J Street, the Pro-Palestinian Jewish group which markets itself as pro-Israel, was the leading donor to Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s (D-NY16) 2022 race for congress. It proudly touted that it poured $100,000 into Bowman’s campaign in August 2022, even though he was a shoe-in as an incumbent in a primary race with multiple candidates. The extreme left-wing group had taken Bowman on a visit to Israel in 2021 and doubled down on its investment.
J Street’s activities with Bowman is seemingly worthless, as it cannot get the congressman to attend liberal Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of congress next week.
Herzog is a J Street favorite. The group congratulated him on his appointment in 2021, writing “We have deeply appreciated our engagement and relationship with President-elect Herzog over the years, during his tenure as chairman of the Israeli Labor Party, as Knesset opposition leader and as Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. It has been our honor to host him for addresses at several J Street conferences and to meet with him regularly with J Street delegations visiting Israel.” Herzog has shown his appreciation to J Street, giving televised addresses to the group’s large gatherings.
If J Street cannot get an alt-left congressman which it heavily supported to attend a speech by a liberal Israeli president, there is only one conclusion: Bowman’s anti-Israel sentiments are so profound that he cannot even accept talking to liberal Jews or Israelis. It remains to be seen if he will start to reject their money.
ACTION ITEM
EMAIL J STREET: “If you cannot get Rep. Jamaal Bowman to attend Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of congress, we expect the organization to back his primary rival next year.”
EMAIL REP. JAMAAL BOWMAN: “Israeli President Isaac Herzog is a liberal pro-peace activist. Boycotting him along with radical colleagues is not a protest against Israel but against coexistence.”
CNN posted an article called “Palestinian leader calls on world to ‘protect us,’ and his people respond with bitter laughter,” which highlighted how much the Palestinian Arab street dislikes its acting President Mahmoud Abbas. It cited various media posts that mocked the old man and his visit to the UNRWA camp in Jenin which housed Arab terrorists killed by the Israel Defense Forces.
The article continued that Palestinian people had “frustrations and aspirations” that were not met by the unpopular leader, and referenced a poll conducted by PCPSR in September 2022 that showed how dissatisfied people were with his leadership.
There have been three polls since that time, so it is unclear why CNN chose to highlight the one from September 2022. In that poll, Palestinian support for another intifada was at 48% (Q46_5), 56% favored NOT engaging in peace talks under international sponsorship (Q55) and 45% supported killing Jewish civilians inside Israel (Q65). The June 2023 poll showed an even greater desire for violence, with 53% supporting an intifada (Q38_5) and 57% support violence against Israeli Jews (Q70).
CNN wrote an article that made Palestinian Arabs “aspirations” seem peaceful and “frustrated” by an inept leader who has not advanced their appeal for sovereignty. The reality is that Arabs’ aspiration is for a land free of Jews and their embrace of violent jihad to achieve such aims.
Israel successfully eliminated several terrorists in the United Nations-administered zone in Jenin and confiscated many weapons. Rather than consider why the UN harbors so many terrorists, the global body used the opportunity to fundraise.
Under the banner of “Jenin Emergency”, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) ran a series of advertisements appealing for funds for the “Jenin Palestine Refugee Camp.” It inverted reality and made the terrorist enclave the victim of Israeli aggression, rather than self-reflect as to why the UN is the mother hen of a terrorist training facility.
Other charities jumped into the circus and started spending money on promoting this false narrative to collect monies for their coffers, even a peaceful sounding group like “Save the Children.”
The “DONATE” and “DONATE NOW” buttons flooded the screens with appeals for “humanitarian aid” for the “suffering and hardship that the children in the Jenin refugee camp are enduring.” The sites relayed stories of an assault of the “Israel Armed Forces” on residents of Jenin. Nowhere was there a discussion of the Arab killers who live in their midst and the overwhelming support that the terrorists receive from their neighbors.
Today, 57% of Palestinians support terrorist attacks against Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
The Palestinians have already started their “intifada” and have gone on the offensive asking for donations to fund their terrorism against Jews. While the poorly named “Second Intifada” witnessed Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran being the main sponsors of the murderers, today, anti-Israel charities are asking the rest of the world to underwrite the spilling of Jewish blood.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY16) told left-wing Israeli media Haaretz that he will be boycotting Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to a joint session of Congress next week. He offered “I’ve been very outspoken regarding the treatment of Palestinians. The United States is important in ensuring accountability and uplifting the human rights of Palestinians.”
It is a remarkable statement in light of Palestinian polls showing the prevailing attitude pushing for violence rather than peace.
In June 2023, Palestinians said the two most positive Palestinian events since the “Nakba,” the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 were the creation of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and the first and second Intifadas. A majority support another intifada and 57% support or strongly support killing Jewish civilians inside of Israel.
Not only is Bowman ignoring Palestinian thirst for Jewish blood, he is choosing to boycott a left-wing leader Israeli leader, who speaks to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas frequently. Such action sets back the cause of peace and empowers the Islamic Republic of Iran.
ACTION ITEM
EMAIL REP. BOWMAN “Israeli President Isaac Herzog is in favor of peace and dialogue with Palestinians. A decision to boycott him is not just an insult to the Jewish State and to a future of peace with Palestinians but is a vote to empower the dangerous genocidal regime in Iran.”
There has been an uptick in the number of homicides happening in Israel recently, and it deserves a detailed review which the mainstream media is too lazy to examine and too biased to report clearly.
In 2021, the last year for which homicide information is available by the World Bank, Israel’s homicide rate was 1.94 per 100,000, which increased from 1.42 in 2020, a 36% jump. The 1.42 in 2020 figure placed it amongst its neighbors’ average of 1.39 in Turkey, Lebanon, Cyprus and Jordan (no data was available for Lebanon in 2021).
Israel’s jump in 2021 to 1.94 homicides per 100,000 was similar to the murder rate in Montenegro (2.39), Albania (2.31), Armenia (2.18), Canada (2.06), Estonia (1.96), Morocco (1.93), Azerbaijan (1.91), Ghana (1.83) and Algeria (1.57). The United States homicide rate in 2021 was 6.80 per 100,000, or 3.5 times as much as Israel.
The rise in the murder rate shows particular trends.
Breakdown By Sex
The murder rate of males jumped to 3.3 per 100,000 in 2021 from 2.3 the prior year, while the murder rate for women jumped to 0.6 from 0.5 per 100,000, according to the World Bank.
The Israel Observatory on Femicide noted the erratic nature of the data: 21 women murdered in 2020, 16 in 2021 and then 24 in 2022, a 50% jump. The average age of the female victim jumped to 45.6 years old in 2021 due to a spike in matricide cases, where people killed their mothers.
Breakdown By Ethnicity
For 2021, the murdered women were 44% Jewish, 31% Israeli Arab and 19% Druze. In almost every case, the murderer had the same ethnic background as the victim. As in 2021, half of the women murdered in 2022 were Arab and killed by Arabs, mostly family members or former partners.
Overall, there were 126 Arabs murdered in 2021 (110 males and 16 females), almost all killed by fellow Arabs. While various organizations track violence in the Israeli Arab sector Abraham Initiatives, the data isn’t as available for Israeli Jews. Using the 1.94 homicides per 100,000 in an Israeli population of 9.364 million in 2021 would imply a total homicide figure of 182, of which 56 were Jewish. This assumes that the 17 Israelis killed by Arab terrorism in 2021 are not included in the homicide statistics.
While data from different sources are somewhat inconsistent, there is a sharp pattern.
The difference in the rate of murderers between Jews and Arabs is astounding if one considers that Jews make up 76% of the population and Arabs account for 21%. It means that an average Israeli Arab is 8.1x more likely to commit a murder than an Israeli Jew.
The 0.79 homicides per 100,000 amongst Israeli Jews is similar to the homicide rate in Greece (0.85), Germany (0.83), Croatia (0.81), Denmark (0.80), Portugal (0.80), Hungary (0.77), Australia (0.74) and Austria (0.73).
The homicide rate in Israel has taken a worrying trend upwards since 2021, now approaching the rate of Turkey when it used to be closer to Cyprus in 2015. The jump has principally come from Israeli Arabs killing other Arabs in gang violence amongst male victims, and “honor killings” and matricide among female victims. At the same time, the homicide rate of Israeli Jews remains much closer to those in Western Europe.
On July 2, 2023, the Israeli government approved the establishment of a new town in northern Israel. Located near the Sea of Galilee and Mount Arbel, the town is to be called “Ramat Arbel”, designed to house roughly 500 families.
Mount Arbel overlooking the top of the Sea of Galilee
The popular political-terrorist group Hamas was apoplectic.
Its spokesperson said that Israel’s plan to “establish a colonial Jewish settlement in occupied Galilee represented a serious escalation in the occupation’s policy of Judaization and colonial settlement.” It added that Israel “is waging an open war against the Palestinian existence” and seeks to “advance the agenda of complete displacement, on which Zionism was founded.”
The root cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Arab refusal to accept Jews living ANYWHERE between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River
The terrorist group Hamas is very popular among Palestinian Arabs, and has 58% of the seats in the current Palestinian parliament. According to a June 2023 poll, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would win the presidency with 56% of the vote, trouncing the current President Mahmoud Abbas, who would net only 33% of the vote.
Palestinians are not upset about Jews living east of the 1949 Armistice lines (E49/ “West Bank”), they are livid that Jews live anywhere in Israel.
That is the plain truth and root cause of the conflict.
ACTION ITEMS
CONTACT Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) “The root cause of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is Arab refusal to accept Jews living ANYWHERE between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The US must therefore remain steadfast in: supporting Israel; ensuring that UNRWA textbooks include the long history and sanctity of the land for Jews, while teaching coexistence; denying the Palestinian Authority any funding while it continues its “martyr payments” and incitement to violence; and backing Israel’s and Egypt’s ongoing blockade of Gaza until Hamas formally accepts Israel’s existence.”
Other member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
Boat packed with as many as 750 fleeing migrants capsizes off Greece in June 2023
Since 2014, the United Nations International Organization of Migrants estimates that 56,912 migrants and refugees are dead or missing. This year is set to be perhaps the deadliest on record, as thousands of people flee their homes due to war or poverty.
The United Nations and media spend a scant moment mourning these poor souls. Men, women and children who reluctantly ran to far-away lands in pursuit of peace were quickly forgotten. No actions are taken to prevent the frequent tragedies.
The United Nations has other priorities:
For synthetic “refugees” over real refugees; and
For people who seek to murder over defenseless souls
The UN has dressed up Palestinian Arabs who have been living in the same land for generations, as a special class of “UNRWA Refugees”. It pardons their jihadi violence against Israeli Jews as a matter of routine and concocted resolutions.
The media closes its eyes and minds to the facts that Palestinian Arabs are not refugees who do not deserve a special UN agency accompanied by a promise of invading a UN member state. Politicians suspend belief that they favor a two state solution while simultaneously advocating that the Jewish State shouldn’t be Jewish and forced to take in millions of Arabs from a few miles away.
The UN held a week-long conference on counterterrorism in June, and subsequently informed Israel that only the rest of the world can combat the global scourge. Israel must accept jihadi violence as penance for its existence.
The UN Security Council is now scheduled to meet to invert reality in discussing Israel’s successful raid to eliminate terrorists in Jenin but will not convene to dismantle UNRWA camps in Gaza and the West Bank which serve as the incubators for Muslim extremists.
It is terribly sad that politicians, the United Nations and media do not attend to peaceful people in actual dire need. It is a horrific state of reality, that the world supports jihadi extremists living next to Israel in their quest to kill Jews and the only Jewish State.
For many years, Palestinian Arab leaders warned Israel against dividing the Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem in time and place. That reality may be coming closer.
The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound
For centuries, Muslims had prevented Jews from going to their holy places in the Jewish holy land. In both Hebron and Jerusalem, Muslims declared that Jewish holy sites were purely Islamic and denied Jews any rights. That changed after the neighboring Arab states conspired to destroy Israel in June 1967 but lost control of those two holy cities which Jordan had illegally annexed in 1950.
After the 1967 war, Jews were finally able to go into the Cave of the Jewish Matriarchs and Patriarchs, which Muslims call the Ibrahimi Mosque. Israel made the site available to both Jews and Muslims, and in June 2023, opened an elevator to facilitate visitation by handicapped persons in a broad effort of inclusivity.
While Israel took over the Old City of Jerusalem in the same June 1967 Six Day War, it handled the situation very differently, giving administrative control of the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Mosque Compound to the Jordanian Waqf, while Israel maintained security control. Even after eastern Jerusalem, including the site, was officially annexed as part of Israel, the Waqf continued to forbid Jews from praying at their holiest location, even as they allow a small number of Jewish visitors.
In October 2014, a Palestinian attempted to assassinate Rabbi Yehuda Glick because he advocated for peace and equal rights for both Jewish and Muslim prayer on the Temple Mount. In response, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority declared “Israel’s leaders are making a big mistake if they think they can turn back history, to impose a reality, and to divide the al-Aqsa Mosque [into separate prayers times and areas] as they divided the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.”
Rabbi Glick survived the four bullets, and was nominated to the Israeli Knesset in 2016, continuing to advocate for Jewish rights on the Temple Mount. His efforts resulted in few practical changes, however, the number of Jewish visitors to the holy site has steadily increased since that time.
For his part, Mahmoud Abbas continues to warn Israeli leaders about Jewish prayer and dividing the Temple Mount. In April 2022, Jordanian politicians joined in condemning then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s non-controversial comments that Jews, Christians and Muslims should all be free to celebrate their holidays (Passover, Easter and Ramadan), which Arab leaders viewed as a precursor to dividing the Temple Mount.
The back-and-forth continues.
In early June 2023, Amit Halevi, a member of Knesset from Likud, put forward an official proposal to divide the religious site between Jews and Muslims, calling for the southern 30% of the compound – which includes the al Aqsa Mosque – to be for Muslims, and the northern 70% – which includes the Dome of the Rock where the Jewish Temples stood – to be for Jews. The political-terrorist group Hamas declared that such proposal was part of an “Israeli religious war launched by the fascist Israeli government… [and] the Al-Aqsa mosque will remain an exclusively Muslim holy site and the Palestinian people will continue to defend the mosque against Israeli partition and Judaization schemes.” Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh voiced concerns about the “order to impose temporal and spatial division in the blessed al Aqsa Mosque. We warn the occupation authorities against taking such a step that would have unpredictable results.”
Most of the media ignored the story, presumably because Halevi is a low level MK without portfolio, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said that he will uphold the Waqf’s antisemitic “status quo” banning Jewish prayer at the site.
The event may be unreported, but the situation will not remain ignored.
There are competing natural desires which have long brewed in the holy land: for Palestinian Arabs to return into the land of Israel to towns where grandparents had lived; for Jews to pray openly and frequently at their holiest site on the Temple Mount; and to live throughout the area. For years, the United States attempted to keep a lid on those aspirations until President Obama reversed precedent, nodding to Arab migration into Israel (2012), while making it illegal according to international law for Jews to move to the eastern parts of Jerusalem and the holy land (2016), and maintaining the ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.
The “status quo” is not a ban on Jews praying on the Temple Mount but of competing points of tension. The large holes in the holy land dam are readily apparent to everyone. One can ignore them and wait for the fissures to crack open unpredictably, or facilitate the spillway, with some Jews praying openly and discretely at their holiest site.
The latest Palestinian poll of June 14, 2023 showed a familiar preference for violence that has been a constant sentiment for years. Now a new headline has emerged: that Palestinians think Israel will disappear within the next 25 years.
Preference For Violent Jihad
When asked about the most positive things to happen to Palestinians over the past 75 years since the reestablishment of the Jewish State of Israel in the so-called “Nakba catastrophe”, the number one response was the establishment of the terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Second, were the two “Intifada pogroms” which killed over 1,000 Israeli Jews. Trailing those responses was the creation of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and last, the formation of the more moderate political party, Fatah.
A large majority of 71% are in favor of the formation of the newest terrorist groups “Lion’s Den” and “Jenin Battalion” which sparked the dramatic rise in deaths among both Israelis and Palestinians over the past two years. An incredible 86% of Palestinian Arabs think the terrorist groups should operate outside of the PA. Not surprisingly, with such support, 58% expect “these armed groups to expand and spread to other areas in the West Bank.”
When asked about the most effective means of creating a Palestinian state, “the public split into three groups: 52% chose armed struggle [aka violent jihad] (55% in the Gaza Strip and 49% in the West Bank), 21% negotiations, and 22% popular resistance.”
These findings are not meaningfully different than results of past polls. The alarming question about the preference to kill Jewish civilians inside of Israel was not asked in this latest poll. In March 2023, 61% were in favor of such terrorist attacks (question 70).
The End of Israel
The quarterly Palestinian poll occasionally introduces new questions based on recent events. For example, this poll asked about opinions related to the Iranian-Saudi reproachment. Last poll asked whether people were in favor of killing two Israelis who drove into the town of Huwara (a vast majority were).
In the latest poll, people were asked a more general question about the future of Israel as the country celebrated its 75th anniversary. In response to the question of Israel making it to its 100th anniversary, “two-thirds say Israel will not celebrate the centenary of its establishment, and the majority believes that the Palestinian people will be able in the future to recover Palestine and return its refugees to their homes.”
While the world debates how to set the “peace process” on track and solely blames the Israeli government for the failure of progress, Palestinians have mentally moved on, and see the end of the Jewish State in their lifetimes and its replacement with an Arab country.
ACTION ITEM
While the world debates how to set the “peace process” on track and solely blames the Israeli government for the failure of progress, Palestinians have mentally moved on, and see the end of the Jewish State in their lifetimes.
CONTACT Sen. Christopher Murphy (D-CT) “Palestinians polled themselves once again and not only show a strong preference for violence but see the end of Israel in the near future. Stop efforts to condition aid to Israel.”
The holy city of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel held two parades over the past couple of weeks. One was done by the right-wing and the other by the left-wing. Each side claimed the moral high ground and accused the other of acting in bad faith.
Let’s speak about both honestly.
The Flag Parade
On May 18, thousands of Israelis marched through the streets of Jerusalem carrying Israeli flags to mark the reunification of the city at the end of the 1967 Six Day War. The tremendous pride in country and messianic feel of Jews controlling Judaism’s holiest site for the first time in almost two thousand years was palpable at the time, and many tried to recreate that sense of awe 56 years later.
Marchers near Damascus Gate of Old City during Jerusalem Day, 2023
The parade route into the Old City to the Western Wall could have worked its way through the Jewish Quarter but the nationalist spirit of the marchers directed them through the Arab Quarter, essentially re-educating the Arabs about their defeat. While the march was basically peaceful, roughly 2,500 police officers came to maintain order as past years saw scuffles as the Arabs in the Old City resented the march.
The Gay Pride Parade
On June 1, thousands of Israelis marched through the streets in a gay Pride Parade. While such a parade would have happened without controversy in the liberal and secular city of Tel Aviv, the religious beliefs of devout Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem caused friction.
Thousands of police came to protect the marchers as there were attacks in past years. This year’s event proved peaceful and uneventful.
Some Truths
The Flag and Pride Parades were both legal and unnecessarily provocative. The right wing Jewish nationalists did not need to go through the Arab Quarter and the left wing secular Jews did not need to march through religious sections of the country. Each sought to drive home their own point that they are free and able to hold such events, and enjoyed rubbing the spectators’ noses in the fact.
The left-wing media only focused on the right-wing in both cases. CNN described a “contentious flag march” in which a” number of Palestinian shopkeepers told CNN before the event that they would close their shops in the Old City for fear of attacks by far-right Jewish nationalists.” The New York Times covered the “Conflict With the Far Right Shrouds Jerusalem’s Pride Parade,” with the backdrop of “the most hard-line and religiously conservative government in the country’s history took power.”
Both the right-wing and left-wing held their parades in Jerusalem being proud and provocative, yet the mainstream opinion shapers could only find fault with right-wing and religious Jews. It fed their macro narrative of right-wing White Supremacist Jews as the elite amongst the bigots, despite being the most persecuted group in the world.
First One Through 