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Category: Israel

Israel USA 

Jews misread America’s cultural civil war

Melanie

The cultural civil war that has now exploded in America is an immensely dangerous moment for the west. It is also perilous for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Yet in both Israel and the diaspora, too many Jews just don’t get it. They are parroting instead the double-dealing and hypocritical pieties of their mortal enemies. After Charlottesville, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin wrote a letter expressing “support and solidarity” with the American Jewish community “at this difficult time”. Jewish students in America run a permanent gauntlet of left-wing…

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Israel Videos 

Why the world doesn’t “get it” about Israel

Melanie

When some years ago I was interviewed on the Israeli current affairs TV show Ro’im Olam and described Israel’s PR as “a joke”, it caused a sensation that has never quite subsided. The points I was making in that interview remain as timely – and are still as generally unsaid or even unsayable – today. The video of that interview went viral. You can watch it below (it switches to English after a couple of minutes).

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Global conflict Israel 

Thank goodness for the Japanese ambassador

Melanie

The BBC is still pushing the hysterical line that it is President Trump, not Kim Jong-un, who is edging the world to the brink of war. The BBC News website, reporting that Trump is “ramping up the rhetorical brinkmanship”, thoughtfully provides us with evidence of Trump’s “nuclear fixation” (Trump’s!!) and also features a delightfully amusing little quiz question inviting people to guess which leader made a particular bombastic remark, Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un. Nucleardum and Nucleardee, eh? You could die laughing, couldn’t you. The BBC’s message is thus that…

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Israel 

Incitement, lies and the strange eclipse of the Dome of the Rock

Melanie

In the wake of the recent violence over Temple Mount, a reader wrote to tell me something I hadn’t realised. I had wrongly assumed that the al Aqsa mosque as well as the Dome of the Rock were built on top of the actual site of the Jewish Temple. In fact, only the Dome of the Rock is situated on top of where the Temple itself stood. Al Aqsa, which was built later, squats on the southern end of Temple Mount which was extended by Herod. This raised a question…

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Israel USA 

An open letter to Jared Kushner

Melanie

Dear Jared Kushner, I have been reading the remarks you made to a group of congressional interns about the difficulties of finding a solution to the Middle East conflict. Among other things, you said this: “We’re thinking about what the right end-state is, and we’re trying to work with the parties very quietly to see if there’s a solution. And there may be no solution, but it’s one of the problem sets that the president asked us to focus on. So we’re going to focus on it and try to…

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Israel 

The Temple Mount trap

Melanie

I wrote here that Israel’s removal of the metal detectors from Temple Mount was a mistake, and that those in the west approving of the move merely showed how badly they failed to understand the Arab Muslim religious war against the Jews. On the day the metal detectors were removed I attended a meeting in Jerusalem where Israel’s minister for housing, Yoav Galant, said erecting the barriers had been “a mistake”. Staggered by this language which played directly into the Arab and Muslim “strong horse” mindset in which any retreat…

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Israel 

A day to teach the world

Melanie

Tonight Jews start the fast of Tisha b’Av, or the ninth of the month of Av. I cannot recall a year when this fast has been so freighted with anxiety, poignancy and the full weight of Jewish history. For through this fast the Jewish people mourn the destruction of the ancient Jewish Temple – a double destruction in fact, the first time by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and and the second by the Romans in 70 CE which saw the Jewish people exiled from their homeland of Israel. The…

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Israel 

The urgent need for the detection of mettle

Melanie

The Israeli government has removed the metal detectors, or magnometers, that it installed at the entrance to Temple Mount to prevent further Arab terrorist attacks. This is a bad move. Even worse is how the government explained it – in terms of total capitulation. This morning Yoav Galant, Israel’s Minister of Housing and Construction, said at a meeting I attended that the metal detectors were a “mistake”. He told IDF Radio: “It is clear that from the absorption point of view that it is impossible to transfer tens of thousands…

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