Stand for Israel

The Stand for Israel blog has moved!

The Stand for Israel blog will now be located here. Head on over the the new site, join the conversation, and update your bookmarks. See you there!

Sometimes a headline says it all

Ha'aretz: "Hamas: War will settle Jerusalem dispute, not talks"

Temple Mount heating up again

Heavy rioting despoiled the Temple Mount and areas around it over the weekend.

On Thursday, just prior to the latest outbreak of violence, Rabbi Eckstein wrote about how the Mount, "Described by Jewish tradition as God's dwelling place on earth...has today become a pawn used by cynical Palestinian leaders—used not to draw us closer to the Divine, but to inflame passions and foment troubles."

Read the whole piece here.

Major dig planned for Western Wall

Arutz Sheva:

Israel is planning a major archaeological dig under the Western Wall (Kotel) plaza, opposite the Temple Mount, officials announced Thursday. The excavations will create an archaeological park directly underneath the area where worshippers currently stand while praying at the Kotel.

The current prayer area will remain open, supported by pillars, while a new area will be added underneath, at the level at which worshippers at the ancient Temple stood in the past.

The dig may be met with harsh reactions from Muslim and Arab leaders in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, many of whom have accused Israel of attempting to damage the Al-Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount. Jerusalem-area Muslims recently rioted for several days after it was rumored that “Jewish settlers” had planned to pray on the Temple Mount

"Human rights" group's founder zings it for unfair, inaccurate attacks on Israel

Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch, sadly writes in the New York Times that he has to distance himself from the group: HRW used to recognize the differences between open, democratic societies and closed, authoritarian ones, and knew that you cannot compare "abuses" in the two. Now, he says, HRW has cast aside the distinctions it used to make and is making a moral muddle:

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Read it in its entirety here.

What part of "the only democratic state in the region" was unclear?

The BBC is marveling that there are Israeli Arabs in the Israeli army:

The traditional view of the Arab-Israeli conflict is of Jews fighting Muslims. But that image does not always reflect the truth.

In fact, there are thousands of Muslim Bedouin who serve in the Israeli army, or IDF, and even bear arms against their fellow Muslims in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Well, yeah. Israelis are always mentioning that their country is a democracy, and how all of its citizens enjoy equal rights... let's hope BBC news presenters will remember to point this out this next time some charlatan defames Israel as an "apartheid state."

(By the by, Israeli Arabs in the IDF include not just Bedouins, but also Druze and other Muslim and Christian Arabs.)

Col. Richard Kemp defends Israel

Richard Kemp, a British army colonel who has served in Iraq and Afghanistan, looks at the conduct of the Israel Defense Forces during Operation Cast Lead and concludes: "The IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare." Watch his entire testimony before the U.N.

Bibi looking to tackle Israel's "brain drain"

A few years ago, economist Omer Moav published a study documenting Israel's "brain drain": the troublingly high rate of Israeli academics--PhDs and other highly educated types--leaving Israel for more lucrative positions abroad.

Now, Prime Minister Netanyahu has announced that he's trying to find ways to draw them back. (He charmingly stated that he plans to "vacuum-suck" them back.)

The problem may not seem severe but Moav showed that the problem is more than a statistical blip: Israel produces top-notch scholars, but loses them to other countries because Israeli universities cannot pay enough to keep them (they also may not offer enough time and resources to compete with conditions abroad).

When the "best and brightest" leave, Israel pays on a number of levels: economically, educationally, and in diminished morale. 

In a 2005 article from Yediot Aharonot on the topic, Prof. Eyal Winter of the Hebrew University described a recent visit to Cornell University in upstate New York: After Winter's lecture, a former student now studying at Cornell invited him to join her for a Rosh Hashana dinner with other Israelis. Winter recalled: 

I thought I was going to meet five or six Israelis, but I was amazed to find about 50 young Israelis in their thirties at the dinner. All of them were staff members at the university, or in the final stages of completing their dissertation, and all of them already had good job offers from leading universities in the U.S.

Netanyahu is proposing the creation of a special fund designed to lure back the top 300 Israeli scientists now doing research abroad.

No big surprise that anti-Israel resolution passes, but some surprise French support

The U.N. Human Rights Council passed the resolution slapping Israel for not cooperating with the Goldstone committee report into the Gaza war, which accuses the Jewish state of all manner of war crimes.

(Among other things, the resolution calls on the UN Security Council to send the matter to the International Criminal Court if Israel doesn't toe their line.)

Interestingly, French delegates joined Israeli efforts to lobby European countries to vote against the report and even tried to get the vote postponed to allow them more time to persuade other countries to vote against it. 

The U.N. Human Rights Council has long been the butt of jokes given its makeup -- last year, its was chaired by the shining exemplar of human rights, Libya. On Friday, among the other pillars of decency and democracy voting to criticize Israel were China, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, and Pakistan.

History shows anti-Jewish rumors lead to Palestinian riots

Barry Rubin looks at the historical record and finds that, sadly, some things don't change:

In August 1929, wild rumors that Jews had attacked Arabs, cursed the name of Islam’s founder, and were about to seize the Temple Mount led to inflammatory sermons in mosques, followed by massive Arab riots. More than 105 Jews were killed by Arabs; not a single Arab was killed by a Jew.

The exact same thing happened—albeit with far fewer casualties—in 1996, 2000, 2009, and at several points in between. The pattern tells a great deal about why the conflict doesn’t end and in fact stays a great deal the same.