said: "To make sense of the furious reaction to the Israeli government's designation of six Palestinian NGOs...as prohibited terrorist fronts, it is necessary to understand the political and ideological context." Behind the "non-governmental" label, the network is an integral part of Palestinian strategy, and for at least 20 years, has received core funding from foreign governments (primarily Western European, including the EU) in return for influence and information. Under cover of civil society, the NGOs cooperate with their European sponsors, promoting soft-power warfare targeting Israel, including the apartheid and war-crimes campaigns. The Israeli designation constitutes a major threat for actors invested in the NGOs and their political campaigns." Steinberg added, "When European officials say they see 'no evidence' of the terror links of their Palestinian NGO clients, they are ignoring numerous open-source verifiable examples." As long as money is bestowed on bad actors, Palestinians cannot possibly create a "civil society" of any sort, let alone a free and democratic one. (Jerusalem Post) There were 189 terror incidents against Israelis in June - more than six per day. These included 117 attacks with petrol bombs, 42 with pipe bombs, 16 arson attacks, 11 shootings and two stabbings. There was also a rocket attack directed at the city of Ashkelon. The BBC failed to report almost any of these, though it was very quick to record injuries or fatalities which result from Israel's counter-measures. BBC News reported just 1% of the terror attacks against Israelis, but it reported 89% of the resulting actions by Israel. Few aspects of the BBC's editorial stance better illustrate its role in fanning the flames of anti-Israel feeling - and thus, indirectly, fanning the flames of anti-Semitism. This cavernous imbalance in reporting damages Israel and harms Jews, because of the blowback on Jewish communities. That Israelis experienced more than six terror incidents per day in June is the kind of context that is vital to enable BBC viewers to make a fair judgement on Israeli actions. Its omission massively manipulates reality in favor of Israel's enemies. That is immoral. (Jewish Chronicle-UK) See also BBC News Coverage of Terrorism in Israel - June 2022 - Hadar Sela (CAMERA UK) For years, the New York Times has been incorrectly depicting Israel as America's most expensive foreign partner. Yet in recent years, America has poured far more money into attempts to secure and rebuild Iraq ($2 trillion) and Afghanistan ($1 trillion). Military assistance to Israel runs about $30 billion over ten years, a bargain by comparison. Moreover, in 2022, the U.S. has awarded $7 billion in aid to Ukraine, far more than it sends to Israel. In addition, if one accounted properly for all the money America has spent to defend Japan, Korea, Germany, and Kuwait, those sums would also be larger. (Algemeiner) Weekend Features 80 years ago, a group of starving Jewish scientists and doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto were collecting data on their starving patients in the hope that their research would benefit future generations through better ways to treat malnutrition, and they wanted the world to know of Nazi atrocities. They recorded their findings in a book titled Maladie de Famine (in English, The Disease of Starvation: Clinical Research on Starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942), recently rediscovered in the Tufts University library. The book records how starvation was used as a weapon of oppression and annihilation as the Nazis were systematically exterminating all Jews in their occupied territories. Physicians in the ghetto estimated that Jews were able to consume 800 calories a day through a combination of rations and smuggling. That's about half the calories volunteers consumed in a study on starvation conducted near the end of World War II by researchers at the University of Minnesota, and less than a third of the average energy needs of an adult male. On July 22, 1942, Nazi forces entered the ghetto and destroyed the two hospitals. Patients and some of the doctors were killed outright or deported to be gassed. With their own demise approaching, the remaining doctors met secretly, transforming their data into a series of research articles. By October, 300,000 Jews from the ghetto had already been gassed, and another 100,000 had been killed through forced starvation and disease. Merry Fitzpatrick is Research Assistant Professor of Nutrition Science and Policy and Irwin Rosenberg is Professor Emeritus of Nutrition and Medicine at Tufts University. (The Conversation) Observations: Israeli Expert: Iran Has Already Crossed the Nuclear Threshold - David Isaac (JNS)
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