Everything you need to know about today’s coverage of Israel and the Mideast. Join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Today’s Top Stories:
1. Barrage of 80 rockets struck Israel, injuring five and forcing schools in the vicinity to close. Air strikes killed four terrorists as Hamas claimed responsibility for the attacks. Numbers changed throughout the day.
Here’s the Jerusalem Post‘s most recent update as the news stream goes live. Barry Rubin weighs in. And Shimon Peres accused Hamas of using Qatari aid to fund terror.
I’m happy to share this BBC headline which were not part of the It All Started When Israel Fired Back syndrome.
2. AP: Sudan blames Israel for a mysterious explosion at a Khartoum weapons factory. They’re probably right. Been there, done that.
3. The New Israel Fund goes into in damage control mode over Haaretz’s apartheid poll yesterday. From the safety of Peter Beinart’s Open Zion blog, Noam Shelef, the NIF’s deputy director of communications, criticized the survey, then reversed course to express concerns about the findings:
So claiming the poll demonstrates support for “apartheid” is spin at its worst . . .
Those of us who believe in this vision laid out 64 years ago need to be concerned about the figures shown in this survey.
Gideon Levy pushed the story well to his Western counterparts. Quite a few papers picked up on the spin at its worst “figures the NIF is concerned about.” Here’s a sampling of the headlines:
By the way, the Times of Israel addressed the financial relationship between the NIF and the survey’s sponsors.
Israel and the Palestinians
• A study of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activity at North American college found that most campuses have little to no such activity. The JTA writes:
Bard and Dawson tracked 674 anti-Israel events at 108 U.S. and Canadian universities during the 2011-12 academic year. One-third of the incidents took place on 10 campuses; four were in the University of California system. Several of the campuses, the report said, have strong pro-Israel groups and cannot be characterized as “hostile toward Israel.”
Two anti-Israel groups — the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine — were responsible for most of the episodes . . .
“Rather than weaken the relationship between U.S. colleges and Israel, the BDS movement has largely backfired and ties are stronger than ever and continue to grow,” the authors wrote.
The full report‘s in pdf format.
• After Haaretz reported in a spike in requests for Israeli citizenship from eastern Jerusalem Palestinians, Khaled Abu Toameh offers several reasons for the phenomenon. This one happens to be the most quotable:
As one Palestinian explained, “I prefer the hell of the Jews to the paradise of Hamas or Yasser Arafat.”
• Bad news for BDS: Brazil awards $25 million military contract to Israeli firm.
• More bad news for BDS: EU Parliament accepts Israeli pharmaceutical standards, streamlining import procedures. But not without a polarizing debate.
• Over at The Guardian, Rachel Shabi argues for a one-state solution. Lousy timing: Hamas’ state-like show for Qatar’s emir fuels the three-state solution. Israelis won’t buy bi-nationalism for other reasons — six of them — but I’ve used more pixels than Shabi deserves.
• The families of Israeli terror victims filed a lawsuit in New York against the Bank of China. UPI explains:
The suit asserts in 2003, the Chinese bank executed dozens of wire transfers totaling millions of dollars to Hamas initiated by the terror group’s leadership in Syria and Iran. The transfers were processed by Bank of China branches in the United States and sent to an account in China operated by a senior militant. From there the funds were transferred to Hamas and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip, the suit alleges
• Canadian flotillista Jim Manly was released from Israeli custody and sent home. Toronto Sun columnist Lorne Gunter heaps scorn on Manly and his family:
But Manly and his family either don’t know their geography or are trying to milk all the propaganda value they can out of his arrest, or both.
