Herman Wouk, the famed novelist who first became a household name for his 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning The Caine Mutiny died last week nearly 70 years after achieving fame. Besides his long career as a writer he was also a lifelong Zionist. This fact of Wouk’s love affair with the State of Israel has been completely absent from the many articles celebrating his literary career and marking his passing, less than two weeks before what would have been his 104th birthday. In this small space we will attempt to rectify that. READ MORE
…We must be aware of the fact that the rapprochement with the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates is solely due to the Iranian threat. Their fear of Iran has simply become greater than their historic, religious, national and cultural hatred of the Jewish state that emerged –despite their opposition – on “Palestinian soil.” Accordingly, if and when the Iranian threat weakens or disappears in some way, we may witness a weakening or the complete disappearance of the main reason Saudi Arabia and the Emirates developed relations with Israel and relied on the Jewish state. READ MORE
JERUSALEM POST Melanie Phillips: How are our new best friends in Saudi Arabia doing these days? Until recently, Saudi Arabia was the principal exporter to the world of the Wahhabi strain of Islamic extremism, which has radicalized countless millions to the jihadi cause. Now, though, the kingdom is no longer trying so hard to do so. It has been almost completely replaced by its foe Qatar as the main source of funding for global Islamist education, and Saudi newspapers regularly publish diatribes against Islamist extremism.
Firefighters managed to contain by Saturday the wildfires that had raged throughout Israel the previous days. International help from Greece, Croatia, Italy, Egypt and Cyprus arrived to help battle the blazes, while Russia and the Palestinian Authority also offered support, according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some 3,500 people were evacuated from towns and dozens of homes were destroyed during the heights of the blazes on Thursday as brushfires raged nationwide, with more than 500 acres of woodland burned…READ MORE
Earlier this month, I wrote an op-ed in TheLos Angeles Times titled “No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans.” I speak from experience: I am neither white, nor European—my grandparents came to Israel from Iraq and North Africa. And, as a gay man, I don’t feel particularly privileged, either. Marc Lamont Hill, a political commentator and professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University, did not like my piece…READ MORE
…But if there is one number that you can learn from a deep dive into the survey’s findings, it’s that only 28 percent of the Jews polled say that support for Israel is one of the most important issues that determine how they vote. That puts it on the bottom of a list of issues presented to them, ranking far below concerns about protecting Medicare and Social Security (the No. 1 issue), health care, gun control, abortion, the Supreme Court, education, taxes and immigration, among others. As the executive summary of the poll summed it up, “Israel is the lowest policy priority for Jewish voters.” READ MORE
ALGEMEINER New Poll of US Jews Connects Growing Anxiety Over Antisemitism With Broader Opposition to Trump The poll — commissioned by the left-leaning Jewish Electorate Institute (JEI) and carried out by veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg — also showed that support for Israel was the lowest political priority among non-Orthodox American Jews, with Trump’s dramatic realignment with the Israeli government over the last two years having virtually no positive impact on his standing in the community.
A graduation speaker at New York University called President Donald Trump a “fascist,” described Israel as an “apartheid” state, endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and praised Occupy Wall Street in a two-minute excerpt from his Monday speech. Speaking at the convocation ceremony for NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Steven William Thrasher praised his fellow doctoral graduates for their fight against the various perceived evils.” READ MORE
THE DAILY NORTHWESTERN Journalist Steven Thrasher to join Medill as inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair Thrasher, who has written about LGBTQ issues for publications including The New York Times, The Guardian and Buzzfeed, will join the University as the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair, a newly created position in which he will lead programming on LGBTQ issues and teach classes on similar subjects.
JEWISH JOURNAL NYU President ‘Shocked’ At Grad Speaker’s Anti-Semitic TweetsNew York University (NYU) President Andrew Hamilton told the Journal that he was “shocked at NYU Doctoral Graduate and soon-to-be Northwestern University Professor Steven Thrasher’s recently unearthed anti-Semitic tweets and that Thrasher shouldn’t have spoken at the May 20 convocation ceremony.
The 72nd assembly of the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO) voted 96-11 this week for a resolution, co-sponsored by the Arab bloc and the Palestinian delegation, which singled out Israel over “health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east[ern] Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”…Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based non-governmental organization U.N. Watch, condemned the delegates’ abuse of the U.N. body as a forum to target Israel. “Singling out Israel is a perversion of the truth and a perversion of the values under which the World Health Organization was founded,” he told JNS. READ MORE
UN WATCH Good News: Germany, UK, Denmark, Brazil Change Votes at UN to Support IsraelIn the past two months, two major UN events saw influential countries—including Germany, Britain and Brazil—change their votes to oppose Arab-sponsored resolutions that target Israel for discriminatory treatment, a key objective of UN Watch…
Despite recent attempts by the government to change the housing situation, the housing market in Israel is still in crisis, and if far-reaching changes are not implemented immediately, the crisis will turn into a socio-economic disaster in the years to come, Israel Builders Association president Raul Srugo warned at the association’s annual conference, which took place over the weekend in Eilat. Srugo told the conference that the government must “stop pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.” READ MORE
…Nothing interferes with The Old Guard’s mission in Arlington—and when I say nothing, I mean nothing, not even 9/11. On that beautiful morning, the 9 o’clock funerals were underway when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, blasting debris across Washington Boulevard into the cemetery’s southeastern corner. The Old Guard’s Medical Platoon rushed to the scene, becoming the first soldiers to deploy to a battlefield in the War on Terror. Yet those funerals continued. So did the 10 o’clock funerals. And the 11 o’clock funerals. READ MORE
WALL STREET JOURNAL Peggy Noonan:‘Which Way to Pointe du Hoc?’Each generation is tested, from the Army Rangers of D-Day to the college graduates of 2019…This holiday weekend I find myself reflecting again on the boys who seized back the continent of Europe, and the boys and girls now graduating college and trying to figure out what history asks of them.
…Every single expert quoted in the article predicted that it would not succeed. Many of these experts have been involved in past unsuccessful efforts to bring about a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is not surprising that these experts would not want to see others succeed where they have failed, especially if those others were members of the Trump administration. Then one expert went so far as to say: “The only way to protect the long-term viability of the best aspects of the Kushner plan,” he wrote, “is to kill the plan.”…There are those who will criticize any plan, no matter how positive it may be, if it emanates from the Trump administration. READ MORE
ArchitectGuy on Israel 