Today’s Top Stories
1. Mahmoud Abbas is reverting back to form, insisting on preconditions before agreeing to join Benjamin Netanyahu, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in a potential Cairo peace summit. The preconditions: A settlement construction freeze, negotiations based on the pre-1967 borders, and timeline for the talks. Officials in Jerusalem called the Palestinian pre-conditions a non-starter.
By demanding preconditions to negotiate, President Abbas is holding peace hostage.https://t.co/xe3cKU9N9d
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) July 13, 2016
2. For the first time in several years, Israel opened the Erez border crossing with Gaza to vehicular traffic delivering humanitarian supplies. Israeli security at Erez seized what the Times of Israel called a “dizzying collection” of electronic equipment being smuggled to the Strip.
Among the items found were 14 small unmanned aerial vehicles and components, security cameras, satellite communications equipment, surveillance cameras, packages of motion sensors binoculars, laser pointers for weapons, communications equipment and electronic boards, tasers, weapons components, diving watches equipped with flashlights, flippers, miniature cameras, GoPro cameras, DVR cameras, and other banned electronic components.
Till now, Israeli aid to the Strip has passed exclusively through the Kerem Shalom crossing, which is closer to the Israeli-Gaza-Egyptian border. If I’m not mistaken, Israel shut down Erez in May, 2008 after a Palestinian truck carrying four tons of explosives blew up on the Gaza side of the crossing, killing nobody but the suicide bomber driving it.
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3. The JTA reports that “Police in 14 German states reportedly conducted raids on 60 individuals in an attempt to root out the sources of anti-Semitic and other hate postings on the internet.”
Suspects were accused of posting anti-Semitic, extremist and xenophobic messages, including denial of or relativizing the Holocaust, celebrating aspects of National Socialism and using Nazi symbolism, and calling for attacks on refugees and politicians. Evidence was seized at several locations.
4. CNN’s Anti-Israel “Comedian” Rages Against Israel – And It’s Not Funny: Distorted and cherry-picked facts, plus severely missing context are no laughing matter.
5. Check Out HR’s Shareable Graphics: In case you missed it, HonestReporting has been posting shareable graphics on our Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Israel and the Palestinians
• The Israeli Bedouin who climbed over the Gaza border fence into the Strip has been identified as 19-year-old Juma Ibrahim Abu Ranim, from Hashim-Zina, an unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev.
• Israeli security forces thwarted a Palestinian stabbing attack during an arrest raid in eastern Jerusalem.
• Pokemon politics as Israelis, Palestinians get in on the app.
Commentary/Analysis
• Over at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes and Zoe Bedell take a serious look at whether a lawsuit filed by a group of victims of Palestinian terror against Facebook has legs. In short, yes, because Wittes and Bedell argue that Facebook could win the battle but lose the war.
Does this complaint meet the Second Circuit’s standard of proximate causation? That may well end up being a jury question, which is to say that at least some of the allegations in this complaint may satisfy the proximate cause requirement for purposes of a motion to dismiss. A reasonable jury, after all, might well be able to conclude that Facebook’s provision of service to Hamas figures and Hamas’s aggressive use of those services constituted a “substantial factor” in the attacks, even if not a “but for” cause, or that the attacks were a “foreseeable consequence” of Facebook’s allowing use of its system by Hamas figures.
If that ends up being how a court looks at the motion to dismiss, this case will be a very big deal, even if Facebook eventually wins. After all, even establishing the principle that a social media company can theoretically be liable for a terrorist’s use of its systems would be a bit of an earthquake both in the law and in the operating environment for companies that seek to make their services available to all users.
• Newsweek picked the brains of a few analysts to determine the “winners and losers” of last year’s Iranian nuclear deal.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Elliott Abrams: Israel, secrecy, and American meddling
– Jonathan Tobin: Israel’s phantom isolation
– Itamar Segal: We won’t break, and we won’t be silent
– Amb. Alan Baker: International funding for salaries and benefits to terrorists
– Alana Herbst: Jewish in Jordan
– Avi Issacharoff: 10 years after the Second Lebanon War, Israel isn’t in Hezbollah’s sights
– Paul Gross: Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism – the UK Labour Party as a test case
Featured image: CC BY John Ragai with modifications by HonestReporting;
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