Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel busted an ISIS-affiliated terror cell in Hebron. Details at the Jerusalem Post.
2. Israel froze tax revenue transfers to the PA in retaliation for ICC membership bid. Most news services quoted Haaretz. We’re talking about “a half billion shekels (more than $127 million)” in sales tax and customs revenue on goods passing through Israel in December that would otherwise have been transferred on Friday.
3. Did Hamas fudge its combatant casualties for ulterior motives? The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center released the names of 50 Gaza terrorists killed in fighting with Israel, but withheld from casualty lists. Why would Hamas do that?
The attempt to censor the names “stem from Hamas’s policy of deliberate concealment, in order to serve the diplomatic, media, and legal campaigns against Israel,” Dr. Reuven Erlich, head of the Terrorism and Intelligence Center, told The Jerusalem Post.
Israel and the Palestinians
• The Palestinians are considering re-submitting their statehood resolution to the UN Security Council. New council members who took seats at the beginning of the year give the Palestinians a more favorable chance of winning forcing the US to use its veto.
• French diplomats explain why they voted in a favor of the Palestinian draft resolution they had actively opposed.
• PA seeks Interpol membership.
• Nobody questions that settlers threw stones at a US diplomatic convoy on Friday; what’s less clear is who — if anybody — drew guns? YNet explains:
According to both Palestinian and settler sources, the American security guards drew their weapons at the settlers, a claim the Americans now reject.
Throwing stones is an act of violence, though Amira Hass might say there’s an “inner syntax” justifying this.
• HarperCollins apologized for schoolbooks sent to Gulf states omitting Israel from their maps.
• Haaretz: The secretary general of Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) plans first official visit on January 5.
• Meet the Arab Christians who want to fight for Israel. One told the Daily Telegraph:
“I would rather be a second-class citizen under a Jewish state than a first-class citizen in an Arab state. “Arab countries don’t have any system. They want to act according to Sharia (Islamic law). Christians have been persecuted all over the world and this is the only country (in the Middle East) that gives me the right to be Christian and practice my rituals.”
On a related note, former US attorney general Alberto Gonzalez spent Christmas in Israel. He shared his thoughts on the status of Christians in the Holy Land in the Washington Times.
• What’s the French connection here?
- Chief Rabbi of Paris: French Jewry is reeling from string of anti-Semitic attacks
- Immigration to Israel hits 10-year high with record French influx
• Israeli released from Egyptian prison after two years. More at YNet.
• The Media Line takes a closer look at growing India-Israel ties.
Commentary/Analysis
• Cartoonist Jimmy Margulies weighs in on the Palestinian ICC bid.
• Experts who talked to New York Times bureau chief Jodi Rudoren don’t expect the Palestinian bid for ICC membership to guarantee them a war crimes case.
Michael P. Scharf, the dean of the Case Western Reserve University law school in Ohio, said that past cases “involved hundreds of thousands or at least tens of thousands of deaths,” and that the court “requires that they be committed as part of a policy or plan, and not simply incidental to attacks on enemy targets.”
• Evidence of Tension between the Military and Political Wings of Hamas
• Giles Fraser raises an interesting point about why the Arab world rejects Ridley Scott’s movie, Exodus: Gods and Kings:
The Egyptian ministry of culture says it banned the film because of historical inaccuracies that “offend Egypt and its pharaonic ancient history, in yet another attempt to Judaise Egyptian civilisation, which confirms the international Zionist fingerprints all over the film”.
They must have been watching a different film to the one I saw, because I think that the people who ought to be most offended by this film are Jews, not Egyptians. OK, it suggests that Jews built the pyramids, which they didn’t. But as to it being a part of some big Zionist conspiracy, that’s ridiculous. If anything it seems to me an attack on Zionism.
Unless, of course, the real worry is not with Scott’s interpretation, but with the Exodus/Promised land story itself. For the part that story plays in Zionism is, as my Palestinians friends attested, a complicated one. Liberation isn’t always as neat and tidy is it seems in the movies.
• Roger Cohen hangs out with Amos Oz.
• For more commentary/analysis, see John Bolton (The UN vote on Palestine was rehearsal — Wall St. Journal via Google News), Jonathan Tobin (Obama shouldn’t oppose effort to hold Palestinians accountable), Steven Rosen (Could Obama swing the Israeli election?), and Burak Bekdil (Davutoglu and Mashaal: A marriage made in heaven). Last but not least, staff-eds in the Wall St. Journal (click via Google News) and New York Daily News slam Palestinian unilateralism.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Iran claims it foiled an Israeli hit on a nuclear scientist.
• New York Post: The World Health Organization is checking reports that a number of ill ISIS fighters in Baghdad may have contracted Ebola. The initial suspicions are that the disease was brought to Iraq by African jihadis.
Featured image: CC BY-NC-SA HonestReporting, Ionia K./truthout (via flickr); funeral YouTube/Al Jazeera English; Exodus YouTube/20th Century Fox
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