Today’s Top Stories
1. Israeli officials concede they can’t stop the UN Human Rights Council from adopting the Schabas report, so they’re focusing on getting a “moral minority” of democracies to vote against it and blunt its legitimacy. More at Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post. The latter adds:
In general, the sense in Jerusalem is that the report issued Monday – which charged that both Israel and the Palestinians may have been guilty of war crimes – attracted a great deal less attention abroad than the Goldstone Report.
Meanwhile, US opposes bringing the report to the Security Council.
2. A Palestinian Salafist involved in the kidnap and murder of an Italian activist escaped from Gaza to join Islamic State in Syria. Mahmoud al-Salfiti was on leave from a Hamas prison to visit family during Ramadan.
It’s not yet clear whether he left Gaza through a tunnel or by using a false identity at the Rafah crossing, which Egypt re-opened for several days. Vittorio Arrigoni, who arrived in Gaza on a flotilla, was killed in 2011.
3. Nuclear cooperation with Iran is a powerful carrot for the West dangle. But does this Associated Press scoop describe something going too far?
The United States and other nations negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran are ready to offer high-tech reactors and other state-of-the-art equipment to Tehran if it agrees to crimp programs that can make atomic arms, according to a confidential document obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press . . .
The West has always held out the prospect of providing Iran peaceful nuclear technology in the nearly decade-long international diplomatic effort designed to reduce Tehran’s potential ability to make nuclear weapons. But the scope of the help now being offered in the draft may displease U.S. congressional critics who already argue that Washington has offered too many concessions at the negotiations.
4. Mad Mads Feted in The Guardian: The Guardian promotes radical Marxist anti-Israel propagandist, Dr. Mads Gilbert’s new book.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Mary McGowan Davis, who led the UN’s inquiry after William Schabas stepped down, discussed the report with Haaretz. Asked about the moral equivalence the report drew between Israel and Hamas:
“We were not in charge of conducting a moral investigation but to check if the international law was violated . . . The law puts them on the same level, and we follow the law.”
Her remarks about Israel bombing civilian areas drew a sharp response from David Bernstein.
• An IAF air strike destroyed a rocket launcher in Gaza after a rocket was fired at Israel last night. The rocket landed in an open area causing no casualties or damage. Israel also responded by cancelling entry permits to 500 Gazans to visit the Temple Mount during Ramadan.
• PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah is leading talks with Hamas on a new unity government that will have “factional leaders replacing independent technocrats.” More at Maan News.
• A study found that German school books found that Israel is portrayed “as an aggressive, warlike country while ignoring that the Jewish state is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East.” The Jerusalem Post writes:
“Pupils connect Israel with a warmongering society,” said Simone Lässig, director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research.
Mideast Matters
• For Egypt, TV Show’s Shocking Twist Is Its Sympathetic Jews
• Dozens of Druze recruits defected en masse from the Syrian army while a convoy carrying more was blocked from leaving the Suweida province. It seems Bashar Assad’s officers broke a promise that the Druze recruits would only serve in Suweida, their home province.
• AFP describes the latest sick, sick, sick Islamic State execution video. It’s apparently filmed in Iraq. Do you really want people like this setting up shop in the Syrian Golan too? And in another Syrian town, two children were reportedly crucified for breaking the fast of Ramadan.
Commentary/Analysis
• Why are Mahmoud Abbas and Mohammed Dahlan trying to outdo each other sponsoring mass weddings? Danny Rubinstein explains that the Palestinian “wedding war” highlights the problem of Palestinian succession.
If succession comes down to Dahlan and the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, things could get messy for Israel.
• Worth reading: Over at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes and Yishai Schwartz impressively unpack the Schabas report:
In a more rigorous report, Hamas’s tactics would be the fundamental lens through which Israeli conduct got analyzed. When one side systematically violates the rules designed to protect civilians, after all, and a lot of civilians then get killed, those systematic violations have to be central to the inquiry into the reasons for those civilian deaths. In this report, those systematic violations are an afterthought. And somewhat shockingly—and very tellingly—they are also entirely absent from the report’s “conclusions and recommendations.”
The report’s main act, by contrast, is the evaluation of Israeli targeting decisions, evaluated in almost total isolation from the context of Hamas’s behavior
• Diana Moukalled warns Arabs not to let Bashar Assad get away with what I’ll call “Druzewashing.” (Takfirist, as Moukalled uses it, refers to radical Islamists.)
We must not make the mistake of undermining the threat which takfirists pose to minorities. However, one should not forget the risk posed by authoritarian regimes, like the Ba’athists in Syria, who use minorities as a means to protect themselves. The Syrian regime’s exploitation of these minorities threatens the latter’s existence just as much as the takfirists do. This is not to mention that the Syrian regime has always used scaremongering over takfirism to gain legitimacy.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– David Horovitz: Shame on you, Mary McGowan Davis
– Nahum Barnea: What war crimes did Israel commit in Gaza?
– Ben-Dror Yemini: Israel must take action to reduce international damage
– Ian O’Doherty: Boycott of Tel Aviv dance festival shows the face of real bigotry
– Clifford May: How to exacerbate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
– Avi Issacharoff: Druze mob’s rash attack may have doomed Syrian cousins
– Aaron David Miller: Nuclear deal unlikely to transform Iranian regime
• Lastly, a Chicago Sun-Times staff-ed weighed in on the Schabas report, while the French peace initiative got a thumbs up from an Irish Times staff-ed.
Featured image: CC BY-SA flickr/Rob Hurson with additions by HonestReporting; Arrigoni via YouTube/Al Jazeera English; McGowan Davis via YouTube/GNews; Dahlan CC BY-NC-SA flickr/World Economic Forum;
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