Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem say that Minister Ben-Gvir’s comments on restricting Arab movement inflict major damage on Israel’s public diplomacy efforts after American model Bella Hadid accuses him of racism

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Officials concerned Ben-Gvir’s spat with Bella Hadid ‘gift for BDS’
Eran Swissa and Shirit Avitan Cohen
August 25, 2023

…Ben-Gvir shot back on Friday, in a tweet attacking the pro-Palestinian advocate. “Good morning to Israel-hater Bella Hadid,” he wrote. “I saw that you took an excerpt from my interview yesterday and sent it out to the world in the hope of making me look racist and unenlightened. I invite you to my hometown Kiryat Arba to see how we live our lives, how Jews who have never hurt a soul get murdered here, and to witness the threats me and wife and children get every day…So yes, my right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria and to make it back home safely – that is more important than the right of terrorists who throw rocks and murder us. I am not apologizing and not retracting what I said. I will repeat this 1,000 times. The People of Israel live.” READ MORE

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Terror deaths of Israelis fell every year under Trump and rose every year under Biden

FRONT PAGE MAG
Biden’s Terror Funding Just Killed an Israeli Preschool Teacher
Daniel Greenfield
August 28, 2023

Last year, Biden met with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and boasted that, “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than a half a billion dollars in 2021.” Batsheva Nigri, a preschool teacher, was riding in a car with her six-year-old daughter when Islamic terrorists from the Palestinian Authority’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cut them off and riddled the car with 22 bullets. Batsheva’s six-year-old daughter watched her mother die. The Palestinian Authority’s terror group hailed the murder of a 42-year-old preschool teacher as a “natural response to the crimes of the occupation”…Monday’s murder comes after an Israeli father and son were shot to death on the Sabbath. They’re among a growing list of terror victims this year ranging in age from a 6-year-old boy run down on a Jerusalem street to an 82-year-old woman who was killed while trying to get her disabled husband to safety when a rocket hit their building. READ MORE

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Former state Assemblyman Dov Hikind said Robin L. Garrell leaving CUNY sends a message to “to stop hiring Jew-haters.”

JNS
CUNY official who hired fired ‘CNN’ commentator exits position
August 31, 2023

Marc Lamont Hill lost his cable-TV news gig after giving a speech calling for anti-Israel boycotts and “a free Palestine from the river to the sea.” Now the woman who just brought him to the City University of New York (CUNY) will likewise depart from her role. Chancellor Matos Rodríguez announced that Robin L. Garrell, president of CUNY’s Graduate Center, will conclude her position after three years, stepping down at the end of September. While no official reason appeared for her leaving, opponents of the decision to hire Hill saw it as “wonderful news.”  READ MORE

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US Marines purchasing Iron Dome systems to help defend against ever increasing threats posed by cruise missiles and drones

THE WAR ZONE
USMC Buying Nearly 2,000 Tamir Interceptors For Its Iron Dome Systems
Joseph Trevithick
August 25, 2023

The U.S. Marine Corps has laid out plans to acquire three batteries worth of Iron Dome systems, including 44 launchers and 1,840 Tamir interceptors. The exact estimated value of this purchase is unknown, but based on publicly available figures the cost of the Tamirs alone could be close to $200 million. The Marines say they want Iron Dome systems primarily to help protect units from cruise missiles, but these systems can also provide defense against drones and rockets and other artillery rounds. The new details about the Marine Corps Iron Dome plans were posted yesterday on the U.S. government’s System for Award Management (SAM) contracting website as part of a notice about future potential sole-source deals with Raytheon. READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA Yoram Ettinger: Israel is a mega-billion-dollar battle-tested laboratory for the US A recent mega-billion-dollar increase in the export of Lockheed-Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft is due to the overcoming of a series of pivotal glitches. This was achieved by Lockheed-Martin, as well as by Israel’s air force and aerospace industries, known as the cost-effective and battle-tested laboratory of the US defense and aerospace industries and armed forces. ..The scores of Israeli solutions to the F-35 glitches have been shared with the US manufacturer and the US Air Force, sustaining the F-35 superiority over its global competition; sparing Lockheed-Martin mega-billions of dollars in research and development…

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Hatred of the Middle East’s only democracy threatens us all, not just Britain’s Jews

THE JEWISH CHRONICLE
There’s a word for how the world judges the Jewish state: Israelophobia
Jake Wallis Simons
August 26, 2023

…Contrary to common perception, in 2022 an American insurance firm named Israel the fifth-safest tourist destination on Earth, behind only Singapore, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Its history may be bloody, but there are at least 27 live conflicts in the world, affecting two billion people; and while the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the Syrian civil war killed hundreds of thousands apiece — and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 claimed at least a million lives — the cumulative number of Arabs who have perished in all wars with Israel numbers about 86,000. That’s over a period of 75 years. READ MORE

THE TELEGRAPH Israelophobia is the one hatred that polite society embraces The country is labelled “white supremacist”, despite being at least 60 per cent non-white. It is blamed for “genocide”, even though the Palestinian population has grown five-fold since its birth. There are no concentration camps or execution pits in the Jewish state. It is accused of “apartheid” when its national football team contains more Arabs than Jews. Although it is the Middle East’s only democracy – the only country in the region to protect the rights of women and minorities – it is routinely compared to the Nazis.

Jake Wallis Simons is the author of ‘Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred’, out next month

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It is unacceptable that while non-Jewish students get protection from microaggressions, Jewish students don’t merit protection from macroaggressions, especially when those aggressions have nothing to do with academic freedom

JEWISH JOURNAL
Princeton Case Shows That When Jews Get Attacked, It Suddenly Becomes “Academic Freedom”
Lori Lowenthal Marcus
August 30, 2023

“Wokeness” and cancel culture operate in reverse when it comes to the Jews. For all other minorities, the Woke Police eagerly sniff out barely perceptible (or non-existent) “harm” caused by a teacher’s stray phrase in a classroom, an actor’s comments, an author’s opinion, or a physician’s approval of biological facts. When such a “sin” is discovered, the woke world demands not merely retraction of the offending statement and a craven apology for the statement’s issuance, but also abnegation of the sinner. And then the offenders are often officially cancelled…But then there are statements about Jews. For these, even the most outrageous and wildly unfounded assertions about Jews and/or the Jewish State are not only permitted to be uttered but also tweeted and retweeted, expounded upon and, most significantly, taught as truth in classrooms. READ MORE

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“One year from now – Israel will be the first country to have partial laser protection”

JERUSALEM POST
Israel to have partial laser defenses by next year
Yonah Jeremy Bob
August 27, 2023

Israel will have partial laser defenses by this time next year, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems chairman Yuval Steinitz told Army Radio on Sunday.”One year from now – Israel will be the first country to have partial laser protection. In two years there may be complete protection – against missiles, shells, rockets, or anything else. This will protect us both in the South and in the North,” said Steinitz. READ MORE

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What the viral sensation behind ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ can learn from Robbie Robertson, writer of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

TABLET MAG
The Night They Drove Oliver Anthony Down
David Meir Grossman
August 24, 2023

On Aug. 7, a YouTube channel called “radiowv” uploaded a song by a guy nobody had ever heard of named Oliver Anthony with the pointed title of “Rich Men North of Richmond.” All sorts of accusations have followed the song’s rapid rise up the Billboard charts—including that Anthony, who lambasts politicians (the “rich men north of Richmond”) and welfare recipients in equal measure, has an incoherent political ideology. Indeed, his overnight rise from alcoholic obscurity into viral success is a version of the American dream. The video of “Rich Men,” which features Anthony alone, singing and playing his guitar in his backyard, has a certain austerity to it, which, for The New Yorker’Jay Caspian King, called to mind the works of documentarian Les Blank. READ MORE

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“Her group’s success in “breaking a billionaire’s soul” whet her appetite, and the next targets, she insisted, must be everyone associated with Kohelet—intellectuals and donors”

JNS
Israel’s #MeToo Stalinists celebrate their victory
Caroline Glick
August 20, 2023

Campaigners against Israel’s Netanyahu government scored a notable victory on Aug. 4. After a six-month demonization, defamation and harassment campaign against the Kohelet Policy Forum and its chief donor, Arthur Dantchik, Dantchik, a Philadelphia businessman, announced that he was ending his support for the conservative Jerusalem think tank. Moshe Koppel, a Bar Ilan University professor, founded Kohelet a decade ago as a full-spectrum policy think tank. Like its opposites on the left, Kohelet has developed policies on legal reform, economics, education and welfare. Its scholars work closely with like-minded policymakers to advance their policies in government ministries and the Knesset. READ MORE

TABLET MAG Gadi Taub: Israel’s Elites Revolt Against Democracy The architects of the anti-Bibi protests are clear about their motives: defending elites from the masses. Thomas Friedman is right that Israel’s democracy is in danger, but Netanyahu’s government is not the source of peril. The real danger comes from the court itself, which is now asserting a made-up “right” to remove a sitting prime minister—that is, to nullify the results of a legal election and eclipse Israel’s democratic politics and institutions through its own self-perpetuating fiat.

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“The message currently being sent to Americans that Israeli democracy will be destroyed unless the protesters get their way is a falsehood”

JEWISH PRESS
Want to Support Israeli Democracy? Then RESPECT Democratic Elections
Jonathan Tobin
August 22, 2023

…As the political warfare inside Israel has escalated since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition won a clear majority in last November’s election to the Knesset, a new variation on that theme has arisen. It comes in the form of a request from prominent Israelis with strong ties to American Jewry for their foreign friends to intervene in the debate about judicial reform that is convulsing the Jewish state to aid those protesting against the Netanyahu government. As outrageous as previous calls for Washington to fight and win battles for the Israeli left that they couldn’t win at home were, this one is actually even more unprincipled and dangerous. That was the conceit of an op-ed published this week in The Times of Israel by Daniel Gordis, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Matti Friedman. It declares that non-Israeli Jews have a moral obligation to join in the delegitimization of the government that was chosen by the people of Israel in a free and fair election. READ MORE

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