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| DAILY ALERT |
Monday, April 25, 2022 |
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News Resources - North America, Europe, and Asia:
President Joseph Biden spoke Sunday with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel to discuss shared regional and global security challenges, including the threat posed by Iran and its proxies. Biden noted that both countries have been able to arrive at common positions on difficult matters. The President also accepted an invitation to visit Israel in the coming months. (White House) See also Bennett, Biden Discuss Iranian Demand to Remove Revolutionary Guards from U.S. Terror List Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke with President Joe Biden on Sunday and updated him on the efforts to stop the violence and incitement in Jerusalem. They discussed the Iranian issue, in particular the Iranian demand to remove the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) from the U.S. Foreign Terror Organization list. Israel clarified its position that the IRGC is the largest terrorist organization in the world. (Prime Minister's Office) The U.S. and Israel will hold a new round of strategic talks this week focusing on the Iranian nuclear program and countering Iran's activity in the region, Israeli and U.S. officials said. The Biden administration has recently started discussing a scenario in which the nuclear deal isn't revived. Israel is pressing the administration to cooperate on a "Plan B" in case that happens. Israel's national security adviser Eyal Hulata will arrive in Washington later this week for meetings with his White House counterpart Jake Sullivan. (Axios) News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:
Early on Friday, hundreds of violent rioters began mass riots on the Temple Mount that included stone throwing and setting off fireworks. Despite the riots, police did not respond in order to enable worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque to complete the prayer. The rioters then began hurling rocks in the direction of the Western Wall, where Jewish prayers were also taking place. As the violence intensified, police were forced to respond with riot dispersal means in order to push the rioters back. We call on all regional and international actors to condemn this violence, reject fake reports, and contribute to maintaining calm during the upcoming days. (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) See also It Is the Terrorist Organizations Who Endangered Muslim and Jewish Worshippers in Jerusalem Minister of Foreign Affairs Yair Lapid said Sunday: "In the past three weeks...during Ramadan, terrorist organizations have been trying to hijack the Al-Aqsa Mosque in order to create an outbreak of violence in Jerusalem, and from there, a violent conflict across the country. Hamas and Islamic Jihad extremists burst into Al-Aqsa Mosque in the early mornings, again and again. They brought weapons into the mosque. They threw rocks and explosives from within it, and used it as a base to incite violent riots. It is not Israel that endangered worshippers - it is the terrorist organizations who endangered them." "We have no plans to divide the Temple Mount between religions. We call on Muslim moderates, on Muslim states, to act against this fake news....During Ramadan, Israel ensured that hundreds of thousands of Muslims could go to the Temple Mount and pray at Al-Aqsa....Despite attempts to stoke violence, we have done and continue to do everything to enable peaceful prayer." (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Israel on Sunday shut its border crossing with Gaza, blocking the entry of 12,000 Gazan workers, following three rocket launches from Gaza at Israel on Friday and Saturday. (Ha'aretz) See also Palestinian Rocket Falls Short, Wounds Four Gazans - Anna Ahronheim A Palestinian rocket fired at Israel on Friday fell short and landed near a residential area of Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, seriously injuring one Palestinian and lightly wounding three others. (Jerusalem Post-Times of Israel) See also Nothing Happens in Gaza without Hamas Approval - Danny Zaken Hamas claims it was not responsible for the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, but nothing happens in Gaza without Hamas approval. It is Hamas that is sending the supposedly "wayward" organizations to launch the rockets. (Globes) Israel fired dozens of artillery shells early Monday at targets in Southern Lebanon, two hours after a rocket fired from there landed in an open field in western Galilee. (Ynet News) On April 17, 2022, official PA TV broadcast a prayer by a Palestinian imam in the Al-Ain Mosque in El-Bireh: "Grant us victory over the infidels.... Allah, delight us with the conquest and liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque....Allah, delight us with the extermination of the evil Jews." (Palestinian Media Watch) A Palestinian sparked a social media firestorm on March 21 when he posted footage of himself setting a mezuzah parchment on fire on TikTok. The man is shown tearing the mezuzah off the doorframe, removing the parchment inside and setting it on fire - all with a big smile on his face. (Israel Hayom) See also Double Standards: Video of Palestinian Who Destroyed a Mezuzah Went Viral - Foreign Minister Yair Lapid A video that went viral on TikTok shows a young Palestinian who destroyed a mezuzah - which contains Hebrew verses from the Torah and is affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes. When you watch this video, think about what would happen if there was a similar video of a young Israeli who did exactly the same thing to a Koran or to a picture of the Prophet Muhammad. (Twitter) Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis:
Total calm on the Palestinian front is impossible. On the one hand, a comprehensive peace agreement according to a two-state solution is unfeasible. On the other, the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem can't accept the existing situation as permanent. This leaves us with two possible courses of action: either examining alternative solutions to the conflict and avoid obsessing over the only direction pursued since 1993 or "managing the conflict." Managing the conflict requires Israel to understand the interests of the other actors. The leadership in Gaza understands that its rule is at risk if it fails to improve, by even a little bit, the state of infrastructure, employment, energy, and water resources. Israel's current policy, which both facilitates a controlled increase in the number of Gazan workers that enter the country and infrastructure projects, is the right move. The silent majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, as well as the Palestinian security apparatus, can put up with Israeli military operations as long as they are relatively focused and as long as the number of fatalities stays low. Israel cannot give in to the rioters. But if the purpose is to "manage the conflict," the trick is to avoid actions whose cost far outweighs their benefits. The writer is a former head of Israel's National Security Council. (Ynet News) On April 16, 2022, the New York Times decried the Israeli "killings" of 14 Palestinians "in response" to attacks that killed 14 Israelis. Seemingly, a case of tit-for-tat. However, the vast majority of the 14 Palestinians were armed terrorists. Raja Abdulrahim's April 16 article, entitled "Palestinians Decry Israeli Raids as Collective Punishment," dripped with empathy and photographs of Palestinian civilians, particularly mothers and children, who fear Israeli counterterrorist raids. She reported that Mohammad Zakarneh, 16 (17, by most accounts), was killed "heading home to break his Ramadan fast," while omitting that Palestinian Islamic Jihad tweeted a picture of him wearing a PIJ headband and holding a photo of himself with an assault rifle. How can the Times ignore the many armed terrorists, members of Palestinian terrorist organizations, when their local obituaries include the fighters' pictures in uniform or with weapons? Abdulrahim's article includes a photo of a martyrs' wall in Jenin, taken by a Times photographer. The caption of the photo claims that "some are civilians." But upon enlarging the picture, not one civilian can be found. All 14 poster obituaries showed the dead men holding weapons or belonging to various terrorist organizations or standing in Jerusalem to defend the Al Aqsa Mosque. The writer served 25 years in senior posts in AIPAC in Washington and Jerusalem, and as Israel's Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington. (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Pro-Israel organizations have submitted nearly two million examples of repression of Jews and violations of their human rights to the UN Human Rights Council's Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past three months. The COI was established last year as an open-ended inquiry into the conflict. The inquiry called for submissions about the "root causes" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including evidence of human rights violations, such as racial and religious discrimination and repression with "no temporal restrictions," meaning they can be from before Israel was established. The organizations gathered names of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust victims and Jews who fled persecution and ethnic cleansing in the Middle East and North Africa. They also wrote about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini's collaboration with the Nazis and his role in inciting mass violence against the Jewish people, such as in the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Iraq. Palestinian Media Watch and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) submitted photos, videos and documents detailing decades of Palestinian incitement to violence against Jews, as well as Palestinian efforts to erase Jewish history and terminate the Jewish state, and the Palestinian Authority's "martyr payments" to families of terrorists. Israel objects to the COI and will not cooperate with it. (Jerusalem Post) See also The Newest Anti-Israel UN Action Must Be Challenged - Now - Anne Bayefsky (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) The building in Jerusalem's Old City known today as the Petra Hotel, near Jaffa Gate, which the Jewish Ateret Cohanim association purchased from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate 20 years ago, is currently subject to an international campaign to prevent any Jewish presence at the site. However, historical research shows that the hotel was Jewish-owned from the first half of the 19th century until 1931. During the British Mandate, the hotel was a magnet for both Jewish and British leaders. In 1918, the cornerstone of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was laid there. The 1929 Arab riots ultimately led the hotel's owner at the time, Yerachmiel Amdursky, to abandon the Amdursky Hotel. According to Hebrew University Professor Emeritus Ruth Kark, the original hotel was established by the Amzaleg family who made aliyah to Israel from Gibraltar. The family maintained ownership of the property until 1895, with it being reopened as the Amdursky Hotel in 1903. Deputy Jerusalem Mayor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, herself an immigrant from Gibraltar, has embarked on an international media campaign to fight back against attempts to prevent the hotel's transfer to Ateret Cohanim. (Israel Hayom) Analysis of the PA's expenditures in 2021 shows that, per capita, it spends 33 times more paying terror rewards than it spends on health services for the Palestinian population. It spends 11 times more paying terror rewards than it spends on education of Palestinian children, and twice as much as it spends on benefits for needy Palestinians. In 2021 the PA spent $193 million on terrorist prisoners and released terrorists and another $78 million, at least, on wounded terrorists and the families of dead terrorists. These sums were paid to 5,000 prisoners, 12,000 released prisoners and 40,000 families of dead terrorists. The writer served for 19 years in the IDF Military Advocate General Corps and was director of the Military Prosecution in Judea and Samaria. (Palestinian Media Watch) Jonathan Elkhoury, an Arab Israeli Christian, has made it his mission to debunk myths about Israel's Christian minority. Five years ago, Elkhoury formed a group of Israeli minorities - Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouin - who were interested in getting more involved in society, including serving in the Israel Defense Forces. "Now we have so many that are just waiting to go and speak," he said. When Israeli minorities appear on campuses that have anti-Israel activists and they defend the Jewish state, "it shakes their whole lives and beliefs." Christians make up 2% of Israel's population, around 160,000 people. "Christian society is one of the most successful minorities. We have doctors, lawyers, judges....There is no glass ceiling." Elkhoury said 1/3 of Christian teens join military service or the police. (Jerusalem Post) Observations: Instead of Relying on Rogue States like Russia for Energy, the West Should Look to Israel and Its Democratic Partners - Amb. Dore Gold (Los Angeles Jewish Journal)
The writer is president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. |
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