Middle East Roundup: January 16, 2017

PBS map

Gazas Palestinian residents angered by Hamass failure to address energy crisis

(JNS.org) Residents of the Gaza Strip are angered by the failure of Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that governs their territory, to address the area’s severe energy crisis.

Gaza’s recent power shortage has left residents with only three to four hours of electricity per day and has sparked rare internal Palestinian criticism of Hamas, including protests and most recently a suicide attempt. Gaza civilian Islam al-Maqusi, 20, doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire Monday in the al-Bureij refugee camp, the Times of Israel reported. Police believe al-Maqusi, who was hospitalized, committed the act in protest of the Hamas leadership.

Neighboring Arab countries are assisting Gazans, with Qatar promising $12 million in fuel during the next three months. Turkey also committed emergency fuel, leading Gaza’s electricity authority to announce Monday that it would restore power to Gazan households for eight hours per day.

Israel’s Electric Corporation sells power to the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA), which in turn distributes fuel to Gaza-based Hamas in exchange for reimbursement. Yet Gaza residents have accused Hamas of extortionary tax hikes, making the residents unable to pay their taxes or electricity bills and Hamas unable to reimburse PA for fuel. Despite the pledged assistance from Arab countries, more Palestinian civilian protests against Hamas are planned for this week.

*

Paris Mideast peace conference touts two-state solution, sends subtle message to Trump

(JNS.org) Sunday’s Mideast conference in Paris, attended by officials from some 70 countries, concluded that the “two-state solution” is the only way forward to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and warned against unilateral steps by either side.

In their final communique, conference participants said they “call on each side…to refrain from unilateral steps that prejudge the outcome of negotiations on final-status issues, including, inter alia, on Jerusalem, borders, security, refugees and which they will not recognize.”

While the statement did not explicitly criticize President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a French diplomat said the communique’s final paragraph was intended to send a message to Trump.

“It’s a tortuous and complicated paragraph to pass a subliminal message to the Trump administration,” the diplomat said, Reuters reported.

Ahead of the meeting, Trump’s advisers told French officials he strongly objected to holding the conference just days before his inauguration, Haaretz reported.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the conference “moved the ball forward” on the peace process.

“It underscores this is not just one administration’s point of view, this is shared by the international community broadly,” Kerry said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government did not attend the conference, called the gathering “useless” as well as an attempt to “force terms on Israel that conflict with our national needs.”

Netanyahu said he looks forward to a new era under Trump.

“This conference is among the last twitches of yesterday’s world. Tomorrow’s world will be different—and it is very near,” said Netanyahu.

Some Western allies of Israel also criticized the conference. The United Kingdom only sent junior diplomats to Paris, with a spokesman from the U.K. Foreign Office explaining that the gathering came “just days before the transition to a new American president, when the U.S. will be the ultimate guarantor of any agreement.”

“There are risks, therefore, that this conference hardens positions at a time when we need to be encouraging the conditions for peace,” said the U.K. spokesman.

*

Israel arrests 13 Hamas terrorists in Judea and Samaria, Ramallah

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Israeli security forces recently arrested 13 Hamas terrorists, the Shin Bet security agency revealed Sunday.

The suspects were arrested in a joint operation by the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet that exposed an extensive Hamas infrastructure in the Ramallah area and in Judea and Samaria’s Binyamin region.

The operation also seized money, a vehicle and propaganda material, the Shin Bet said in a statement, explaining that the terrorist command center operated under a hierarchical structure and comprised dozens of terrorists who were working to strengthen Hamas’s “broad regional impact” in Judea and Samaria.

Part of the command center’s operations focused on financial and social activity, including financial support for families of Hamas prisoners and dead terrorists. It also worked to spread the Hamas message and sponsored mass rallies. The command center received steady funding from Hamas in Gaza and from Hamas satellites abroad.

The exposure of the Hamas infrastructure demonstrates that the Gaza-based terror group continues to attempt to position itself on the ground to topple the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank rule, in addition to continuing its focus on carrying out mass-casualty terrorist attacks against Israel.

*

Wall dating back to King David era excavated at Israels Timna mines

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) A copper smelting site and an ancient wall dating back to the 10th century BCE have been excavated at the Timna copper mines antiquities site in southern Israel’s Arava desert region, lending credence to the biblical story of the capture of Edom in the time of King David.

The well-fortified wall once ran for hundreds of meters and stood at least five meters (16.5 feet) tall. Many sling stones were discovered next to the edifice, which may be evidence of the great battle mentioned in Samuel 8:13.

“We have plenty of archaeological proof to determine that the miners who worked the Timna mines weren’t humble slaves, as had been assumed, but rather expert miners who oversaw the complex, demanding work by apprentices,” said Tel Aviv University’s Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef, who headed the biblical archaeology team that uncovered the wall.

“Today, we are discovering more and more evidence of a concentrated, hierarchical society that interacted extensively with its neighbors, which matches up with texts from the Bible and other sources,” he added.

*

ADL to Huffington Post Arabic website: remove blog blaming Jews for Mohammads death

(JNS.org) The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is calling on the Huffington Post to remove a blog from its Arabic-language website that promotes the conspiracy theory that Jews poisoned to death the Islamic prophet Mohammad.

“It is troubling that an anti-Semitic screed cleared The Huffington Post’s editorial review process and that our concerns so far have been ignored,” said ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt. “We call on the Huffington Post to immediately remove this offensive entry and to ensure that the proper safeguards are in place so that the Arabic site is free of anti-Semitism and incitement against Jews.”

The blog, originally published Nov. 29, stated outright in its title that a Jewish woman used arsenic to poison Mohammed, while the text included that claim and other anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. The ADL initially reached out to the editor of the Huffington Post Arabic website Dec.7, but never received a response. But following the outreach, the blog was given a less aggressive title, “Did the Prophet Die From Being Poisoned With Arsenic?” The blog’s anti-Semitic language, however, remained.

*

Sens. Graham, Cruz introduce bill to defund UN over resolution against Israeli settlements

(JNS.org) U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced “The Safeguard Israel Act,” a bill that would cut off American funding for the United Nations until the president certifies to Congress that the recent U.N. Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements has been repealed.

“Twenty-two percent of the money to fund the U.N. comes from the American taxpayer,” Graham said. “I don’t think it’s a good investment for the American taxpayer to give money to an organization that condemns the only democracy in the Mideast, and takes the settlement issue and says that’s the most important and only issue in terms of an impediment to peace.”

According to the senators, the U.N. resolution “falsely claims” that Israel’s sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem and West Bank settlements is illegal, and that Jerusalem’s Old City—including the Western Wall and Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest sites—are ‘‘occupied Palestinian territory.”

“President [Barack] Obama betrayed decades of robust bipartisan American support for Israel at the United Nations by permitting the passage of a biased resolution that condemns our close friend and ally,” Cruz said.

*

World nations glean emergency-response expertise from Israels Magen David Adom

(JNS.org) Amid the rise in global terror attacks, countries around the world are turning to Magen David Adom (MDA)—Israel’s national emergency medical, disaster relief, ambulance and blood services organization—to learn from its method of shortening emergency-response times.

Chaim Rafalowski, MDA’s disaster management coordinator, recently presented the organization’s method of integrating Israeli volunteers into its emergency-response system at the first International Conference for Victims Assistance, held in Paris and sponsored by the United Nations cultural body UNESCO.

Representatives from Germany, Belgium, Canada, Israel, the U.K., the U.S. and other countries attended the Paris conference.

MDA provides medical equipment to trained volunteers who serve on standby basis and are summoned to nearby scenes of emergencies when need. Anyone with basic medical training can become a volunteer MDA “life guardian” emergency responder. MDA’s command and control dispatches EMTs, paramedics and life guardians based on their proximity to any particular incident, reducing emergency-response times.

The Israeli organization’s presentation at the Jan. 9 Paris conference came a day after the deadly Palestinian truck-ramming terror attack in Jerusalem, an attack that mirrored recent truck-rammings carried out by Islamic State in Nice and Berlin.

 

*

Palestinian TV keeping up with Kim Kardashian, displays fundamental anti-Semitism

(JNS.org) Official Palestinian Authority (PA) television, in its follow-up coverage on an Israeli media report on arrests in the Kim Kardashian jewelry heist case, falsely stated that Jewish “thieves” are definitively behind the robbery.

Citing an article in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth on the arrest of 17 suspects in connection with last October’s theft of about $10 million in jewelry from Kardashian’s hotel room during Paris Fashion Week, PA TV’s Jan. 11 “Palestine This Morning” program featured an interview with “Israeli affairs expert” Fayez Abbas, who said that “Jews” who robbed Kardashian were arrested, according to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

“That is written in Yedioth Ahronoth, it’s not from me. It says ‘Jews.’ They are thieves. In other words—they steal lands here too, no?” Abbas said, despite the fact that 15 of the 17 suspects arrested in the Kardashian case are non-Jews.

“PA TV’s reporting demonstrates that anti-Semitism is so fundamental to PA ideology that even a single mention of two Jews anywhere in the world in a negative context is all that is needed launch another PA anti-Semitic rant,” PMW said.

*

Poll: 85% of Jews worldwide have experienced or seen anti-Semitism

(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Eighty-five percent of Jews around the world have witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism at some point in their lives, according to a new survey by the World Zionist Organization’s International Center for Countering Anti-Semitism. The poll also found that around 50 percent of respondents from Europe and North America said they had either witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism in the past year.

The survey of 702 respondents who identify as Jewish and do not live in Israel was published Thursday, ahead of Israel’s National Day to Combat Anti-Semitism and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which are set to coincide Jan. 27.

According to the survey, 67 percent of respondents witnessed or experienced anti-Semitic incidents involving abusive language and insults, 20 percent said they had witnessed or experienced anti-Semitism in the form of threats, and 13 percent said they had either experienced or witnessed anti-Semitic violence.

*
Articles from JNS.org appear on San Diego Jewish World through the generosity of Dr. Bob and Mao Shillman.