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Jewish Journal

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July 31, 2014

Israeli tourists evacuated from Maldives

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Israeli tourists in the Maldives had to be evacuated from the island nation after an Israeli surfer removed an anti-Israel sign placed outside a guest house.

The tourists were evacuated earlier this week from Kaafu Thulusdhoo Island by security services after protesters on the island called for their removal and protesters from other places began converging on the island, according to minivannews.com.

The sign, outside a guest house owned by Mohamed Hashim, featured a swastika next to an Israeli flag. The tourist ripped it in half, according to the report. Hashim told the news service that about 60 percent of the bookings in his guest house are Israelis.

Following the evacuation of the tourists, a protest was held in the Maldives capital of Male, during which an Israeli flag was burned. The protest follows a pro-Palestinian protest held earlier this month in Male, attended by about 13,000 people.

Maldives, which resumed diplomatic relations with Israel in 2009, last week annulled all cooperation agreements signed with Israel and announced a boycott of Israeli products.

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Leaving Congo One Day

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Diana Buckhantz, JWW Board Member, is traveling with four other JWW delegates in Congo’s eastern provinces. They will work with survivors of the country’s decades-long conflict, which has claimed nearly six millions lives. They will meet with JWW’s partners on the ground, with whom JWW works to create innovative programs and projects that change lives and transform communities.

***

Here are just a few astounding things that I learned about Congo this evening: Congo's minerals are worth close to $30 trillion; Congo is home to the world's second largest rain forest; 54% of Africa's fresh water is in Congo; and Congo has 120 million hectares of farmable land, which could feed 2 billion people. Congo’s incredible beauty is legendary – and it’s home to the same gorillas that drive a large number of tourists to Rwanda. Given its natural resources, Congo should be one of the world's richest countries. Instead, it has no infrastructure, very poor healthcare, 48% illiteracy, and extreme poverty.

Many things have contributed to Congo’s woes. The country’s constant conflict and the instability of its regional neighborhood have brought destruction to people, property, and the Congolese economy for decades. At the same time, the government and the international corporations who operate with little regulation in Congo have used the country’s resources in way that has done very little to benefit its people.

Tonight, over dinner with our partner from the Enough Project, Fidel Bafilemba, we discussed how things are beginning to shift. Fidel, among other things, does research on how the UN Joint Missions Analysis Center works in the field to certify conflict-free mines in Congo. We are seeing a remarkable change lately, and this is in large part a result of international pressure and greater regulation from the Dodd-Frank legislation, which requires U.S. companies to trace and audit their mineral supply chains, and determine whether the minerals they purchase come from conflict zones in Congo. As a result of the advocacy work of JWW and its partners in the United States and around the world, 67% of the 500 most important mines in the Kivus – the DRC’s most important mining region – are conflict-free. JWW has been at the forefront of the movement to make that possible.

Given this progress, accountability is taking on another meaning in Congo. Fidel and others have argued that international organizations should be coming into Congo with an exit strategy, with the intention of empowering community-based, Congolese organizations and individuals to take over their work.

It is not enough to simply throw aid at Congo. International organizations must support the efforts of local individuals to develop and run the programs that they know will benefit their communities. That is what it will take to create a middle class – and close the disparity between the haves and have nots in Congo. I’m proud of the work that our JWW Grantmaking Committee has done to ensure that our projects here in Congo work with effective, community-based organizations. By investing in local leadership, we can truly help to move whole communities forward.

Fidel thinks we all need to work together to promote, foster, and deepen the talent and resources of the Congolese people – and move away from a perspective where all of Congo’s woes are blamed on the devastating legacy of the Belgians or the whims of the international community. Jewish World Watch has met and partnered with so many of these phenomenal individuals — men and women who are working hard to rebuild their country and bring Congo the many riches that it so deserves. We will continue to support them so that one day our support will no longer be needed here.
 

Leaving Congo One Day Read More »

Genesis Philanthropy Group names Ilia Salita as new CEO

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Ilia Salita was appointed the new CEO of the Genesis Philanthropy Group, which funds Jewish identity-building efforts for Russian-speaking Jews around the world.

The Genesis Philanthropy Group is a consortium launched by wealthy Jewish businessmen from the former Soviet Union, including Mikhail Fridman, Pyotr Aven and German Khan.

“We are confident that Genesis Philanthropy Group’s management team under the leadership of Ilia Salita will expand and deepen the organization’s impact on Russian-speaking Jewish communities around the world,” Fridman, co-founder of Genesis Philanthropy Group, said in a statement released Thursday.

Salita is currently the organization’s North American executive director. He replaces co-founder Stan Polovets, who has served as the group’s CEO since its founding seven years ago.

“I look forward to working with our exceptional team, our partners, our grantees and our constituency – the multilingual and multicultural Russian-Jewish community around the world – in ensuring that this community is an integral part of the wider Jewish landscape and a vibrant contributor to a successful and innovative Jewish future,” Salita said.

In 2012, the Genesis Philanthropy Group started the Genesis Prize Foundation, a separate entity that awards an annual $1 million prize to an inspiring Jewish individual. Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire, accpeted the inaugural Genesis Prize at a ceremony in Jerusalem earlier this year.

Polovets will continue to serve as the prize foundation’s chairman and CEO and will oversee a number of new initiatives for the prize, planned together with Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Genesis Philanthropy Group names Ilia Salita as new CEO Read More »

Israel calls up 16,000 more reservists

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Israel called up 16,000 extra reservists at short notice as its Gaza offensive intensifies and the death toll rises. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's security cabinet approved continuing the assault saying it was days from achieving its goal of destroying cross border attack tunnels.

Gaza officials said at more than 1,300 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed, stoking international alarm. Israel has lost 56 soldiers.

Despite evacuation warnings, rolling Israeli ground assaults on residential areas have displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel says it is trying to avoid civilian casualties and blames these on Hamas and other Palestinian factions intent on urban combat.

Israel calls up 16,000 more reservists Read More »

U.S. sells munitions to Israel from its surplus stockpile

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The U.S. Defense Department sold to Israel munitions from its Israel-based surplus stockpile.

“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said in an email Thursday to JTA. “This defense sale is consistent with those objectives.”

The weapons released were 120mm tank rounds and 40mm illumination rounds. Israel made the request July 20, which was 12 days after the launch of the current Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip. The items were released on July 23.

Kirby in his email noted that White House approval is not required for the sale of munitions in the Israel-based stockpile.

U.S. defense assistance to Israel has for years included the existence of a stockpile in the country of surplus U.S. weapons available for expedited sale to Israel.

Separately, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in a phone call with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon repeated U.S. calls for a humanitarian cease-fire.

“Hagel called for the cease-fire and expressed concern about the rising number of Palestinian civilian deaths as well as the loss of Israeli lives,” said a statement by Kirby describing the phone call on Wednesday. “Hagel also reiterated U.S. support for Israel’s security and its right to self defense and said that any process to resolve the crisis in Gaza in a lasting and meaningful way must lead to the disarmament of Hamas and all terrorist groups.”

U.S. sells munitions to Israel from its surplus stockpile Read More »

Thousands attend pro-Israel rally in Paris

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Thousands of people attended France’s largest pro-Israel rally since the launch of the Israel Defense Forces’ offensive in Gaza.

The crowd, estimated by police at 8,000, gathered near Israel’s embassy in Paris’ 8th Arrondissement under heavy police guard Thursday, shouting “long live Israel” and singing the French and Israeli anthems while waving both countries’ flags.

The gathering Thursday was the first time that CRIF, the umbrella organization representing French Jewish groups and communities, convened a large event in support of the Jewish state since the launch on July 8 of the IDF’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas.

Paris has seen dozens of anti-Semitic incidents since then, both during and after unauthorized protests against Israel. Nine synagogues have been targeted.

Organizers warned protesters in fliers handed out at the rally not to respond to “provocations by counter demonstrators.”

Titled “Rally of Friends of Israel,” the gathering’s main message was that Israel has a right to defend itself, according to the organizers.

The gathering was held “because we affirm that Israel has a right to defend itself against blind attacks against its population,” organizers wrote, and “because Hamas is a terrorist group that has taken the Palestinian population hostage.”

Serge Salfati, a leader of the far-right Jewish Defense League of France criticized CRIF’s decision to hold the rally, at the police’s recommendation and for safety reasons, inside a confined space instead of outside at a march.

“When pro-Palestinians march against the law and against Israel, I am supposed to be confined away from the public eye three weeks too late, and am being deprived my right to march,” he said in explaining his decision not to attend.

The French Jewish Defense League was nonetheless represented at the rally, Salfati said.

Thousands attend pro-Israel rally in Paris Read More »

Rockets Launched Behind Journalist During Gaza Coverage

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While reporting live from Gaza, Hamas recklessly fires a rocket behind a France 24 journalist.

Rockets Launched Behind Journalist During Gaza Coverage Read More »

Ayelet Waldman’s new book is more than a Holocaust novel

Leave a Comment / Books, Culture /

I devoured all 331 pages of Ayelet Waldman’s gripping and powerful novel, “Love and Treasure” (Alfred A. Knopf) in one 14-hour marathon on my flight from Los Angeles to Israel. Before the El Al plane made its descent into Ben Gurion Airport, I began this review with Waldman’s interview with Carolyn Kellogg for The Los Angeles Times in which Waldman muses that “people who read me expecting they’re going to get in-your-face sassy funny” might be “a little taken aback,” after reading “Love and Treasure.”   In her fantasy, Waldman adds, “People who read me thinking that then think, ‘Oh wow, she can really write.”  

Well, Ms. Waldman, you can really write, and write brilliantly.

Two weeks later, on my way to catch a flight back home to Los Angeles, the tragic news of the discovery of the bodies of Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frenkel, the young Israeli boys kidnapped on June 12, was announced on the radio, and I decided to start this review again, this time with one of the many complicated historical subjects Waldman tackles in her novel: the importance of the existence of the State of Israel to every Jew around the world.  (Readers may choose their preferred opening.)

In one of the most poignant scenes in “Love and Treasure,” we are told that 18,700 of the 19,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, who planned to immigrate to Palestine and had to fill out a questionnaire, listed Palestine as their first and second choice.  Not only that, but in the Furth displaced persons (DP) camp near Nuremberg, when a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration worker said “they must put a different destination for their second choice, a quarter of the DPs filled in the word ‘crematorium.’ ” 

Today, more than 70 years after Hitler unleashed his wrath on European Jews, anti-Semitism is on the rise again in France, so much so that the number of French immigrants to Israel is at a record high.  What then, one can’t help but wonder, would have happened to Jews around the world if the might of the Israeli army did not exist as a deterrent?

The story moves seamlessly from 2013 in Maine, to March 1938, when Hitler invaded Austria, to 1945, and back to 2013 in Budapest and Israel, unfolding against the backdrop of monumental historical events that changed the face of Europe and hastened the creation of the State of Israel.  

In 1945, after World War II, at the outskirts of Salzburg, Austria, Jack Wiseman, an American lieutenant, is ordered to guard the Hungarian Gold Train filled with crates of personal belongings — silverware, china, sheets, watches, fur coats, wedding rings, coins — confiscated from Hungarian Jews who perished in concentration camps. As anyone who has visited Yad Vashem in Israel or the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., can attest, coming face to face with such personal belongings, such as a single red, rhinestone-buckled evening shoe among a mountain of dark-colored shoes, is a heart-wrenching experience.  Was the owner of the red, satin shoe on her way to the opera when the Gestapo descended on her?  One such a personal item, an enamel pendant in the shape of a peacock — a symbol of bad luck — is at the center of Waldman’s novel that brings a cast of disparate characters together to retell history in a fresh and engaging manner.

While on duty listing the train’s cargo, Jack falls in love with Ilona Jakab, a Hungarian refugee and survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau.  The tormented, but still passionate Ilona, succeeds to tease out Jack’s connection to his heritage and make it difficult for him to keep silent as his superiors go about borrowing all types of objects from the train for their personal use, never to be returned.  Jack himself, though, in hope of securing something to remind him of Ilona, steals the peacock pendant from the train.

Sixty-eight years later, in 2013, the dying Jack returns home to Maine.  He recounts to his granddaughter, Natalie, the story of his youth in the army after the war, his love for Ilona and how he came to own the peacock pendant.  Plagued by guilt, Jack extracts a promise from Natalie to return the pendant to its rightful owner.  In her quest to honor her grandfather’s request, Natalie, who is reeling from a recent divorce, meets Amitai Shasho, an Israeli art dealer who hunts for stolen paintings, returning them to their previous owners in exchange for a substantial commission. Amitai, who has been searching for a Hungarian painting of a woman with the head of a peacock, agrees to help Natalie trace the pendant to its owner.

After much traveling and tremendous research, Natalie and Amitai manage to connect the pendant to Nina S., a defiant intellectual, and her friend, Gizella Weisz, a suffragist dwarf, living in Budapest during World War I, at a time Jews were highly assimilated into the culture.  But whom does the pendant belong to if the heirs are long gone?

It would be a mistake to call “Love and Treasure” a Holocaust novel, although it is that, too.  More than anything, this is a tale of hope and the unbreakable spirit of a people, the transformative power of love and the miracle of the birth of Eretz Israel.

Ayelet Waldman’s new book is more than a Holocaust novel Read More »

Israel, Palestinians locked in vicious circle of Gaza wars

Leave a Comment / Israel /

When Israel ended its 38-year occupation of the Gaza Strip by withdrawing settlers in 2005, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hailed it as a “disengagement” from conflict with Palestinians in the densely populated coastal enclave.

But the conflict did not end, it only changed.

Israel kept expanding settlements in the West Bank where the Palestinians also seek a state. Hardline Islamists seized control of Gaza in 2007 and periodic U.S. efforts to broker a permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority under secular President Mahmoud Abbas have proved fruitless.

In the diplomatic vacuum, confrontation has festered.

Israel sealed Gaza in an economically choking blockade and the territory's ruling Hamas movement and other militant factions fired rockets with increasing frequency and range, though not accuracy, into the Jewish state.


A rocket is launched from the northern Gaza Strip towards Israel. Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters

Israel in turn has bombarded Gaza countless times from the air and sent in armored columns on occasion to ferret out and destroy rocket batteries and tunnels used to smuggle in arms from Egypt or infiltrate Israel for guerrilla ambushes.

Mediated ceasefires under which Israel pulled out forces and rocket fire abated brought periods of relative calm, only for the two sides to relapse into bouts of bloodshed.

Conflict management has won out over peacemaking.

Israel's current Gaza incursion, in which it aims to cripple the Hamas rocket and tunnel threat before Western opprobrium over a soaring Palestinian civilian death toll boils over and forces it to pull back, echoes past offensives since 2007.


An Israeli army officer in a tunnel said to be used by Palestinian militants for cross-border attacks. Photo by Jack Guez/Reuters

At least 1,410 Palestinians had been killed in three weeks, mostly civilians in packed urban areas hammered by Israeli air strikes and shelling. The scale of destruction of Palestinian housing and infrastructure is greater than in past offensives.

Israel has lost 56 soldiers and three civilians who were hit by crashing rockets launched over the Gaza border.

As in previous Gaza wars, the toll of death and destruction has been lopsided because of Israel's huge superiority in state-of-the-art firepower and its Iron Dome missile defense shield, which has shot down most rockets streaking toward its cities.

But the broader strategic environment has changed, making it harder to prod Israel and Hamas into downing their weaponry.


An Iron Dome launcher fires an interceptor rocket in southern Israel on July 8. Photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters

Hamas feels cornered by its rift with Syria, cooler ties with Iran and the toppling of its Muslim Brotherhood patrons in Egypt. Israel, having spurned U.S. peacemaking efforts as ties with Washington turned frostier than for many years, has vowed a long battle if necessary to neutralize its Gaza adversary.

Unlike in the 2008-09 Gaza war, there has been no serious world pressure – beyond mild rebukes and U.N. remonstrations – to end the hostilities. The United States and the main European countries have underlined “Israel's right to defend itself.”

Major powers are distracted and divided by other crises over Russia's role in Ukraine, reawakening old Cold War antagonisms, and the stunning advance of jihadi insurgents in Iraq and Syria.

Middle East power brokers are polarized over how to stop the region's descent into disorder after “Arab Spring” revolts that overthrew long stable autocratic regimes.

Gaza truce talks are further complicated by the fact that Israel and the United States ostracize Hamas as a designated terrorist group that refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist, while the intermediaries – Egypt, Qatar and Turkey – disagree over how much leeway to grant to Islamists.

Following is a comparison of the current Gaza conflict with two previous major outbreaks of war since 2007.

DECEMBER 2008-JANUARY 2009


An Israeli shell hit a UN school in Beit Lahia on Sept. 27, 2009 according to Human Rights Watch.

In what became the most deadly and destructive conflict over Gaza since Israel captured the wedge of territory in the 1967 Middle East war, the Israelis launched air strikes and artillery barrages on Dec. 27 and invaded with tanks and troops on Jan. 3.

The stated goal was to stop Islamist rocket fire into Israel and destroy cross-border tunnels used by militants to smuggle in arms from Egypt and stage ambushes inside the Jewish state.

The Palestinian death toll was 1,417, more than half of them civilians. Thirteen Israelis, 10 of them soldiers, were killed.

Israeli forces targeted Hamas bases, training camps and security premises. Civilian infrastructure including mosques, houses, medical centers and schools were also hit as alleged militant hideouts. Hamas rocket salvoes reached farther than before, hitting cities like Beersheba and Ashdod.

Israel declared a unilateral truce on Jan. 17 and Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other smaller militant factions followed suit a day later. The last Israeli forces left Gaza on Jan. 21.

Both sides claimed victory. Rocket fire from Gaza was reduced, though not eliminated. Israel's reputation, however, took a heavy hit with widespread criticism of the large number of civilian casualties and severe damage to Gaza infrastructure.


Hamas deployment in Gaza City in 2009. Photo from Official Publications by the State of Israel.

A U.N. fact-finding mission led by South African judge Richard Goldstone accused both Israel and Gaza militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity over alleged targeting of civilians and using them as human shields.

Israel refused to cooperate with the inquiry and denounced its conclusions as biased and flawed.

NOVEMBER 2012

Israeli forces stormed into Gaza on Nov. 14 after tit-for-tat clashes including an ambush of an Israeli border patrol and the killing of Hamas's military commander in an air strike.

A U.N. Human Rights Council report said 174 Palestinians were killed in three weeks of fighting, 107 of them civilians. Six Israelis were killed, four of them civilians in rocket fire on towns near the Gaza frontier.


An Israeli Iron Dome intercepts a rocket on Nov. 17, 2012. Photo by Emanuel Yellin

The Israeli military said it hit more than 1,500 rocket launchpads, weapons depots, Hamas government premises and other targets in Gaza. Hamas and its allies fired rockets at Tel Aviv, putting Israel's main city under air attack for the first time since 1991, when Saddam Hussein's Iraq fired Scud missiles.

Israel said over 400 rockets were intercepted by its Iron Dome shield. Many others landed in uninhabited areas.

A cease-fire was struck on Nov. 21, brokered by Egypt and the United States. Both sides, again, claimed victory. Israel said it had crippled Hamas's rocket-launching ability while Hamas said Israel's option of invading Gaza had ended.

JULY 2014

This year's war was triggered by events outside Gaza. Three Jewish seminary students kidnapped while hitch-hiking in the West Bank were found murdered. Israel blamed Hamas and rounded up hundreds of suspects. In revenge, Israelis abducted a Palestinian youth, killed him and burnt his body.


Teens murdered in Israel, from left: Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frankel and Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir

Palestinian protesters battled Israeli security police in Jerusalem and the West Bank, Gaza militants intensified rocket fire into Israel – and the war was on.

Israel began by bombarding Gaza targets, launching a ground offensive a week later when Hamas refused to stop firing.

Ground assaults on residential areas, preceded by warnings to evacuate, displaced more than 200,000 of Gaza's 1.8 million Palestinians. Power and water supplies were crippled.

As before, controversy erupted over alleged indiscriminate Israeli barrages that killed entire families in their homes and hit two schools run by the U.N. refugee agency UNRWA, killing dozens of Palestinians in designated shelters.


Palestinians near a damaged classroom on July 30. Photo by Suhaib Salem/Reuters

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the carnage at the schools. U.N. officials in Gaza reported finding caches of rockets inside three other UNRWA schools.

As in the past, Israel said its forces did their utmost to avoid civilian casualties and accused Hamas of putting its people in harm's way by waging combat in their midst.

The United States and the U.N. Security Council have urged an immediate, unconditional ceasefire to allow humanitarian relief and talks on a durable cessation of hostilities.

The shelling of a U.N. facility in Gaza this week by the Israeli military is “totally unacceptable and totally indefensible” and Israel needs to do more to protect innocent civilians, a White House spokesman said on Thursday.

The Obama administration, however, has allowed Israel to tap a local U.S. arms stockpile to replenish grenade and mortar stocks depleted during its offensive, U.S. officials said.


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, left, in Tel Aviv on July 28. Photo by Nir Elias/Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday he would accept no truce that stopped Israel completing the destruction of militants' infiltration tunnels.

Both sides are setting truce terms harder to reconcile than in the past. Israel wants Gaza “demilitarized”, although that would be hard to enforce barring an indefinite re-occupation of the territory. Hamas is demanding an end to the Gaza blockade and the release of prisoners seized in the West Bank.

Editing by Paul Taylor

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