Today’s Top Stories
1. Two Israeli soldiers who mistakenly wandered into the Qalandiya refugee camp were attacked by a mob of Palestinians with rocks and firebombs, triggering an IDF rescue operation and a firefight. One Palestinian was killed and five Border Policemen were injured. YNet reports that at one point, believing that one of the soldiers had been taken hostage, the army declared the Hannibal directive.
The soldiers were misled into the camp by following directions from Waze, a navigational app. Neither was harmed during the violence. The Times of Israel has good background on why Qalandiya is an especially violent place.
https://twitter.com/EylonALevy/status/704633818758713345
2. SodaStream laid off its last 74 Palestinian workers when the Israeli government refused to renew their work permits. It’s not clear to me whether the government’s decision was based on security (five months of stabbing attacks), politics (prioritizing jobs for Israelis), or a bit of both. If the numbers help you make any sense, the Wall St. Journal (click via Google News) notes:
Despite the violence, Israel has issued 58,282 work permits for Palestinians as of Feb. 1, up from 52,647 a year earlier, according to government data.
The SodaStream factory, originally located in the West Bank’s Mishor Adumim industrial zone, relocated to the Negev in 2014 and laid off more than 500 Palestinians, partly for business reasons and partly because of BDS pressure. AP quotes one BDS leader’s reaction. I find it strange, because the factory is in Lehavim, just north of Beersheva, well inside Israel. “The occupation” can only refer to pre-1967 Israel:
Mahmoud Nawajaa, the BDS coordinator in the West Bank town of Ramallah, called the loss of the Palestinian jobs at SodaStream “part of the price that should be paid in the process of ending the occupation“.
#BDS wins a shutdown of SodaStream, last Palestinian worker laid off. Will BDS offer jobs to 600 Palestinian factory workers now unemployed?
— Mudar Zahran مضر زهران (@Mudar_Zahran) March 1, 2016
3. Why is Palestinian lawmaker Najat Abu Bakr holed up in the PA parliament building as a fugitive from Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces?
Her crime: blowing the whistle on the financial corruption of a cabinet minister who is closely associated with President Abbas.
Her claim is that the minister has been privately selling water to Palestinians and has illegally taken more than $200,000 from the Palestinian budget.
But that is not her only alleged crime. A further one concerns her public support for a teacher’s strike in the West Bank. The strike has seriously embarrassed President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority leadership. Abbas has ordered scores of striking teachers arrested and has deployed hundreds of policemen at checkpoints to foil a protest organized by the teachers, who are demanding higher salaries and better conditions.
4. Subconscious Bias in The Guardian? Surely Not: When the paper got confused about the difference between extra-parliamentary and extra-paramilitary groups, HonestReporting corrected the record.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
Israel and the Palestinians
• Portugal’s Syndicate of Journalists rejected a formal complaint from the Palestinian Authority against a December, 2015 report filed by Israeli-Portuguese journalist Henrique Cymerman. The PA took issue with the language of an on-screen caption which said, “22 Israelis were murdered and roughly 100 Palestinian assailants were killed.”
Ajjuri complained the article was biased because it “equates the occupier and the occupied and goes further to justify the cold-blooded murder by the Israeli occupation forces of Palestinian youths and children.”
The full ruling on the Syndicate’s web site essentially affirms that slain Palestinian terrorists weren’t murdered.
• Ahead of his UK trip, the Daily Telegraph profiles Yuli Edelstein. Now the speaker of the Knesset, Edelstein was imprisoned by the Soviets for teaching Hebrew.
• Oh no, Hamas!
Hamas Commander, Accused of Theft and Gay Sex, Is Killed by His Own
Around the World
• Officials in Jerusalem and Ankara are distancing themselves from recent reports of imminent Israeli-Turkish reconciliation. Yesterday, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was quoted in Hurriyet saying the two countries may make a joint statement “in the coming days.”
Officials stressed that Israel was insisting Ankara terminate Hamas’ base of operations in Turkey and that currently there was no progress on the matter.
• Unwilling to guarantee the full and equal participation of Israeli competitors, Oman withdrew from hosting this year’s Youth Sailing World Championships. It’s part of the fallout from last year’s fiasco when Israeli windsurfers Yoav Omer and Noy Drihan, and their coach were excluded from the Youth Sailing World Championships in Malaysia.
World Sailing then demanded written confirmation from all venues that have already been selected and confirmed for forthcoming World Sailing championships to guarantee they can meet the updated regulations, resulting in Oman’s withdrawal.
• Ruhr University Bochum, one of Germany’s largest universities cancelled a BDS lecture.
• The Guardian takes a closer look at what’s known about the death of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
Commentary/Analysis
• Judging from the photos of Iranian Jews voting, I think Karl Sharro and Jeffrey Goldberg are talking about what I’d call Iranian “Jew-washing.”
I love how the pictures of Jews voting in Iran are meant to impress us. Because it's normal to wheel out minorities for photo ops like that.
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) February 29, 2016
• Israeli humanitarian aid workers on missions in Muslim countries can never let their guard down. One described her experiences in an anonymously written commentary in The Guardian.
When I first started working in a conflict zone, it was in a country categorised by Israel as an “enemy state”. This meant that officially you were never supposed to set foot there – dual nationality or not. Usually this also applied vice versa and said enemy state would have a field day if it discovered you on its soil.
At the local field office level, I always feared I could be made an example of in a cruel and sadistic way. Stories such as that of the murder of American-Israeli journalist Daniel Pearl gave me nightmares.
Most of the time though I flew under the radar of my colleagues, but on each mission, several people did know my identity and others guessed. There were also times I wanted to out myself to those who clearly didn’t have a clue. I became an expert at laughing off antisemitic jokes, while wondering what the hell was wrong with the world, and preparing a “day of reckoning” speech. I never used it.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– David Horovitz: Victory for BDS as SodaStream’s last Palestinian workers lose their jobs
– Eli Lake: Iran’s elections are magic
– Abdulrahman Al-Rashed: Punishing Lebanon or Hezbollah?
Featured image: CC BY regelzamora; Omer via Yoav Omer;
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
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