For twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, the world, and especially the United States, enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace. Preparations for great-power war, the anticipation of it, and negotiations with such a war in the background were largely absent from the foreign policies of the strongest powers. The war in Ukraine makes it clear that that happy period has ended. Now it is a matter of urgency to assess how that conflict will proceed and what American and Western policy toward it should be. One way to make such assessments is to refer to America’s most recent experience with great-power competition, the Cold War, which has a good deal both to teach and to suggest. READ MORE
…Like Ukraine, Israel is a country under existential attack. The fact that, unlike the current Russian onslaught on Ukraine, Israel is subjected to an unending war by terrorist proxies backed by rogue states—punctuated over the past century by all-out regular wars—doesn’t alter that similarity. Yet today, hardly any Western journalists are equating Israel with Ukraine. Instead, more people in Britain are appallingly equating Israel with Russia’s warmongering and tyrannical president Vladimir Putin. This is because they have uncritically absorbed the propaganda pumped out for decades by the Palestinian Arabs that Israel has taken over their historic lands. READ MORE
The terrorist who killed four Israelis in Beersheba on Tuesday was reportedly called a “ticking time bomb” by prosecutors in a previous security case and was given a four-year prison sentence. Mohammad Ghaleb Abu al-Qi’an, 34, killed three women and one man in a ramming and stabbing attack in the southern city before being shot to death by armed civilians. He was a terror convict from the Bedouin town of Hura in the Negev who served four years in prison for plotting to join the Islamic State. He was released in 2019. Abu al-Qi’an was an elementary school teacher when he was indicted in 2015 for his affiliation with Islamic State and for attempting to recruit people to the jihadist group. READ MORE
…While the Biden administration postures as standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine in its desperate defence against murderous aggression, it is itself reportedly about to capitulate entirely to Iran. This, astoundingly, is America’s actual answer to Zelensky. Given that the Iranian regime has been at war with the west since it came to power in 1979, that its fingerprints are on almost every major terrorist atrocity against western interests and that it unceasingly declares its genocidal aim to exterminate Israel, the administration’s determination to empower it is incomprehensible. The reported terms of the deal being negotiated in Vienna will allow Iran legitimately to equip itself with a nuclear arsenal after a mere delay — according to Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — of two-and-a-half years. READ MORE
…Zelensky continued his practice of customizing his speeches to suit his audience when he addressed the Knesset over Zoom, taking the comparisons he had already made between his country’s situation and World War II to the next level and dedicating the lion’s share of his speech to the Holocaust…Rather than stir Israel’s leaders and legislators to action and solidarity, the heavy Holocaust comparisons – from saying Moscow is planning a “final solution for the Ukrainian question” to saying that Israel should save Ukrainians like Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations saved Jews – drew more focus from its audience, which criticized its inappropriateness, than Zelensky’s appeal for weapons. READ MORE
TIMES OF ISRAEL Yes, Zelensky misspoke, but that really doesn’t matterWhat matters is how Israel handles the present moment – and whether its actions will stand the test of time…when we focus on where Zelensky went wrong in his speech, we risk losing sight of the destruction being wrought in Ukraine.
124NEWS ‘Until you arm Ukraine’: Republican lawmaker calls on US to stop aid to IsraelRepublican Congressman Adam Kinzinger attacked Israel on Monday, saying the United States should stop helping the Jewish state “unless Israel supplies arms to Ukraine in the fight against the Russian invasion.” Kinzinger, who backs massive military action to defend Ukraine, lambasted Israel after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to Knesset members on Sunday asking them to provide him with the Iron Dome system to defend himself against Russian military missiles.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff praised Israel’s mediation efforts on Thursday, saying that Ukraine considers Jerusalem “one of the priority venues” for a meeting between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking to Israeli journalists via Zoom, Andriy Yermak said that Ukrainian officials “are impressed by how deeply aware of the situation Israeli officials and Prime Minister Bennett in particular are…Yermak also noted Kyiv’s hope that Israel will be one of the nations signing guarantees of Ukrainian security in the event of a negotiated solution to the war. The Ukrainians have proposed the five permanent UN Security Council member states along with Germany, Turkey, Canada, and Israel as guarantors, and are open to adding more countries. READ MORE
…Russian oligarchs have become a part of the architecture of Jewish communal life, in the same way that they were accepted elements of the broader global economy until last month. Israel’s pragmatically warm relationship with Russia—whose army is deployed throughout neighboring Syria and effectively controls Israel’s ability to strike at Iranian targets there—was similarly treated as noncontroversial, or at least as no worse than the German establishment’s widely tolerated closeness with Putin’s regime. Fairly or not, the rules have now changed. As the war escalates, the choices facing Jewish organizations that receive money from wealthy Russian Jews, and who hope to reach Jews inside Russia itself, will only get more complicated.READ MORE
One seeking any more proof of the antisemitism behind much of the obscene accusations of Israel being an “apartheid” state need look no further than the new United Nations (“UN”) report that will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council (“UNHRC”) on March 24. The report is authored by the UN’s Special Rapporteur “on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967,” Michael Lynk. In his report, an advance unedited version of which was made public on March 22, Lynk accuses the Jewish state of being a “covetous alien” entity. Having thus started off with the tired antisemitic trope of the “covetous” Jew, Lynk goes on to spread numerous false claims using the megaphone handed to him by the United Nations. READ MORE
The most prominent Jewish figure in Ukraine right now is the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. The runner-up may well be another country’s famous Jewish leader. Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel and a native of Kiev whose family fled amid anti-Semitic violence, has loomed large ever since Russia launched its war on Ukraine late last month. Her words have appeared in pro-Ukrainian memes, been quoted by Ukrainian diplomats and even been pulled from the backpack of a battle-ready Ukrainian soldier. Almost as soon as the war began, a variation on a quote from Meir began circulating online. READ MORE
In response to criticism of its first slate of political action committee endorsements, the AIPAC lobby told its activists that it would continue to cultivate politicians of all stripes, even those who questioned the most recent presidential election based on false claims, citing what it calls deadly threats faced by Israel. “We have friends who are pro-choice and pro-life, those who are liberal on immigration and those who want to tighten our borders, and yes, those who disagree strongly on issues surrounding the 2020 presidential election,” said the message AIPAC sent on Friday, a day after a Jewish Telegraphic Agency story on the lobby’s support of Democrats who voted “yes” on the Iran deal, one of the group’s most reviled foreign policy developments. READ MORE
ArchitectGuy on Israel 