United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a message on March 30, 2023 related to the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. He offered words for the whole world.
How easily hate speech — a key indicator of the risk of genocide — turns to hate crime. How complacency in the face of atrocity is complicity. And how no place, and no time is immune to danger — including our own.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres
Unfortunately, the global body – as well as many countries and people – turn a blind eye to the rampant hate speech in Palestinian society.
On May 15, 2023, the United Nations gave a platform to the acting President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The man who wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial gave a master class in antisemitism.
Abbas claimed that Jews have no history in the Jewish historical homeland. He said that Jews never even had a single temple in Jerusalem.
Abbas said that Jews were implanted into the land of Israel by the British and Americans who wanted to export the Jews which they despised. He argued that doing so made the Jews indebted to their western benefactors to serve as a colonial outpost.
Abbas called the Jews a bunch of liars – on par with Nazi Germany’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who was instrumental in the genocide of European Jewry.
Abbas’s performance was a reminder of his past antisemitic tirades when he praised the Arab assassins of Jewish civilians, calling them “martyrs” for the Palestinian cause, who will always get pay-to-slay money, even “if we had only a penny left.“
Horrifically, the United Nations was not “complacent in the face of these atrocities” but an active participant.
The UN continues to give the Palestinian leader the floor to air his antisemitic vitriol. It continues to push money into the terrorist enclave of Gaza, headed by Hamas, with the most antisemitic governing charter ever written. The global forum echoes Palestinians’ demands for apartheid, denying Jews the basic right to pray at their holiest location on the Jewish Temple Mount, and to live in the center of their holy land.
Palestinian hate speech was once again given a platform at the United Nations, inflaming danger to Jews everywhere, and “the risk of genocide.”
On May 21, 2023, the U.S. State Department issued a statement about Israeli “Settlements in the West Bank.” It read:
“We are deeply troubled by the Israeli government’s order that allows its citizens to establish a permanent presence in the Homesh outpost in the northern West Bank, which according to Israeli law was illegally built on private Palestinian land. This order is inconsistent with both former Prime Minister Sharon’s written commitment to the Bush Administration in 2004 and the current Israeli government’s commitments to the Biden Administration. Advancing Israeli settlements in the West Bank is an obstacle to the achievement of a two-state solution.”
There were many things covered in this paragraph:
Israeli law about whether building in the “Homesh outpost” is legal;
The 2004 exchange of letters between Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon and U.S. President George W. Bush;
The current Israeli commitments to the Biden Administration; and
Whether Israeli Jews “living in the West Bank is an obstacle…to a two-state solution.”
Israeli Law
First, it’s a bit rich for the United States to make comments about Israeli law. I cannot imagine that the U.S. would take kindly to any country opining on its rulings on imminent domain, seizing land to build a wall with Mexico, or any other real estate matter.
While Israeli courts have ruled against approving building on privately owned land, the courts have also legalized previously unauthorized settlements. Countries modify their rulings depending on societal needs of the moment. For example, the Israeli courts had approved Israeli taking ownership of the homes they own in the Sheikh Jarrah section of Jerusalem but then suspended the eviction of the Arab squatters because of violence. Real estate in Israel is a matter of law as well as of security and order.
The 2004 Exchange of Letters
In the middle of the 2000-2005 Arab pogroms which killed over 1,000 Israelis, Israeli PM Sharon decided that he was going to build a security barrier to stop terrorism emanating from the West Bank, and to pull all Israelis out of Gaza. In exchange for these actions, U.S. President Bush issued a letter in support of the actions with U.S. commitments.
The State Department just referenced the 2004 Sharon letter because while Sharon understood there was no chance for peace with Palestinians at that time, he “decided to initiate a process of gradual disengagement with the hope of reducing friction between Israelis and Palestinians.” Sharon’s “Disengagement Plan” called for pulling all Israelis out of Gaza “as well as other military installations and a small number of villages in Samaria,” which included the town of Homesh and three other nearby villages.
The Israeli Disengagement Plan was not a “commitment” as described in the latest State Department statement. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Sharon made clear that it “represents an independent Israeli plan” designed to create space between the parties while terrorism was ongoing.
In addition to incorrectly calling the dismantling of Homesh a commitment, the State Department ignored U.S. commitments that Bush made to Sharon in that exchange of letters.
The Bush letter repeatedly stated that the U.S. is committed to fight Palestinian terrorism and incitement and that it will work to “prevent the areas from which Israel has withdrawn from posing a threat.” That was in 2004 and Israel left Gaza the following year in 2005.
Then what happened?
The Palestinians held elections in 2006 under America’s watch, and the terrorist group Hamas won a majority of Parliament. In 2007, Hamas routed Fatah and took control of Gaza, and proceeded to launch wars against Israel in 2008, 2012, 2014 and more recently.
So much for America’s commitment to preventing the abandoned areas “from posing a threat.”
Further, in another part of his letter, Bush stated clearly that “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” In plain English, that meant that the United States acknowledged that Israel will annex sections of the West Bank.
Yet the Obama Administration broke that commitment to Israel when it allowed United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass in 2016, making it illegal for Israelis to live east of “the armistice lines of 1949.”
In short, Israel made no commitments in the 2004 letter while the United States trampled on its commitments to Israel.
Current Commitment to Biden Administration
Israel met with the U.S. and Palestinian Authority in Egypt in March 2023 and issued a joint statement which covered a number of issues including “an Israeli commitment to stop discussion of any new settlement units for 4 months, and to stop authorization of any outposts for 6 months.” As Homesh was an existing settlement until it was dismantled in 2005, it is debatable whether allowing its redevelopment runs counter to Israel’s statement.
It should be noted that the Palestinian Authority has completely ignored its stated March 2023 commitments, as it continues to incite violence.
Jews As Obstacle to Two State Solution
Roughly 25% of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, so the notion that a theoretical Arab state of Palestine cannot be viable with a small percentage of Jews is ridiculous. It can only be viewed as an “obstacle” to two states if the Palestinian Authority refuses to have any Jews living in the country.
And if Palestine can only be created as a Jew-free state, it should never be admitted to the United Nations or recognized by any country.
Road in Judea and Samaria
The State Department is “deeply troubled” by Israeli action in the village of Homesh because its accounting of history and facts are deeply flawed. More generally, if the U.S. assumes that a Palestinian State must be Jew-free, it should adamantly oppose its existence.
Should pressure mount on Israel to evacuate Homesh again, it should turn to those agitators and get their support for the Israeli Jews to take ownership of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah.
On May 10, 2023, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) sponsored a resolution, “H.Res.388 – Recognizing the ongoing Nakba and Palestine refugees rights” which was co-sponsored by five fellow extremist members of Congress, Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO). The same cohort pushed a resolution last May called “H.Res.1123 – Recognizing the Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights.” The two bills are similar but by no means the same, and the latest version reveals the deep toxicity of the current anti-peace anti-Israel narrative.
The insertion of one word in the resolution’s title – “ongoing” – captures much of the difference between the 2022 and 2023 versions of the bill. While the 811-word, May 2022 Res.1123 gave an alternative version of actual history, whitewashing the crimes committed by Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s when it worked with the Nazis in Europe and British in Palestine to facilitate the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Holocaust and to launch a war on Jewish survivors in Palestine, the 2023 resolution claims that the war of Israel’s independence is very much part of the Palestinian psyche TODAY.
The May 2023 1,327-word Res.388 claims the so-called “nakba” “is the root cause” of the Palestinian conflict and that there will not be peace “without addressing the Nakba and remedying its injustices toward the Palestinian people.” The resolution holds the United States accountable that it must force the State of Israel to accept millions of Stateless Arabs whose parents or grandparents left Israel while they waited for five Arab armies to perform a second genocide of Jews in a generation.
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties were historically very clear on the issue of “refugees.” The 2008 Democratic platform specifically said “The creation of a Palestinian state through final status negotiations, together with an international compensation mechanism, should resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there, rather than in Israel.” The 2004 letter from U.S. President George W. Bush to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said almost the exact same, that “It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.” The entire idea of a two state solution is a Jewish state and an Arab state, not a bi-national state of Israel and an Arab state of Palestine.
Palestinian polls, as recently as January 2023, show that Palestinians believe that the conflict started with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promoting a Jewish State, together with the immigration of Jews. Relatively few blame the conflict on the 1948 or 1967 wars. It is the presence of Jews that is the core problem for Palestinian Arabs, not Arabs being unable to live in the same apartments as their grandparents had lived in.
If the 2023 resolution simply misrepresented the core of the conflict or misquoted bipartisan policy for the descendants of Palestine refugees, that would be bad enough. The resolution went much further.
The resolution called upon the president to use the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, named after a Jewish Holocaust survivor, against the Jewish State in regards to its treatment of Arabs. The fact that Hamas, a political-terrorist group governs half of the Palestinian Arabs and has over half of the seats in the Palestinian parliament is ignored, as is its antisemitic charter which calls for a jihad on Jews and destruction of the Jewish State. Today, nearly two-thirds of Palestinians (61%) support killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel. Somehow, this resolution turns an act meant “to prevent and mitigate acts of genocide and other mass atrocities against civilians” AGAINST THE DEFENDERS OF CIVILIANS IN FAVOR OF THE PERPETRATORS.
Nearly two-thirds of Palestinians (61%) support killing Jews inside of Israel, but Rep. Tlaib and her antisemitic squad want to use the Elie Wiesel Genocide Prevention Act to protect Arabs killing Jews
The “Nakba” was a self-inflicted event in the 1940s when Arabs rejected coexistence with Jews and launched a war to destroy Israel, which they fortunately lost. Outrageously, on the 75th anniversary of the rebirth of the Jewish State, six extremist members of congress put forward a resolution asking the United States to join the Arabs to continue their fight to end the Jewish State.
ACTION ITEMS
EMAIL REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN (NY16) “Your ongoing extremism and co-sponsorship of an ‘ongoing Nakba’ resolution at Israel’s 75th anniversary is both a whitewashing of the contribution of Palestinians to the deaths of thousands of Jews in the 1940s, and a hostile action to dismantle the only Jewish state today.”
EMAIL SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY) “The Nakba Resolution put forward by two New York Democratic members of congress is appalling and offensive. To mark the rebirth of the Jewish State in the shadow of the Holocaust in this way, as nearly two-thirds of Palestinians polled say they are in favor of killing Jewish civilians in Israel is sickening.”
EMAIL SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-NY) “The Nakba Resolution put forward by two New York Democratic members of congress is appalling and offensive. To mark the rebirth of the Jewish State in the shadow of the Holocaust in this way, as nearly two-thirds of Palestinians polled say they are in favor of killing Jewish civilians in Israel is sickening.”
EMAIL WHITE HOUSE “The Nakba Resolution put forward by two New York Democratic members of congress is appalling and offensive. To mark the rebirth of the Jewish State in the shadow of the Holocaust in this way, as nearly two-thirds of Palestinians polled say they are in favor of killing Jewish civilians in Israel is sickening.”
The crowds coming to Jerusalem were enormous during the holy month of Ramadan. Despite ongoing Palestinian terrorism slaughtering many Israeli civilians, Israel facilitated the large Muslim crowds into the Old City of Jerusalem.
Tens of thousands Muslim worshippers pray near the Dome of the Rock at Al-Aqsa mosque compound / Jewish Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem on April 17, 2023, on the night of 27 Ramadan, celebrated as Laylat al-Qadr, one of the holiest nights during Ramadan. (Photo by HAZEM BADER / AFP)
On April 17, some 280,000 people in total entered the Temple Mount compound for prayers during Laylat Al Qadr, also known as the Night of Destiny. Police said that the crowds peaked at 130,000 inside the compound at any one time. Noon prayers the Friday before were estimated to have had 250,000 people.
The Israeli government banned all non-Muslims from visiting the site to make it easier for Muslims to reach the compound. Despite the efforts to accommodate prayer, many leading Palestinians turned what should have been a time of contemplation and appreciation, into caustic calls against the Jewish State.
The former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sabri, said at Friday prayers “There is no room for compromise on Al-Aqsa or space for negotiations around it and we will not give up one iota of its land.”
The political-terrorist group Hamas which rules Gaza and makes up a majority of Palestinian parliament issued a statement calling “on international rights and legal groups to condemn and expose Israeli crimes against occupied Jerusalem and its Palestinian population. The Israeli occupation continues to target Palestinian Jerusalemites, by detaining them, banning them from accessing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Old City, and imposing hefty fines on them, in a bid to force them from the holy city.” The statement further “called on all Palestinians and the Arab and Muslim world to provide the Palestinian population of occupied Jerusalem with all forms of financial and popular support to confront the Israeli occupation and its policies against them.”
Both Israel and Palestinians prove repeatedly that the Jewish State is the only honest and safe caretaker of the holy sites in the holy land.
Three leaders of the terrorist group, Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) were assassinated by the Israeli military this week. As such, on May 10, The New York Times decided to devote an article to inform readers about the organization.
The Times’ description stands in sharp contrast to that supplied by the US State Department.
Issue
NY Times
State Department
Year founded
1980s
1970s
Purpose
“to fight the Israeli occupation“
“committed to the destruction of Israel and to the creation of an Islamic state in historic Palestine, including present-day Israel.”
Backers
N/A
“PIJ receives financial assistance and training primarily from Iran. PIJ has partnered with Iran- and Syria-sponsored Hizballah to carry out joint operations.”
History
Limited to last summer, when “Israeli military began the hostilities when it assassinated a leader of Islamic Jihad…. Islamic Jihad responded…”
“PIJ terrorists have conducted numerous attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings, against Israeli civilian and military targets…”
New York Times and the U.S. State Department offer starkly different descriptions of Palestine Islamic Jihad
According to the anti-Israel NY Times, PIJ merely fights “the Israeli occupation,” while the State Department correctly notes that the group is “committed to the destruction of Israel.” The gap in understanding the nature of the group is enormous, and renders the entire review by the Times as a deliberate whitewashing of the terrorists’ activities.
The paper went on to describe the attacks of last summer, which it pinned on Israel killing one of its leaders making PIJ simply retaliating to the Israeli provocation. The paper paints Israel as the aggressor, when in fact, as described by the State Department, PIJ has long conducted “numerous attacks, including large scale suicide bombings, against Israeli civilians.”
All of the terrorist group’s activities are bankrolled and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is actively pursuing nuclear weapons. That important point about a group which launches thousands of missiles into Israel, went unmentioned in the Times article.
The New York Times correctly labeled PIJ as a terrorist group but turned the narrative upside down, making Israel the aggressor against an organization merely opposed to “Israeli occupation.” To read the Times, one might think that the State Department incorrectly labels PIJ as a terrorist group instead of Israel, a narrative being orchestrated by left-wing extremists in Congress, Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Well before the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) launched the First Intifada in 1987, and the guerilla war from 2000 to 2004 which they whitewash calling the “Second Intifada” to make it sound like a peaceful uprising, the Arab world launched the “Intafa”, expelling Jews from Muslim countries.
After Israel declared itself as an independent country on May 14, 1948, the surrounding Arab nations invaded the Jewish State. Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan and Saudi Arabia sent their armies and weapons to annihilate the 650,000 Jews in Israel. Meanwhile, the rest of the Arab World set their sites on driving 850,000 Jews from their lands.
The Muslim Arab countries of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen ethnically cleansed their countries of Jews over the next decades. The Muslim (non-Arab) countries of Afghanistan and Iran would do much the same.
In 1948, Palestinian Arabs sought to kill 650,000 Jews and to destroy Israel but failed in their goals which they call a “nakba” meaning “catastrophe.” However, the greater Arab world succeeded in ethnically cleansing 850,000 Jews from their countries starting in that year, in their “intafa” or effort to “expel” the Jews.
Palestinians ask that you remember their failure and forget their success, a red flag of a deep victim mentality. It’s a thin veneer masking the attempted genocide and successful ethnic cleansing of Jews which they continue to pursue. Ideally, they urge, with your support.
Many anti-Zionists point to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (Britain), the San Remo Resolution of 1920 (Britain, Italy, France and Japan), and the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947 as examples of foreign intervention against the will of the region’s inhabitants. While the Jews had thousands of years of history in the land and a religion which is uniquely tied to the land, the local Arabs did not want Jews in their midst. The Palestinian Arabs’ desires were ignored because foreigners sought to help Jews reestablish their rights in their homeland.
Those same anti-Zionists don’t pause in their push to ignore the will of local Israelis today who do not want millions of Arabs from abroad to move into their country. Not only do the pro-Palestinian advocates ignore the will of millions of Israeli citizens, they dismiss that Israel is a sovereign country with its own laws, something that was never true of Palestine before the creation of Israel in 1948.
Those same individuals point to United Nations Resolution 194 of 1948 Article 11 which states that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes if they are willing to live in peace. Somehow they ignore three critical items: 1) Palestinian Arabs refuse to coexist in peace, as shown in their terrorism and quarterly polls; 2) there are only a few thousand refugees from 1948, not millions of people which include descendants of people who left the region, many taking citizenship elsewhere; and 3) that resolution was for a moment in time and no longer relevant. For example, Article 8 says that greater Bethlehem and greater Jerusalem should be under United Nations control – are they advocating that Bethlehem be stripped from Palestinian Authority control?
The Ottomans and British may have ignored the wishes of the local Arab population in Palestine but they had the authority to do so. Today, there is no basis for the United Nations, the European Union, or anti-Zionists in the US Congress to impose their will over the common position of both the Israeli government and Israeli population.
A popular discussion about creating a Palestinian Arab country runs rampant around the United Nations and political outlets. The reality is local Arabs have no interest in the “two state solution” and the majority favor killing Jewish civilians, so there is no possibility of advancing such a new Arab state currently.
But that doesn’t keep the U.N. and various capitals busy talking about it anyway.
So let’s add an idea which may foster good will and coexistence: should that imagined Palestinian Arab state have Hebrew as an official language?
The idea seems to have merit based on comments made by United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutteres on “World Portuguese Language Day” celebrated on May 5. In discussing languages, he said they are an “indispensable vehicle of understanding and hope. They are also a place of resistance against those who intend to spread hatred, exclusion, violence, extremism, misogyny and discrimination…. Portuguese language is also a good example of this, being shared and constructed by populations on all continents. Marked by diversity, it is a language that promotes understanding and conciliation.”
There is nothing more sorely needed in Palestinian society than removing “exclusion, violence and extremism” and promoting “understanding and conciliation” with their Jewish neighbors.
It is estimated that English is the official language of 67 countries, while French has 29, Arabic has 26, Spanish has 21, Portuguese 10, and German 6. Hebrew is the official language of only a single country, Israel. Perhaps a Palestinian state should be the second.
There are over half a million Israeli Jews and an unknown number of Israeli Arabs living in the West Bank. Presumably, all speak Hebrew already. While many of those Israelis will likely fall inside of Israel if and when borders are defined, it is likely that hundreds of thousands of Hebrew speakers would become Palestinians in a theoretical state. It is natural to include them into the fabric of the country, and to foster a good relationship with Israel.
Today, Palestinian Arabs mostly learn Hebrew so they can work inside of Israel. In the future, all Palestinian Arab people should learn Hebrew to reject the current strain of “violence and extremism”, and to promote “understanding and hope” with their Jewish neighbors.
Nothing so inflames the passions of Muslims around the world as hearing that Jews are threatening the al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem.
So the Palestinian Authority yells lies to incite people to jihad against Jews quietly visiting Judaism’s holiest location.
On May 4, 2023, just as it has done many times, Wafa, the official news agency of the PA posted the headline “Israeli settlers break into Jerusalem’s Aqsa mosque.” The inflammatory rhetoric and article had nothing to do with facts. The article said:
“Dozens of fanatic Israeli settlers Thursday morning broke into the compounds of al-Aqsa Mosque under heavy protection from the Israeli police.
“The Waqf said that settlers, divded into groups, raided the holy Islamic Mosque from al-Maghariba gate and took provocative tours in its compounds.
“It added that the extremist settlers performed Talmudic rituals in the eastern part of the Mosque.
This comes at a time as Israeli forces intensify measures against Palestinians coming from Jerusalem to enter the Mosque, inspecting their IDs and briefly detaining them.”
Jews quietly visiting the Temple Mount, which the PA called a “raid” of the al Aqsa Mosque
That the PA would label a few dozen Jews visiting during regular visiting hours – some with their sons for their bar mitzvahs – as an “extremist” and “provocative” “raid” and “break in” of the mosque (which they never entered) demonstrates the importance of having a police escort.
The Palestinian Authority repeatedly shows the world that it can never have control of Jerusalem, as it fosters extremism and violence and rejects peaceful coexistence.
In May 2016, after the deadly wave of Palestinian Arab stabbing attacks and deliberate vehicular manslaughter of Jewish civilians began to subside, the Israeli government sought to make life easier for Palestinians, hoping that good will gestures would allow for peaceful coexistence.
In response to complaints that it took hours for Palestinians to get processed through checkpoints, Yoav Mordechai, the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) posted a note in Arabic that “It has been decided to renew and improve checkpoints in the West Bank, [to] increase the number of Palestinian workers allowed to pass through to their workplaces in Israel, improve waiting conditions and adopt advanced technology at all checkpoints.” He included an image of Palestinians crammed in line, waiting to enter Israel.
Palestinian Arabs waiting at a checkpoint to enter Israel
Israel estimated the improvements would cost 300 million shekels ($78 million), and would increase the amount of goods that pass through Israeli checkpoints by 30% and reduce wait times by 30% to 50%. The announcement was made right before Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, in an effort to lower tensions when thousands of Palestinian Muslims come to Jerusalem from the West Bank.
The Washington Post shared a video in 2019 about the new high tech facial recognition security cameras and turnstiles. It interviewed several Palestinians who were thankful that the crossings which used to take hours now only took minutes or seconds.
Israel uses almost the identical system at its airport for all passengers that enter the country, speeding up entry and reducing unnecessary manpower. People who use Global Entry to enter the United States use a similar system.
You wouldn’t know any of this by reading The New York Times or Amnesty International.
Cover of the NY Times Business Section on May 2, 2023
In an inflammatory piece of click bait called “Israel Tech Automates Apartheid, Critic Say,” the paper quoted a new absurd anti-Israel Amnesty International report. The jaundiced document said that Israel uses “technology against Palestinians” in “both Hebron and occupied East Jerusalem” as “part of a deliberate attempt by Israeli authorities to create a hostile and coercive environment for Palestinians.”
An absurd inversion of facts.
First, Palestinian Arabs created the hostile environment during their multi-year guerilla war against Israeli civilians from 2000 to 2004, which necessitated Israel building a security barrier.
Second, Israel put in place the high technology checkpoints to address the concerns of Palestinians that hated the long lines to enter Israel. Israel doesn’t have security cameras dotting Areas A or B in the West Bank to track Palestinians in their daily lives; it is focused on those areas near the security barrier.
Third, the technology focuses on everyone that goes before the cameras, not as portrayed by Amnesty or the Times which said “in Hebron and East Jerusalem, the technology focuses almost entirely on Palestinians.” For sinister measure, the anti-Zionist paper added “Government use of facial recognition technology to so explicitly target a single ethnic group is rare.”
But Israel doesn’t do that. It captures the images of everyone before the cameras, just as it captures the faces of everyone at the airport.
Israel was forced to spend $1.5 billion to build a security barrier to protect itself from Palestinian terrorists, and then opted to spend another $100 million to address Palestinian complaints regarding long wait times at checkpoints. No matter. Both the defensive action and the noble effort are varieties of a fictional “apartheid” for the anti-Zionist Amnesty International and New York Times.
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