Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 05, 2015

Michael Oren names a villain (Mike Lumish)

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has recently published his highly anticipated memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide.

In the weeks and months leading up to the publication much chatter arose suggesting that Oren primarily blamed US President Barack Obama for the deterioration of US-Israeli relations during Obama's tenure. Oren's recent articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy raised very serious concerns about Obama's foreign policy competency and his friendliness toward America's foremost ally in the Middle East, the Jewish State of Israel.

Those articles raised expectations concerning the book.

Therefore, many people are asking themselves "who is the villain?"

The Primary Question

Over the years, Barack Obama has nurtured an animosity among pro-Israel / pro-Jewish people throughout the world for his support of political Islam and his apparent eagerness to welcome a nuclear-armed Iran as a strategic partner to the United States... despite the fact that Iran is a Muslim-authoritarian theocracy that likes to hang Gay people from cranes.

Many of us who follow the conflicts in the Middle East want to know why Obama supports the Muslim Brotherhood and the forthcoming Iranian bomb?

As Ambassador to the US, Oren is used to fielding all sorts of questions concerning Israel. One question that he found interesting, and I paraphrase, is this:

Is it easier to explain Americans to Israelis or Israel to Americans?

He suggests that it is much harder to explain America - or, at least, the current American president - to Israelis than the other way around.

For Israelis, but also for many alert diaspora Jews, Obama's support for the Muslim Brotherhood is alarming and unfathomable given the fact that the Brotherhood is the parent organization of both Hamas and al-Qaeda and it called for the conquest of Jerusalem during Muhammad Morsi campaign rallies.

The Muslim Brotherhood is, in fact, a genocidal organization because it contemplates a second Holocaust against the Jews of the Middle East, via the conquest of Israel, and it supported Nazi Germany and the Nazi cause during, and after, World War II.

Thus, Oren writes:

"Most challenging to explain to Israelis was Obama's support for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. Contrary to the assurances I had received that the administration would not engage the Isamist movement, the State Department formally initiated ties with Brotherhood leaders in January 2012. Six months ater, after the election of the movement's leaders, Mohammed Morsi, to the presidency - by just over 51 percent of th vote - those contracts became an embrace."

This is a question that concerned Jews - aside from the ideologically blinkered - have been grappling with for years. Although Obama's supporters, and particularly his Jewish supporters, refuse to acknowledge the obvious, the fact remains that the President of the United States supports a movement - political Islam - that oppresses women, is chasing Christians out of the Middle East, despises Gay people, is destroying antiquities, and screams from the hilltops for the blood of the Jews.

The fundamental question that Oren seeks to answer is, how is this possible?

The Cairo Speech of 2009

Whether or not the Cairo speech is the most important speech in the career of Barack Obama, it is the one wherein he endeavored to "reset" the American relationship to the Islamic world... as if there is any such monolith.

Concerning the speech, Oren writes:

More passionately than ever, he described his personal connections with Muslims and his conviction that "Islam is part of America." He reiterated his vision of a new era of understanding between the United States and Muslims based on "mutual interests and respect" and the shared American and Quranic values of "justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

Oren suggests that if you wish to understand Obama's foreign policy in regards the Middle East then the Cairo speech is key. Unlike President George W. Bush, Oren claims that Obama was intent on supporting authentic, democratically-elected Muslim leadership. Whereas Bush hoped to impose democracy, Muslim or otherwise, onto the Arab-Muslim Middle East, Obama was intent on taking what he considered a more "enlightened" and respectful approach grounded in his education at the feet of post-colonial professors such as Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi in places like Columbia University and Harvard.

The events around the Cairo speech presaged what was to come. Over Hosni Mubarak's objections, Obama invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the speech despite the fact that the Brotherhood has generally been considered an enemy of Egyptian governments since the 1920s. However, Mubarak represented old-school Cold War-style Arab-Nationalist dictatorships of the sort that Obama opposes in contradistinction to the new-school democratically elected "authentic" Islamists which Obama supports.

While opposing secular dictatorships is certainly within the liberal tradition, if Obama is a liberal and liberals support freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and social justice, then why does Barack Obama support the Ayatollahs and the Brotherhood?

The answer, according to Oren, is that both are seen by the president as representing authentic expressions of Muslim democracy. Many Christian Copts may have been kept from voting at the point of a rifle by Brotherhood members and Iran's "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Khamenei, was not democratically elected and, in fact, was a product of the anti-American 1979 revolution. Nonetheless, according to Oren, Obama concluded that they represent the true democratic will of the Muslim world, along with other milder Islamists like Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

The Post-Colonialists

Obama's instincts are not his alone.

The Cairo speech is an expression of American post-colonialism as derived from an important strand of western academia typified by the late professor of literary criticism, Edward Said, and historian Rashid Khalidi, among others.

Obama grew up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and through the decay of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States toward the end of the twentieth-century. He attended university at a time when veterans of both those fights held influence and tenureship throughout the Western academe and who generally looked upon American and Western influence throughout the non-western world as one of imperialism, racism, and theft of natural resources.

Oren says this:

Their ideas found fullest expression in Orientalism, a book published in 1978 by Edward Said, a Columbia literary critic and spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Said denounced Middle East experts - the Orientalists - as "racist, imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentic," and accused them of abetting the region's conquests by the West. Only by identifying "wholeheartedly with the Arabs" and becoming "genuinely engaged and sympathetic... to the Islamic world" could these scholars redeem themselves. They had to shun traditional Middle Eastern professors such as Bernard Lewis and reject Israel, which Said maligned as the ultimate Orientalist project.

Thus according to Said and any number of currently working academics - including Jewish ones who claim to be pro-Israel - Israel represents a western, racist imperial intrusion onto the land of other people.

So, really, just who is the villain here?

The Villain

If anyone intends to use Oren's book to castigate or malign the Obama administration there is plenty of material here to mine.

Do not be shy. Go right ahead.

I do not need to draw bullet points, just go into the index and choose the pet peeve of your choice.

{Mine is the apology to Erdogan which Oren actually approved of.}

An important truth of this book, however, is that while Oren is unsurprisingly kinder to Benjamin Netanyahu than he is to Barack Obama, he is also more than fair to Barack Obama. This is not a book intended to smear anyone. Oren is a well-respected historian and I, as someone who follows the conflict closely, found his portrayal of his central characters, including himself, to be decent.

Obama is not a villain in this treatment because the writer, in terms of Obama versus Netanyahu, is not dealing in Good Guys versus Bad Guys. He is doing his best to be fair while, simultaneously, keeping an eye on his own political future, in the coming years, within Israel as a Knesset member with the moderate Kulanu party.

If there is a villain in Oren's story it is not Barack Obama nor, obviously, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The real villain is the news media.

Again and again throughout the book Oren castigates the news media for distorting the truth and Matti Friedman's important contribution to this subject did not go beneath notice.

Oren writes:

Israel sells. Arabs massacring Arabs in, say, Syria is a footnote, while a Palestinian child shot by Israeli soldiers is a scoop. The racist undertones are clear but the reality, irrefutable. And no one understands it better than the terrorists, Hamas and Hezbollah. If they fire at Israeli civilians, Irael will retaliate and invariably kill the Palestnian and Lebanese civilians behind whom the terrorists hide. The pictures will be gruesome, and if insufficiently so, the terrorists will manufacture them, exhuming bodies from morgues and graveyards. The staged images, picked up by editorless blogs proliferate on the Internet. Many will be reproduced, uncritically, by the mainstream press.

Oren has many significant criticisms of Barack Obama and understands his flaws as a product of western post-colonial ideology which, in my view, is correct. The problem is not that Obama has malice toward Israel, but that he honestly believes that the Arabs have been abused under Israel due to circumstances that neither could well control. Obama is sympathetic toward the plight of the Jews in the Middle East, but he is also sympathetic toward the local Arab population who he believes have been displaced and occupied.

The End

Ultimately the book is a terrific read because, throughout, Oren is on the run and he is a man with a mission and that mission is defending and protecting the Jewish State of Israel. His take on Barack Obama, however, is fair. He gives Obama credit where credit is due, but he also criticizes Obama in an honest and straight-forward manner, which is why this highly sensitive administration takes such objections to the book.

The main criticism that he has of Obama is that he is an ideologically-driven president who simply does not understand the Middle East. Obama hoped that an unclenched American hand could meet an unclenched Islamic hand. This is an admirable goal for any president of the United States, but the only happy faces that Obama is finding in the Middle East are in the faces of the Iranian ayatollahs.

And that is not good for either Israel or the United States or Europe or the Sunni-Arab states.

No one is happy with the Iran nuke deal aside from the Iranians, Barack Obama, and some within the Democratic Party.

Oren certainly is not.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

Dictator Abbas grooming Saeb Erekat to be next leader

Mahmoud Abbas is still a dictator:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday appointed Saeb Erekat to the post of secretary-general of the PLO.

Erekat, who served as chief PLO negotiator for the past two decades, will replace Yasser Abed Rabbo, whom Abbas fired last week.

The move improves Erekat’s chances of eventually becoming head of the PA.

Abed Rabbo, a veteran PLO official and former information minister, was fired after falling out with Abbas.

Palestinian sources claimed that Abed Rabbo had joined forces with former PA prime minister Salam Fayyad and ousted Fatah leader Muhammad Dahlan to undermine Abbas. The sources claimed that Abed Rabbo had recently visited the United Arab Emirates, where he held secret talks with Dahlan.

Dahlan has been living in the Gulf country ever since Abbas expelled him from Fatah four years ago. Abbas has accused Dahlan of conspiring against the PA leadership, murder and financial corruption – charges the latter has strongly denied.

Abbas’s decision to appoint Erekat to the top job is seen by some Palestinians as a significant promotion for the chief negotiator. They see it as an indication of Abbas’s full confidence in Erekat and that he considers him fit to serve as the next PA president.

Middle East Monitor adds:

Secretary of the Executive Committee of the PLO Yasser Abed Rabbo said Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas does not have the power to sack him, Quds Press reported yesterday.

He said he was "surprised by the news that Abbas had sacked him" and reiterated that he did not receive any information about this or the reason behind the action. He said media outlets had informed him that Abbas was planning to take this step.

Abed Rabbo added: "Abbas does not have the power to sack me. This is the power of the Executive Committee. If it planned to sack me, this must be in a general meeting and it must be clearly announced."

Abbas is the chairman of the PLO Executive Committee, head of Fatah, President of the Palestinian Authority, and President of the "State of Palestine." But the Palestinian Authority and "State of Palestine" reports to the PLO anyway, so he holds all the cards despite the pretense of democracy and procedures.

But he is now 80 yeas old and it seems fitting for him to groom a fellow liar Saeb Erekat as his successor, since he has no one else he trusts.

Here is an infographic I made in 2012 that I believe is still accurate:

Residents of Jenin are celebrating Islam Salih Jarrar, who recently received his masters degree in Israel Studies from Al Quds University.

He received the degree while in an Israeli prison. He was mentored by Marwan Barghouti.

Jarrar is a member of Hamas.

Yes, Hamas terrorists can still earn their advanced degrees in those awful, inhumane Israel prisons.

Jarrar is serving a term of nine life sentencesfor his role in a terror attack in Safed in 2002. It appears that the attack was a suicide bombing in August of that year:

Aug 4, 2002 - Nine people were killed and some 50 wounded in a suicide bombing of Egged bus No. 361 traveling from Haifa to Safed at the Meron junction in northern Israel. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

The victims: Mordechai Yehuda Friedman, 24, of Ramat Beit Shemesh; Sari Goldstein, 21, of Karmiel; Maysoun Amin Hassan, 19, of Sajur; Marlene Menahem, 22, of Moshav Safsufa; Sgt.-Maj. Roni Ghanem, 28, of Maghar; Sgt. Yifat Gavrieli, 19, of Mitzpe Adi; Sgt. Omri Goldin, 20, of Mitzpe Aviv; Adelina Kononen, 37, of the Philippines; Rebecca Roga, 40, of the Philippines.

07/04 Links: Saudi prince to visit Israel (hoax); London neo-Nazi protest met with large counter-rally

From Ian:

Saudi prince to visit Israel in unprecedented overture

[It appears this is a hoax, JPost changed the headline to "False online rumors suggests Saudi prince to visit Israel", then deleted the article h/t Zaba]

In an unprecedented overture, Saudi Arabian prince and wealthy media tycoon Talal Bin Waleed announced Thursday that he is planning a seven-day-trip to the Jewish State and urged all the Arab nations in the region to "strive for a more peaceful, prosperous and homogenous Middle East," according to Saudi Arabian news media.
"All my Muslim brothers and sisters must understand that it became a moral imperative for all inhabitants of war-torn Middle-East, namely Arabs, to desist their absurd hostility toward Jewish people," Okaz reported the prince saying, an Arabic-language Saudi news agency.
"My sovereign, King Salman has instructed me to open a direct dialogue with Israel's intellectual (community), building amicable ties with our Israeli neighbors," Bin Waleed added.
Bin Waleed also mentioned in his statements that he hopes his visit would herald a new beginning in "peace and fraternity" between Israel and its Arab neighbors, stressing the importance of fostering better relations between each other's military and intelligence communities.
The Saudi prince said that he plans to pray at the Al-Aksa mosque located on top of the Temple Mount when he visits Jerusalem's old city, the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest site in Islam.
It was not clear when the Saudi prince would embark on his visit to Israel.

London neo-Nazi protest met with large counter-rally

A neo-Nazi rally in central London on Saturday afternoon was met with a large counter-protest by Jewish and anti-racism groups.
Only about two dozen people showed up for the neo-Nazi demonstration ostensibly against the “Jewification” of London’s Golders Green neighborhood — where the protest was originally scheduled to be held — and Shomrim, the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood watch group. The area has a Jewish population of 40 percent.
Authorities moved the rally to Richmond Terrace in Westminster instead, fearing public disorder.
The new location was secured by some 200 police officers who cordoned off an area for the neo-Nazis.
They displayed Palestinian and Confederate flags and waved several national banners, including those with the “White Pride” slogan.
The neo-Nazis were soon outnumbered by counter-protesters, numbering some 200 according to media reports, and shouting slogans such as: “Nazis off our streets” and “We are black, white, Asian and we’re Jews, and there’s many, many more of us than you,” according to a report in the Evening Standard. (h/t Effect)

Ben-Dror Yemini: Saying one thing and doing another

There is something very despairing in the free world's war against global jihad and the terrorism it produces. We should pay close attention particularly to France, a country that has turned into a terror victim and does not shy from making blunt statements about it, including a rare recognition that this is a "war of civilizations." Normally, European leaders are afraid of even uttering this factual truth. Not in France, though. They stress there, and rightly so, that this isn't a war against Muslims, but against jihad. And they don't try to hide it.
The problem is that France says one thing and does the complete opposite. The most important of the boats that attempted to reach the Gaza Strip this week was the Marianne. All of the useful idiots were on it. The boat sailed with the aid of the French NGO Platform for Palestine (Plateforme des ONG françaises pour la Palestine). Practically all of the organizations under this umbrella are a part of the BDS campaign against Israel.
This platform, as the umbrella organization, issued a call for boycott against Israel and led the campaign to pressure the French mobile company Orange to cut all ties with Israel. The problem is that this organization gets funding from the French government through the French Development Agency (AFD). Is this how you fight radicalization?
Gaza flotillas, as we've previously learned, are a result of instructions coming from the Hamas regime, which has been recognized as a terror organization by the European Union. The Hamas charter openly calls for the annihilation of Jews. And not just Jews. Hamas television also airs propaganda that says: "We must kill the Jews, we must kill the Christians, we must kill the Communists - every last one of them."

07/03 Links Pt2: Netanyahu: UNHRC cares nothing for human rights; Flotilla Brought Hate, Not Aid

From Ian:

Vote approving UN’s Gaza war probe a case of much talk, few consequences

It came as no surprise whatsoever that the United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday approved a resolution backing the controversial McGowan Davis report on last summer’s 50-day Israel-Hamas war.
The European Union deliberated until virtually the last minute on how to vote, but eventually decided to throw its full support behind the resolution welcoming a report that Israel considers to be deeply biased and skewed. The desire among the Europeans to speak with one voice eventually led even Germany to vote yes, in what will be perceived as a particularly painful sting in Jerusalem. As so often happens, only the US rejected the resolution.
But even if Israel had succeeded in splitting the European vote into many yeses and a few abstentions, the automatic Arab majority in the 47-member council meant that the end result was never in doubt.
Israeli diplomats in Geneva spent many hours trying to persuade their colleagues to vote against the resolution. Several Israeli politicians, from the coalition and opposition, sent letters urging council members to reject draft resolution A/HRC/29/L/35. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited the ambassadors of the countries sitting on the council to Jerusalem for a special briefing (though according to a diplomat who was there, he spoke mostly about Iran).
The bad news is obvious: Once again, Israel was let down not only by the usual suspects, but also by countries that it considers its friends.
During the debates that preceded the vote on the resolution, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries with questionable human rights records voted against resolutions condemning Syria and Belarus. Yet on Friday they all happily voted in favor of a text that, at best, put Israel and Hamas on the same moral plane. (Since the McGowan Davis report strives to differentiate between Hamas and what it calls “Palestinian armed groups,” it actually spares Hamas the kind of direct criticism it levels at Israel.)

Full text of UNHRC resolution on Gaza war probe

The following is the full text of Friday’s UN Human Rights Council resolution backing last week’s report by the Gaza Conflict Commission of Inquiry. It is titled “Ensuring accountability and justice for all violations of international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”:

Netanyahu: UNHRC cares nothing for human rights

Israel officials on Friday tore into the UN Human Rights Council’s adoption of a report on last summer’s war between Israel and the Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip. The report charged that Israel, as well as Hamas, may have committed war crimes during Operation Protective Edge.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in response to the vote — which was supported by all European members of the UNHRC — that “the UN’s Human Rights Council cares little about the facts and less still about human rights.”
He added: “On a day when Israel is hit by fire from the Sinai, when Islamic State is carrying out cruel terror attacks inside Egypt, in Syria [President Bashar] Assad is slaughtering his people and in Iran the number of arbitrary executions rises on an annual basis, the council decides to condemn Israel that has committed no sins. Israel will continue to defend its citizens from those who call for its destruction and act every day to achieve this.”

Archival documents reveal secrets of mission to rescue Israeli hostages at Entebbe

The Defense Ministry released the military operations log for Operation Entebbe on Thursday, which marked 39 years since the daring mission to rescue Israeli hostages being held in Uganda.
The IDF Archives also released the handwritten notes passed between then-defense minister Shimon Peres and thenprime minister Yitzhak Rabin in which Peres’s apprehension over the fate of the mission was evident. In one such note Peres wrote to Rabin: “How does the operation start? – They say it is impossible, the timing isn’t right and the government won’t approve it – the only question I’ve seen, and continue to see, is how will it end?” Another note has Peres suggesting changes to Rabin’s plan for the raid at Entebbe Airport.
“The last improvement in the plan, instead of an airport vehicle, a big Mercedes will enter with flags. [Ugandan president] Idi Amin is returning home from Mauritius. I don’t know if it will be possible, but it’s interesting.”
Rabin replied to Peres’s suggestion by asking him, “When is Idi Amin returning from Mauritius? What is the Mercedes for?” The archives also released the video of the Israeli hostages being welcomed back home after the rescue. In the video, Peres and the defense leadership are seen waiting on the runway at Ben-Gurion Airport for the Israel Air Force Boeing 707 with the rescued passengers on board.
Operation Entebbe had the military codename Operation Thunderball, and was later called Operation Yonatan, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother Lt.-Col.
Yonatan Netanyahu, the only IDF soldier killed during the mission that he led, sought to save 84 Jewish passengers and 12 French crew members who had been aboard an Air France flight that terrorists hijacked while en route from Tel Aviv to Paris.

PA really worried that Hamas will secede Gaza

A new rumor has erupted, that Hamas will declare Gaza to be independent if the new PA government does not include Hamas representation.

According to an unnamed source, if the PA unilaterally declares a new government, "Hamas will not recognize it and will be obliged to take firm and decisive action to ensure the stability of the Gaza Strip administratively and politically," meaning it will cut all ties to the PA and seek independence.

This is highly unlikely. Hamas would have no support or legitimacy, unlike a few years ago when Iran, Egypt and Turkey were wholeheartedly behind the group and supported it financially.

But it does show how paranoid Fatah is about Hamas and how little influence it has in Gaza.

UNHRC condemns Israel based on a report that was careful NOT to condemn Israel

From Haaretz:

The United Nations Human Rights Council decided on Friday to adopt a resolution condemning Israel over the UN report into the Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.

41 countries vote in favor of the resolution, while one country – the U.S. – voted against.

India, Kenya, Ethiopia, Paraguay and Macedonia abstained.

The fact that India abstained reflects a significant policy change by Delhi; traditionally, India voted in favor of all anti-Israel resolutions in UN institutions. Friday's abstention is another sign of warming ties between India and Israel since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014.

The resolution welcomes the UN Human Rights Council report, which found evidence of alleged war crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas during the Gaza conflict in 2014. The resolution calls for the implementation of the report and its recommendations. It also calls for an end to the impunity of Israeli officials responsible for alleged war crimes.

The resolution, which was drafted by the Palestinians and Arab states, condemns Israel's targeting of innocent civilians and completely ignores the rockets launched by Hamas; it also ignores the inquiry's criticism of the Palestinian side.

Here's the funny thing.

The UNHRC Davis report mentions about 23 cases of acts (from both Israel and terrorist groups) that they say "may" or "could" amount to war crimes if they are confirmed, if intent is proven, or other caveats.

In only one single case did the report say, flatly, that an act was a war crime - and that was against Palestinians referring to the public executions of "collaborators":

Because of their link to the armed conflict, the extrajudicial executions constitute a violation of article 3 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which, in relation to “persons taking no active part in the hostilities […] and those placed “hors de combat” by […] detention, prohibits (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture […]; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples” and amount to a war crime. Whoever is responsible for the killings, whether the Al Qassam Brigades, other Palestinian armed groups, or the local authorities, must be brought to justice.

The UNHRC condemned Israel based on a report that didn't condemn Israel.

Which is par for the course.

07/03 Links Pt1: Rocket hits southern Israel; UNRWA, Hamas are two sides of the same coin

From Ian:

Rocket explodes in southern Israel

A rocket exploded in Israeli territory near the Gaza Strip Friday afternoon, and security officials were checking whether the launch had come from the Palestinian territory or the Sinai peninsula.
There were no reports of casualties or damage in the attack.
The launch set off “Color Red” warning sirens in the Eshkol Regional Council, which borders the southern Gaza Strip as well as the Egyptian peninsula. Security teams were scouring the area for the impact site.
Palestinian media also reported explosions in northern Gaza, according to Walla News.
There has recently been in increase in sporadic attacks by terror elements in the Strip. Recent weeks have seen several rocket launches from Gaza, the first significant attacks since the conclusion of the war between Israel and armed groups in the coastal territory last summer.

'UNRWA, Hamas are two sides of the same coin'

Little is known about the second U.N. report on Operation Protective Edge, waged in the Gaza Strip last summer. While the U.N. Human Rights Council's fact-finding mission, headed by American jurist Mary McGowan Davis, looked into alleged war crimes committed during the fighting, the second, 207-page report, penned by retired Dutch Maj. Gen. Patrick Cammaert, focused solely on the damaged sustained by U.N. Relief and Works Agency facilities during the 50-day military campaign.
Cammaert's report is classified, and only a fraction of it, some 27 pages, has been made public, garnering little attention. The findings concluded that 44 Palestinians were killed and 227 others were injured while taking shelter in U.N. facilities in Gaza. An addendum to the report said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon was "shocked that militant groups had endangered U.N. schools by using them as weapons caches."
One can understand why the Cammaert report was downplayed. Terrorist groups' continuous use of UNRWA facilities across the coastal enclave is a source of much embarrassment to the U.N. The "shock," however, should be taken with a grain of salt, as Israel has been warning for years about the interaction between Hamas and other terrorist groups and UNRWA. These ties have been recorded in dozens of files, and two new reports published in recent days, one by the Institute for Zionist Strategies and one by the Center for Near East Policy Research, indicate that the symbiosis between Hamas and UNRWA in Gaza is only growing stronger.
UNRWA itself recorded the terrorists' use of its facilities in the Strip, and the findings were corroborated in the Cammaert report, detailing dozens of cases when weapons, munitions, and missiles were hidden in schools, and how school buildings were used as cover for rocket launching sites.

JPost Editorial: Horror in Sinai

On Wednesday, cowardly terrorists killed more than 100 Egyptian police and civilians. As terrorism hit the Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian security forces swept in and killed nine armed men in Cairo just days after the top state prosecutor was assassinated.
Egypt is experiencing tumultuous times. It is a reminder that Egypt and Israel, as well as the region as a whole, confront similar enemies; extremism and terrorism.
In each country there are those elements that seek to spread murderous ideologies and harm civilian life.
The rise of Islamic State in Sinai is the latest culmination of years of turmoil in the peninsula. Under Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, the extremists were encouraged to strike down roots. According to interviews Egyptian security officials gave to foreign media, the harm done to civilians and security in Sinai was at the heart of then-Gen. Adbel Fattah al-Sisi’s outrage at the mismanagement of Egypt under Morsi.
Morsi ordered the army to give free rein to extremists, who often victimized Egyptians in the area.
Northern Sinai has long been home to localized Islamist groups, such as Ansar Beit al-Maqdis. These groups have bombed Beduin shrines and sought to impose their strict version of Islamist ideology on the inhabitants.

White House hasn't called out Iran's cheating for nearly two years - instead, it acts like Iran's lawyer

Omri Ceren at The Israel Project continues to document how the White House is backtracking on agreements in order to accommodate Iranian cheating. (These are all via email.)

On July 1:

Remember how at the beginning of June the State Department melted down on David Sanger, after he and William Broad published an article about Iran's failure to turn its enriched uranium gas (UF6) into oxide? Turns out, Sanger and Broad were right and the State Department was wrong.

Iran is obligated by the interim JPOA to do two things by the end of every 6 months: (1) get rid of any UF6 it has enriched above a total stockpile is 7,650kg (this is the "hexafluoride cap") (2) get rid of that excess UF6 in a very specific way: by turning it into uranium dioxide powder (this is the "oxidation requirement"). The oxidation requirement was written into the JPOA because other methods of getting rid of enriched gas aren't as proliferation resistant. When the JPOA was extended last summer, this was how Kerry described it: "Iran has committed to take further nuclear-related steps in the next four months... [t]hese include a continued cap on the amount of 5 percent enriched uranium hexafluoride and a commitment to convert any material over that amount into oxide." [a]

Sanger and Broad reported at the beginning of June that Iran had enriched too much gas to hit their targets by June 30 [b]. That triggered a full week of administration pushback, but State spokespeople never quite got the argument: they thought it was about the hexafluoride cap not the oxidation requirement. The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) tried during the week to explain the difference but to no avail [c]. On day 4 of press briefings on the subject Senior Advisor for Strategic Communications Marie Harf was still asserting that the Iranians would be in compliance with the JPOA because they'd decrease their hexafluoride [d]. When reporters clarified they wanted answers about the Iranians refusing to oxidize she said - falsely - "I don't think we've seen any evidence that they are converting it more slowly." When reporters subsequently informed her that - in fact - the Iranians had stopped oxidizing in November 2014, she promised to look into it.

Today the IAEA published a report confirming the Iranians have met the hexafluoride cap but didn't meet the oxidation requirement. That would put them in violation of the JPOA, except the administration has declared that it's not a violation because the Iranians did something that wasn't what they were supposed to do, but was OK anyway. The full story is pasted below, but here's the key part:

However, the report indicated that only several hundred pounds of the oxide that is the end product had been made. A U.S. official told The Associated Press the rest of the enriched uranium in the pipeline has been transformed into another form of the oxide that would be even more difficult to reconvert into enriched uranium. The official said that technical problems by Iran had slowed the process but the United States was satisfied that Iran had met its commitments to reduce the amount of enriched uranium it has stored.

A few reasons this is a huge deal:

-- The Obama administration is already playing Tehran's lawyer and explaining away Iranian cheating - They're letting the Iranians pick and choose which parts of the agreement they want to comply with. Then they're working to justify it. As another part of the AP article notes: "Violations by Iran would complicate the Obama administration's battle to persuade congressional opponents and other skeptics." So they have to either ignore or spin.

-- Even worse, the administration appears to be politicizing the reporting process so as to better spin away the cheating away - It's not just that the administration is saying that the Iranians cheated but it doesn't count. They're also fiating that Iran complied with the JPOA as a legal matter, even though Iran didn't.

-- The Iranians flat out cheated; again - It's not the first time they cheated (they've busted through the JPOA's oil export caps every month and they injected gas into an advanced centrifuge). It's not even the first time that the administration tried to sandbag the press corps on the cheating by saying "wait and see; this is just a normal fluctuation; they'll hit their target" (that was the State Department's argument about oil export caps for months). But nonetheless the administration keeps telling lawmakers that the Iranians can be trusted to meet their final deal obligations, because they met their interim deal obligations. No they didn't.

-- The esoteric technical fixes that were built into the interim JPOA - and which are being built into the final JCPOA - failed - The oxidation condition was always a too-cute-by-half mechanism to let the Iranians keep enriching (their red line) while ostensibly keeping their program frozen (the administration talking point). But the final JCPOA is built on similar esoteric technical fixes, which were similarly designed to placate the Iranians. When administration officials go to the Hill to brag about the "science" behind the 1 year breakout timeline - which they insist they can achieve despite giving into Iran's demand to spin thousands of centrifuges - that's what they're talking about. The evidence now suggests that the Iranians can't or won't implement such fixes.

And today:

Day 3 of this, and still nothing on the record from the Obama administration about why it's OK to let the Iranians be in violation of the interim JPOA's requirement that they convert their excess enriched uranium (UF6) into uranium dioxide powder (UO2). The main argument appears to be that the Iranians got close enough: a "US official" told the Associated Press the US was "satisfied" with Iran transforming the uranium gas into something that's not dioxide, and yesterday Scott Kemp - a former science advisor for the State Department on Iran's nuclear program - tweeted that the distinction was about "minor chemical variants not meaningful in the slightest."

No it's not. The issue isn't about chemical variants of uranium oxide as mandated by the interim JPOA deal. It's about the credibility of the final JCPOA deal that Congress will have to evaluate. For the interim agreement, the administration invented an unproven technological quick-fix so that it could cave to an Iranian demand - the demand to keep enriching - while still telling lawmakers that Tehran's program was "frozen." When that technological quick-fix failed the White House went into “Iran’s lawyer” mode: first they declared that skeptics were wrong and that the Iranians would stay in compliance - because White House scientists said so (!) - and when that became indefensible they weakened the deal's criteria so they could claim the Iranians weren't cheating.

His last paragraph is devastating, and should make even the most enthusiastic Obama supporter think twice:

If lawmakers were evaluating the agreement based on whether the Obama administration will even enforce it, 100% of the evidence cuts the other way. In the last 20 months, the administration has never called out Iranian cheating, and has instead played Iran's lawyer on half a dozen different JPOA and UN sanctions violations.

This story encapsulates how much the media ignores stories from the territories that don't involve Israel.

Last night, many members of the Eshtewi family held a protest outside the home of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza. One of their sons, Mahmoud (in some reports Abul Magd) has been in Hamas prisons for months without charge. The family demanded that Haniyeh come out to talk to them, and they chanted slogans and held up banners.

Hamas police came and started beating them, injuring a number of family members including a female journalist Buthaina Eshtewi, and two brothers were arrested and taken away to an unknown destination.

In one story we have:

Detention without charge
Peaceful protesters being beaten
Peaceful protesters being arrested

In the grand scheme of things, this is not that big a deal. But the complete absence of any western media ever reporting stories like this while eagerly reporting on similar stories that can be blamed on Israel reveals a much bigger issue here.

Even if the media does not consider this newsworthy, "pro-Palestinian" NGOs would be expected to be compiling statistics of these sorts of events, and issuing annual reports counting the number of arrests, beatings, imprisonment without trial, cases of torture, people killed by police - all the statistics that are being zealously kept and often inflated by these same NGOs against Israel, even though they often claim that they are non-partisan.

Journalists, NGOs and diplomats have an unwritten agreement to ignore these sorts of stories to ensure that the news that filters out to the world is one-sided against Israel. The tiniest anti-Israel stories in the Hebrew press get translated and quoted prominently while Arabic stories like these get ignored. The decision as to which stories get coverage is not newsworthiness or the level of human rights being violated. No, the major decision-making is based on a single factor: whether the Jewish state can be properly blamed.

This ensures that generations of young people are brought up on biased, one-sided news stories based on simplistic memes of Jewish oppression and Arab victimhood.. It takes real effort to find out the truth and practically no one will spend the time, since there is an assumption that the news media will do their jobs. And the very people who should investigate this bias are the people who practice it.

This particular case is not a big story. But the situation that causes stories like this to be ignored day in and day out is indeed a very big deal.

Haaretz has a an accidentally excellent article with a terrible headline and perspective that describes the checks and balances that go into the IDF's decision to bomb a house.

The headline is "After UN report on summer Gaza war, Israel Air Force still believes it acted properly" - as if the IDF is closing its eyes to the stories told in the UNHRC Davis report.

HRW and Amnesty, and to a lesser extent the Davis report, believe that the IDF acts like an irrational person who gets his kicks out of randomly bombing Arabs.

Last November, Amnesty released a statement:

“Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war by carrying out a series of attacks on civilian homes, displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.

“The report exposes a pattern of attacks on civilian homes by Israeli forces which have shown a shocking disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians, who were given no warning and had no chance to flee.”

Here's the truth:

The army is not turning its back on the results of the war, but even today it is convinced that all the targets went through what they call “the oiled machine.” This air force-speak means that they were researched by intelligence people and approved to the effect that bombing them did not violate international law. Then, they went through a planning process to decide how and from where the target would be bombed. Only at the end of that process were they sent as coordinates to the aircraft.

The “target page” that explains what is to be bombed includes an aerial photograph of the target and its surroundings, and indicates whether there is likely to be weaponry nearby. It also shows what kind of aircraft will attack – combat plane or helicopter – and with what armament. In addition, it notes what warning needs to be given to the inhabitants of the house. In most cases, this was the “roof knock” procedure in which the plane first fires a relatively light bomb at the corner of the target in order to warn the inhabitants of the impending strike.

“Let’s say there’s a target located in some building and it’s a kind of war room, and in order to destroy the building we need to use bomb X,” an officer with the rank of colonel who was involved in these planning stages explained to Haaretz. “Because of the population density of the neighborhood, it’s clear that the bomb will damage adjacent buildings, which could endanger their inhabitants. In a case like that they’d choose a smaller bomb, at the expense of damage to the war room. We wouldn’t necessarily demolish it but we’d have a consultation in order to make sure we achieve an operational effect while it also looks like we aren’t attacking disproportionately.”

Proportionality was one of the key topics in the UN report, which also questioned why Israel did not moderate its aggressive aerial line during the fighting. “The apparent lack of steps to re-examine these measures in the light of the mounting civilian toll,” states the report, “suggests that Israel did not comply with its obligation to take all feasible precautions before the attacks. Furthermore, the large number of targeted attacks against residential buildings and the fact that such attacks continued throughout the operation, even after the dire impact of these attacks on civilians and civilian objects became apparent, raise concern that the strikes may have constituted military tactics reflective of a broader policy, approved at least tacitly by decision-makers at the highest levels of the Government of Israel.”

In the army they are claiming that Hamas exploited the private residences of military arm commanders for terror actions: In some of them weapons were hidden, in others war rooms were located. The prevailing explanation is that the military use of a residential building transforms it into a legitimate military target.

“If it was clear that this commander was directing terrorist activities from his residence, then we don’t give him any immunity in his home,” says Major-General (res.) Amos Yadlin, a combat pilot in his military training, formerly head of Military Intelligence and currently head of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. “Of course it is necessary to check the collateral damage (military-speak for harm to civilians who are not involved in the fighting) from the attack, vis-à-vis the military advantage that will be obtained. If there is a military advantage here that can be proved, then it is definitely a legitimate target.” However, says Yadlin, if a bomb hits a minor militant and many uninvolved civilians around him are killed – that is “a grave mishap.”

At the same time, Yadlin emphasizes it was Hamas that chose to absorb itself into a civilian environment, using it as a human shield. “It is our fundamental moral obligation to defend the State of Israel by hitting those people and not giving them any immunity – not in homes and not in any civilian environment from which they operate against us,” he says.

One such case is the attack on the Abu Ghanem family in Khan Yunis. According to reports in the Palestinian media, 10 people were killed in the bombardment, two of them Islamic Jihad militants. The military inquiry found that the target of the attack was Danian Mansour – a commander in the organization with a rank parallel to brigade commander. He was responsible for the group’s activity in northern Gaza. In the army they assessed that there were civilians in the building in which Mansour was located but believed that there was only one residential apartment at the site.

During the preparations for the attack, the military took into account the expected damage to adjacent buildings. Ultimately in the IDF they decided the attack was legal, as “the extent of the strike on them would not be excessive relative to the military advantage” that would be achieved. That is, the attack would be proportionate under the principles of international law. In fact, despite the specific warning given to those who were inside the building, five civilians were killed in the Abu Ghanem house and three more in an adjacent house. In addition to Mansour, another Jihad member was also killed.

In another incident, in which the Al Najjar family home in Khan Yunis was bombed, eight people were killed, two of them Hamas members. The target of the attack, according to the army, were Hamas militants who were manning a war room that had been set up in the family home. Here too, in the army they thought there would be civilians there but it was decided to attack nevertheless, using precision weaponry in order to avoid hitting adjacent buildings. In this case, the air force decided not to warn the residents of the building “so as not to thwart the aim of the attack.”

In conversation with members of air force personnel on active service, in the reserves and after their service, it is evident that they believe these cases do not reflect the majority of the air force’s activity in what is a densely populated and complex area. “It could be that we don’t see people in the building, or intelligence says there aren’t any people – and in the end there are,” one of them explained.

In the army they explain that when an attack is planned there are a number of people – reservists, air crews, intelligence officers and people in operations research – who are shown nearly all the information the defense establishment can provide. This includes how the building is constructed and out of what materials, how many people live in it according to the population registry, and what intelligence has been gathered about the place that transforms it from just another house on a street into a military target. After that, each target is sent for approval by a small group of officers, a number of standing army officers with the rank of brigadier general and colonel in the air force.

“We do not look at it with the eyes of ‘this is the target, we don’t ask questions.’ We see ourselves, in the very fact of our existence – as people who push the buttons and fly the planes – as responsible for the attack. We will not act as though we are blind when we receive an order,” explains the brigadier general. “And still, it’s not a rosy world. In the end, when you
attack with a fighter plane, in an urban area, you inevitably take a risk. It’s clear that it this is what you are doing, with a fighter plane, and you aren’t going to complete it without hitting anyone. That is not reasonable. And I think that this is clear to everyone.”

Lt. Col. Yoav, commander of Squadron 100 – the air force intelligence squadron – says that his people are required to report whether after the “roof knock” procedure people left the building or whether there were people in the area of the attack and after the bombardment – and whether the target was bombed as required. “There is always the potential that there will be people – and in many cases the crew identifies this, reports and stops the attack.” According to him, during the course of Protective Edge, the presence of civilians in the area of strikes engaged his people quite a lot.

“In the end people on the other side get killed, however you look at it. We see the collateral damage, and also the direct damage,” explains Yoav - who’s last name has not been released - and screens a video documenting an attack on an armed motorcyclist who fired on Israeli soldiers. “He was killed because I was good at my task,” he says. “It’s clear to me that I had to do it but it isn’t that I get up in the morning and lick my lips over this. This isn’t fun.”

An air force officer, a navigator by training, says: “You can make a mistake – and you’ll have to know how to go on fighting to live with that mistake. You have to absorb that blow, which is huge if it is personal, and keep going forward. You don’t have the luxury of saying that on the day you make a mistake – you’ll stop. The answer is that this is a complex situation. But that’s the work, and that’s the reality.”

Eshel, who spoke at a Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies conference, added, “We must minimize the extent of potential collateral damage because today, with the attack capability of thousands of targets a day, it could reach thousands of fatalities a day of people who are not involved. This is first of all bad morally, and I am saying this way before any external problem – of legitimacy and so on – and if we are not strict about this matter it will cause us to crumble from within.”

In short, every single target is vetted by may people of varying ranks with the information they have available at the time, and every bomb is accounted for to ensure that it was used properly. And mistakes are made.

Notice also that even though the left-wing Haaretz interviewed a number of people anonymously at all levels, not one of them had a "Breaking the Silence" experience of the Israeli air force just bombing people for kicks. Their accounts are consistent and also consistent with other reports over the years - reports that the NGOs studiously ignore because they write the verdict before they look for evidence.

Israel now more allied with Egypt than America is

From Times of Israel:

Israel has been giving the Egyptian military a free hand to operate in northern Sinai against local jihadist groups, voluntarily ignoring an annex to the 1979 Camp David Peace Accords banning the presence of significant Egyptian forces in the area, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel on Thursday.

According to the military annex of the Camp David accords, Egypt is allowed to maintain a civilian police force only in the eastern strip of the Sinai Peninsula, where the majority of local jihadists are currently located. Following Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the Egyptian army was allowed to deploy a border patrol battalion along the border with Gaza.

An official told The Times of Israel in 2014 that due to the challenges facing the Egyptian military in the northern Sinai, “In practice, the military annex is nonexistent.”

With fighting between the Egyptian army and jihadists pledging allegiance to the Islamic State intensified this week following a coordinated attack against army positions in northern Sinai Wednesday, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that Israel has maintained its policy of ignoring the peace treaty’s military annex for the benefit of Egypt’s war on terror.

Unlike the United States, which continues to place immense hurdles on the Egyptian army before authorizing the delivery of “a few crummy F-16s” — the official quoted his disgruntled Egyptian counterparts as saying — Israel has allowed the Egyptian army to do as it pleases in northern Sinai without hesitation, realizing the common interest in its fight on terror.

“It took one phone call from Cairo to Jerusalem to authorize whatever Egypt wants in Sinai, counter to the military annex,” he said.

“Israel understands the challenge facing Egypt. We face the same challenge,” he added. “We aren’t worried that Egypt may attack Israel, nor are they worried that Israel will attack them… it is clear to the [Egyptian] leadership that not only is Israel not an enemy, it’s an ally.”

The most populous Arab nation is now a de facto ally of the Jewish state.

This doesn't mean that there will ever be normalization between the two countries, but this is the best Israel can hope for with all its neighbors.

Haaretz goes further, but this report seems too far-fetched unless Egypt's army is really against the wall:

An Egyptian source familiar with Egypt’s decision-making process told Haaretz that if Islamic State comes near Gaza, President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi may “invite” the Israel Defense Forces to act against it. This will not be seen as an Israeli breach of Egypt’s sovereignty, because Gaza falls under Israel’s responsibility.

“The two armies may already be coordinating in preparation for such a possibility,” the source said. “The Egyptian problem is that a military campaign inside Gaza could lead to breaking down the fences and a mass flight of civilians from Gaza to Sinai.”

(h/t Paul H)