On 6 January, Issa Amro, a UN-recognised human rights defender, and the founder and coordinator of Youth Against Settlements, a Hebron-based group, was convicted in an Israeli military court near Ramallah on six counts. He was first put on trial in 2016 on 18 charges dating back to 2010, including incitement, insulting a soldier…

As we noted in our complaint to editors, the very source Shehadeh included in that paragraph (a Reuters article) was clear that the six counts he was convicted of did not include “insulting a soldier”.  He was convicted however on the charge of “assaulting” an Israeli settler.

We also noted that Amro, a resident of Hebron, faces additional charges in the Palestinian Authority courts, which includes one count of “insulting” Palestinians authorities in a Facebook post, which shows that the Guardian writer either accidentally or intentionally conflated the charges Amro faces within the two legal systems.

The Guardian upheld our complaint and revised the relevant sentences thusly:

On 6 January, Issa Amro, a UN-recognised human rights defender, and the founder and coordinator of Youth Against Settlements, a Hebron-based group, was convicted in an Israeli military court near Ramallah on six counts, including protesting without a permit, obstructing soldiers’ activities and assault — charges that he denied.

The correction is important because the broader narrative advanced by Shehadeh, that we refuted in our post, was that Amro is a ‘progressive’ and strictly non-violent protester.

The following addendum noting the change appears at the bottom of the article:

• This article was amended on 3 February 2020 to clarify the charges on which the military court convicted Amro.

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The post Guardian corrects suggestion Palestinian was convicted of “insulting a soldier” appeared first on CAMERA UK.

(dates in brackets indicate the time period during which the item was available on the ‘Middle East’ page)

One article carried over from the previous month related to the normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab nations:

Sudan-Israel deal fuels migrants’ fears (21/12/20 to 17/1/21) discussed here

Three reports concerned security issues:

Syria war: Suspected Israeli strikes on Iran-linked targets ‘kill dozens’ (13/1/21 to 18/1/21) discussed here

Why Iran’s nuclear facilities are still vulnerable to attack Frank Gardner (19/1/21 to 31/1/21) discussed here

Delhi blast: Small bomb detonates near Israeli embassy in Indian capital (31/1/21 to 2/2/21) discussed here

One report concerned the new US administration’s policies:

Biden administration to restore aid to Palestinians (27/1/21 to 30/1/21)

One report was about an archaeological discovery:

Israeli archaeologists find ‘Biblical royal purple dye’ (29/1/21 to 1/2/21)

Two Christmas items about Bethlehem were carried over from the previous month:

Faith and fertility at Bethlehem’s Milk Grotto Yolande Knell (19/12/20 to 12/1/21) discussed here

Christmas celebrations to go ahead in Bethlehem Yolande Knell (20/12/20 to 24/1/21 and 26/1/21 to 27/1/21)

Also carried over from the previous month was one item concerning Palestinian affairs:

Samaa Abdulhadi: Activists call for release of ‘Palestinian techno queen’ Tala Halawa (30/12/20 to 2/1/21)

Two items were about the death of a US citizen:

Obituary: Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who moved an embassy (12/1/21 to 21/1/21)

Casino mogul and political donor Sheldon Adelson dead at 87 (12/1/21 to 16/1/21)

One report concerned a court case neither in nor about Israel:

Beny Steinmetz: Mining tycoon in Swiss trial over Guinea deal (11/1/21 to 13/1/21)

Of 14 items relating to Israeli affairs, twelve concerned the Coronavirus pandemic and associated vaccination drive, with a quarter of those promoting the political campaign concerning Israel’s supposed ‘obligation’ to supply vaccines to non-citizens:

Coronavirus: Israel leads vaccine race with 12% given jab dated January 3^rd but actually published January 2^nd (2/1/21 to 11/1/21)

Covid-19: Impact on Israel Tom Bateman (3/1/21 to 9/1/21)

Israel leads in vaccination rates – but is ‘not out of the woods yet’ Tom Bateman (6/1/21 to 12/1/21)

Israel publishes data-for-vaccines deal with Pfizer (18/1/21 to 20/1/21)

Israel extends lockdown as concerns raised about single dose vaccine (20/1/21 to 24/1/21)

Covid: Israel vaccine fears ‘out of context and inaccurate’ Rachel Schraer (21/1/21 to 25/1/21)

Covid: Israel vaccinates 16 to 18-year-olds ahead of exams (24/1/21 to 25/1/21)

Covid-19: Vaccine divides in the Middle East Yolande Knell (25/1/21 to 2/2/21) discussed here

Covid: Facebook suspends Israel PM Netanyahu’s chatbot (25/1/21 to 27/1/21)

Covid-19: Why are Palestinians not getting vaccines? Reality Check (26/1/21 to present) discussed here

Covid: Thousands attend Israel funeral for orthodox rabbi (31/1/21 to present)

Covid: Israel to transfer 5,000 vaccine doses to Palestinians (31/1/21 to present) discussed here

One report carried over from the previous month concerned new arrivals in Israel:

Jonathan Pollard: Israel spy greeted by Netanyahu after flying to Tel Aviv (30/12/20 to 1/1/21)

One report related to a legal case:

Malka Leifer: Israel extradites ex-principal accused of child sex abuse in Australia (25/1/21 to 26/1/21)

In summary, the sole item concerning internal Palestinian affairs to appear (for two days) on the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page throughout January was carried over from the previous month. In contrast, 53.8% of the month’s content related to Israeli affairs with 46% of the total reports published relating to the topic of the Coronavirus pandemic. 11.5% of the month’s content promoted a political campaign initiated by political NGOs and later amplified by two UNHRC special rapporteurs.

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”.

That article has since been amended several times. At its head appears the one-sided filmed report by Yolande Knell, versions of which were widely promoted by the BBC the previous day. Readers then find signposting relating to the status of the Gaza Strip – from which Israel withdrew over a decade and a half ago – and areas under full or part control of the Palestinian Authority: [emphasis in bold added]

“Israel has the highest rate of Covid-19 vaccination per person in the world while the Palestinian territories appear to be significantly behind.

So what is the situation in the West Bank and Gaza – regarded as occupied territories by the international community?”

Among the inaccurate claims in that ‘fact-checked’ article is the following:

“The WHO told the BBC that vaccines supplied under the Covax scheme, as well as those procured by the Palestinian authorities, would go to Gaza.

However, it is faced with the logistical challenges of the restrictions imposed on the area, which has been under blockade by Israel and Egypt since the militant Islamist movement Hamas took charge there in 2007.”

The “restrictions imposed” on the Gaza Strip apply solely to dual-use goods that can be employed for terrorist purposes and do not apply to medical supplies, including vaccines. Since the beginning of the pandemic the WHO has regularly delivered supplies and equipment including ventilators to the Gaza Strip via the crossings from Israel and there is no evidence whatsoever to support the BBC’s allegation that the supply of vaccines risks being hampered by the counter-terrorism measures taken by Israel.

Under the sub-heading “Whose responsibility is it to vaccinate Palestinians?” readers are told that:

“The United Nations (UN) human rights body has released a statement saying it’s Israel’s responsibility to provide equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The body says differential access is “morally and legally” unacceptable under international law laid out in the Geneva Conventions on the regulation of occupied territories.”

That link directs readers to the statement put out by two UNHRC special rapporteurs which audiences have already seen promoted and quoted in other BBC content but the article provides no explanation of the fact that they are not UN members of staff and does not make any mention of the obviously relevant anti-Israel record of one of the two.

Failing to provide a link to the relevant section of the Oslo Accords, the report goes on to claim that the PA has “oversight of public health” rather than “[p]owers and responsibilities in the sphere of Health in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip” as actually stated in the agreement.

“But Israeli health minister, Yuli Edelstein, told the BBC: “We can also look into the so-called Oslo agreements where it says loud and clear that the Palestinians have to take care of their own health.”

The Oslo accords – which Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation – give the Palestinian Authority oversight of public health under the principles of self-determination.

But the Palestinian authorities point to another part of those accords which says: “Israel and the Palestinian side shall exchange information regarding epidemics and contagious diseases, shall co-operate in combating them and shall develop methods for [the] exchange of medical files and documents.””

That quoted part of the agreement – Section 6 – does not specify any Israeli obligation to supply vaccinations to combat “epidemics and contagious diseases” and indeed section 2 of Article 17 clearly states that it is the Palestinians who are responsible for vaccination programmes:

“The Palestinian side shall continue to apply the present standards of vaccination of Palestinians and shall improve them according to internationally accepted standards in the field, taking into account WHO recommendations. In this regard, the Palestinian side shall continue the vaccination of the population with the vaccines listed in Schedule 3.”

Failing to inform readers of the exploitation of the topic of Coronavirus vaccinations for the promotion of a political campaign to discredit Israel to which the BBC has given considerable amplification over the past month, the article continues with promotion of the claims of “UN experts”:

“But UN experts say international law takes priority over these accords.

The experts say the fourth Geneva Convention is specific about the duty of the occupying power to provide healthcare, but Israel often argues it isn’t technically occupying the West Bank and Gaza.

It’s a matter on which international law experts disagree, and many issues surrounding the governing and final status of the occupied territories remain unresolved.”

In other words, this article by BBC Reality Check fails to actually inform BBC audiences “whose responsibility it is to vaccinate Palestinians” and instead continues to promote politically motivated claims and statements on that subject.

Nevertheless, a subsequent report titled “Covid: Israel to transfer 5,000 vaccine doses to Palestinians”, which appeared on the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page on January 31^st, links to and recycles much of the inadequate information promoted in the ‘Reality Check’ article.

That report relates to an Israeli decision taken two days previously.

‘“In accordance with the recommendation of the Defense Minister and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the political echelon approved [on Friday] the transfer of 5,000 vaccine doses to medical teams in the Palestinian Authority,” a military source said in a statement.’

The first batch of 2,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine were indeed transferred the day after the publication of the BBC’s report, which opens with a link to the statement put out by two UNHRC special rapporteurs that was promoted in the ‘Reality Check’ report.

“Israel says it is transferring 5,000 doses of Covid vaccine to immunise frontline Palestinian health workers.

Israel has one of the most advanced vaccination programmes in the world but Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza have yet to see one.

UN experts say Israel has a responsibility for vaccinations there.

Israel says that is not part of agreed protocols and it has not received any requests from the Palestinians. This is its first such transfer.” 

However Palestinian Media Watch reports that:

“According to an answer submitted in response to a petition to Israel’s High ‎Court of Justice, on Jan. 4, 2021, the PA contacted Israel and asked for an amount of ‎vaccines for over 100 Palestinian medical staff members aged over 60 who are treating ‎Coronavirus patients in the PA. With the consent of the Israeli Minister of Health, the ‎director-general of the Ministry of Health approved the request in a humanitarian ‎gesture, and Israel transferred the vaccines to the PA on the very same day.‎”

Later on in the report readers find another reference to the same two “UN experts” – again without any explanation of the fact that they are not UN members of staff or any mention of the obviously relevant anti-Israel record of one of the two.

The BBC’s report states:

“The office of Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz confirmed on Sunday that Israel would make the transfer [of vaccines] to the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinians have not yet commented.”

AFP however reported that ‘A Palestinian official dismissed the offer, telling the AFP it was a “symbolic move” and “will not help us”’ while the Jerusalem Post quoted an unnamed PA official as saying that “no decision had been made about sharing these doses with the Gaza Strip, which is controlled by Hamas” and journalist Khaled Abu Toameh noted that “Palestinian Ministry of Health says it received today 2,000 Moderna vaccines, but doesn’t say where they came from (Israel)”.  

In a section sub-headed “What is the situation in the territories?” readers find a misleading reference to “limited self-rule”: a theme increasingly seen in BBC News website content of late.

“Neither the West Bank, whose limited self-rule is run by the Palestinian Authority, nor Gaza, controlled by militant Islamist movement Hamas, has started vaccination programmes.”

In another section sub-headed “Whose responsibility is it to vaccinate Palestinians?” readers again find the filmed report by Yolande Knell which was given extensive cross-platform promotion the previous week.

Readers also find an unhelpful ‘he said-she said’ portrayal of the relevant parts of the Oslo Accords as something that ‘Israel says’ is the case.

“Israel points to the Oslo accords, agreed in 1993 and 1995, which set out how parts of the West Bank and Gaza would be governed under an interim framework until a permanent peace settlement can be reached.

It says these give the Palestinian Authority oversight of public health under the principles of self-determination.

The Palestinians say those accords also say Israel should co-operate in combating epidemics and contagious diseases.”

UN experts say the Geneva Convention on occupied territories takes priority over these accords and it is Israel’s responsibility to provide equitable access to vaccines for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

But international law experts disagree on this and on many other issues surrounding the occupied territories.”

UK Lawyers for Israel points out that:

“The UN Human Rights Commission’s press release on 14 January 2021 reported statements by Michael Lynk and Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, Special Rapporteurs appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, regarding Palestinian coronavirus vaccinations. According to the press release, they said that

“as the occupying power, Israel is required under the Fourth Geneva Convention, ‘to the fullest extent of the means available to it’, to maintain health services in the occupied territory. Article 56 requires Israel to adopt and apply ‘the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics’ in cooperation with national and local authorities”

“If the protected population is inadequately supplied, the occupying power is required under the Convention to facilitate relief schemes ‘by all means at its disposal’. Even if relief consignments, including ‘medical supplies’, are provided by others, Article 60 states that such consignments ‘shall in no way relieve the occupying power of any of its responsibilities’ for health care to the protected population.”

In fact, Articles 56 and 60 of the 4^th Geneva Convention are not included in the provisions specified in its Article 6(3) that bind an Occupying Power for the duration of an occupation. In accordance with Article 6(3) they cease to apply in an occupied territory one year after the general close of military operations.

The International Court of Justice advised in the so-called “Wall” case: “Since the military operations leading to the occupation of the West Bank in 1967 ended a long time ago, only those Articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention referred to in Article 6, paragraph 3, remain applicable in that occupied territory.” (para 125)

Therefore, even if the West Bank and/or Gaza are “occupied territory” within the meaning of the 4th Geneva Convention, Articles 56 and 60 ceased to apply to them in 1968. The statements quoted above are thus wrong and misleading on any view.”

In other words, even the BBC’s ‘fact-checking’ department has failed to provide audiences with a sufficiently critical analysis of the statement put out by the two UNHRC special rapporteurs it portrays as “experts”.  As we see, BBC self-conscription to promotion of the political campaign that statement (and others) is designed to advance continues apace one month after it began.

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The post BBC ‘fact-checking’ fails to deliver on Palestinian vaccinations issue appeared first on CAMERA UK.

Green has in fact long been a proponent of even the craziest conspiracy theories, many of which place Jews at the center of the conspiracy.

Amplifying the antisemitism of the far-right, Greene, in 2019, replied to a tweet with memes accusing George Soros of being part of a secret totalitarian world government. One picture showed Soros as a vampire controlling “every single Democrat politician.” In her reply, Greene called Soros “the Nazi himself trying to continue what was not finished.”

In 2018, she liked a tweet claiming that the Mossad was behind the assassination of JFK:

The NY Times’ Michelle Goldberg noted, in a piece on Greene’s lunacy, that, that same year, she shared a notorious white nationalist video in which a Holocaust denier claimed that “Zionist supremacists” are scheming to promote immigration and miscegenation.  The left-wing media monitouring group Media Matters reviewed the film shared by the congresswoman:

About nine minutes in [to the video], it quotes former BNP [British National Party] leader Nick Griffin saying that an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation”.

It’s telling that Griffin, a hardcore racist and Holocaust denier, knew to use “Zionist supremacists” as code for “Jewish supremacists”.

But, it’s even more revealing that the Guardian, in their recent official editorial on B’Tselem’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, didn’t feel the need to use such a code word.

As we posted about previously, though their coverage from the beginning uncritically quoted B’Tselem’s charge that Israel was guilty of “Jewish supremacism”, and published an op-ed by the NGO’s director which used that term, this editorial used that term in the media outlet’s own editorial voice, in claiming the Nation State Law “constitutionally enshrines Jewish supremacy” in Israel.

As CST wrote, in response to our request for a comment about the Guardian’s (and B’Tselem’s) use of the term, it “has a long-standing antisemitic usage”.

Specifically, anti-Semites often use the term to suggest Jews believe themselves to be racially or ethnically superior to non-Jews – and therefore must dominate them, and, as we demonsrated previously, the idea of “Jewish supremacism” is often associated with neo-Nazi David Duke.  Duke wrote a book using that very term in the title, and published a “Ph.D.” dissertation titled “Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism”.

The use of the term by the Guardian is pernicious in the context of the current amplified debate about the impact and threat posed by white supremacy, a universally despised ideology which the term “Jewish supremacy” necessarily evokes.

Whilst white supremacist American oppress and commit violence against people of color, in the minds of some of Israel’s far-left critics, Israelis (imagined as ‘white’) behave in much the same way toward its own minorities (perceived as) ‘of color’.

Those reducing the Israeli-Palestinian issue to one of racial/ethnic supremacy not only display a profound level of ignorance about the root causes of the conflict, whilst completely denying Palestinian agency and obscuring their society’s own endemic (anti-Jewish) racism, but impute racism to Israel’s very essence, and by extension, to the overwhelming majority of Jews throughout the world.

Given the centrality of Zionism to Jewish life, the use of “Jewish supremacy” in that context has the impact of toxifying Jewish identity itself.

Though there’s nothing politically that unites Marjorie Taylor Green and Guardian editors, we know that extreme ideological opposites can mirror one another in several ways: the tendency to find simple explanations for complex problems; vilifying opponents as not just wrong but evil; and by taking their cue from the loudest voices who proclaim that they know how to bring on utopia.

Though the Guardian would never conjure an idea as risible as Rothschild-controlled laser beams from outer space, their overlap with the far-right concerning which particular nation is uniquely guilty of the crime of supremacism reminds us that, when it comes to Israel, racists and ‘anti-racists’ increasingly reach the same antisemitic conclusions.

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The post The Guardian, Marjorie Taylor Green and Jewish “supremacism” appeared first on CAMERA UK.

As of January 31^st the same short article also appeared on the website’s ‘Middle East’ page.

The report gives an initial account of the incident itself which has not been updated to include later developments such as the discovery of a letter.

“Indian media reports said investigators had found an envelope with a letter addressed to the Israeli ambassador in the street describing the low-intensity explosion as a “trailer” and making references to “Iranian martyrs” Qassem Soleimani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. “We can end your life, anytime, anywhere,” the letter read.”

The article also promotes two links to BBC reports dating from February 2012:

“An Israeli diplomat’s wife was wounded when a bomb was planted under her car in New Delhi nine years ago.

On the same day, 13 February 2012, a bomb was also planted under an Israeli diplomatic car in the Georgian capital Tbilisi but it failed to detonate.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of being behind both the incidents in 2012 – allegations denied by Tehran.

Who was behind 2012 Israel embassy attacks?”

Not for the first time (see ‘related articles’ below) the BBC erases from audience view the fact that the investigation into the 2012 attack in New Delhi resulted in India’s police concluding that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were behind the attack. The BBC also omits any mention of the related Red Notice put out by Interpol in March 2012 or the findings of additional investigations.

If – as is apparently the case – the BBC considers the February 2012 attack to be relevant background to this latest event at the Israeli embassy in Delhi, it should obviously include the full story rather than what amounts to little more than amplification of Iranian denials of involvement.

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The first attempt by the Palestinian writer to sell credulous Guardian readers on this premise is found in this early paragraph:

On 6 January, Issa Amro, a UN-recognised human rights defender, and the founder and coordinator of Youth Against Settlements, a Hebron-based group, was convicted in an Israeli military court near Ramallah on six counts. He was first put on trial in 2016 on 18 charges dating back to 2010, including incitement, insulting a soldier and participating in a march without a permit.

However, as the Reuters article he uses as his source makes clear, Amro, an ‘activist’ from Hebron, wasn’t found guilty of merely “insulting a soldier”.  Rather, the charge was for “assaulting” an Israeli.

Here’s the relevant sentence from the Reuters article:

Amro denied the charges, which included protesting without a permit, obstructing Israeli soldiers’ activities in the flashpoint city of Hebron and assaulting a Jewish settler.

Whether Shehadeh’s error was intentional or not is impossible for us to know.  However, it’s telling that the same Reuters article also adds the following, on additional charges by the Palestinian Authority against Amro:

Amnesty said the PA has accused [Amro] of “disturbing public order” and “insulting higher authorities” over Facebook posts in 2017 critical of Palestinian leaders.

So, the Guardian contributor somehow managed to conflate the charges, obfuscating from readers that it was the Palestinian Authority that charged Amro with “insulting” authorities, not the Israelis.

The op-ed’s framing continues:

Following the violent period of the second intifada (2000-2004), Israel restricted Palestinian movement by placing more than 500 roadblocks throughout the West Bank. Now that the country is living through one of the least violent periods in its history, what justification remains for keeping most of these restrictions in place?

This is misleading in two respects.

First, CAMERA UK has continually documented that, whilst the number of casualties resulting from terror attacks has been relatively low, the number of actual terror attacks (the goal of which of course is to kill Israelis) remain high. In 2020, there were over 1500 terror attacks – based on reports from Israel’s Security Agency.

Also, it’s likely that the reason why the number of Israeli fatalities is so low – despite the high number of attacks – is directly related to the security measures (including roadblocks) Shehadeh complains about.

The op-ed continues:

The most extreme example of these obstacles to movement is in the Old City of Hebron, a once vibrant centre for trade and commerce serving a population of 220,000 Palestinians from the city and its surrounding villages. This historic area is now termed H2, home to several hundred Jewish settlers – in violation of international law – where in one square kilometre there are 21 permanently staffed checkpoints.

However, the Israeli presence in the historic Jewish city was agreed to by the Palestinian Authority under the terms of Oslo II, which involved an IDF withdrawal, in the late 90s, from 80% of the city.  The agreement divided Hebron into two sectors, H1 (Palestinian control) and H2 (Israeli control).  As H2 only represents 20% of the total territory of the Hebron, it means that Jews are barred from 80% of the city.

Shehadeh then argues that there is no legitimate “security rationale” for “extreme restrictions in the Old City of Hebron, which ignores that the city has long been a hub of terror.  During what’s known as the Stabbing Intifada, in 2015-16, dozens of attacks occurred in Hebron. And, as recently as 2018, Israel’s Shin Bet uncovered an extensive Hamas network in the city, which was planning attacks, raising funds and facilitating the group’s infiltration into the city’s charitable and municipal institutions.

The op-ed continues:

It takes strong conviction to face such injustice and respond to it with nonviolence. This kind of resistance marked the first Palestinian intifada (1987-1993).

The claim that the First Intifada was “non-violent” has been refuted on these pages previously. In fact, roughly 160 Israelis were killed and thousands more wounded during that period of “non-violent resistance”, in addition to the thousands of Palestinians murdered by Palestinian vigilantes accusing them of being ‘collaborators’.

Shehadeh then adds:

After 2000, many have tried shooting and stabbing soldiers and settlers. 

The suggestion that ‘only’ soldiers and settlers were targeted by Palestinian terrorists during the Second Intifada is of course a lie, as most attacks targeted civilians (roughly 70% of the total fatalities), and most were within the Green Line.

Finally, let’s address Shehadeh characterisation of Amro, the protagonist in his tale, as some sort of progressive ‘human rights activist’.   First, as the late Petra Marquardt-Bigman documented, Amro tweeted explicitly antisemitic content.

Amro, who’s been framed as the “Palestinian Ghandi” by other media outlets has also rooted for a Third Intifada on social media repeatedly.  His group ‘Youth Against the Settlements’ referred to Palestinian terrorists killed by Israeli forces while they were in the act of carrying out an attack as “martyrs“, and has engaged in incitement with the libel that thousands of settlers were “storming the Ibrahimi Mosque” in Hebron.

Of course, the mosque is known by Jews as the Cave of Machpelah (Tomb of the Patriarchs), and it is considered Judaism’s second holiest site.  So, even if those Jews shown in the photo entered the building, they were simply visiting a site that’s extremely holy to Jews.  The “storming the mosque” libel has been used for generations – usually in connection to Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – to incite violence against Jews.

As such, it’s not difficult to understand why Amro would be charged with incitement, and why the Guardian op-ed’s claim that he’s a “peace activist” is absurd.

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) as follows: [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

Franks: “Joe Biden’s number one priority, he’s consistently said, is trying to control the awful damage of the Coronavirus. But it’s in the nature of being the most powerful man in the world that he will not be able to stop foreign policy disputes crowding in. We’re spending a bit of time looking at those challenges abroad and today we’ll return to one of those which has longest eluded resolution: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So what effect can a Biden presidency have? Let’s begin with the Palestinian view. Their representative in London is Husam Zomlot.”

Those familiar with the frequent appearances of Husam Zomlot in BBC content would not be surprised by his often less than diplomatic tone, his frequently cavalier relationship with facts and his dogmatic interpretations of ‘international law’. Nevertheless – despite the BBC being obliged to provide “duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding” – Franks’ refrained from challenging Zomlot’s inaccuracies and talking points. 

Zomlot: “Number one we hope he would clear the floor completely clean from the aberration of Mr Trump. As he started doing day one, reversing all the illegal acts by Mr Trump internally in the US, we need the same to happen vis-à-vis Palestine and the political settlement process.”

Franks: “You’re not surely talking about him having to move the US embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv?”

Zomlot: “I am, definitely, because the issue of Jerusalem is very well defined in international law. This is not just…”

Franks [interrupts]: “I understand the argument but I mean it’s…it’s…he’s hardly going to do that, is he?”

Zomlot: “That’s up to him but that will not be really a cleaning up and starting afresh. That will leave mess behind. It’s an international city and its fate can only be decided by final negotiations. These are the US long-held position and policies and reverting back to them would be highly recommended to move us forward. But it’s not just Jerusalem that Trump has ransacked. It’s every issue. The issue of refugees, settlements were declared by his State Department to be not contrary to international law; name it! Annexation was endorsed and supported by the administration. So there is a lot to be reversed, to be corrected and we truly, truly look forward to that. This is not correcting it for the sake of Palestine. This is correcting all the bogus [unintelligible] international [unintelligible].”

Zomlot’s portrayal of Jerusalem is “an international city” is taken from from the 1947 UNGA Partition Plan proposal which was of course rejected by the Arabs, including Palestinians, at the time and hence became irrelevant. So why did Franks not challenge that claim? The answer to that question is found in a 2013 decision published by the now defunct BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee which shows just how close the BBC’s approach on the topic of Jerusalem is to that of the PLO.

“The [BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards] Committee noted that while there is no expectation that in a two-state solution West Jerusalem would become Palestinian territory, a UN resolution passed in 1947 has not been rescinded. It calls for the whole of Jerusalem to be an international city, a corpus separatum (similar to the Vatican City), and in that context, technically, West Jerusalem is not Israeli sovereign territory. “

Franks’ failure to challenge Zomlot’s claim that “[t]hese are the US long-held position and policies” is – sadly – not surprising either. Ever since the topic of the relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem first arose, a recurrent theme in BBC reporting has been promotion of the claim that President Trump “reversed decades of American foreign policy by recognising the ancient city as Israel’s capital”.  That inaccurate claim erases from audience view several resolutions on the topic passed by the US Congress and Senate over the last 30 years, including the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act.

Franks: “However far you are keen for there to be movement, I mean the Secretary of State – his nominee for Secretary of State, Antony Blinken – has said that he wants to move forward on the two-state solution, do you accept that the priority inevitably for Joe Biden when it comes to the Middle East won’t be the Palestinians and it will be Iran, for the time being?”

Neither did Franks’ failure to challenge Zomlot’s anachronistic claim concerning the ‘centrality’ of “the Palestinian issue” come as much of a surprise given the approach taken by the BBC in its coverage of the Abraham Accords.

Zomlot: “It will be a gravely missed opportunity and like Mr Biden has learned himself over the years of being a US official, the Palestinian issue is the central issue in the region and all issues are interconnected. So we are hoping that the issue of Palestine is a priority and I believe the base that has brought President Biden to the White House want to see peace prevailing there and therefore we hope that the administration will pick on this issue early on.”

Listeners to this item did however discover that – despite its silence on the topic to date – the BBC is in fact aware of the supposedly upcoming Palestinian elections.

Franks: “Do you accept that they’re unlikely to make any real move until after…I mean we’ve got the Israeli elections in the next couple of months but also much delayed elections for both the Palestinian National Assembly but also the presidency. And again the administration isn’t really likely to make a big move until they know the outcome of that.”

Zomlot: “Yeah and that give us time to reset the Palestinian-American bilateral relations. We need to re-open the consulate general in Jerusalem – occupied East Jerusalem. We need to reopen our mission in Washington, we need to resume funding and we need to make sure that the relationship is grounded on mutual interests and values not subjected to the Congress or the Israeli veto for that matter. We need to make sure that the political process starts on the right foot. First, it needs to be around international resolutions and second it has to be multi-lateral mediations not excluding other players. Elections in Palestine is very important. We will wait for elections in Israel but in the meantime we have a huge homework to do that once the US starts investing in the political process it will be the absolute right investment.”

Franks made no effort to inform listeners of potential legal barriers to some of Zomlot’s wish-list – including those presented by the Palestinian Authority’s policy of paying convicted terrorists. He even failed to remind audiences that the ‘exclusion’ of the Palestinians since December 2017 came entirely at their initiative.

Franks: “Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian mission in London.”

The item continued with an interview with Uzi Arad which raised some interesting points in itself but did not relieve listeners of any of the inaccurate impressions promoted by Zomlot.

Throughout the four years of the Trump administration the BBC conducted numerous interviews with – and received at least one briefing from – Husam Zomlot. Its journalists should therefore by this time be capable of challenging his somewhat limited repertoire of talking points. Nevertheless, even experienced BBC presenters such as Tim Franks continue to refrain from asking the challenging questions which would actually help BBC audiences understand why the Israel-Palestinian conflict is still – as Franks put it – “one of those which has longest eluded resolution”.

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BBC NEWS TOUTS ISRAEL’S CHOICE OF CAPITAL CITY AS ‘CONTENTIOUS’

EXAMINING THE RATIONALE BEHIND BBC POLICY ON ISRAEL’S CAPITAL

IN WHICH BBC RADIO 4 RE-DIVIDES JERUSALEM

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The post Jerusalem: where BBC and PLO approaches meet appeared first on CAMERA UK.

If you’re looking for examples of spin in B’tselem’s latest anti-Israel document, in which the organization slings around the inflammatory terms “apartheid” and “Jewish supremacy,” there are plenty.

Consider, as one small example, the report’s charge that Israel has built “hundreds of communities for Jewish citizens – yet not a single one for Palestinian citizens.” The sentence was written to sound as damning as possible, which increases its shock value, but also left the authors in the uncomfortable position of having to immediately rebut their own falsehood. “The exception,” B’tselem admits in the very next sentence, “is a handful of towns and villages built to concentrate the Bedouin population.”

Which is to say, Israel built “not a single” community for Palestinians, except for all the ones it did build: Rahat, Kuseife, Shaqib al-Salam, Ar’arat an-Naqab, Lakiya, Tel as-Sabi, Hura, Tirabin al-Sana, Mulada, Abu Krinat, Bir Hadaj, Qasr al-Sir, Makhul, Umm Batin. It’s Orwellian newspeak: None, but many. A lie, but with the truth appended as a throwaway-line.

This is far from the worst distortion in the document. The big lie is conveyed in the report’s title, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.” But the semantic gamesmanship here is revealing. What should be straightforward, B’tselem makes a point of muddling. And so it goes throughout the report, with the result being a mess of factoids, fibs, and fraudulence meant to inflame and misinform, and which tells us more about the organization than about Israel.

The other side of the ledger – B’tselem’s comment about communities for Jews —is hardly better. It’s true that Israel has established hundreds of Jewish communities. But the reason for that isn’t nefarious, as B’tselem suggests. These towns and cities were needed to house immigrants numbering in the millions — Holocaust survivors, Middle Eastern Jews escaping persecution in Arab countries, Jews who wanted to live near their holy sites — absorbed by a country serving as a haven for Jews everywhere. It isn’t supremacy. It’s sanctuary.

B’tselem’s Anti-Zionism

This takes us to the report’s most brazen spin. B’tselem casts the very existence of a Jewish state open for Jewish immigration as evidence of “Jewish supremacy.” Israel’s mission of facilitating the entry of Jews, which is described in the country’s Declaration of Independence in the same sentence that promises equal social and political rights to all religions and races, is according to B’tselem one of the “methods the Israeli regime uses to advance Jewish supremacy.”

It reads like a bad joke. After the Holocaust, the tattered remains of the world’s Jewish population, reminded yet again of the awful repercussions of their powerlessness, and conscious of the fact that the world’s doors were closed to them (or worse) as genocide loomed, coalesced around the idea of a sovereign state where they could exist without persecution, and where Jews scattered across the world would be able to take refuge. For this — and here is the sad punchline — they’re accused of being Jewish supremacists. It would be no less absurd to insist that historically black colleges and universities, meant to provide what an oppressed community had been denied, were founded in the service of “black supremacy.”

The idea that Jews see themselves as superior, though, is an old antisemitic trope. It was recently repackaged by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who wrote a book on Jewish Supremacism and a PhD thesis on “Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism,” and now again it’s invoked by B’tselem.

To be fair to B’tselem, the organization isn’t likely to be influenced by the likes of David Duke (even if it did once employ a Holocaust denier). Rather, its talk of “supremacy” seems meant, in part, to appropriate language from the American conversation about race, with the aim of attracting American progressives. If you hate white supremacy, B’tselem is trying to telegraph, you should hate Israel, too. It would be a vile and ahistorical charge even if it didn’t evoke an antisemitic canard.

But the repetition of “supremacy” isn’t only meant to appeal to American activists. The more important role it plays in the report is as a basis for B’tselem’s other accusation: the slur that Israel is an apartheid state. A complex geopolitical situation does not, of course, equate to apartheid. But a complex geopolitical based on racial “supremacy”? That sounds closer. B’tselem makes the link between its twin accusations explicit it its report, stating that “a regime that uses laws, practices and organized violence to cement the supremacy of one group over another is an apartheid regime.”

Citizenship Discriminates

If you look closely at the report, though, it becomes clear that most of it focuses on the mundane reality that non-citizens don’t have the same rights as citizens, just as non-citizens of any other country don’t have the same rights as citizens. Citizenship, by definition, discriminates.

In Israel, Jewish and Arab citizens can vote in national elections. Non-citizens can’t. Jewish and Arab citizens can freely enter their country. Non-citizens are regulated. Jewish and Arab citizens have Israeli passports. Non-citizens don’t. Not exactly foundations of apartheid, although B’tselem holds them up as such.

For a visualization of just how much of the report focuses on differences between citizens and non-citizens, consider the image below. The text in blue — a majority of the report — discusses non-citizens. (The image excludes the report’s introduction and conclusion, which reiterate and frame its arguments.)

As importantly, both the portion focusing on citizens and that focusing on non-citizens are marred by egregious distortions meant to support the document’s charges.

Before examining those, though, it may be helpful to understand who, exactly, are the citizens and non-citizens mentioned in the report. After all, in apartheid South Africa, a distinction between citizens and non-citizens was conjured from thin air, based entirely on race and a doctrine of oppression. Citizenship was categorically stripped from the Black majority by the white minority, an act of disenfranchisement meant to segregate and solidify the existing system of white supremacy.

The context in Israel is vastly different, and while unique, resembles the founding of India and Pakistan, where the land was partitioned to carve out a Muslim-majority state from the Hindu-majority one. There are also similarities to Yugoslavia, which split into several states, allowing different ethnic and religious groups to steer their own course. In today’s Slovenia, for example, ethnic Slovenes make up a majority of the population. The Serb minority there has the same rights as the majority. Serbs abroad who aren’t citizens of Slovenia, though, obviously do not share the rights that come with citizenship.

Similarly, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not citizens of Israel.

This isn’t a profound observation. They don’t live in Israel. They weren’t meant to become part of Israel in 1947 under a United Nations plan to partition British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. They didn’t become part of Israel in 1948, when Egypt and Jordan conquered the two territories. And they didn’t become citizens in 1967, when Israel pushed out the Egyptian and Jordanian armies but didn’t annex the territories.

In the years after 1967, as Palestinian leaders refused to negotiate with Israel and instead vowed to destroy it, they didn’t become citizens. Nor did they become Israeli citizens in the 1990s, when Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed agreements designed to give Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza self-government and move the parties toward a resolution of their conflict.

Finally, they didn’t become citizens in the decades that followed, when Palestinian leaders engaged in negotiations with Israel but turned their back on multiple peace plans that would have created an independent Palestinian state in which West Bank and Gaza Palestinians would become citizens.

Israel never annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The international community doesn’t want Israel to annex the territories. And the Palestinians don’t want Israel to annex them. Indeed, the prevailing idea in the international community today is similar to that drawn up by the United Nations 70 years ago: That the two national movements between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea would be best served by having two states: a Jewish state with a Jewish majority alongside a Palestinian state with an Arab majority. It wasn’t apartheid then. And although B’tselem casts the division between Israel and the territories as evidence of Jewish supremacy, it isn’t apartheid now.

B’tselem omits this background information from the report. “We do not provide a historical review or an evaluation of the Palestinian and Jewish national movements,” they say. This might seem surprising, since B’tselem does cover relevant history in other, less-consequential reports, and since the historical context would clearly help readers weigh the group’s indictment.

But it is a convenient omission. To fully inform readers, after all, would help them understand that the political situation in the Holy Land is a result of war, peace, and comprise, and not, as B’tselem insists, Israeli “designs” and “engineering” in the service of “supremacy.”

Falsehoods and Distortions

Again, much of B’tselem’s report simply repeats that, as non-citizens, West Bank and Gaza Palestinians don’t have citizenship rights in Israel while Israelis of all ethnicities and religions — any combination of Jew, Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, Samaritan, Assyrian, and so on — do.

To support its accusation of apartheid, for example, B’tselem states that “the Gaza Strip is home to about two million Palestinians, also denied political rights” (emphasis added), as if Gazans — who live outside of Israel, who are not citizens of Israel, who had elections of their own in 2005, and who voted for the antisemitic terror organization Hamas — would somehow be expected to vote in Israel’s elections. They are “denied political rights” in the same way Israelis are denied political rights in the Kingdom of Jordan, or Canadians are denied political rights in the United States. Non-citizens aren’t citizens.

And what of the portion of the report that does focus on Israel’s Arab citizens (or as B’tselem chooses to call them, “Palestinian citizens of Israel”)? The organization charges that members of this population “do not enjoy the same rights as Jewish citizens by either law or practice – as detailed further in this paper.”

But it’s not detailed in the paper. Incredibly, B’tselem does not point to a single provision of any law that, apartheid-like, denies individual rights to Israel’s Arab citizens.

What they do instead, as they purport to describe “four major methods the Israeli regime uses to advance Jewish supremacy” is spin, distort, and manipulate readers.

Immigration

The first “method” B’tselem names is immigration. Jews “are entitled to immigrate to Israel at any time and receive Israeli citizenship,” the report laments, while “non-Jews have no right to legal status in Israeli-controlled areas. Granting status is at the almost complete discretion of officials.”

But this isn’t supremacy or apartheid. It doesn’t reflect any legal differentiation between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. Immigration policy, after all, doesn’t deal with the rights of citizens but instead focuses on non-citizens abroad.

While the organization clearly wants readers to believe otherwise, preferential immigration policies are actually not uncommon in the world. As Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein have explained, “It is a recognized European norm that a nation-state can maintain official ties with its ‘kin’ outside its borders and treat them preferentially in certain areas, including immigration and naturalization.” The authors name Ireland, Finland, Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia as other examples of countries that offer “privileged access to rights of residence and immigration for ethno-cultural kin groups.”

A notable difference between those countries and Israel is that none of their kin groups had recently endured the worst genocide in history, as the Jews did prior to Israeli independence, or mass expulsion from countries in which they had lived for centuries, as Jews did shortly afterward. And yet, with its comments on immigration, B’tselem wants to show us that Israel is guilty of “Jewish supremacy.” What it actually shows us is that B’tselem effectively denies Israel’s right to exist as a haven for Jews.

This is the grand distortion in B’tselem’s section on immigration. But as is the case throughout the report, the organization plays other linguistic games, too.

Conflating Citizens and Non-Citizens

The report claims that “Palestinian citizens of Israel or residents of East Jerusalem can easily relocate to the West Bank” but that “they risk their rights and status in doing so.”

This is false. With a sleight of hand meant to mislead, B’tselem lumps “residents of East Jerusalem” with “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” two distinct groups with two distinct sets of rights. The latter and larger group, as citizens of Israel, do not risk their “rights and status” if they relocate to the West Bank. Indeed, plenty of Arab Israelis live in predominantly Jewish parts of east Jerusalem, territory described in the report as being part of the West Bank, with no loss of rights of status.

And within this manipulation is another one. B’tselem tells readers that Arabs in east Jerusalem universally risk their rights by moving away; and elsewhere that they “do not hold Israeli passports”; and elsewhere that “they can vote in municipal elections but not for parliament”; and elsewhere that they “are defined not as citizens but as permanent residents of Israel” whose status “may be revoked at any time.” But this isn’t entirely true.

Arab residents of East Jerusalem, who held Jordanian citizenship when Israel reunified the city in 1967, were formally given the option to apply for Israeli citizenship. And despite pressure from within Arab society not to apply, a small but growing number, over 20,000, have indeed become citizens. They hold Israeli passports, they vote for parliament, and their status cannot be revoked.

In other words, B’tselem falsifies the situation of nearly two million Arab Israelis, mischaracterizes the status of tens of thousands of Jerusalemites, and neglects to tell readers about the path to citizenship for the Arab residents of Jerusalem. Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of accusations about Jewish supremacy and apartheid?

Jews, Arabs, and “Crowded Enclaves”

B’tselem also argues, in another of its four sections meant to prove Jewish supremacy, that Arab citizens of Israel are “corralled into small, crowded enclaves.” Here again, the organization dramatically misrepresents the status of Israel’s Arab citizens.

In Israel, the towns and cities with the highest population density are Jewish. Seven Israeli cities, for example, have a population density of over 10,000/km². Not one is Arab.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are 16 towns with over 5000 residents that have a population density of less than 1000/km². Five of them are Arab. Even more striking is the distribution of the next group of low-density communities – those with a population density above 1000/km² but below 2000/km². Of these 41 locales, a vast majority, 29, are Arab. Overall, according to a recent study, the average population density of Jewish towns and cities in Israel is double that of Arab communities.

There are, of course, Arabs who live in densely packed areas. But B’tselem tells its audience something entirely different: that Israel’s Arabs, in general, are “corralled” into crowded enclaves. It is a lie. Because, again, the truth doesn’t do much to support the organization’s inflammatory thesis.

Admissions Committees

The section about “crowded enclaves” again misrepresents when claiming that an Israeli law allows small towns to “reject Palestinian applicants on grounds of ‘cultural incompatibility,’” which “effectively prevents Palestinian citizens from living in communities designated for Jews.”

Contrary to B’tselem’s insinuation, the admissions committee law, which applies only to communities on Israel’s periphery with 400 or fewer residents, does not allow towns to reject Arab applicants as Palestinian and ergo “culturally incompatible.” On the contrary, it explicitly forbids committees from considering “race, religion, gender, nationality, disability, personal status, age, parenthood, sexual orientation, country of origin, political-party opinion or affiliation.” B’tselem unsurprisingly conceals this fact.

The law is nonetheless controversial. What’s to stop an admissions committee from rejecting a Palestinian — or a Mizrahi Jew, homosexual, or Likud supporter — on the basis of a protected characteristic while claiming some other reason for the rejection?

The law may indeed be subject to abuse. As in other countries, discrimination does exist in Israel. But there is legal precedent on the side of Arabs and others who might be wrongfully rejected. Israel’s Supreme Court in 2011 ruled in favor of an Arab family whose application for residency was rejected by the town of Rakefet’s admissions committee, and required the town to accommodate the family. B’tselem unsurprisingly conceals this fact, too.

Controversial or not, a law that explicitly bars discrimination based on race, ethnicity and religion, and whose anti-discrimination provisions are enforced by the Supreme Court, is not proof of “apartheid.” And it does not, as B’tselem claims, “effectively prevent” Palestinians from living in small towns. As the case of Rakefet underscores, discrimination might exist, but it is also illegal, and the prohibition is enforced by Israeli courts.

And More…

The report is peppered with other distortions.

* B’tselem insists, for example, that “the West bank has been annexed in practice.” The phrase is legally meaningless and, worse yet, absurd. Israel has not claimed sovereignty over the West Bank. On the contrary, has attempted in multiple rounds of peace talks since 2000 to facilitate an Israeli withdrawal from, and Palestinian sovereignty over, most of the territory. The peace and statehood offers are another inconvenient fact concealed by B’tselem.

* Speaking about Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, B’tselem states that Israel’s “regime” governs “the entire area and the people living in it” — a particularly strange thing to say about the Gaza Strip, which in actuality is governed by Hamas, an internationally designated terror group sworn to Israel’s destruction.

* B’tselem persists, claiming that Israel continues to control “nearly every aspect of life in Gaza” from outside. Again, it does not.  As two legal experts noted in a 2010 paper,

Israel does not and cannot appoint or dismiss local Gazan governing officials. Indeed, Israel strongly opposes the current Hamas regime in Gaza. Israel does not administer government services in Gaza. It does not have police in Gaza. It does not levy taxes in Gaza. It does not provide social services in Gaza. It has no courts in Gaza. It operates no schools in Gaza. It establishes no governing structures in Gaza and appoints no officials. Were Israel to issue orders to the government or population of Gaza, one can safely assume such orders would be ignored.

By contrast, the Palestinian Authority, first under Fatah, and then under Hamas, is fully able to exercise its authority in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has police forces, courts, and jails. It operates schools, electronic media and social services. It regulates business activities and establishes banks and maintains land registries. It levies taxes. It controls its own borders. It even imposes a dress code. In sum, it has a functioning and fully independent local civil government, buttressed by armed forces.

* Elsewhere, B’tselem excludes Gaza from its claim of Israeli control, stating that “Jewish citizens live as though the entire area were a single space (excluding the Gaza Strip).” And yet this, too, is false. Jewish Israelis are barred from entering Palestinian-ruled sections of the West Bank, let alone buying a home in West Bank cities like Jenin, Ramallah, or Nablus.

* B’tselem states that “all settlements are closed military zones that Palestinians are forbidden from entering without a permit,” and in its next sentence, that “Israel has established more than 280 settlements in the West Bank (East Jerusalem included).” But per B’tselem’s own definitions in the report, this is doubly false. What B’tselem describes as settlements in east Jerusalem are not, in fact, closed military zones. And settlements in general are not closed to those B’tselem describes as Palestinians citizens of Israel.

* B’tselem insists that “Israel denies Palestinians political rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of association.” It also states that “Palestinians in the Occupied Territories … are not allowed to demonstrate.” In fact, Israeli Jews and Arabs alike share the same rights to free speech and free association. And Israel neither grants nor denies such rights to the vast majority of Palestinians in the territories, who answer to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Redefining Apartheid to Remove the Jewish State

Apartheid is clearly defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as meaning inhumane acts — atrocities like murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, illegal imprisonment, torture, and rape — that are committed in order to maintain a regime of systematic oppression and domination “by one racial group over any other racial group.”

The B’tselem report does not, and cannot, document any such thing. Instead, the organization points to Israel’s role as a refuge for Jews, its immigration policy, the large number of towns built to house Jewish immigrants, the (generally low) population density of Arab towns, the fact that Israel hasn’t annexed the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the fact that the residents of these territories aren’t treated as citizens, the provisions of an interim peace agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinians, and a basket of distortions and outright falsehoods, pretending that these amount to supremacy and apartheid. (B’tselem goes so far as to protest that the separation between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza “thwarts … resistance” — a term that in practice has meant suicide bombing targeting Jewish civilians.)

It is absurd and libelous.

Even B’tselem inadvertently admits that its report fails to meet the definition of apartheid. While the Rome Statute refers to crimes to further oppression “by one racial group over any other racial group,” B’tselem, in a passage admitting fundamental differences between apartheid South Africa and the Jewish state, says race isn’t involved: “The division in South Africa was based on race and skin color, while in Israel it is based on nationality and ethnicity,” the organization states.

As noted above, most of the B’tselem report indeed refers to divisions based on nationality. This isn’t apartheid. It is the nature of citizenship.

And as also noted above, Israel doesn’t divide based on ethnicity. It is, rather, a multi-ethnic country in which all citizens have the same individual rights. Arabs vote in Israel’s election. They are represented in its parliament, have been government ministers, represent the country as diplomats. They are Supreme Court justices. They serve in the Israeli army and hold senior positions. They work as doctors side-by-side with Jews, earn college degrees alongside Jews, recreate alongside Jews, and live alongside Jews.

Israel can be a messy place geopolitically. Due to a history of rejection by its neighbors and wars driven by that rejection, the country’s borders haven’t been finalized. And in the absence of finalized borders, it has built settlements in the West Bank. But it has also repeatedly offered to dismantle settlements, withdraw from almost all of the West Bank, and draw borders that separate it and a Palestinian state.

Not that B’tselem seems particularly concerned with a Palestinian state. As underscored by its protest over Israel’s immigration policy and its suggestion that this reflects “Jewish supremacy,” the organization has effectively come out as an opponent of a Jewish state. The report’s title might echo David Duke’s far-right rhetoric about “Jewish supremacism,” but the content is more a revival of a propaganda campaign from the other political extreme — the Soviet campaign to cast Zionism as racism.

The problem with B’tselem’s report, then, isn’t only the flagrant misinformation. (Unfortunately, that’s not a new phenomenon. To skew public opinion, the organization has staged footage, and has repeatedly mischaracterized Palestinians killed while attacking Israel, or killed by other Palestinians, as noncombatants killed by Israel.) It is also the immorality of the organization’s cause, which has shifted from advocating for human rights to undermining the legitimacy of the Jewish state by treating Zionism as racism.

American civil rights hero Bayard Rustin has explained that “Zionism is not racism, but the legitimate expression of the Jewish people’s self determination.” Those who want to protect that self-determination must forcefully reject B’tselem’s new focus.

The post Understanding B’Tselem’s “Apartheid” Libel appeared first on CAMERA UK.

Last week a member of the public alerted us to an edition of a programme called “Dooda Jimcaha” which was aired on the BBC Somali Service radio on December 18^th 2020.

Among the contributors to that programme was the Somali MP Mohamed Omer Dalha who stated (48:00 to 48:20 here) that there is a conspiracy against Somalia by foreign countries that are interfering in the “Islamic world” propelled by “Jews running these affairs both in the West and the East”. His remarks went unchallenged by the BBC presenter.

A translation of that segment (which has been confirmed for CAMERA UK by Dr. Moshe Terdiman, Founder and director of Research on Islam and Muslims in Africa and co-founder and director of the Institute for Environmental Security and Well-being Studies) can be found here.

Clearly such antisemitic statements should have no place in BBC content, including on foreign language stations and this case once again raises questions concerning the BBC World Service’s ability to oversee the foreign language content put out in its name and ensure that it meets BBC editorial guidelines.   

The post Antisemitism goes unchallenged on BBC Somali Service radio appeared first on CAMERA UK.

“On January 15, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree calling for two sets of elections this year: legislative on May 22 and presidential on July 31. He also asked that the Palestinian National Council be reconstituted on August 31. If the elections are held, they would be the PA’s first since 2006. This is not the first time that such calls have been floated, but the new decree goes further than previous announcements.

Even so, current political dynamics raise serious doubt about whether the elections will actually be held. The PA and Hamas have offered no guarantees that the conduct of voting would be free and fair or that the outcome would be respected.”

2) Writing at the Atlantic, Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi discuss ‘The Case Against the Iran Deal’.

“Proponents of the Iran nuclear agreement are sounding the alarm. In 2018, the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and since then, Iran has increased the quality and quantity of its uranium enrichment well beyond what the deal allows. Recently, it has even begun enriching uranium to 20 percent, a short distance away from weapons-grade. Iran, JCPOA advocates say, is closer today to producing a bomb than it was in 2015, when the deal was concluded. Only the deal’s renewal, they insist, can prevent the nightmare of a nuclear Iran. […]

Why, then, aren’t Israelis and Arabs—those with the most to lose from Iranian nuclearization—also demanding a return to the JCPOA? Why aren’t they panicking over its dissolution? The answer is simple: The JCPOA didn’t diminish the Iranian nuclear threat; it magnified it.”

3) Dr Jonathan Spyer and Dr Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak present a study of ‘Turkish Militias and Proxies’ at the JISS.

“Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, Turkey seeks to be the dominant regional force, projecting power over neighboring countries and across seas. In cooperation with a variety of bodies, most significantly the SADAT military contracting company and the Syrian National Army, Turkey has developed over the last decade a large pool of well-trained, easily deployed, and effortlessly disposable proxy forces as a tool of power projection, with a convenient degree of plausible deniability.

When combined with Turkish non-official, but governmentally directed and well-established groups such as the Gray Wolves, it becomes clear that Erdoğan now has a private military and paramilitary system at his disposal.”

4) At the Fathom Journal, ‘David Hirsh responds to a recent ‘call to reject’ the IHRA’.

“The 40 writers of the ‘call to reject’ the IHRA definition of antisemitism parade and mobilise their Israeli identities in an effort to give their position greater moral weight. Their message is aimed at licensing and encouraging their non-Jewish and non-Israeli colleagues to support a controversial position on antisemitism which the overwhelming majority of Jews and Israelis oppose.

They write not only ‘asaJew’ but also as Israelis. And not only as Jews and Israelis, but as antiracist Jews and Israelis, as though this is a special and rare subcategory. The truth is that the ‘call to reject’ position on antisemitism is opposed by the overwhelming majority of antiracist Jews and Israelis. And most Jews and Israelis, just like anybody else, are against racism. And the ‘call to reject’ position is opposed by Jews who are against racism because they’re against racism, not in spite of it. To campaign specifically against the racism that targets you yourself is not disgraceful and nor does it signify a softness on racism that targets other people.”

The post Weekend long read appeared first on CAMERA UK.