I am not an historian, decent author or a journalist, and the chances are that unless there is a link or reference to somewhere else, the perpetrator is yours truly – Renaud Sarda. I created this blog as a focal point, to arm people with arguments and facts that they can perhaps use to counter biased media reporting and anti-Israel propaganda, and to help counter (BDS) campaign. I am a Zionist/Sephardi/Jew who will fly the Israeli flag, and defend whatever Israel does.
Volkswagen and Intel-owned Mobileye are teaming up to launch a ridesharing service in Israel using autonomous electric cars. Development of the project will begin in 2019, with full commercialization in 2022, the partners said in a press release. VW and Mobileye are racing against competitors like Waymo, Uber, Ford, and General Motors to be the first to commercialize self-driving cars.
Under the terms of the partnership, Volkswagen will provide electric cars, while Mobileye will provide the hardware needed to make them autonomous. A third partner, Champion Motors, will oversee fleet management and run a control center. The Israeli government will clear any regulatory red tape, as well as provide access to traffic data and infrastructure. This will clear the path for other ventures wishing to launch autonomous ridesharing services in Israel, VW and Mobileye said.
As both automakers and tech companies continue to develop self-driving cars, the emphasis is firmly on ridesharing rather than private ownership. Waymo plans to launch a commercial-scale ridesharing service in Arizona before the end of this year, and Uber has long sought to replace its human drivers with machines. General Motors has indicated that it is close to launch a ridesharing service through its Cruise Automation division, while Ford has said the self-driving car it has promised to launch in 2021 will be aimed at commercial fleets rather than individual owners.
Concentrating on ridesharing offers a number of advantages. It allows companies to maintain tighter control of what is, after all, a new and largely untested technology. Operators can ensure that cars never stray out of a well-mapped area through geofencing, and can regularly evaluate vehicles when they return to their home base.
Cars used for ridesharing can also continually generate revenue for automakers and tech companies, while selling them to individual buyers severely curtails opportunities for future revenue. Compared to human drivers, autonomous cars could generate vastly more money in ridesharing because they can stay on the road longer.
Mobileye previously supplied hardware to Tesla for the Silicon Valley automaker’s Autopilot driver-assist system, but discontinued that relationship. The company now conducts autonomous-car research in concert with parent Intel, as well as BMW. Volkswagen previously partnered with U.S. startup Aurora Innovation on autonomous-driving tech. VW is planning to launch a family of electric cars over the next few years as it looks to put a massive diesel-emissions scandal behind it.
Today, foreign minister Anders Samuelsen summoned the ambassador of Iran, Mr. Morteza Moradian, to a meeting with the political director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This happened in reaction to information about illegal activities of an Iranian intelligence agency on Danish soil, which the head of Danish Security and Intelligence Service disclosed today.
“As stated by the head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service earlier today, the assessment is that an Iranian intelligence agency has planned an assassination on Danish soil. This is completely unacceptable. In fact, the gravity of the matter is difficult to describe. That has been made crystal clear to the Iranian ambassador in Copenhagen today”, says Minister for Foreign Affairs, Anders Samuelsen.
At the meeting, the political director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on behalf of the Danish government, expressed his unambiguous condemnation of the completely unacceptable Iranian behavior. At the meeting, it was also stressed that Denmark is considering further consequences of the matter.
Foreign minister Anders Samuelsen says that Denmark among other things intends to bring up the matter internationally. “We are in close contact with several like-minded countries regarding the issue of an Iranian intelligence agency’s illegal activities in Europe”, says foreign minister Anders Samuelsen.
A press conference will take place in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at 6.30 PM. The press conference will be in Danish.
For further information: Press Advisor Kasper Thams Olsen, +45 61 97 90 31
Mira Sucharov is a columnist at Haaretz and The Forward and an associate professor of political science at Carleton University.
The nightmare so many Jews live with when we attend synagogue – will they come for us? – came horrifyingly true this weekend in Pittsburgh. At the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, a gunman entered the sanctuary and murdered 11 people – among them a 97-year-old woman.
The alleged killer, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, had publicized his motives – a deadly cocktail of anti-Semitism and xenophobia – on social media. “There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation," he posted on Gab, a site attracting many from the far-right, where he was referring to President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. Other posts by Mr. Bowers targeted HIAS, formerly known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a group that supports refugee resettlement. HIAS had recently hosted a “refugee shabbat” event at synagogues across the United States to mark the work of supporting refugees. “Well hello there HIAS!” Mr. Bowers wrote. “You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided.” (At least one congregation in the Tree of Life synagogue had participated in the refugee-support event.)
Many of the anti-Semitic canards that define this ancient hatred involve power: that Jews hold sinister, mysterious and outsized influence. Mr. Bowers’s strain of anti-Semitism, though, also played on instances of Jewish generosity. Mr. Bowers seemed to believe that Jews contaminate the white race not only by their own presence but also through their impulse to help others in need of sanctuary.
Across Canada, through private sponsorship options facilitated by the federal government, many synagogues have been on the front lines of refugee-resettlement efforts. In the United States, where those private options are not available, a coalition of Jewish groups pressed Congress to admit Syrian refugees. As Reform Judaism leader Rabbi Jonah Pesner told me at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, “To sit at our [Passover] seder tables every year and [tell] the story [starting with], ‘My father was a wandering Aramean,’ and to live through 5,000 years as a community of refugees, not to model for the world what it means to welcome the stranger would be an abdication of our legacy.”
Despite many Jews having attained positions of comfort and prominence – what McGill sociologist Morton Weinfeld, writing about Jews in Canada, calls their “paradoxical success” – deadly bursts of anti-Semitism remind Jews in North America that we might never feel at home.
But staring down anti-Semitism is not enough. We must also wage a war against xenophobia more broadly. In the age of Trump, these terrible forces feed off one another, just as they go hand in hand with racism, Islamophobia and transphobia. And as we’ve seen, these terrible forces are gaining traction.
When I was young, I believed that anti-Semitism had all but ebbed in North America. At that time, I had heard the word “kike,” but I thought that this horrible epithet that Mr. Bowers would later use to describe my people was a relic from the past. Anti-Semitism, I believed, was on its way to being extinguished. But clearly, I was blissfully ignorant about how others around me were growing up, since Mr. Bowers is exactly my age.
There are nearly six million Jews in the United States and nearly 400,000 in Canada. But still, as updated news reports came in, many Jews across the continent rushed to check the names of the victims, seeing if we knew anyone or if their relatives or friends might be connected to us or our parents or our kids or our camps or synagogues or Jewish community centres or rabbis or schools or youth movements. We sent and received notes of condolence and fear and sadness and anger. Two of the past rabbis at Tree of Life had spent many summers as educators at a Jewish summer camp in Ontario. The person I know in Pittsburgh through Jewish community links was unharmed, thankfully. But she knew eight of the 11 victims personally. That is the nature of 21st-century Jewish life in North America: concern, collectivity and connection. And now, we reach out to one another and are grateful for the healing embrace of community, and the allyship of others, because we are human, and we are hurting.
Israel's Culture Minister Miri Regev (C) visits the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates October 28, 2018. Picture taken October 28, 2018. Chen Kedem Maktubi/Israeli Culture Minister Spokesperson/Handout via
REUTERS
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli cabinet minister's visit to Abu Dhabi's grand mosque gave more momentum on Monday to Israel's diplomatic push in the Gulf, where it sees Arab states as its natural allies against regional powerhouse Iran.
"I am happy that I was privileged to be the first senior official from Israel to sign the mosque's guest book," Sports Minister Miri Regev wrote on Facebook about the tour which she said took place on Sunday.
On Sunday, Regev, in the United Arab Emirates for a judo tournament, fought back tears after Israel's team won gold in the Abu Dhabi Grand Slam - a feat which allowed the Israeli national anthem to be played in a country that does not formally recognize it
Her attendance at the event and the judo win were portrayed in Israel as both diplomatic and sporting achievements in a region where prospective allies have been reluctant to lift the veil on what Israeli officials have said have been years of covert contacts.
Israel's Communications Minister Ayoob Kara was due in Dubai on Monday to attend the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency.
Shining a rare spotlight on direct ties with Gulf states, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced on Friday he had just returned from a surprise visit to Oman, the first time an Israeli leader has visited the Sultanate in 22 years.
Netanyahu has on several occasions hinted at warmer relations with Gulf states.
He told Israel's parliament last week that due to fears of a nuclear threat from Iran, "Israel and other Arab countries are closer than they ever were before."
Israel has diplomatic relations with only two Arab states, neighboring Egypt and Jordan.
Netanyahu's intensified outreach in the Gulf comes amid heightened speculation in Israel that he could call an early election ahead of polls due no later than November 2019.
Any normalization of relations with Arab states in the Gulf could be a political boost at home, where he has also portrayed tighter ties as a way forward to a broad peace after direct peace talks with the Palestinians that collapsed in 2014.
On Facebook, Regev posted a video that showed her standing inside Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque next to a man who appeared to be Mohamed Bin Thaloob al-Dera, president of the UAE Wrestling Judo & Kickboxing Federation, and another man whom she identified as a mosque official.
The UAE government media office said it could not immediately confirm the identities of the men shown in the tour of the mosque, named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the UAE's first president.
"The essence of the message in this mosque is one of brotherhood and peace," Regev, a former chief Israeli military spokeswoman, said in the video, which showed her writing in Hebrew in the guest book.
(Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Richard Balmforth
REVEALED: US-Israel historian Kobby Barda has uncovered the ‘forgotten’ chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: US President Truman’s administration gave the Arab nations and Israel $1.5 billion [in today’s equivalency] to resolve the Middle East refugee problem. – But only Israel fulfilled its obligation.
By Eldad Beck
Kobby Barda couldn’t believe what he was seeing. While researching the establishment of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee under the auspices of the Ruderman Program for American Jewish Studies at the University of Haifa, Barda found his way to the personal archive of one Isaiah Leo “Si” Kenen, a Canadian-born lawyer, journalist and philanthropist who was one of the founders of the pro-Israel lobby.
Researcher Kobby Barda: “Jordan and other countries have already received money to take in refugees.”- Photo: Facebook
Among the many documents that record in detail Kenen’s work in the first years of Israel’s existence as a state, Barda discovered a lost chapter in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At the start of the 1950s, in addition to pouring money into the Marshall Plan to rehabilitate Europe after World War II, the U.S. decided to provide money to Arab states and Israel so they could find a solution to the refugee problem created by the 1948 War of Independence.
The American aid earmarked to solve the issue of Middle East refugees was supposed to have been split evenly between Israel and the Arab states, with each side receiving $50 million to build infrastructure to absorb refugees. The money to take in the Arab refugees was handed over to the U.N. agency founded to address the issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Americans gave Arab countries another $53 million for “technical cooperation.” In effect, the Arab side received double the money given to Israel, even though Israel took in more refugees, including ones from Arab nations – Jews who had been displaced by the regional upheavals. The amount Congress allocated to provide for Middle East refugees – Jewish and Arab – at the request of then-President Harry Truman was equal to $1.5 billion today.
“When I saw the documents, I was in complete shock,” Barda says.
“The U.S. undertook to fund a solution to the refugee problem in the Middle East. A message Harry S. Truman sent Congress explicitly says that this is where the matter ends. It was a commitment the president made in a letter to convince Congress to vote for the aid bill. In other words, an important chapter in the history of the conflict has been lost, simply swept away by history. The people who worked on it aren’t alive anymore, and there’s no one who will put it back on the table. Now, when the Trump Administration is coming up with new ideas to solve the conflict and address the refugee issue, the information takes on new relevance.
Jewish refugees from Yemen cross desert to reach Israel. – Photo Courtesy: Israeli National Photo Archive
“In hindsight, the Americans have already paid to have the Palestinian refugees accommodated, but they are still defined as refugees and still living in refugee camps. Israel, on the other hand, has taken in [Jewish] refugees from Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, given them citizenship, and ended the matter. In Jordan, where most of the Palestinian refugees wound up and which signed the aid deal with the U.S. – unlike Syria, which refused – there are still Palestinian refugee camps. This is the asymmetry that has been created in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it’s very important to the historical narrative and to any future attempt to reach an agreement,” Barda explains.
The decision to send aid to the Middle East to solve the double refugee problem was the result of an Israeli initiative. The young Jewish state urgently needed foreign aid to confront the many challenges it was facing. One option was to appeal to the U.S., both because of its size and because of the influence of the American Jewish community.
Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N Abba Eban (left 1970) and Canadian journalist/philanthropist, Isaiah Leo Si Kenen (right) – Wikipedia
To promote the idea, Israel asked to establish a pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Then-Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Abba Eban suggested that Kenen – who served as spokesman for the Israeli delegation – to travel to Washington and work with the American authorities. The need for a congressional lobby was born out of the Israeli embassy’s failed efforts to convince the State Department to provide Israel with a grant, despite the support of President Truman. Truman tried to convince his cabinet that American foreign aid laws allowed him to move up to 10% of all foreign aid grants, meaning that the money for the Middle East would be taken out of the Marshall Plan for Europe. But then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson was a vigorous opponent of the idea of the U.S. sending aid to Israel.
Thus it was decided to hand the decision over to Congress, even though there were still obstacles to its passage. Eban wanted Congress to pass an aid law specifically for Israel. Kenen, as head of the new pro-Israel lobby, thought that the best way to secure aid for Israel would be by expanding the Marshall Plan to the Middle East and make it part of the humanitarian framework to address the post-war refugee problem as a whole.
“Abba Eban wanted his law to be included in the refugee aid bill. Kenen and others, including some in Congress, told him, ‘With all due respect, you’re wrong.’ The bills presented to Congress in 1951 included a bill to send Israel aid to take in refugees. It was the first and last time that any mechanism was established for the Jewish refugees,” Barda says.
American economic interests
“To avoid creating the impression that [the U.S.] was trying to provide aid to Israel alone, Kenen said, ‘Let’s attach it to the Marshall Plan, include the Arab countries, and break down the opposition in the State Department.’ The U.S. State Department has objected to the establishment of Israel as well as to giving it any money. In the end, the aid bill passed, because they managed to convince the same government operatives that the lion’s share of the aid was going to Arab states. Israel was only mentioned in passing, in half a sentence. Congressman Abraham Ribicoff Connecticut [who would later become a cabinet secretary under President John F. Kennedy] even argued that it was a terrible mistake to put Israel’s name in the bill. The idea was to soften the State Department objection through simultaneously sending aid to Arab countries, and it became the historic basis of that same deal,” Barda says.
President of the US, Harry S. Truman (1945, Left) and Secretary of Defense, George C. Marshall (1950, Right) – U.S. National Archives
In May 1952, Truman sent a message to Congress explaining the importance of passing a law for international aid and laying out his vision for the Middle East. Truman said that Israel and the Arab countries needed a regional approach to basic problems of economic development, which he called “vital” to easing existing tensions that were mainly the result of a satisfactory solution to the refugee problem.
Truman said that the aid he was proposing for Arab nations would allow them to produce more food and develop their water infrastructures, whereas the aid to Israel would help the young state sustain its economy in a crucial time of national development. Moreover, the president argued, aiding Arab refugees from Israel would serve three purposes: It would help their new home countries; strengthen the countries where they settled; and help Israel and the Arab countries by eliminating the refugee problem, which he said presented a “serious threat” to peace in the region.
Barda sees this as an enormous miss for Israeli foreign policy and public diplomacy.
“This information completely changes the perspective on the matter of [the Palestinians’] right of return. There are two nascent sides, both of whom a rich uncle agreed to pay so they could solve their problems about the refugees once and for all, just like what happened in the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey after World War I, and in the spirit of the action taken to rehome the German refugees in central and eastern Europe, who after World War II were returned to Germany, partly through the Marshall Plan. Both sides received hefty sums of money and were told: take compensation and let’s move on,” Barda says.
“Israel took in refugees from Arab countries and didn’t perpetuate their status by giving them any different status [here]. Arab counties didn’t do that – even though it was clear that the Americans had given them the money so they could feed the refugees, develop agriculture, provide housing and employment for them – in addition to the aid that was transferred directly to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.
US President Trump ends funding to UNRWA after Palestinian kleptocrat Abbas refused to negotiate peace.- Wikimedia
“If today [U.S. President] Donald Trump really wants to make a move toward creating a mechanism of compensation for the refugees, particularly with Jordan, where most of them live, he can take into account that any additional compensation will in effect be superfluous. This story could be a very powerful card to play, as Jordan and other countries have already received money to take in refugees,” Barda says.
The documents Barda found in Kenen’s archive show that just before the aid plan was passed, another obstacle popped up. A congressman from South Carolina put together a coalition to block any aid to Israel. After returning from a tour of Jericho, Gaza and Jerusalem, where he witnessed the distress of the Palestinian refugees, he decided that there was no reason to send American aid to Israel. Nevertheless, his gambit failed, and the bill passed in the House of Representatives in a vote of 146:65. The decision to bundle American aid to Israel in with aid to Arab states turned out to be the right one. The aid bill passed in the Senate, as well, and became law.
An exclusive agency for the Palestinians
Only a few days before the law passed, Deputy Secretary of State George McGhee addressed the Senate and told legislators that the regional economic plan included three parts: direct aid to Arab countries, direct aid to Israel, and helping the U.N. coordinate the matter of refugees from Arab countries.
Barda says that this is exactly the idea Kenen was pushing for in the first place.
“UNRWA was established in 1949, started operating in 1950, and in 1960 declared that its work was done. But then, under pressure from Arab countries, it was decided to extend its mandate. It’s a unique organization because there is a high commission in the U.N. that deals with refugees from all over the world, and a special authority established to handle only the Palestinian issue. On the other hand, no one established any agency for Jewish refugees in Israel.
“The American aid plan rebalances the historical narrative. The U.S. undertook to pay both sides to put an end to the refugee issue. Israel also played a part in the equation. There was drama the entire time it took to get the aid approved, which was the first U.S. foreign aid to Israel. They were always trying to cut down the amount. This story doesn’t exist in history books. In contemporary journalism, it is mentioned offhand. Kenen’s archive opened my eyes and let me see the full picture and understand what happened and why it provides us with a lot of armor,” Barda says.
British Jews protesting in London against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Photo: antisemitism.uk
The stakes have never been higher for the Jewish community in the UK. British Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s relentless obsession with Israel has created a dangerous climate of apathy towards antisemitism in the country. The problem is serious enough that nearly 40 percent of British Jews would “seriously consider” emigrating if he ever became prime minister.
Corbyn, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, has given rise to a discourse that fails to distinguish between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israel. All lines have been blurred.
The Corbyn effect has shaken British Jewry to its core, with an impact felt far beyond the borders of Britain. The rhetoric deployed by Corbyn and his supporters is remarkably similar to language used by groups and individuals that disseminate antisemitic narratives to isolate and demonize Israel in the global arena.
Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 and the Durban Conference of 2001, organized movements around the world have promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The boycotters openly advocate for a full Palestinian right of return — from the river to the sea — which is code for a one-state solution that does not include Jews.
In the ongoing train wreck that is the New York Times coverage of Orthodox Jewish schools in New York comes...
“The Holocaust has been employed shamelessly by Israel. The extermination of European Jewry is the principal argument that is used to justify the creation of the State of Israel,” former Labour activist Tony Greenstein wrote in an article for a website that supports the BDS campaign against Israel.
This mindset resonates in Corbyn’s circles. Mark Serwotka, a senior union boss and close ally of the Labour leader, last week charged that Israel created the antisemitism issue — “a story that does not exist” — in order to distract attention from its “atrocities” against Palestinians.
And then there is Corbyn’s own flirtation with antisemitism. At a 2013 event hosted by the Palestinian Return Centre, he compared Israel to the Nazis, and a year later, he participated in a controversial wreath-laying ceremony in Tunisia at the grave of a terrorist behind the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich.
The Labour leader also claimed that British-born Jews are not fully English. Zionists, Corbyn said, “clearly have two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.” Additionally, activist Ewa Jasiewicz, who desecrated the walls of the Warsaw ghetto with “Free Gaza and Palestine” graffiti, was described by Corbyn as “a very good friend.”
The Corbyn effect has pushed extreme anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments from the obscure fringes of the political spectrum into the mainstream. Unfortunately, it’s also a phenomenon not unique to Britain.
The virus has already reached the shores of the United States.
The BDS campaign has taken American institutions of higher education by storm. Earlier this month, it emerged that professor John Cheney-Lippold of the American Culture Department at the University of Michigan refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student because she would be studying abroad in Israel.
As a life-long Democrat, I am alarmed that antisemitism appears to be no longer a marginal phenomenon on the Left, and that candidates espousing such views are climbing the ranks within a party that, historically, has been the natural political home of Jews.
Take, for example, Linda Sarsour, the Palestinian activist and famed leader of the Women’s March, who asked Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis, and charged that there’s no room in the feminist movement for those who support Israel’s right to exist. Imagine if Sarsour had made those comments about any other minority. The Left would be up in arms.
But because Jews are increasingly seen as persona non grata among America’s Left, Sarsour is celebrated as a heroine of the progressive movement, while her fellow Women’s March leader, Tamika Mallory, shamelessly embraces the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan. That’s not progressive; that’s fascist.
There was a similar incident last year, when organizers of the Chicago Dyke March excluded Jewish participants for no other reason than they were carrying a Pride flag emblazoned with a Jewish Star, which the organizers claimed “made people feel unsafe.”
The Jeremy Corbyns of Britain and Linda Sarsours of America are intellectual soulmates, who — with the help of the global boycott movement — advocate for the isolation and, in my view, ultimately the total annihilation of the Jewish state. That’s where Labour’s antisemitism scandal comes full circle.
What’s happening in Britain should be heeded as a warning of what is yet to come. It allows us to study, reject, and counter these views and their holders — a process that hopefully results in their marginalization to the extreme fringes where they belong.
Joshua S. Block is CEO and President of The Israel Project. He is a former Clinton administration official and spokesman at the State Department’s USAID.
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