Today’s Top Stories
1. By a two-thirds vote, Egyptian parliamentarians expelled MP Tawfik Okasha for meeting with Israel’s Ambassador to Cairo, Haim Koren. I wonder if suspended Israeli-Arab MK Haneen Zoabi will show solidarity with the brave Egyptian lawmaker or the small-minded MPs who expelled him.
2. A letter by an Islamic State fighter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi reveals IS-Sinai’s ties to Hamas. It touches on, among other things, Hamas providing IS with home-made explosives, wireless communication and medical care while IS delivers weapons to Hamas.
3. Judging from Irish election results, the Jerusalem Post concludes “Israel’s position in the Emerald Isle went from bad to worse.”
Though it is not clear whether the ruling Fine Gael will form a coalition together with its bitter political rival Fianna Fail, or whether Fine Gael will form a minority government, it is clear that pro-Israel candidates were roundly defeated across the board, while pro-Palestinian candidates enjoyed a good day Friday at the polls.
4. Israeli Self-Defense Termed “Deadly Retaliation”: Palestinians have been killed while carrying out terrorism or confronting Israeli security forces. So why does The Guardian refer to Israeli self-defense as “deadly retaliation?”
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
Israel and the Palestinians
• A 14-year-old Palestinian girl stabbed an Israeli police officer in the Jordan Valley, near Jericho this morning. Last night, two Palestinians stabbed two soldiers at the entrance to the Har Bracha settlement, in the northern West Bank. Also overnight, shots were fired at a police car at a junction near Nablus.
Apart from that, two Arab Israelis planning to shoot soldiers were caught. The pair, who said they were inspired by Islamic State, had been saving money to buy a gun.
• UNRWA-USA communications director Laila Mokhiber deleted her Twitter account after activist Avi Mayer called out her support for Israel Apartheid Week.
.@LailaMo identifies as an @UNRWAUSA spokesperson. She just endorsed a hate fest targeting a @UN member state. pic.twitter.com/2lZ42kowKz
— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) March 2, 2016
• More terrorists carry out attacks in pairs than before, which challenges the notion of “lone wolf” terror. YNet explains the significance:
Terrorists who go out in pairs to carry out attacks work in a more deliberate manner and not from a momentary desire or on impulse. The fact that the terrorists carry out attacks together increased, in some cases, the deadliness of the attack . . .
• Jerusalem Post: A Jewish man from Nazareth was indicted for inciting violence against Arabs on Facebook.
• Israel indicted a Palestinian man plotting attacks on Jews in Ukraine and Israel.
• The Israeli Air Force began receiving the deliveries of David’s Sling, an intermediate range missile defense system which will hopefully intercept Hezbollah rockets with the same success as Iron Dome shooting down shorter-range Qassam rockets fired from Gaza. See Globes, which also updates the latest with Israel’s third layer of missile defense, the Arrow, which is designed to intercept ballistic and other long-range missiles.
And check out today’s Washington Post video.
• I see that the story of Palestinian lawmaker Najat Abu Bakr — she’s staging a sit-in in the Palestinian parliament building to protest corruption and a warrant for her own arrest — was picked up by AFP.
• Reuters looks at the growing trend of Palestinians attacking Israelis with home-made guns. The knock-offs are cheap and untraceable, but, Israeli officials noted one silver lining:
“Obviously such weapons will not be as reliable as a complete factory-made gun,” the Shin Bet official told Reuters. “Most of the recent gun attacks employed improvised firearms. It appears that in many cases they malfunctioned.”
Around the World
• Elhanan Miller visited a few UK campuses during Israel “Apartheid” Week to take the pulse of the Israel-bashers and the Jewish students fighting back. His dispatch, in Tablet, concludes:
For those of us living in Israel, the obsessive preoccupation with the Palestinian issue seems self-evident. After all, for us it’s a matter of life and death. But the level of emotion and indignation in Britain over our little corner of the earth seems strange. Post-colonial guilt? Latent anti-Semitism? Those are surely part of the mix. Perhaps, as a perennial showdown between “occident” and “orient,” Israel-Palestine will forever remain an intriguing story.
• New York City council members are drafting bill to fight campus anti-Semitism at City University of New York (CUNY).
• The Indiana state senate passed a bill “banning state dealings with entities that boycott Israel or its settlements.”
• The cause isn’t clear yet, but there’s no electricity in Syria. The whole country went dark.
Commentary/Analysis
• Worth reading: Robert Nicholson (via Elder of Ziyon) dissects the issue of why Palestinian Christians are fleeing Bethlehem. It’s clearly not because of “the occupation” or the security barrier.
Muslims, in fact, are not fleeing. They are arriving—in large numbers.
Surely there is some significance in this disparity between the two populations. Why is the Muslim sector of Bethlehem growing while the Christian sector is falling? Both face the same exact set of circumstances. Could it be that this disparity tells the true story? . . .
In reality, Christians are fleeing for the same reason they are fleeing Iraq, Egypt, and Syria: the rise of Islamic intolerance and violence against anyone who denies the revelation of Muhammad.
Palestinian Christians don’t like the wall, it’s true. But their main problem is that they are stuck living on the wrong side of it. It is not surprising that many Palestinian Christians call for a “one state solution” that will tear down the wall and reintegrate them with the Jewish state. Until that happens, however, many are choosing to leave.
• Ali Ibrahim offers one of the clearest responses to Hamas “tunnel vision.”
The truth is that if Hamas wanted an honest review of its experience of governing the Gaza Strip for a period of ten years which has failed by all accounts, it must give up its obsession with tunnels. The idea of housing the two million Palestinians inhabiting the strip underground is a ridiculous one; tunnels are for mice and not for humans who yearn to breathe the air of freedom and open sea ports.
The tunnels were not for resistance purposes. Rather, hundreds of them were dug on the border with Egypt to smuggle goods, weapons and militants and are disrupting the economy and security of its large neighbour Egypt. The Palestinians have nothing to gain from being hostile towards or provoking Egypt as the movement used to do by deliberately publishing pictures of cows, calves and cars being lowered into tunnels to smuggle them.
All of this could have been done above ground but Hamas chose underground tunnels to conceal its illegal activities, and no sovereign state accepts tunnels under its land where it cannot control what passes through them.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Yossi Kuperwasser: The delusion of separation from the Palestinians
– Africa Times (staff-ed): Israel and Africa in 2016: Where to next?
– Terry Glavin: Iran’s fake reformers win bogus elections
Featured image: CC BY Dimas Ario; Ireland CC BY-NC-ND jacquelinetinney; Bethlehem CC BY-NC-ND Steve Conger;
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