Today’s Top Stories
1. Palestinian riots along the Gaza border intensified on Friday. “In the most serious incident, in the south of the Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said several Gazans planted a bomb by the fence. After it exploded and blew a hole in the fence, some 20 Palestinians rushed through and ran toward Israeli soldiers stationed in a snipers’ nest.” One of the seven Palestinians rioters killed was shot while attacking soldiers with a knife. More at the Times of Israel and Haaretz.
The army said some 15,000 protesters hurled grenades, bombs, firebombs and rocks at Israeli forces at various locations along the border. Hadashot reported that for the first time soldiers were also being shot at with crossbows.
If you’re wondering how we got here, be sure to watch our latest video, Gaza Truce Talks: The Breakdown.
2. A Tel Aviv court upheld an entry ban on Lara Alqasem, the US student accused of supporting BDS. But she will be allowed to remain in the country if she opts to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The judge, Erez Yekuel, found that there was “no disputing” that Alqasem from 2014-17 was a member of an organization that called to boycott Israel, and for two years was the president of its Florida campus chapter, and that the organization allegedly urged the “boycott of Israeli society” and expressed support for those who carried out activities to harm Israel.
He cited contradictions in her testimony, noted that she had wiped her social media history, and found that the state had the right to bar someone who sought to harm the country’s economy and image.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
3. The Jerusalem Post and Seth Frantzman examine what the disappearance of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi means for Israel. Did Khashoggi’s criticism of growing Israeli-Saudi ties play a factor in his disappearance? Will Iran seize on the incident to drive a wedge between the Saudis and the West?
Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Saudi officials say the 60-year-old writer left the consulate through a rear door but Turkish authorities say there’s no surveillance footage to support that claim.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Settlers are suspected of killing a 47-year-old Palestinian woman in a stoning attack. Aisha Muhammad Talal Rabi, a mother of eight, succumbed to injuries when her car was pelted by stones near the Tapuah Junction in the northern West Bank. More at the Times of Israel.
• The government approved a $6 million 31-unit housing complex in Hebron, the first Jewish building there in 16 years. The Jerusalem Post unpacks the complicated history of Hebron’s Hezkiyahu neighborhood, where many Jews lived before the 1929 Arab riots wiped out the city’s Jewish community.
• A Gaza terror group unveiled its incendiary ‘blimp’ bound for Israel. I think they got the idea from the famous terror blimp scene from Black Sunday . . .
Gaza group unveils first-ever incendiary blimp bound for Israel https://t.co/BAwC2oCefw
— The Times of Israel (@TimesofIsrael) October 13, 2018
• Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov to i24 News: It is “irrational” not to recognize West Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. “But he explained that Russia would not move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem until it could also move its mission in Ramallah to the eastern part of the contested city.”
• Critics denounced the UN Human Rights Council’s election of ‘unqualified’ new members. We’re talking about human rights luminaries like Somalia, Eritrea, Bahrain and the Philippines.
• Worth reading: Vanity Fair got exclusive access to YAMAM, Israel’s elite counterterror unit.
YAMAM’s technology, including robots and Throwbots (cameras housed in round casings that upright themselves upon landing), is dazzling to the uninitiated. But so are the stats: YAMAM averages some 300 missions a year. According to N, his commandos have stopped at least 50 “ticking time bombs” (suicide bombers en route to their targets) and hundreds of attacks at earlier stages.
• Worth reading: Ynet went behind the scenes with the IDF’s tunnel hunters.
• Coexistence took a big hit when a Palestinian terrorist shot two Israelis to death at a West Bank industrial park last week. The New York Times takes a closer look at where Jewish and Palestinian employees of the Barkan Industrial Park go from here.
• Municipal elections are two weeks away. Haviv Rettig Gur takes the pulse of Jerusalem politics.
Around the World
• Drip drip drip: Dozens of Jewish journalists and anti-racism activists were barred from a UK Labour Party event in London in yet another antisemitism controversy, per The Independent.
Multiple Jewish people who had tickets to the event on Thursday evening, but who had previously spoken out about the antisemitism row that engulfed Labour over the summer, were told at the last minute that their tickets had been cancelled.
Organisers told The Independent that people had been banned because they had “previously misrepresented events, people or facts”.
• Drip drip drip: The British government is due to release statistics on antisemitic incidents in the past year. The figures are expected to rise with a probable link to Labour Party antisemitism. The Daily Mail explains:
Jewish safety group the Community Security Trust recorded 727 anti-Semitic incidents in the first half of 2018, including 34 that made specific reference to Labour.
However, the figures to be published this week are expected to provide more detail on the scale of the problem.
• Man suspected of drawing devil, setting fire at Modesto, Calif. synagogue.
• Antisemitic fans of the Chelsea soccer team will have to choose between a trip to Auschwitz or being banned from the Stamford Bridge stadium, The Sun reports.
• Jewish teens assaulted, robbed in anti-Semitic attack in France.
• Three colleges in one New York town banned a person suspected of hanging antisemitic fliers blaming Jews for allegations of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
• The new government of Quebec plans to ban the province’s public servants from wearing kippahs and other religious symbols.
The proposed ban by the Coalition Avenir Québec government is ostensibly to make Quebec public institutions more secular and “neutral” religiously. It would bar police, prison guards, public school teachers and some others from wearing visible kippahs, turbans, hijabs and crucifixes under the possible penalty of dismissal for noncompliance.
Commentary
• Tweet of the day goes to @barbyonabike, who was reacting to our own tweet about AP coverage.
Surely if armed attacks were merely a protest, then all the IDF did was stage a counterprotest.
— barbyonabike ? (@barbyonabike) October 14, 2018
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Yoav Limor: Gaza: Back to the beginning
– Elior Levy: From Gaza to Ramallah: crucial days for Israeli-Palestinian relations
– Amanda Borschel-Dan: Lara Alqasem: A pawn in the PR battle for and against BDS
– Dan Diker: Will PA-supported terrorism kill economic peace?
– Jonathan Tobin: BDS threatens the diaspora, not Israel
– Lahav Harkov: When the BDS battle lost pro-Israel US Jewry
– Talia Katz: Antisemitism run amok at the University of Michigan
– Ido Aharoni: News media bias and the information revolution
– Asaf Romirowsky: Antisemitism spreads in the United States
Featured image: CC BY-SA Johnny Silvercloud; Khashoggi via YouTube/Washington Post; YAMAM CC BY-SA Wikimedia Commons; British flag CC0 Max Pixel; Chelsea CC0 Pixabay; Quebec City CC BY-NC-ND Steve Leclerc;
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
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