Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel shot down a Palestinian drone flying over the coast near Ashdod.
2. Egypt’s offering Gaza aid, but not leverage, reports the Christian Science Monitor. And that has Smadar Perry commenting that Cairo’s Sisi regime is perfectly happy to let Gaza simmer while Israel pounds Hamas. The Egyptian media’s been vicious against Hamas too. MEMRI rounded up a collection of harsh commentaries.
3. Demonstrations for and against Operation Protective Edge have gone global. Unfortunately, some of the protests have taken a nasty turn.
Hundreds of French Jews were trapped in a synagogue when a Paris protest got violent. A rabbi in Morocco and a dual Israeli-Australian citizen in Melbourne were both beaten up over Gaza. In Los Angeles, a federal officer fired his gun when Israeli and Palestinian supporter scuffled at a rally. Nobody was harmed.
Demonstrations in Boston, London, and New Delhi also had ugly moments. But the hands-down most absurd moment was in Frankfurt:
A demonstrator in Frankfort, Germany, used a police megaphone to shout anti-Israel slogans after duping police.
Police said the demonstrator had agreed to calm down a violent protest Saturday but instead shouted “Child murderer Israel” and “Allahu akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great” — a Frankfurt police spokeswoman told The Associated Press.
4. Israel Under Fire: Answering the Accusations: As Operation Protective Edge enters its second week, HonestReporting provides articles, videos and other resources to counter accusations.
5. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Vicious and Misdirected: Serial Israel-basher attacks the legitimate right of Jews to support Israel.
Israel and the Palestinians
• For details on the weekend news, see today’s liveblogging at the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Times of Israel, and i24 News. Among today’s most notable developments:
• Coordinated cyber attacks took down Hamas web sites for five hours.
• Hamas is really fighting an uphill media battle. Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said on TV that Hamas is “leading our people to death.” Freudian slip? Who knows? Hamas insists the video was fabricated, but it doesn’t help that this was aired on the organization’s own Al-Aqsa TV.
• Worth reading: Behind Israel’s rocket warnings, an increasingly complex system: Meet the IDF officer who ultimately decides when and where a siren is sounded.
• Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer discussed the Gaza crisis with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and ambassadors Ron Dermer and Maen Areikat. Dermer’s Red Alert app went off during his interview.
The Israeli media blitz continued with Bibi on Fox News, and Avigdor Lieberman at YNet.
• Mahmoud Abbas is the big loser of the Gaza crisis, rendering him irrelevant as Israel and Hamas slug it out. So reports the Washington Post.
• UNRWA tells reporters to interview Norwegian supporter of 9/11 terror attacks.
• A Hamas rocket hit an Israeli power line providing electricity to 70,000 Gazans. That means lights out in Khan Yunis and Deir el-Balah.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the [Israel Electric Corporation] not to risk the lives of its employees in trying to restore power to the affected sector in Gaza, an operation that could take hours.
• Buzzfeed: 150 American citizens have been evacuated from Gaza; more remain stranded.
• British editorial cartoons in the Daily Telegraph and The Independent carried a theme of moral equivalency — the latter unforgivably so.
• Chris Elliott, the readers’ editor at The Guardian, weighs in on complaints about the paper’s Mideast coverage.
Though I have tried to write the above as carefully as possible, there will already be readers reaching for their keypads to complain about the way I have framed the conflict, readers who believe passionately that the Guardian is either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine.
Who could possibly believe (with passion!) that The Guardian is pro-Israel?
• Haaretz: Suspects in Palestinian teen’s murder to plead insanity. Details of the Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s murder, which were finally cleared for publication, are at YNet.
• For more commentary/analysis, see David Horovitz (The statement not issued by the Security Council), Dan Hodges (Israel knows the price of weakness), Michael Oren (A smart way out of the Gaza conflict), Jonathan Tobin (Why doesn’t Gaza have bomb shelters?), AP (A strategic stalemate), plus staff-eds in the Times of London, The Guardian, and New York Daily News.
Also weighing in are Avi Issacharoff, Jonathan Spyer, Shmuley Boteach, James Hider, Lloyd Green, Dan Margalit, Michael Goodwin, and Peter Beaumont. Last but not least, Fisk’s being Fisk again.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• The Dutch parliament unanimously called on the PA to stop paying salaries to convicted terrorists.
The Netherlands gives $88 million annually to the Palestinian Authority in addition to about $24 million that it donates to UNRWA, according to the De Telegraaf daily.
Holland’s former foreign minister, Uri Rosenthal, has said that of those sums, only $10,800 is used by the Palestinian Authority to pay salaries to terrorists, but Voordewind said recent figures show the real figure is closer to $5.5 million.
• Over at Tablet, David Goldman (a.k.a. Spengler) says that as the Arab Spring rages, Israel is increasingly becoming the only force capable of governing the West Bank.
Image of Dutch parliament CC Flickr/Markus Bernet
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream and join the IDNS on Facebook.
