Today’s Top Stories
1. Hamas is putting kids on the firing line, recruiting hundreds of Gaza children for tomorrow’s border protest. Palestinians insisted to The Media Line that the “Kids’ Right To Live Freely” protest will be, uh, peaceful.
Hamas appears intent on upping the ante amid ongoing tensions with Israel. With the sides on the cusp of war, whereby one small, even unintentional incident, might tip the scale in favor of full-blown conflict, Gaza’s rulers have decided to recruit hundreds of Palestinian children from across the enclave to take part in Friday’s installment of the so-called “March of Return” protests. The children will amass, along with potentially tens of thousands of other Gazans, near the Erez crossing point with Israel in order to denounce the “violation of their fundamental rights.”
The panel will be headed by David Michael Crane, a US law professor and former prosecutor in war crimes trials. The other two members of the “Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” are Sara Hossain, a Bangladeshi lawyer educated in the UK, and Kaari Betty Murungi, a lawyer and human rights activist from Kenya.
Crane, who currently teaches at the Syracuse University College of Law, was the founding Chief Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, an international war crimes tribunal. In 2012, the tribunal convicted former Liberian president Charles Taylor of war crimes and sentenced him to 50 years in prison, which he is serving in Britain.
Join the fight for Israel’s fair coverage in the news
3. In a display of solidarity, Britain’s three largest Jewish newspapers, the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and Jewish Telegraph took the unprecedented step of running identical front page editorials with each other’s logos denouncing Labour Party antisemitism.
With the government in Brexit disarray, there is a clear and present danger that a man with a default blindness to the Jewish community’s fears, a man who has a problem seeing that hateful rhetoric aimed at Israel can easily step into antisemitism, could be our next prime minister.
On 5 September, Labour MPs vote on an emergency motion, calling for the party to adopt the full IHRA definition into its rulebook.
Following that, it will face a binary choice: implement IHRA in full or be seen by all decent people as an institutionally racist, antisemitic party.
BREAKING: Britain's leading Jewish newspapers, @JewishNewsUK, @JewishChron and @JewishTelegraph, all carry the same front page on the community’s anger and anxiety over @LabourUK rejection of international anti-Semitism definition. #UnitedWeStand @BoardofDeputies @JLC_uk pic.twitter.com/G2ysww8641
— Jewish News (@JewishNewsUK) July 25, 2018
4. CBC’s Appalling Coverage of Israel’s Daring Rescue of Syria’s White Helmets: Network repeatedly fails to mention Israel’s key role in evacuation.
5. PBS Newshour Calls Tel Aviv Israel’s Capital: Whether or not one recognizes Jerusalem’s status, Tel Aviv is clearly not Israel’s capital.
6. New York Times: Anti-Israel Agenda in 280 Characters: The paper of record only scores one out of three on accuracy.
7. HonestReporting in a Minute: What are the “Palestinian Territories?” The mainstream media isn’t always clear about the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel and the Palestinians
• The Gaza situation heated up when an Israeli soldier patrolling the border was moderately wounded by sniper fire from the Strip. The IDF retaliated with air strikes and tank fire on Hamas targets. Hamas confirmed three of its operatives were killed and fired nine rockets early Thursday morning that caused no damage.
• The IDF struck targets in Syria after a pair of errant Islamic State rockets landed in the Kinneret Lake. According to the Jerusalem Post, “The rockets were not intercepted due to the fact that Israel’s aerial defense system is not fully hermetic.” Moscow later thanked the IDF for destroying an Islamic State rocket launcher in Syria.
• Ahed Tamimi and her mother are scheduled is scheduled to be freed Sunday after serving eight months in jail for hitting a soldier. “They are then planning to hold a press conference at the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, which is slated for demolition by Israeli forces.”
• The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees laid off hundreds of workers. For now, the agency’s work in Gaza is bearing the main brunt of the cutbacks. Staff and refugees are bitterly protesting.
Sources in the Gaza Strip said that some 1,000 employees have been affected by UNRWA’s latest measures, which include the immediate dismissal of 125 workers from the agency’s emergency program. UNRWA employees in the West Bank will also be affected by the measures.
Another 570 UNRWA employees were notified that they would be hired only on a parttime basis, while an additional 270 were told that their contracts would be terminated at the end of the year if the financial crisis is not resolved.
That budget meltdown is the direct result of the US administration’s decision to suspend more than half of the annual funding – $65 million out of $125 million – which it had previously UNRWA.
• Over at the UN, the Group pf 77, a coalition of now 134 developing countries (135 if you count the PA) selected Palestine to chair the organization in 2019. New York Times coverage.
• The UN Economic and Social Council resolution criticizing Israeli actions against the Palestinians made no reference to Palestinian violence. Council members also refused to even add a sentence calling on Hamas to release Israeli captives held in Gaza.
• A Spanish BDS activist was denied entry to Israel on Tuesday.
• According to a Le Monde report picked up by Ynet, the Mossad has turned Paris into a veritable “playground” for espionage and counter-terror operations.
The reason the Mossad—like many other foreign intelligence agencies including the CIA—has turned Paris into its center of operations is because it hosts many international conference and frequent visits of African leaders. Furthermore, the city is home to many foreigners.
Another reason, according to a source in French intelligence, is that “France dedicates most of its espionage activities to the fight against terrorism, therefore it doesn’t have enough manpower for counter-espionage.”
Window Into Israel
• Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman is beginning the process of choosing the IDF’s next chief of staff. Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot’s is due to step down on January 1.
• As the Druze community protests the nation state law, two of its key supporters, cabinet ministers Naftali Bennett and Moshe Kahlon admitted mistakes were made and called for amending the law. But Israeli media reports say the prime minister is opposed to changing the law, preferring “other moves aimed at improving conditions for the Druze.”
• Jerusalem Report cartoonist Avi Katz was fired for an ‘Animal Farm’ cartoon portraying Netanyahu and MKs as pigs celebrating the passage of the nation state law. One Jerusalem Report writer resigned in protest of Katz’s dismissal. The Jerusalem Report is owned and distributed by the Jerusalem Post.
• Death penalty for terrorists?
• Haaretz takes a deep dive look at why an expected wave of French aliyah never materialized after 2015 terror attacks.
• For domestic commentary, Judith Bergman, Charles Dunst and Seth Frantzman weigh in on the nation state law.
Around the World
• Austrian vice chancellor says ritual Jewish slaughter should be outlawed.
• Even more scandalous is that he was in mid-swing when this happened.
• Philadelphia teacher investigated for playing Nazi wrestling character.
• Man charged in arson attempt on 250-year-old Exeter synagogue.
Commentary
• Kiwi columnist and former politician Sir Bob Jones is entitled to his opinions, but he must be among the least qualified people on earth to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a rambling New Zealand Herald column, confesses that everything he knows about the Mideast comes from reading headlines and nothing else for around 30 years.
One of my best predictions was back in the mid 1980s. Reading about the latest outbreak in Israel of stone-throwing, bombings, killings and so on I realised I had been reading the same story for years.
More salient, I concluded, given the belligerence of the parties nothing would ever change so I decided henceforth not to read past the headlines. That decision in a lateral sense has probably added a few years to my life in avoiding wasted reading time and putting it to better use.
Furthermore, I have no doubt my prediction nigh on four decades ago remains just as valid for the future and will end only when the two factions ultimately destroy one another.
Come to think about it, everything I know about the NZ-Australia flag dispute comes from headlines and nothing else. Will NZ Herald editors give me a 954-word soapbox too?
• Tweet of the day goes to Daniel Rubenstein.
A request for those sharing their hot takes about Israel and Hamas: “Neither side wants war” is a useless statement. You are no smarter for having said it and I am no smarter for having read it. Give me something more than the anodyne analysis you’ve offered for the past decade.
— Daniel Rubenstein (@paulrubens) July 26, 2018
• Here’s what else I’m reading today:
– David Horovitz: Hamas, the murderous neighbor that demands Israel give it the gun
– Amos Yadlin: On deterrence, equations, arrangements, and strategy
– Yoav Limor: Israel’s message to Syria: No more ‘small violations’
– Charles Bybelezer: 100 km between war and peace in Syria?
– Benny Avni: Russia just proved it doesn’t have control in Syria
– Avi Issacharoff: With Syria focused on ending war, it’s unlikely downed jet was threat to Israel
– Ron Ben-Yishai: Syrian fighter jet: A navigational error with no hidden agenda
– Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Daring rescue of White Helmets shows international cooperation isn’t dead after all
– Daniel Finkelstein: Jeremy Corbyn is blind to the racism in his party
– Benedict Cooper: Claims of antisemitism face hostility and suspicion in Labour
– Bassam Tawil: Palestinian Authority silences students
Featured image: CC BY-SA Johnny Silvercloud; Crane via YouTube/RobertHJacksonCenter; Tamimi via YouTube/TRT World; Paris CC BY Chris Waits; New Zealand CC0 Pixabay;
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
Before you comment on this article, please remind yourself of our Comments Policy. Any comments deemed to be in breach of the policy will be removed at the editor’s discretion.
