Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel has offered asylum to an Iranian-born writer who blogged for the Times of Israel from Turkey. Turkish officials sought to deport Neda Amin back to Iran, which she had fled years earlier because of her writing on women’s issues. More at Israel HaYom and Reuters.
2. An Israeli court ruled to revoke the citizenship of a convicted terrorist today.
Alaa Ziad from the Arab city of Umm el-Fahm was sentenced one year ago to 25 years in prison for four attempted murders following an October 11, 2015 terrorist attack, in which he both ran over and stabbed two soldiers and two civilians, one of whom was a 15-year-old girl, at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel near Hadera.
The court ruled on Sunday that in place of citizenship Ziad would be granted temporary residency, which would be renewed from time to time, according to the interior minister’s judgment.
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3. Concerned about Islamic State in the Sinai digging tunnels threatening Israeli communities adjacent to the Israel-Egypt-Gaza border, the IDF will build an underground barrier along a three km stretch. “Expected to be complete within one-and-a-half years, the new barrier will set Israel back NIS 3.4 billion,” Ynet reports.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Israel busted a Hamas money-laundering ring involving personnel in Turkey, Hebron and Gaza. The Jerusalem Post explains:
. . . the investigation revealed that $200,000 had been laundered in that manner. In addition, the construction of a multi-million dollar concrete plant financed by Hamas was planned, with the aim of laundering more money.
• PA chief Mahmoud Abbas insisted he’ll maintain financial pressure on Hamas.
• Israel arrested 15 more Palestinians around eastern Jerusalem last night on suspicion of instigating Temple Mount riots.
• Times of Israel: Senegal and Guinea, two Muslim-majority Africa states, will send their first-ever envoys to Israel this week.
• Details are scant, but a small drone from Gaza fell in Israeli territory on Saturday.
• Israeli developed a new system capable of identifying explosive devices from afar, reports Ynet.
• I really don’t understand why AP and Reuters are wasting reporters’ time on the latest artwork appearing on the Israeli security barrier. Is there nothing more important they could be spending their time on?
Around the World
• Closing the chapter on Kevin Myers, the embattled Irish columnist denied he’s an anti-Semite, but acknowledged he deserved to be fired for his recent commentary noting that two of the BBC’s highest paid female presenters are Jewish.
See JTA coverage or listen to the full Myers interview on RTE Radio One.
“It was stupid of me, the encapsulation of such a complex issue in a single sentence,” Myers said, referring to a line in a July 30 column that played on the stereotype of Jews as hard bargainers. “One of my flaws is to deal with major issues with throwaway lines.” . . .
In his first comments on the incident, Myers told RTE Radio One that at least “five or six” other Sunday Times employees would have overseen the column before it went to print.
“A number of people nodded on duty and let something through that shouldn’t have gone through,” he said.
However, Myers called himself the “author of his own misfortune” and took responsibility.
• Roger Waters, the anti-Semitic pro-BDS rocker now touring the US, was denounced in critical op-eds in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Nashville Tennessean ahead of upcoming gigs in those two cities. And the Washington Post picked up on a video response to Waters by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
I have a feeling Jewish activists in Newark, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, and all the other cities on Waters’ Us+Them tour will be taking action as well.
• British Co-op banned from four US states over BDS policies.
Florida, Illinois, New York and Arizona have implemented the proscriptions against the Co-op, which has suffered a series of controversies since adopting its policy five years ago.
Co-op supermarkets in Britain have refused to stock products from Israeli West Bank settlements since 2009, and the policy was extended in 2012 to include barring any engagement with Israeli suppliers known to work with the settlements.
• Australian Jews are up in arms after a local council shot down plans for a new Sydney synagogue citing fears of a possible terror attack.
Jewish leaders are shocked the decision appears to suggest they cannot freely practice their religion because they are the target of hate by Islamist extremists — and that the council has used their own risk assessment of the threat posed by IS against it.
The head of the local Jewish community said the council and the court had effectively stifled freedom of religion and rewarded terrorism.
But the council insists it isn’t to blame.
• Germany’s taking BDS awfully seriously, judging from this development reported by the Jerusalem Post:
A criminal complaint filed against three BDS activists who allegedly launched physical and verbal tirades at MK Aliza Lavie and an Israeli survivor of the Holocaust at a June event in Berlin has been sent to a police division responsible for political extremism, a spokeswoman for the authorities told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday.
• Sanity prevails at Frankfurt’s Goethe University, whose student council equated BDS with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses.
• Two Iranian soccer players who play for a Greek team were condemned by Iran’s soccer federation for playing in a match against an Israeli team, reports AP.
Commentary/Analysis
• Worth reading: David Koren and Ben Avrahami, both advisors on east Jerusalem affairs for the Jerusalem Municipality, take the pulse of eastern Jerusalem, examining Palestinian nationalism, the rise of Islamic religious identity, the Temple Mount as a flashpoint, and increasing normalization of ties with Israeli government authorities. Their piece in HaShiloach has a lot to chew on, so don’t try reading it all at once.
• Palestinian scholar Bassam Tawil has a bone to pick with the Foreign Press Association in Israel.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Ruthie Blum: Sex, lies and terrorism
– Alex Fishman: Decades-long Jerusalem activity going down the drain
– Raphael Ahren: Temple Mount crisis ended Trump’s Palestinian honeymoon. Kushner made things worse
– Yardena Schwartz: Jerusalem’s forever crisis
– Ronni Shaked: Israel is going to miss Mahmoud Abbas
– Michael Wilner: Kushner rejects ‘history lessons’ while still reliving them
– Ami Ayalon, Gilead Sher and Orni Petruschka: The inevitable next conflagration
– Dr. Mordechai Kedar: The failure of liberalism
– Jamie Palmer: The left and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The path to righteous hatred
– Andrew Bolt: Bondi synagogue ruling over terror fears shames Australia
– Jonathan Tobin: It’s not about flags: The real problem with Jewish-Palestinian dialogue
– Zvi Bar’el: Hezbollah shows who’s really in charge of the Syria-Lebanon border
– MSP Jeremy Balfour: Shalom Festival is a chance for Scots to show they support the path to peace
Featured image: CC BY Pedro Ribeiro Simooes; Sydney CC BY-NC-ND Geee Kay;
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