“The shift away from Israel among several major unions has been years, if not decades, in the making”

JEWISH INSIDER
Why several leading labor unions abandoned their long-standing support for Israel
Gabby Deutch
August 28, 2024

…The decision by the UAW and other leading labor organizations to call for an end to American military aid to Israel represents a stunning reversal of many unions’ long-standing support for Israel, dating back nearly a century, when American unions donated money to the Histadrut, Israel’s national labor union. “The fact that those seven unions last month, like UAW and SEIU, issued that statement is pretty remarkable, given how much reluctance there’s been, traditionally, to to have any criticism of Israel,” said Jeff Schuhrke, a labor historian at Empire State University. Labor unions’ calls for an arms embargo puts Democrats in an awkward position. READ MORE

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“When Netanyahu spoke to Congress about “total victory,” the political establishment ridiculed and dismissed the prospect of defeating Hamas, instead arguing in favor of a deal with the terrorist group”

JNS
Israel has the right to win
Daniel Greenfield
September 5, 2024

…Kamala and the political establishment are wrong. Israel does not have a “right to defend itself,” it has a right and a duty to go on the offensive and win. It has a right and a duty to utterly defeat and destroy every single Islamic terrorist organization at war with it. It has a right and a duty to secure whatever territory the terrorists were using for their operations, including the Philadelphi Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, through which massive amounts of weapons were delivered to Hamas. That’s the least of what winning means. In 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israel undertook to win. In those first three decades, it won and emerged stronger for it. In the next terrible four decades, it lost land, ambition and safety in a failed search for a peace that could never come on any terms other than its own strength. Defense was traded for offense. READ MORE

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“Every time we hear of another hostage in Gaza that the IDF rescued, it feels like a piece of our soul begins to heal”

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Israel’s true nature shines bright in hostage rescue
Zina Rakhamilova
August 29, 2024

On Tuesday, the IDF announced the rescue of Qaid Farhan Alkadi, a Bedouin-Israeli father of eleven who was kidnapped on Oct. 7 while working as a guard in Kibbutz Magen, near the Gaza border. Alkadi was found alone in a tunnel in southern Gaza, having endured weeks of isolation, confined to total darkness, and forced to witness a fellow hostage die beside him. Watching the videos of Alkadi’s family rushing to greet him in the hospital, seeing him reunited with his brother and his children – one of whom was just two months old when he was kidnapped – was profoundly moving. After his rescue, Alkadi told the media, “Suddenly, I hear someone outside the door speaking in Hebrew. I didn’t believe it, I didn’t believe it. Thank you so much. This is thanks to our army; they do sacred work, they risked their lives.” READ MORE

JNS Hostages’ families burst through Gaza fence during border protest Dozens of families of hostages still being held captive by Hamas since Oct. 7 demonstrated at the Gaza border on Thursday, shouting through loudspeakers in the hope that their loved ones would hear. Some broke through a fence near the border and ran toward the Strip. Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hersch Goldberb-Polin, 23, shouted, “This is mom, Hersch. This is the 328th day. We’re all here. All the families of 107 abductees who remain in captivity,” Ynet reported. “Hersch, we work day and night, and we will never stop. I need you to know that I bless you every morning and every Friday evening, and I raise my hands toward Gaza, and I give you the blessing, ‘May God bless you and keep you,’” she said.

TIMES OF ISRAEL The Rescue of Qaid Farhan Alkadi: Shattering the Myths of Apartheid On August 27th, in an operation that should have captured the attention of the world, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) achieved what can only be described as a triumph of courage and precision: the rescue of Qaid Farhan Alkadi, an Arab Israeli who had been seized by Hamas and dragged into the infernal depths of Gaza. Yet, this extraordinary event has been met with a curiously muted response from much of the mainstream media. The silence is telling, for it betrays an unwillingness to confront a reality that utterly dismantles the vile and persistent slander that Israel is an apartheid state.

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“Iran seeks as a strategic objective to surround Israel with a crescent of active fronts maintained by Iran and supported by Islamist client militias”

GATESTONE
Iran’s War Against Israel – From the West Bank
Khaled Abu Toameh
August 28, 2024

…On August 25, a committee set up by Abbas to prepare for the return of the Palestinian Authority to the Gaza Strip decided to “contact the political bureau of Hamas and other Palestinian factions in order to agree and reach an understanding with them” on Abbas’s plans to head to the coastal enclave. Abbas, it seems, believes that he can reach an advantageous deal with Hamas, whose members staged a bloody coup against his PA in 2007 and were preparing to assassinate him. The PA will never be able to assume control of the Gaza Strip as long as Hamas’s military capabilities have not been destroyed. Even if Abbas does go back to the Gaza Strip, it is not probable that he would be able to confront Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups there. As in the West Bank, new “battalions” and militias will no doubt spring up in the Gaza Strip under Abbas’s PA to pursue the Jihad (holy war) to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state. READ MORE

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IDF exposes Hamas for manipulating public opinion surveys

ALGEMEINER
Hamas Falsified Polling Data to Indicate Higher Support for Oct. 7 Among Gaza Civilians, IDF Says
Corey Walker
August 29, 2024

Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that runs Gaza, has been secretly fabricating polling results from civilians of the war-torn enclave in order to hide that the Islamist organization enjoys far less support than previously thought, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The IDF revealed on Thursday that it obtained documents in Gaza showing that Hamas falsified polling data from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR)… According to the IDF, the March 2024 polling results were doctored by Hamas “to falsely boost Yahya Sinwar’s popularity,” referring to the terrorist group’s top leader. A striking 71 percent of Palestinians in Gaza said that Hamas was “correct” in its “decision to attack Israel on October 7th,” according to the allegedly faked polling data. In reality, 31 percent of Gazans expressed support for the Oct. 7 attacks, according to what the IDF characterized as the accurate polling data, representing a difference of roughly 40 percentage points. READ MORE

CAMERA BLOG More Than 80 Media Outlets Correct AP’s False Claim That Gaza’s Civilian Deaths Exceed 40,000 More than 80 North American media outlets this week published an Associated Press correction prompted by CAMERA after the wire service falsely reported that the civilian death toll in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 40,000…Not even Hamas has claimed that the civilian death toll has now exceeded 40,000. The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza has claimed without evidence that total fatalities exceed 40,000 but their highly disputed data does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. According to Israeli figures, more than 17,000 Hamas combatants have been killed. READ MORE

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The fact that Muna had to leave Nablus to find a target proves that the “occupation” claim is a lie. He wanted to kill a lot of Jews. So he set his sights on Tel Aviv.

JNS
Three lessons from the Tel Aviv bombing
Moshe Phillips
August 23, 2024

The fumbled suicide bombing in Tel Aviv might sound as if it was just another one of the countless attempted terrorist attacks that fail for whatever reason and are ignored by the international community. But if you look closer, you see that there’s much to be learned from this incident. Let’s start with the fact that the bomber, Jafar Muna, was a resident of Nablus (Shechem, in Hebrew), a city governed by the Palestinian Authority. Why did he travel all the way to Tel Aviv, 26 miles away, to carry out the attack? After all, if Nablus and other Palestinian Arab cities are “occupied”—as the media and Peace Now constantly claim—why didn’t he attack the “occupiers” right there? Why travel to Tel Aviv, risking capture along the way? READ MORE

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As Moshe Dayan, the famed Israeli Minister of Defense during the 1967 Six-Day War, used to say: “Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”

FUTURE OF JEWISH
No other country is infantilized as much as Israel.
Joshua Hoffman
August 24, 2024

During the last 11 years of living in Israel, I have spoken to many people across the world who, more often than not, talk about Israel as if its roughly 10 million people do not seem to know what’s good for them. It feels like no other country is infantilized as much as Israel. Many Americans, for instance, think they can project whatever tickles their fancy onto Israelis because of the nearly $4 billion in annual military aid that the U.S. offers Israel, yet plenty of them do not realize that this money is not actual aid in the altruistic sense of the word; it is a mutually beneficial arrangement in which the U.S. receives all types of assets (e.g. technology, defense, intelligence) for literal pennies on the dollar. READ MORE

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“Candace Owens’ outburst is part of a troubling trend in her rhetoric over the past year”

JPOST
Shmuley Boteach and daughter file complaint to FBI against Candace Owens
August 20, 2024

Shmuley Boteach, a popular celebrity rabbi filed a complaint with the FBI against Candace Owens on Monday, a controversial figure in conservative media after she seemingly accused him and his daughter of trying to kill her…“Yesterday, before more than one million people in a live X feed,” who he called, “arch antisemites,” Candace Owens, “arguably the foremost female Jew-hater in America, accused me of trying to murder her, in collaboration with the world’s Zionists, thereby putting a national target on my back and naming me specifically from all American Jewish leaders,” Boteach wrote to the FBI…According to Boteach, Owens, months ago, “insinuated that I killed Michael Jackson. Two days ago, to her 5.5 million X followers, she said that Michael Jackson put me on a list of Jews who were seeking to destroy his life. READ MORE

NEW YORK POST Candace Owens’ father-in-law defends Israel after controversial commentator is accused of antisemitism Candace Owens’ father-in-law [Lord Michael Farmer] sought to distance himself from her controversial comments about Jews that have sparked an uproar, prompting social media users to accuse her of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories…Lord Michael Farmer, a member of the House of Lords, which is the upper chamber of the UK parliament, went on to praise Israel as a “rare example of a democracy in the Middle East.”

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Gal Gadot is no stranger to calls for boycotts against her films, but since October 7, we’ve witnessed a surge of antisemitic campaigns targeting Israelis and Jews

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Giving Gal Gadot the poison apple will not liberate Palestinians
Zina Rakhamilova
April 15, 2024

“A character that tries to kill a child and steal her kingdom. How fitting.” Those are the words used to describe Israeli-Jewish actress Gal Gadot. The live-action remake of Disney’s Snow White is set to hit theatres in March 2025. While many are excited to see their childhood film brought to life, a group of pro-Hamas activists is calling for a boycott because the film features Israeli actress Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen… Israeli Eurovision representative Eden Golan was forced to hire security measures typically reserved for world leaders. She had to wear a disguise on the rare occasions she left her hotel…Calls to boycott Snow White are spreading across social media, with statements like: “They’ve cast Israeli terrorist Gal Gadot in the film. She’s a trained killer who served in the Israeli degenerate forces.” READ MORE

JPOST Gal Gadot haters call for Snow White boycott, co-star Rachel Zegler voices support for Palestine Zegler posted the trailer on her X account, noting the film would be released in 2025 and thanking viewers for their support, then added in a comment, “and always remember, free Palestine.”

CREATIVE COMMUNITY FOR PEACE 150+ Entertainment Industry Leaders Call on Emmys to Rescind Nomination of Bisan Owda Amidst Ties to Terrorist Organization More than 150 entertainment industry leaders signed an open letter released by the nonprofit organization, Creative Community For Peace (CCFP), urging the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) to rescind the Emmy nomination of Bisan Atef Owda for the 2024 News & Documentary category. The letter, which comes in response to Owda’s nomination for the documentary “It’s Bisan From Gaza and I’m Still Alive,” calls on NATAS to rescind the nominations due to Owda’s documented ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a United States-designated terrorist organization.

INSIDE HIGHER ED AAUP Faces Criticism for Reversal on Academic Boycotts The American Association of University Professors announced Monday it had dropped its categorical opposition BDS. Critics say the organization has changed for the worse, but its new president isn’t backing down…Academia leans very heavily to the left, so a lot of professors naturally bring left-wing political interests with them into their organizations…” There’s real interest among politically activist academics in taking part in the boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel…

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Oren: “ Is this period more like 1967, when Israel preemptively attacked its enemies? Or like 1973—when it failed to do so?”

CLARITY
Should Israel Strike First?
Michael Oren
August 20, 2024

For more than two weeks, Israelis have been waiting for war. Immediately after the July 31 assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran pledged to retaliate massively against Israel. So far the main event hasn’t happened. Talks for the release of the remaining 111 Israeli hostages in Hamas’s hands drag on inconclusively and Hezbollah rockets slam into the north, but it’s the fear of Iranian missiles raining down on our homes that most consumes Israelis. We are hoarding essentials and stocking our bomb shelters with canned tuna and bottled water. Nobody dares travel far from home. Nobody wants to get caught in their car, in the middle of a highway, when the sirens wail. READ MORE

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