Biden is trying to make it appear that a normalization deal will happen if the Jewish state pays for it in concessions to the Palestinians. Netanyahu should see it as a trap, not a favor.

Posted on August 3, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Is a US-Saudi-Israel deal really in the works?
Jonathan Tobin
August 2, 2023

According to New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, President Joe Biden is trying to do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a big favor. That would involve the administration finally moving to follow up on former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords triumph and brokering a deal normalizing relations between Jerusalem and Riyadh. Lending some weight to Friedman’s speculation is the fact that Biden has himself signaled his interest in some sort of pact with the Saudis that would involve Israel. This would give Biden a rare foreign-policy triumph in the midst of his re-election campaign. At the same time, since achieving that upgrade from under-the-table ties to the exchange of ambassadors is a major Israeli objective, it would also be a victory for Netanyahu, who is currently under siege from both Biden and domestic opponents who are falsely labeling his push for judicial reform as an assault on democracy. READ MORE

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“The Israeli government must give up on any further judicial reforms”

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
‘Dai,’ enough, stop it, let it go
Benjamin Kerstein
July 30, 2023

The word dai, best known from the dayenu of the Passover service, has a simple and assertive meaning in modern Hebrew: Enough, stop it, let it go. Israel has reached the point of both dai and dayenu. With the passage of the first stage of the government’s judicial reforms, the signs have become unmistakable. All the major newspapers printed a black page on their covers, paid for by the reforms’ opponents. The streets filled with angry crowds of pro- and anti-reform demonstrators. A general strike is threatened. Israel’s international credit rating will be lowered. High-tech companies are beginning the process of relocation. The economy threatens to crater. Reservists are refusing to serve and the IDF warns that its readiness could soon be in danger. One can support or oppose the law just passed and indeed the rest of the proposed reforms. We have reached the point, however, that this has become irrelevant. Whether either side likes it or not, we must face the reality that Israeli society is being torn to pieces. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL PM aide: We’ll pass Judicial Selection Committee shakeup, shelve rest of overhaul A top aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Wednesday that the coalition plans to pass legislation remaking the Judicial Selection Committee in the fall parliamentary session and then will shelve the remainder of its controversial judicial overhaul package.

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Amazon Labor Union protest against Amazon doing business with Israel puts it out of step with the nation’s largest labor unions, which oppose the BDS movement

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
Amazon Labor Union Alongside Anti-Zionist Activist Linda Sarsour Accuses Israel of ‘Apartheid’
Andrew Bernard
July 28, 2023

The Amazon Labor Union, which represents more than 8,000 employees at the tech behemoth, took part in a protest on Wednesday accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide in response to an Amazon contract with the Israeli government. Videos and photos provided to The Algemeiner show executives from AWS and Salesforce being disrupted at least five times during their keynote address at the Amazon Web Services summit in New York. Dozens of protesters outside the event held signs with slogans including “Zionism is Genocide,” “Israeli Apartheid and Genocide Funded by the US,” and “Amazon Profit$ Off Israel’s Military Occupation.” The organizers claim that Wednesday’s anti-Israel protest was the first time that Amazon tech workers and warehouse workers have protested together. READ MORE

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Israel must show that it treats Palestinians who hold a US passport the same as it treats all US citizens

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Over 2000 Palestinian Americans enter country so far under visa waiver trial
Reuters and ILH Staff
August 2, 2023

More than 2,000 Palestinian Americans have traveled into or through Israel since it eased conditions for them at border crossings as part of a bid to achieve a visa waiver deal with the United States, an Israeli official said on Wednesday. Ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline to qualify its citizens for visa-free admission to the United States, Israel has reciprocally loosened access through its main airport and at the occupied West Bank’s boundary for Palestinian Americans…To obtain the visa waiver deal, Israel, which imposes tight controls on movements by Palestinians and does not usually allow them to travel through Ben-Gurion International Airport, must show that it treats Palestinians who hold a US passport the same as it treats all US citizens. READ MORE

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The common policy of the last three administrations tacitly assumes that the costs to the United States, to the Middle East, and to the world of a nuclear-armed Iran, while certainly unwelcome, would be manageable

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

THE JERUSALEM STRATEGIC TRIBUNE
The United States, Iran, and the Lessons of the Last War
Michael Mandelbaum
July 2023

…The present policy rests on the conviction that confronting Iran with the threat of war would likely lead to war, and that such a war would follow the pattern of Afghanistan and Iraq, proving as costly to wage and as unsatisfactory in its outcome as those conflicts were. Neither proposition is necessarily correct. Successfully deterring the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran is feasible, given the vast military superiority the United States enjoys over the Islamic Republic, provided that the Iranian authorities are convinced that the United States would in fact unleash its armed forces to stop them from getting the bomb. Various measures that the American government has thus far chosen not to take would enhance the credibility of such a threat: a more emphatic declared policy to that effect, military exercises that simulate an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, and actual but limited military reprisals for Iranian provocations…READ MORE

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A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions and it destroyed his life

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto
Rupa Subramanya and Ari Blaff
August 3, 2023

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States. “Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.” It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity. Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.” READ MORE

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DeSantis went wrong almost immediately by choosing the wrong strategy

Posted on July 28, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

REAL CLEAR POLITICS
DeSantis Has Only One Path Back From Failed Launch
Charles Lipson
August 1, 2023

Two decades before “Mad Men”-era advertising executives downed their martinis and bedded their secretaries, a brilliant predecessor came up with a powerful idea still in use today. The best way to sell any product or service, he said, was to highlight its single best quality – the one that truly stands out from the competition and benefits consumers directly. That ad man, Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company, dubbed it the “unique selling proposition.” Eight decades later, advertisers and marketers still rely on it. The failure of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to identify his own “unique selling proposition” is the best explanation for his failure to surge in the polls, despite the high anticipation with which he entered the primaries. READ MORE

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fresh from passing the first of his proposed judicial reforms, will next tackle an even more contentious proposal: democratizing the process through which judges are selected.

Posted on July 27, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

BREITBART
Israel’s Next Judicial Reform: Democratize Selection of Judges
Joel Pollak
July 26, 2023

Currently, judges are chosen by a committee that includes judges, members of the Israeli bar association, and a number of members of the parliament, or Knesset. In practice, the judges and the bar association form a bloc that allows the judiciary and the legal profession to control the process. The result has been a judiciary that is left-leaning and ethnically skewed toward the secular, Ashkenazi elite, which damages the courts’ credibility. As the Jerusalem Post notes, Netanyahu’s proposal, which he suspended in the spring to allow for negotiations, “would have removed the Bar Association representatives and introduced an expanded panel with more elected officials.” Critics complained that the proposal “would have created an automatic majority for any coalition” in parliament. That might surprise observers in the U.S., where elected politicians control every aspect of judicial selection. READ MORE

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Judicial reform facts you’ll never hear amid pearl-clutching over the “death of Israeli democracy” — this is all about power

Posted on July 25, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

CAMERA BLOG
David Remnick’s Ignorance Knows No Bounds
Alex Safian
July 23, 2023

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine, once remarked “It’s one thing to be ignorant, it’s another to parade it as sophistication,” which has to rate as one of the greatest self-owns in history. For it’s hard to imagine a more apt description of Remnick himself, whose fatuous ignorance and faux sophistication are nowhere more evident than when he writes about Israel. The latest example is Remnick’s Is This the End of Bibi?, the usual rehash of anti-Netanayahu propaganda, relying on the usual hack reporters like Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer, whom Remnick would have his readers believe is “a leading Israeli journalist.” READ MORE

Caroline Glick explains the “reasonableness law”

 

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Yet again, a major movie has cast a non-Jew to play a famous Jew. This may be part of a deeper erasure of Jews — and antisemitism — going on under the surface of storytelling

Posted on July 25, 2023 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH CHRONICLE
Oppenheimer liked to pretend he wasn’t Jewish — like the film
David Baddiel
July 27, 2023

Another day, another film/TV show/play in which a famous Jew is played by a non-Jew. I have talked and written about this many times — about how it’s a question not of acting but of context: minority casting being presently dominated by the notion of authenticity, the question is why that doesn’t apply to Jews, and what that means for how people see Jews — so I shan’t rehearse it again. But there is another, more complex issue thrown up by the casting in Oppenheimer. Any biopic on such a serious subject as the creation of the atomic bomb needs to delve deep into the psychological underpinnings of the narrative. My sense of a possible omission in that regard was alerted reading Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian saying that the film “doesn’t quite get to grips with the antisemitism Oppenheimer faced”. READ MORE

NEWSWEEK An Irish Actor Playing Oppenheimer Proves Once Again That Jews Don’t Count Oppenheimer was raised a secular Jew, and much has been made of the strain of internalized shame and self-hatred that ran throughout the course of the scientist’s life. Oppenheimer was noted for denying his Jewishness, despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that he encountered antisemitism at almost every turn, facing discrimination at Harvard, the University of Göttingen and U.C. Berkeley, where after lobbying faculty head Raymond Birge to hire fellow scientist Robert Serber, he was told “one Jew in the department was enough.”

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