That Bet Yochanan House: Jews In Jerusalem East

From a recent Women in Green field trip to observe Jewish residency in Jerusalem East on February 14th 2010 including Abu Tor, Beit Yonathan in Silwan, named for Jonathan Pollard, Ma'ale Zietim, then Beit Achim, Beit Orot on the Mt of Olives and finally the Shimon HaTzaddick neighborhood:



above: Bet Yochanan


this is the entrance to the Shimon HaTzadik tomb:

the ladies:
Chaim Luria explaining at Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood:



and Nadia Matar (with an Arab woman displaying a bit of displeasure in background):




Photo credits: Gemma Blech

Backward? Or Just Der Stürmer?

If you go to the Purim spoof issue of The Forward, appropriately entitled "Backward", you'll see this:-




Yes, that's Holocaust victim Anne Frank photoshopped as winking.

Bad taste?

Well, if my friend, Forward senior columnist JJ Goldberg can write this about the anti-NIF/Naomi Chazan advert this:-

the Der Stuermer-style caricature of Chazan with horns that was run as a newspaper ad in the Jerusalem Post and carried as signs by protesters outside Chazan’s home.

well, I guess I can call the publication of that fake ad not only a perversity but a defamation of the sacredness of Jewish suffering. Oh, and border-line Der Stürmer, - and JJ, note the correct spelling.

Of course, sometimes, left-wing radical progressive forces just don't know anything about democracy, respect and awe, basic Jewish values.

Our Efficient Secret Service or Whatever

You would think that a blog post, like this one, which announced a Shabbat on the outskirts of Jericho (the second poster) would have been interesting.

But, well, this is Israel.

Tobin vs. Klein - Who Is Antisemitic?

Joe Klein’s Unhinged Attack on COMMENTARY Jonathan Tobin

On Thursday, I wrote about the latest column of Joe Klein on Time magazine, in which he took on the Obama administration’s refusal to “engage” with the Hamas terrorists in charge of Gaza. While covering a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Qatar, Klein ignored the main story of Clinton’s talking tough about Iran and instead focused on her defense of Israel and on America’s continued support for efforts to isolate Hamas. As I concluded then, “what Klein fails to understand is that no matter who sits in the White House, it is not in America’s interest to rescue the killers of Hamas.”

This rather gentle rebuke provoked the notoriously thin-skinned Klein to respond in a post on the Time website, in which he returned to the style that has become all too familiar to readers of his work in recent years. Rather than engage on the issues or face up to the faults in his reasoning, he claims that responses are full of errors and chooses to launch wild attacks on his antagonists and to pose as the victim of extremists who accuse him of anti-Semitism. It is useful to go through his litany of false charges and calumnies to see just how out of whack his thinking is these days.

First, as to the “errors” he charges me with, they don’t amount to much.

One is that, according to him, I was wrong to say that he was “along on the junket with Hillary” — since, he says, he was not part of the secretary’s traveling party. Fair enough. But the point of this was to point out that he was in Qatar on a junket to attend the conference at which she spoke, not to imply that he and Hillary were sitting next to each other on the plane or sharing a hotel suite. And, as Klein then admits, his presence at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum was in the capacity of an invited member of a conference working group, not as a member of the working press.

Next, he says that I falsely claimed that he criticized Clinton’s remarks on Iran. Wrong. What I said was that “Klein wasn’t terribly interested in the secretary’s obituary of Obama’s failed outreach to Iran.”

Then he claims that I did not mention that the delegates to the conference were displeased by Clinton’s remarks on Gaza. But my mention of that displeasure was the whole point of my piece and I noted that they were unhappy with it (more about that statement in a minute).

Then Klein claims that I said he blamed Israel for the Gaza impasse. But what I said was that Klein blamed Israel for “Obama’s acknowledged failure in the Middle East,” which referenced Klein’s own line that “U.S. envoy George Mitchell’s slow-moving effort to start talks tanked because of Israel’s unwillingness to stop building illegal settlements on Palestinian land.” He says instead that he blamed the Gaza standoff on Hamas for not releasing Gilad Shalit but, as I pointed out, what he wrote was that he considered the Shalit ordeal to be “an insane sticking point” to be holding up progress toward lifting the blockade of Hamas in Gaza.

According to Klein, my post was merely “bile and bullying” and amounted to me accusing him of being “anti-Semitic.” but as Eric Fingerhut wrote of his crazed response:

Whoa! Anti-Israel? Anti-Semitic? Where’d you get that, Joe? Tobin’s piece said your proposal to engage with Hamas was a bad one because it wasn’t in America’s interest to help out terrorists. Tobin may be right, he may be wrong, but he never said anything about you being “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic” anywhere in the piece. He didn’t even imply it. He just didn’t like your ideas, and didn’t like your statement that Israel was at fault for the failure of George Mitchell’s efforts. But in your attempt to make yourself out to be some courageous truth-teller, you claim you’ve been smeared — when you’re the one doing the smearing.

But if you think that canard from Klein was bad, the worst was yet to come. Klein then writes:

The barely concealed anti-Arab bigotry so frequently found on the COMMENTARY blog, reveals itself in this sentence: “That answer pleased neither the Arabs nor Klein.” In fact, it was a U.S.-Islamic Forum: Arabs comprised maybe half the Islamic delegates.

What? Does Klein really think it is bigoted to refer to Arabs as “Arabs?” It may well be that there were non-Arabs at the conference but it was Klein who wrote in his column that “Clinton’s tough talk on Iran got most of the U.S. headlines, but her position on Gaza was far more important to the Islamic participants at Doha, especially the Arabs.” Not only was my reference entirely neutral as opposed to prejudicial, but it was based on Klein’s own comment.

Unlike Klein’s response, my original post never attacked him personally; I just took aim at his wrongheaded advice to Obama. And far from throwing “calumnies” at the president, I defended Obama’s current stand on Hamas. In return, he falsely accuses COMMENTARY of errors and makes bizarre charges of bigotry. This is something he has done before with others who have criticized him, especially for his attacks on Israeli policy and American supporters of Israel. One would expect that any sensible writer would, after some consideration, back down and apologize for his slurs against me and this magazine, even while defending his ideas. But given the unhinged and hate-filled nature of his writing on this subject, I have no such expectation.

Jericho Documentation

From Oslo II

GAZA-JERICHO AGREEMENT

ANNEX II
Protocol Concerning Civil Affairs

Religious Affairs:

1. The Palestinian Authority shall ensure free access to all holy sites in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area determined by the respective religious sects and shall protect these sites.

2. The above is without prejudice to the arrangements with regard to archaeological sites as set out in subparagraph 30 below.

3. Visitors to holy sites shall behave according to accepted rules of behavior in holy sites.

4. Religious sects shall inform the Palestinian Authority of their respective holy sites in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area. For the purposes of this paragraph, the relevant authority regarding Jewish holy sites shall be the Israeli Government.

5. A list of the existing Jewish holy sites is attached as Appendix A attached to this Annex.

6. Israel declares that no property (including lands, buildings and institutions) belonging to the Islamic Waqf in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area was taken by the military government or its Civil Administration, except such property that might have been put to use for public purposes such as schools and public roads.

7. Pending the entry into force of the Interim Agreement the holy site of Nebi Mousa shall be under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority for religious purposes.

8. During religious events that take place three times a year and other special occasions that shall be coordinated with the Israeli authorities, Palestinians shall have the right to religious pilgrimage to the al-Maghtas under the Palestinian flag.

9. Religious affairs in the "Shalom Al Israel" synagogue in Jericho shall be under the auspices of the Israeli authorities.

Now, why did I post that?

Because the Jerusalem Post can't get the facts straight:

Security forces began evacuating right-wingers from a Jericho synagogue who broke through IDF checkpoints in the West Bank on Sunday afternoon and entered the city, holding prayer services. They raised an Israeli flag...Upon entering the city, the activists - among them MK Michael Ben-Ari (National Union) - began to make their way to the ancient synagogue which was torched during the Second Intifada.

The city of Jericho falls under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority , and Israelis are not allowed to enter it.

That Non-Denominational Tradition

From a NYTimes wedding announcement:-

a nondenominational ceremony that draws from Episcopal and Presbyterian traditions

Heritage and History of the Land of Israel

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Tel Hai:

...Today, we are due to approve a comprehensive plan, the largest ever, to strengthen the national heritage infrastructures of the State of Israel. We will do four things:

We will rehabilitate archaeological and Zionist heritage sites. We will build and enrich archives and museums. We are talking about approximately 150 sites.

We are due to invest almost NIS 400 million, with the assistance of 16 Government ministries. We will create two trails: An historical trail of archaeological sites from the Biblical, Second Temple and other eras in the history of the Land of Israel and a trail of the Israeli experience that joins the main sites which relate the history of a People's return to its Land.

Hebrew source



So come along and trail along with Jewish history!

Someone Like-Thinking

...Lee Smith asks. Why is the region so assailed by the intractables of political dysfunction and religious violence?...

Smith, a Middle East correspondent for The Weekly Standard, contends in this short, dense, nuanced polemic that the area suffers from endemic political violence. The ruling elites are caught in “a perpetual pincer movement” between regional concerns and the internal threat of overthrow. They are simply self-interested factions trying, by any measure possible, to retain their grip on power. Jihad, Smith argues, is an age-old byproduct of this struggle as the ruler pushes the energies of the young militant warrior class away from his ­capital. For Smith, the 9/11 attacks were less the result of a clash of civilizations than part of existing Middle East power struggles.

Smith wants the American left to stop blaming American foreign policy for the Middle East’s ills and concentrate instead on the structural deficiencies of the region’s societies. This is an enticing exoneration but...

...it’s all too easy for the violent few to hold the majority hostage. Smith sees this as an embedded cultural inheritance. I prefer my history less dogmatic;...

That Travel Book I Blogged About

I reviewed a Tom Conover book just recently, and now spotted it being reviewed in the NYTimes:

“...Commuting between Palestinian and Israeli zones in the West Bank, with attendant rock-thumpings and checkpoint humiliations...I especially recommend the book’s horrifying fourth chapter, “A War You Can Commute To,” which deals with the Israeli occupation’s interdiction and interruption of Palestinian travel, the retaliatory menaces to which Israeli checkpoint soldiers are subjected and their retaliations in turn upon Palestinian homes. I wish I had the space to consider Conover’s observations, and his reactions to them, with the complexity they deserve. Instead, I will have to settle for quoting from the caption of his aerial photograph of the 60 Road, which carries settlers between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, shooting straight and very high above the S-curves of the local road for Palestinians passing between its pillars: “In much of the West Bank, separate roads carry Israelis and Palestinians. . . . A series of concrete panels on the highway’s left side, near the top, serves to protect Israeli vehicles from projectiles.”

The only reason for any checkpoint, any inderdiction, is Pal. terror. There are no true separate roads for there are roads Jews can't drive along. There are temporary detours necessitated by rockthrowing, molotiv-bottle tossing and shooting.

Temple Mount Conquest Footage

28th Iyar 1967:

Why Won't The Guardian Barf Up Bapthrope?

As a public service notice about an antisemitic commenter "William Bapthorpe" who was supposed to be banned but has apparently been allowed back.

Here:

To give some background - last month Bapthorpe stated that West Bank Jews should be slaughtered down to the last man, woman and child. It took over two weeks for Bapthorpe to be banned for making this comment and it was only after a campaign led by CiF Watch and a police investigation into this that Bapthorpe was finally banned.

It now emerges that he has been posting under a new moniker and he claims, based on his emails with the Guardian, that he was allowed to return as William Bapthorpe if he wanted to.

This is nothing short of outrageous.

If you feel outraged about this, write to Matt Seaton at matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk and give him a piece of your mind.

HH #257

New weekly carnival of Jewish blogging.

Here.

Good going Ruthi.

Two New Posters

"We Must Get Out of the Freeze".

"The Freeze is a Test"

Poster by Kommemiyut.


And this past Shabbat's demo call to protest Sabbath desecration led by R' Aharon Bransdorfer:-

Photographs

Did you know that the Toldot Aharon Yeshiva has expanded?

Here are two shots of the new facade at the end of Meah Shearim Street, looking towards Shivtei Yisrael Street:-


Did you notice the little fire in the second photograph at the right?

And have you ever visited the family plot of Eliezer Ben-Yehudah on Mt. of Olives?

The site:-

The grave of the founder of modern spoken Hebrew:-

Did you notice his death year as being "six years since the Balfour Declaration"?

His son, Itamar's gravestone:

Get Ready for a 10th Century Archaeological Discovery in Jerusalem

Just received:-

Subject: Press briefing on archaeological findings from the tenth century B.C.E.

Reporters and photographers are invited to participate in a press briefing at 10 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 22, for presentation of details about new archaeological discoveries from the tenth century B.C.E., the period of the united monarchy of Israel. The unique discoveries were made in an area adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem in excavations conducted under the auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The press briefing will depart from the Dung Gate of the Old City to the archaeological site.

That's February 22.

Tomorrow.

Comments on Those 'Stolen' Passports

The Editor, The Times, For consideration for publication.

Sir

Fascinating that the issue of the availability of fake British Passports should have become such a key issue.

When cupboards full of fake British and other country's passports were discovered during the raid on the Finsbury Park mosque, scarcely a mention was made and there was little concern.

Why the change now?

Adrian Korsner

===============================================================================

To: dtletters@telegraph.co.uk
Sent: 18/02/2010 15:34:11 Jerusalem Standard Time

Whether or not the Dubai killing of the Hamas leader was connected to Mossad, would Mr Brown, before appearing so virtuous in inquisiting the Israeli Ambassador, as UK Prime Minister like to confirm that MI6 does not use false passports for its operations in the world ?.Sauce for the goose is usually sauce for the gander.Peter Simpson

Peter Simpson
Jerusalem
Israel

===================================================================

To The Editor of the Times,

Sir,

I am completely mystified by the heading to the report by Hugh Tomlinson and Sheera Frankel on p. 13 of yesterday's issue.

It reads "Mossad assassination squad used British passports".

The quotation marks indicate, without any possibility of error, that someone made a statement in those terms. There no such statement anywhere in your report nor does it appear in the reports of the incident in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian or the Independent.

On the contrary, Dubai's chief of police is quoted in your report and in those other newspapers as saying merely that Israeli involvement could not be ruled out.

Your words amount to a positive assertion that the assassination was carried out by "Mossad assassination squads". At this time there is not a vestige of proof for that assertion. The words are without substance, the heading is completely misleading and you should withdraw it and apologise.

Yours etc. A.J. Cotton. 17 February 2010

Are The Graphics Improving?

Here's the Im Tirzu portrayal of New Israel Fund chairperson Naomi Chazan:



And here is one from the Hebrew blog newsletter Maraah, No. 85:-



An improvement?

And What Were They Discussing?

Who?

These two:



Dan Meridor (l.) and Benny Begin (r.).

Two ministers in the Netanyahu cabinet.




Photo credit: Y. Medad

In Nepal?

Notice anything in this picture?



Yes. It's that star:

The Simple Truths

There were no Israeli settlements in the West Bank in 1948, when all the surrounding Arab states attacked when the UN established Israel (*). There were no Israeli settlements from the 1949 Arab/Israeli armistice until the 1967 war, during which time Israel was attacked by a variety of Palestinian terrorists. There were no Israeli settlements in 1964, when the PLO created its charter, declaring that the establishment of Israel was illegal and that armed conflict was necessary to eliminate the Zionist entity.

Now we are asked to believe that the settlements and Israel's existence in the West Bank are the obstacles to peace. There is no credible evidence that the mind-set to destroy Israel declared by the Palestinian leaders in their Charters, constitution and their speeches before Israel had the West Bank, has changed or would change if Israel were to dismantle the settlements and did leave the West Bank.

William K. Langfan


___________________

(*)

Actually, there were Jewish communities there and they were occupied by Arab forces, the Jewish population ethnically cleansed and in some cases, massacred:

Kfar Etzion, Revadim, Ein Tzurim, Massu'ot, Bet HaAravah, Atarot, Neveh Yaakov, Kfar Darom and Mishmar HaYarden as well as the industrial sites at Neharayim (electricity) and the Dead Sea (phosphates).

The Jewish populace of Hebron, Gaza, Jenin and Shchem had already been disposed of by Arab pogromists between 1929 and 1936.