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Annexation: US President Donald Trump is poised to make a final decision today as to whether and how Israel should apply sovereignty to parts of the West Bank. US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman headed to Washington, DC for a meeting with special adviser to the president Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and special representative for international negotiations Avi Berkowitz to discuss how to move forward with the Israeli plan to apply sovereignty to parts of the West Bank as early as July 1.
Concerned about the collateral damage that could follow from allowing Israel to move ahead with its planned annexation of areas of the West Bank, Washington is reportedly considering several options, including a staged process in which Israel would start by declaring sovereignty only over several settlements in the Jerusalem area.
UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov, head of the EU Representative Office to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Sven Kuehn von Burgsdorff, and diplomats from several countries, including Britain, China, Russia, Japan, and Jordan attended a rally in Jericho to protest Israel’s intention to extend its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank. PA, PLO and Fatah officials also attended the rally.
Clashes were reported as 2,500 Israelis prayed at a Nablus holy site ahead of annexation. A leader of the settler movement told worshipers at Joseph’s Tomb, which is in an area of the West Bank under PA control, that “history will not forgive those who abandon the holy places at this time.”
A majority of Republican members of the US House of Representatives have signed a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu endorsing Israeli annexation of settlements in the West Bank. The letter praises the Middle East plan presented by the administration of US President Donald Trump, and blames the Palestinian leadership for choosing to reject it. It also says that its signatories support Israel’s “right to sovereignty and defensible borders.”
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Lebanese activist Kinda El-Khatib has been accused by a Lebanese military court of “collaboration with the Israeli enemy” and entering Israeli territory, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA). The activist was also accused of “dealing with spies of the Israeli enemy.”
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Antisemitism Watch: One of Europe’s top rabbis has warned that Jews on the continent may no longer be able to consume kosher meat because of legislation targeting “shechita” — the Jewish method of slaughtering animals for human consumption.
Malak Afaneh, senior class president at Pomona College in southern California, has been accused of antisemitism after social media posts surfaced featuring tweets comparing the ongoing conflict in Yemen to the Holocaust, while also suggesting that Israelis or Diaspora Jews are involved with or sympathetic to the violence.
The popular TikTok video-sharing service is being used antisemites, Holocaust deniers and other far-right extremists to reach young people, researchers from the University of Haifa and Israel’s Institute for Counter Terrorism found in a report titled “Spreading Hate on TikTok.”
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Recommended Reading
- Jerusalem, Jordan, and the Jews (Daniel Pipes)
- The law of annexation: what’s right and what’s wrong? (Daniel Pomerantz)
- Palestinians and Israelis will both gain from Israeli sovereignty over West Bank (Avi Bell)
- Why Black Lives Matter protests are a catalyst for anti-Semitism (Zoe Strimpel)
- Israel will annex nothing (Dr. Norman Bailey)
- What is Israel’s next move as Turks and Saudis duel over Jerusalem? (Ariel Ben Solomon)
- How strong is the Jewish claim to the West Bank? (Dov Lipman)
