• A UN committee spent two days with legal experts devising how “to promote legal action, plus boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, “under the seemingly neutral auspices of the UN.” Details at UN Watch.
• Must read: The Daily Telegraph‘s Jake Wallis Simons slams the PA for using British funds to pay generous stipends to terrorists in Israeli prisons:
The Israeli charge is grave: that British aid to the Palestinian government – worth £343 million between 2011 and 2015 – is funding generous salaries and bonuses to about 5,000 convicted terrorists. This money, they say, not only rewards terror, but also exacerbates the threat by diluting the deterrent of a prison sentence . . .
The Palestinian Authority continues to pay between four and six per cent of its own resources to convicted terrorists, a huge sum that is proportionally roughly equivalent to Britain’s entire defence budget (which stands at 4.5 per cent).
• Does the family of Menachem Zivotofsky even have legal standing to pursue legal action against the State Department over listing “Jerusalem, Israel” in his US passport? Eugene Kontorovich isn’t so sure.
• CNN discussed the reconciliation deal with Hanan Ashrawi and Dore Gold. Judging from the different tone of questions Jim Clancy asks the two, methinks the CNN anchor believes in the tooth fairy.
• For more commentary/analysis, see Khaled Abu Toameh (what is Abbas trying to achieve?), Jeffrey Goldberg (why Israel pulled out of the peace process), Asaf Romirowsky (the evenhandedness trap), Robert Tait (Kerry sunk by failure to address Gaza), Avi Issacharoff (Israel should thank Abbas for unity deal, not berate him), Elliott Abrams (will Kerry continue shuttle diplomacy if Hamas and Fatah unite?), Diane Buttu (reconciliation based on factional interests won’t last), Boaz Bismuth (Hamas is the same Hamas), and a staff-ed in The Australian.
Over at the NY Times’ Room for Debate, Jonathan Schanzer, Ami Ayalon, Noura Erakat and Ali Abunimah weigh in. Last but not least, Fisk’s being Fisk again.
• Credit the NY Times for noting Abbas’ checkered background on the Holocaust and an Israeli response that deserves wider acknowledgement:
Mr. Abbas has been vilified as a Holocaust denier because in his doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 1983, he challenged the number of Jewish victims and argued that Zionists had collaborated with Nazis to propel more people to what would become Israel. A senior Israeli minister,incensed at quotations from Hitler highlighted on Facebook pages affiliated with the Palestinian Authority, denounced Mr. Abbas earlier this year as “the most anti-Semitic leader in the world” at a conference in Tel Aviv . . . .
“For Abu Mazen to put out a statement when he’s embraced Hamas, that’s a serious problem,” the official said, using Mr. Abbas’s nickname. Further, he said, Mr. Abbas should have condemned Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian who as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem supported the Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews. “Abbas’s message would ring truer if Palestinians would look at their own past and their own attitude at the time to the genocide of the Jews.”
• McClatchy News picked up on the vitriol Professor Mohammed Dajani is catching for bringing Palestinian students to Auschwitz.
Al Quds University, which used to promote joint academic ventures with Israelis but changed its policy, issued a statement dissociating itself from Dajani’s trip and warned him that he should make clear to students that the visit was not a university activity.
See also Nazir Mgally, who wants to give Dajani a medal.
• Reuel Marc Gerecht (Wall St. Journal via Google News) boils down the “logic” behind Iranian Holocaust denial to two reasons.
Many Iranian revolutionaries appear to be a bit flummoxed by the contradiction of the all-powerful Jews losing more than half their number to the Nazis. The common refrain that one hears among pan-Arab nationalists and Muslim Brotherhood types—that Hitler didn’t go far enough—isn’t widespread among Iran’s Islamic militants. For them, Holocaust denial restores some logic to history: If they can assert that Hitler did not kill six million Jews, the Holocaust can be labeled a narrative spun by Jews to engender guilt and special advantages over Muslims and others. In that light, Holocaust denial is both moral and politically essential.
The second main reason for denying the Holocaust: Doing so implicitly negates the need for Israel’s existence.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• Former Israeli National Security Advisor Yaakov Amidror slams the direction of the Iranian nuclear talks.
None of assumptions behind the emerging accord are sound: Neither the assumption that a monitoring regime could guarantee identification in real time of Iranian violations; nor the assumption that the US would act with alacrity if a breach is identified; nor the assumption that in the real world Iran will truly be deterred by US threats. An agreement along these lines would be far worse than no agreement, and could force Israel to respond independently.
But a NY Times staff-ed takes a polar opposite view:
Even so, the negotiations keep confounding skeptics by making steady progress and showing that investing in this process is worth the risk.
• With Sinai tourism down the drain, locals are turning to opium production. As the Christian Science Monitor explains, the right climate for growing poppies — most notably risk-free lawlessness.
Yet for many first-time poppy growers, the deciding factor was not the retreat of law enforcement but the collapse of tourist arrivals. Of six poppy growers interviewed by the Monitor, all had previously worked in tourism.
• Egypt discovers Gaza tunnels in Rafah mosque. Is anyone shocked at the way Islamists treat their own places of worship?
• Zalman Shoval on Israeli neutrality in the Ukrainian conflict.
Some 200,000 Jews live in Ukraine today, even more in Russia, and the last thing the Jews in both countries need is to become tools of a conflict that is not theirs. Any unequivocal stance taken by Israel in support of one side or another in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict would just add fuel to the fire — to the detriment of both Israel and our fellow Jews in those nations.
(Image of Auschwitz via Flickr/Adam Jones, Abbas via Flickr/President of the European Council, opium via Wikimedia Commons)
For more, see Thursday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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