APN's daily news review from Israel

Thursday January 2, 2020

 Quote of the day:

"It is Netanyahu’s right to fight the indictments against him. It is his right to ask for immunity. But he has no right to destroy the remainder of the trust of the citizens of the state in its institutions. Without trust there is no law, no institutions, no army, no state."
--Top Yedioth political commentator, Nahum Barnea, writes about the accusations made by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his speech about why he requested immunity from trial.*

APN's daily news review from Israel

Wednesday January 1, 2020

Number of the day #1:
30%.
--Amount of Israeli children living under the poverty line, according to new national report.**

Number of the day #2:
100 million.
--The amount of shekels (= $29 million) that the settler organization, Amana, received from taxpayer funds between 2013 to 2015, to promote Jewish settlement on occupied lands, often acting illegally to achieve this goal.*

Quote of the day:

“The justices’ decision is a dramatic and significant step that sets bounds, at least for now, on the rampant criminality in the settlements and the illegal outposts. We hope that in this spirit, the court will rule that no public money should be transferred to Amana ... A situation in which Israel backs the transfer of public money for illegal activity is intolerable, and we urge the government to put a stop to it.”
--Peace Now reacts to the High Court decision forcing settlements to ask for government permission to transfer funds to the Amana settler organization.*

APN's daily news review from Israel

Tuesday December 31st, 2019

Quote of the day:

"And perhaps the most terrifying fear of all: the fear that, in fact, all the rules have changed and nobody writes new ones in their place. Because Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Bashar al-Assad, and Binyamin Netanyahu may have nothing in common, except for one rule: there are no more rules. Everything goes."
--In a pre-New Year's Op-Ed, Yedioth commentator Raanan Shaked writes a review of the last decade.*

Breaking News:
Iraqi mourners, supporters of US-attacked militia, storm US Embassy after US airstrikes kill 25
The mourners held funerals for the 25 Iraqi fighters of the Iran-backed militia killed in US airstrikes in a Baghdad neighborhood, after which they marched on to the heavily fortified Green Zone on Tuesday and kept walking till they reached the sprawling U.S. Embassy there. Iraqi security forces fired teargas to disperse protesters. US ambasador and staff evacuated. (Ynet, Haaretz)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

A piece of so-called art - a banana duct-taped to a wall - garnered the public’s attention when it sold for $120,000.

Was it a publicity stunt? Was it satire? Whatever it was, it certainly made the headlines and probably succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.

Well, $120,000 ain’t bananas to us here at APN. In fact, at the time, we needed just about that much more to meet our 2019 budget target. We are now down to $50,000, and that still ain't bananas!

APN receives three stars on Charity Navigator, in no small part because of our fiscal responsibility. No bananas and duct tape for us. So rest assured, we do all we can to put your donations to work toward more programing and less administration.

* $50,000 more to our budget means expanding APN’s support for Israel’s Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) movement.

* $50,000 more to our budget means updating our materials, including a new 2020 map of Israeli West Bank settlements, which is an essential and highly demanded educational tool.

* $50,000 more will allow us to maintain our map-app, found on the Apple app store, produce more podcasts, renew News Nosh for which there are over 4000 subscribers, promote Yossi Alpher’s popular weekly Q and A, expand our social media presence, produce regional events, and much more.

As we head into 2020, an election year with many fundraising challenges, please do whatever you can to help now. Because fighting for a two-state solution is no publicity stunt.

Happy New Year and a peaceful 2020 from the staff of APN.

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.

Here are 10 selected quotes from APN's 2019 Updates, emailed each week:

"When the hell will someone in this government broadcast to the public that Israel is a country for all its citizens. And every person was born equal. Arabs, too, God help us, are human beings. And so are the Druze. And so are gays, by the way, and lesbians, and...shock...leftists." (March 13, 2019)

Rotem Sela, popular Israeli actress and TV host, in an Instagram post to which Prime Minister Netanyahu replied "Dear Rotem, an important correction: Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the Nation-State Law that we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish People - and them alone." 

Last Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump planned to sign an executive order targeting anti-Semitism on college campuses by defining Judaism as a race or nationality, cuing a flood of op-eds and a social media fury.  In the ensuing discussion, an important question arose; namely, what does such an order mean for the pro-Israel, pro-peace activities of organizations like Americans for Peace Now (APN) who hold events on college campuses?

In the following days, a different pattern emerged.  When unveiled, the text of the executive order definitively did not define Judaism as a race or nationality; instead, it suggested that those who face discrimination based on race or national origin will not lose protection under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  In other words, if a racial slur is lobbed, or a far-left campus activist tells a group of Jewish students that they are tools of “Israeli oppression,” Title VI grants those students a means for recourse.  Discrimination often occurs through the lens of race or nationality; consequently, it is an important, even welcome, development to include anti-Semitic acts carried out under the guise of race or nationality— in other words, based on the target group’s perceived racial or national characteristics— as being protected by civil rights law.  

There lies a complication, though, regarding attempts to define anti-Semitism.  President Trump’s executive order advises executive agencies to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which includes a broad array of examples that “might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent.”  While many of these examples are self-evident, such as comparing Israeli policy to Nazi Germany, the list includes the far murkier waters of denying a right to self-determination for the Jewish people, for example, by claiming that the state of Israel is a racist enterprise, and targeting the Israeli state, understood as a Jewish collectivity.

As it turns out, this broadened definition of anti-Semitism can include an entire range of criticism of Israeli policy, subject to the prerogative of the US Department of Education.  As some critics have argued, this threatens to create a “chilling effect” whereby critics of Israeli policy exercise self-censorship, for fear of being subject to Title VI litigation.  And, most ominously, it achieves a seamless sleight of hand; as presidential advisor Jared Kushner wrote in his New York Times opinion piece defending the policy, this definition blurs the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.  By transforming the definition of anti-Semitism from including delegitimization of the Jewish state to including criticism of the policies and actions undertaken by the government of Israel, this executive order leaves little space for healthy debate about Israeli policy on campus.  While criticism of Israel certainly can venture into the territory of anti-Semitism, criticizing Israeli policy is not inherently anti-Semitic; rather, it is an essential part of formulating policy preferences in a functioning democracy, both in Israel and in America.

Reliance on the IHRA definition empowers the Trump administration to limit the scope of Jewish organizations, including APN, to critically discuss difficult aspects of the occupation.  It could, ultimately, serve as a Trojan horse to divide the Jewish community, on the one hand offering a greater umbrella of civil rights protections to Jewish students who face a real and growing problem of anti-Semitic harassment on campus, and on the other, risking labelling pro-Israel organizations which criticize Israeli actions as anti-Semitic and liable to be barred from federally funded spaces.  And, under the stewardship of an ideologically motivated Department of Education, this executive order provides ammunition for Title VI investigations against individuals or groups which stand in opposition to administration political priorities, thereby threatening to water down the flow of ideas on campus.

This portent is something that we should all be wary of.

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.