Today’s Top Stories
1. The father of the Palestinian baby killed in the Duma arson attack died of his injuries. Saad Dawabsha was buried in Nablus. Afterwards, the PA announced it would pursue Israel diplomatically, while Hamas called on Palestinians to take revenge. Israel is bracing for escalation in the West Bank.
Israel arrested nine people and placed three suspected Jewish extremists, Meir Ettinger, Eviatar Slonim, and Mordechai Meyer, in “administrative detention.” None are suspected of involvement in the Duma firebombing; Meyer is suspected of involvement in an arson attack at the Church of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes in June. According to Reuters:
Yaalon accused Ettinger and Slonim of “involvement in activity by an extremist Jewish group”. Meyer had been involved in “recent terrorist attacks as part of a Jewish terror group,” Yaalon said. No specific incidents were mentioned.
2. Are critics of the Iran deal getting unfairly smeared with charges of “dual loyalty?” The question starts with Senator Charles Schumer, who, in announcing his opposition to the accord, took the unusual step of explaining why in writing. I’ll come back to Schumer in a moment.
Interviewed by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, President Obama said he can’t recall any foreign leader interfering in a policy debate more than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done with the Iran deal. That’s from the excerpt CNN released ahead of tonight’s airing of the full interview.
Previewing tonight’s broadcast on the CNN show, New Day, Zakaria claimed Schumer was motivated by money. Zakaria doesn’t overtly brand the anti-accord deal as Jewish or Israeli. But his comments to Brooke Baldwin certainly dance on the edge:
Zakaria: If you look at somebody like Senator Schumer, if you ask yourself what does he gain by supporting the deal? Not very much. What does he gain by opposing the deal? If he were to support President Obama on this, if he were to support this deal, he knows it would create a firestorm of opposition, particularly among, perhaps, you know wealthy supporters; he wouldn’t be able to raise as much money
Baldwin: So it’s money.
Zakaria: It’s money, it’s the possibility that you lose support of a core group of supporters. There’s a very strongly organized campaign against the deal. There isn’t a particularly strong campaign organized for the deal, so there’s an asymmetry of cost. So if you vote for this deal, you don’t get a lot. But you get a huge opposition against it.
So senators like Cory Booker, like Chuck Schumer, are probably looking at it in those terms, and asking themselves, “Look, if I were to support the president on this, I’m going to — funding sources are going to dry up, a lot of the core supporters I have are going to be upset with me, because there is this well-financed campaign against it. I don’t get that much, you know, on the upside.”
You can watch Zakaria’s “money quote” if you skip to 1:36.
A must-read staff-ed in Tablet denounced the White House and its allies of playing the “dual loyalty card” to silence critics of the Iran deal.
What we increasingly can’t stomach—and feel obliged to speak out about right now—is the use of Jew-baiting and other blatant and retrograde forms of racial and ethnic prejudice as tools to sell a political deal, or to smear those who oppose it. Accusing Senator Schumer of loyalty to a foreign government is bigotry, pure and simple. Accusing Senators and Congressmen whose misgivings about the Iran deal are shared by a majority of the U.S. electorate of being agents of a foreign power, or of selling their votes to shadowy lobbyists, or of acting contrary to the best interests of the United States, is the kind of naked appeal to bigotry and prejudice that would be familiar in the politics of the pre-Civil Rights Era South.
This use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives. Let’s not mince words: Murmuring about “money” and “lobbying” and “foreign interests” who seek to drag America into war is a direct attempt to play the dual-loyalty card. It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.
Post script: Liberal advocacy organizations said they will withhold $8.3 million in potential donations from Schumer and other Democratic lawmakers opposing the Iran deal.
It’s unfortunate, but the Wall St. Journal’s Sohrab Ahmari‘s tweet of the day is an unpleasant truth.
3. Israel arrested a Lebanese-Swedish man of Palestinian descent at Ben-Gurion Airport suspected of trying to gather intelligence for Hezbollah. Take your pick of Jerusalem Post or YNet coverage.
Israel and the Palestinians
• France is tweaking a draft UN resolution that reportedly demands Israel withdraw from the West Bank within 18 months. Algemeiner picked up on Arab media coverage.
• The IDF launched an air strike on unspecified Gaza terror infrastructure after a Palestinian rocket hit southern Israel. It landed in an open area causing no damage.
• Worth reading: Israel HaYom‘s Yoav Limor discussed “the battle of narratives” and Operation Protective Edge with IDF Brig. Gen. Mickey Edelstein.
• Looks like Hamas is in Iran’s doghouse again.
Iran has canceled a scheduled visit by a Hamas delegation to the Islamic Republic in response to Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal’s visit to Tehran’s rival Saudi Arabia last month, the Huffington Post’s Arabic edition quoted informed sources as saying Saturday.
• Brazil passports will no longer list Israel as the country of birth for Brazilian nationals born in Jerusalem.
• Christians Joining Israel Defense Forces At Record Rates
• We’ve written about the silly charge of Israeli pinkwashing before. Now, thanks to the fatal attack on Jerusalem’s recent gay pride parade, we’re seeing charges of what Legal Insurrection calls reverse pinkwashing. Israel can do no right. Sheesh . . .
• Jerusalem Post: PA security arrested a Ramallah man for naming his baby after Mohammed Dahlan, who is Mahmoud Abbas’s political rival.
• An event organized by the Paris municipality honoring Tel Aviv beaches generated anti-Semitic reactions
Iranian Atomic Urgency
• Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon made some waves in a Q+A with Der Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: So will we see further deaths of Iranian nuclear scientists through attacks or malware compromising Iranian computer networks?
Yaalon: We should be ready to defend ourselves. I’m not responsible for the lives of Iranian scientists.
• Iran reportedly gave Hezbollah strict orders not to respond to a recent (Israeli?) air strike in Syria.
• Journalist Amir Taheri reports that John Kerry actually negotiated with the other P5+1 parties (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Germany) on Iran’s behalf.
Salehi recalls that when he briefed newly elected President Rouhani on the secret talks, the latter was “astonished” at Obama’s readiness to bend backwards to appease Tehran. For Tehran, Obama and Kerry made an ideal team.
During lengthy negotiations in Geneva, Lausanne and finally Vienna, the Iranian and US teams were often on the same side, fighting to persuade other members of the P5+1 to soften their positions vis-a-vis Iran.
In an off-the-record briefing in Tehran which was nevertheless partly leaked, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi cited a number of occasions when Kerry fought hard to win others to Iran’s position.
One occasion was when the French and the British insisted that Iran formally undertake not to finance and arm the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah. “Naturally, we refused,” Araqchi said. “And it was [John] Kerry who persuaded others to drop the issue.”
• Hebrew University chemistry professor accepts academic invitation from Tehran
Around the World
• Dominic Kennedy, an editor at the Times of London, got himself in some hot water with Jews and other people over an ill-advised tweet (which quickly apologized for and deleted). Kennedy was responding to his paper’s staff editorial on revelations of child abuse leveled against former prime minister Edward Heath. Screen grab via Breitbart.
What the heck was Kennedy thinking when he posted that?
Commentary/Analysis
• The New York Times gave cabinet minister Naftali Bennett an op-ed platform to denounce Jewish terror.
The terrorists who killed Shira and Ali do not represent Israel or its people. They are a fringe group, made up of radical extremists who do not only seek to kill. Their ultimate goal is the destruction of the State of Israel. They act against and threaten the very premise of what the Zionist movement envisioned when returning to the Land of Israel after 2,000 years in exile — a Jewish and democratic state committed to equality and freedom for all its citizens. They are anarchists, a fifth column within Israel and like Hamas and Hezbollah, they must face the full force of Israel’s justice system and its defense establishment.
But they are also a tiny group. They do not represent the 400,000 residents of Jewish communities throughout the West Bank, the overwhelming majority of whom are law-abiding citizens and have condemned these acts of violence.
• Israeli officials continued speaking out on the Iran deal. Cabinet minister Silvan Shalom got an op-ed platform in The Guardian, while MK Yair Lapid was published in Die Welt (with Israel HaYom summarizing in English).
• Plenty more Iran deal commentary:
– Efraim HaLevy: It’s not American Jewry’s responsibility to save Israel from Iran deal
– Benjamin Weinthal: Does Germany’s pro-Iran deal diplomatic push endanger Israel?
– Eyal Zisser: The day after the deal
– Charles Krauthammer: Just who is helping Iran’s hard-liners?
– David Brooks: 3 U.S. Defeats: Vietnam, Iraq and Now Iran
– New York Sun (staff-ed): Obama’s version
– David Ignatius: Obama’s cry of despair on the Iran deal
• Ambassador Boaz Modai is stepping down as Israel’s envoy to Ireland this month. The outgoing ambassador shared his parting thoughts in an Irish Independent op-ed.
Those who wish to demonise my country find it easy to get a platform in the media to repeat non-specific charges such as “Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians”. The more extreme ones speak of “genocide”. Has amnesia progressed so far that some people have forgotten the meaning of a word like “genocide”? One-third of the world’s Jews wiped out in the Holocaust – that was genocide. One million Tutsis eliminated in Rwanda that was genocide.
• Here’s what else I’m reading this weekend . . .
– Aaron David Miller: How Obama plans to create a virtual Palestinian state
– Avi Issacharoff: Is Abbas about to quit?
– Fred Maroun; I am a Zionist because I am an Arab
Featured image: CC BY-NC flickr/David Jones with additions by HonestReporting; flag CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com; Ballycarbery Castle CC BY-ND flickr/Steve Corey;
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
