Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel retaliated on Saturday with air strikes on Syrian military targets after several errant mortar shells fell on the Israeli side of the Golan Heights. While no Israelis were injured, two Syrian soldiers were killed in the Israeli air strikes. The IDF has released video footage of strikes on two Syrian tanks and a heavy machine gun.
The spillover from the Syrian civil war has continued Sunday with more mortars landing on the Israeli Golan Heights.
2. Ugly scenes in Tehran and elsewhere as the Iranian regime commemorates Al-Quds Day. According to the LA Times, President Hassan Rouhani and other top officials attended the rallies while state television repeatedly played a song whose lyrics proclaimed that Israel “will be wiped out.”
Rouhani, in remarks carried by the official IRNA news agency, said Israel supports “terrorists in the region.” Parliament speaker Ali Larijani, in a speech to Tehran demonstrators, called Israel the “mother of terrorism” and said that in the “20th century, there was no event more ominous than establishing the Zionist regime.”
The rally also inaugurated a huge digital countdown display at Tehran’s Palestine Square, showing that Israel will allegedly cease to exist in 8,411 days from the day of the rally.
Plenty of unpleasant photos from the rally courtesy of the Daily Mail.
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3. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah says the next war with Israel could see thousands of Shi’ite militia fighters join forces with Hezbollah to fight Israel.
“This could open the way for thousands, even hundreds of thousands of fighters from all over the Arab and Islamic world to participate – from Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said in a television speech.
The JPost’s Seth Frantzman sets out five reasons that Hezbollah’s latest statement has ramifications for Israel and the region.
4. Hey Newsweek: Israelis Want Their Country Back: Newsweek twists a quote by Israel’s Minister of Defense, Avigdor Lieberman, into a rejection of Israel’s very existence, written by an openly anti-Israel activist.
Israel and the Palestinians
• US President Donald Trump is reportedly weighing whether to pull out of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations following a “tense” meeting with White House senior staff and officials in Ramallah, according to London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat on Saturday.
• Speaking at the IDC Herzliya Conference on Wednesday, IDF Military Intelligence chief Maj.- Gen. Hertzi Halevi revealed Iran’s massive funding of terror organizations, bankrolling Hezbollah to the tune of $75 million a year, while paying $50m. of Hamas’s budget and approximately $70m. to Islamic Jihad.
• Weighing in on an investigation of a spokesman for the left-wing Breaking the Silence group over testimony in which he claimed to have seriously assaulted a Palestinian during his IDF service in Hebron, his commander at the time insists the incident ‘never happened. All soldiers under his command also say it didn’t.’
• Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin have reportedly reinstalled a monument to a terrorist who masterminded a notorious 1974 massacre of Israeli school children, despite intense pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Around the World
• Rock group Radiohead, due to play a concert in Tel Aviv in July, were reportedly met with shouts of “free Palestine” during their headline slot at the Glastonbury music festival. Protesters were apparently waving Palestinian flags as the band performed, while a banner read: “Israel is an apartheid state. Radiohead, don’t play there.” Radiohead had previously expressed their disgust at Roger Waters’ and BDS’s efforts to get them to cancel their Israel appearance.
• The Qatar crisis rumbles on as Saudi Arabia issues a bucket list of demands including the shuttering of Al Jazeera. The Washington Post looks at why the Saudis hate the TV channel so much while The Atlantic analyzes the station’s central role in the crisis.
• The world just can’t get enough of its favorite Israeli, Gal Gadot a.k.a. Wonder Woman (apart from a few Mideast countries). So we’ve included a nice feature from the Financial Times (via Google).
Commentary/Analysis
• A number of media outlets, including the New York Times, have recently published excerpts from a Breaking the Silence sponsored book of essays by prominent novelists, including Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon. In a book review for the Washington Post, Matti Friedman rips the book apart:
The essays vary in tone and quality, but experienced journalists covering the Israel/Palestine story will recognize the usual impressions of reporters fresh from the airport. Cute Palestinian kids touched my hair! Beautiful tea glasses! I saw a gun! I lost my luggage, and that seems symbolic! Arabs do hip-hop! The soldiers are so young and rude! The writers interview the same people who are always interviewed in the West Bank, thinking it’s all new, and believe what they’re told. Chabon, for example, waxes sarcastic that in the West Bank you can spend months in administrative detention if you forget your ID card at home. But that isn’t true.
Everything is described with a gravitas suggesting that the writers haven’t spent much time outside the world’s safer corners. Eggers devotes two whole pages to an incident on the Gaza border, where one Israeli guard said he couldn’t pass and then a different one came and let him through. Dave, if you’re reading this, I hope you’re okay.
• Julie Lenarz writes in the International Business Times that Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for Gaza’s suffering:
All of this is a tragedy. But it is a tragedy deliberately manufactured by Hamas that easily could have been avoided. Hamas is doing again what it has done a hundred times before: sacrificing the well-being of Gaza’s civilian population on the altar of cynical political ambitions.
Hamas could, if it wanted to, pay for the lack of electricity and ease the suffering immediately. According to data from the Hamas Finance Ministry, the group collects at least $15m (£11m) a month in taxation. But instead of paying for education, medical services and electricity, Hamas invests millions of dollars a year in its military infrastructure and preparations for war, including smuggling tunnels and rockets.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Conrad Black: Palestinian terror and Israel boycotts aren’t a form of ‘dissent.’ They’re just evil and stupid
Featured image: CC BY-ND Gregor Fischer
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