The Way to Your Heart

There's a new cookbook published.

PC sent me a review:

So, I had to check it out. Previously, I had blogged about a restaurant with Palestinian-themed dishes.

The cover:

Palestine:

On her 2009 trip, she couldn't get in to Gaza as, well, she couldn't as it was shut, she claimed.  Maybe there were Hamas-instigated hostilities?

A review notes:

...when Khan returned for research trips for Zaitoun (Arabic for “olive tree”), she was shocked by how much the situation had deteriorated since her first visit in 2009. “It’s so much more dire than when I used to work on it,” she says. “I think history is going to look back on what’s happened to Palestinians in the last century with…” she pauses, choosing her words, “with a lot of shame, actually.”

Another review provides a bit of a warning:

The recipes are interspersed with Khan’s recollections of her travels in Palestine, which follow (I think) some kind of geographical trajectory. I found these interesting but their relation to the rest of the book – helpfully ordered by courses, beginning with starters and winding towards desserts – was occasionally somewhat confusing.

Nigella Lawson is aware that it is

 a politically engaged and hungry travelogue

Yes, there are politics in the book

but there are great recipes as well that can be adapted. How many are exclusively "Palestinian" rather than Middle Eastern (or even Jewish), I do not know.

Just be careful about kashrut requirements when cooking.

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Quaint Qumran Bothers the BDSers

In an Al Jazeera piece attacking tourism that, supposedly, brings tourists to visit "an illegal settlement", that is, Qumran, and that "only six mention or imply that one will be outside Israeli territory" and that "Thomas Cook, Collette and On the Go Tours, for example, make stops at the Ahava Visitor Center without telling tourists they are leaving Israel", you can read this:

For the unsuspecting visitor, it is not easy to tell that one is no longer within the internationally recognised borders of Israel, but in the occupied West Bank, in an Israeli settlement, illegal under international law.

The same goes for nearby Qumran, a popular tourist attraction where a Bedouin shepherd once found the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.

Notwithstanding it being situated in the West Bank, Israel now controls the site,

And someone really wants to threaten these tourists:

According to John Dugard, professor of international law and former UN special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, the travel agencies' customers are unknowingly "aiding and abetting" the crime of establishing illegal settlements.

"In theory, this exposes tourists to prosecution for having purchased illegal goods," said Dugard, who added that although holidaymakers are not going to be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court for such an offence, travel agencies should be warning tourists that they are about to commit a crime.

"The tourists ought to have a cause of action against the tour companies and claim compensation for having been fraudulently misled and exposed to criminal activity," Dugard said.

Dugard is a long-time opponent of Israel's rights to its historic national homeland. And some international law he gets wrong. And he's been called a 'racist'.

Let's start with "internationally recognised borders".

Israel had none.

Today, its borders with Egypt and Jordan are and, to a great extent also Lebanon, through UN agreements, are "internationally recognized".  But not so as regards the areas of Judea and Samaria, and Gaza for that matter.

They were defined by armistice lines, cease-fire boundaries, etc. which would not "in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party hereto in the ultimate peaceful settlement of the Palestine question". No peace treaty or any final settlement arrangement exists as regards that territory.

But more to the issue, Qumran had nothing to do with Palestine if what is meant is an Arab entity. It is a Jewish site.

As we all should know, 

The Hellenistic period settlement [!] was constructed during the reign of John Hyrcanus (134–104 BCE) or somewhat later, and was occupied most of the time until it was destroyed by the Romans in 68 CE or shortly after. It is best known as the settlement nearest to the Qumran Caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden

The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish documents. The residents were Jewish. No Arabs lived there although some nearby Bedouins stole some of the Dead Sea scrolls created at Qumran in the 1940s.

If not for Israel's archaeological units, little of Arab remains would be preserved.

Of course, Israel could simply term the area the "Holy Land" and avoid the whole concern of these BDSers:

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Who Triggered That War?

Sometimes, you read something that just takes your breath away.

Here's an example:

three decades later, British forces withdrew from Palestine and Israel declared independence shortly after, triggering a civil war and heralding the Israeli-Arab conflict, rendering the prospect of an independent Arab Palestine a distant mirage. 

That's just one snippet of history misrepresented in an op-ed in Haaretz:

In Palestine, World War I Has Never Really Ended

Let's ignore violent murderous riots in 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-1939 which could be described as a "civil war" if, indeed, the Arabs thought that Jews belonged in what they thought was their country, which they didn't. And let's ignore that that period was very much one of a Jewish-Arab conflict.

But the violence of 1948 when Israel was declared began at least on November 30, 1947, the day after the UN vote on Partition which was actually still before midnight Nov. 29 in Palestine. Arabs started shooting at Jews already then.

Here's from the Palestine Post's December 1 edition:

Here's a second:

The Arabs rebels were fighting against the Ottomans on a promise of British support for Arab interdependence after the war, as envisioned in the famous Hussein-McMahon Correspondence of 1915–16. The British were indeed keen to fulfill their promises - but not to the Arabs.

The British promise was that the entire Middle East from east of Egypt that had been in Ottoman hands would become a free and independent state albeit at first under a Mandate system just as Palestine would be a Mandate. Abdullah became Emir and then King of Jordan and Feisal was King of Iraq. That the Husseins were kicked out of Saudi Arabia was not Britain's fault.

When history is treated in such a cavalier fashion, you know you simply cannot trust anything the author promotes.

----
Thanks to EH

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How To Solve the BDS Labeling Difficulty

You've read this?

Israeli farmers take fight against BDS to consumersThey plan to combat anti-Israel boycott efforts by more aggressively appealing to shoppers in Europe and America • Plan includes increasing product visibility, hosting public-opinion leaders in tours of Judea and Samaria, Golan and Jordan Valley.

My solution:

A previous 2009 idea.
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Diminishing Eretz-Yisrael

"Diminishing/Shrinking Palestine" is a favorite ploy of the anti-Zionists.

You can find examples here, and here.

But there's a Zionist version.

This one from 1938, one in Polish, the other in Hebrew:

First, Transjordan was removed from the Mandate territory.

Then, the Peel Commission and then the Woodhead Proposal.

Use the maps as counter narrative tools.

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Update on Temple Mount 'Sinkholes'

You may have read of the problems of  a 'sinking' of some pathways located on the Temple Mount.

I primed that story and provided pictures from a WhatsApp group of Temple Mount activists.

Well, the situation now looks like this:

More here and a YouTube clip.

More Israel-Erasing Fashion

From here:

Erases Israel from that territory and operates on behalf of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

That fund, founded in 1991, although it claims to represent "Palestine", which is a territory which included originally what is today Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, has as its mission

to address the medical needs of Arab children in the Middle East.

So, not only does that fashion erase Israel, it obliterates Jews. 

____________

UPDATE

The refugee tree design is out:

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Bansky, Batia and the Two Banks "Historic Palestine"

Batia Ofer has taken on Bansky.  Background at Israelycool.

His pro Palestinian and anti-Israel posters:

a.

and

b.


Her counter poster:

So I commented:

If they insist on "Historic Palestine", well, that means all of Jordan need be included as only in 1922 was it officially separated from the original territory of the reconstituted-to-be Jewish National Home. Oops.

So Bansky becomes Two Banks.

Do read the comments left at her poster.


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Ilhan's Ill-wind

It may be that the new Congresswoman from Minnesota is becoming a problem.

We've all seen this:

and this

She is now claiming to be not only the first hijab-wearing Muslim elected to Congress but the first Congresswoman who has begun fabricating history and erasing Jews from it on her election victory evening.

How?

By declaring

“I stand here before you tonight, as your congresswoman-elect, with many firsts behind my name...The first woman of color to represent our state in Congress...The first woman to wear a hijab...The first refugee ever elected to Congress [here at 4:33]”

"The first refugee ever elected to Congress”?

Really?  The first?

As Sefi Kogan pointed out, Jews and others preceded her:

Shouldn't Tom Lantos, who was born in Budapest, enslaved in Nazi-occupied Hungary, and, penniless and with much of his family murdered, made his way to the US on a scholarship after the war, count? Or Rudy Boschwitz, who was born in Berlin and fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933? Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who will retire from Congress at the end of this year, is a refugee from Cuba [and whose maternal grandparents were Sephardic Jews]. Joseph Cao is a refugee from Vietnam.

Perhaps she was ill-informed? Or an aide wrote that and she was ignorant?

Or she is engaged in creating a new narrative.  Perhaps a bit like another newly-elected politician, NY's State Senator Julia Salazar.

I hope this making up facts, or not knowing them, does not continue or there'll be an ill-wind, and not only a cold one, blowing in from Minnesota.

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