June 27, 2020

After nearly four years of litigation, the National Lawyers Guild—a nonprofit organization that purports to be a storied network of human-rights activists—succumbed to pressure to settle a lawsuit that, ironically, stemmed from the Guild’s flagrant violation of long-existing human-rights laws. The settlement is a watershed moment for Israeli and Jewish civil and human rights. It represents a harsh blow to the BDS campaign to economically isolate Israelis and the Jewish state (i.e., to discriminate in commercial activities based on national origin).

The Guild, which has chapters across the United States, has long been a staunch adherent of this hateful campaign. The Guild specifically cited its support for BDS, which outwardly calls for violations of human rights and anti-discrimination law, in the very organizational policy that resulted in legal action. The lawsuit was filed by David Abrams, executive director of the Zionist Advocacy Center, represented pro bono by the Lawfare Project, a New York-based legal think tank and litigation fund dedicated to enforcing the rights of the Jewish people worldwide.

The lawsuit arose in 2016, after Bibliotechnical Athenaeum, an Israeli company, sought to purchase ad space in the Guild’s annual gala “dinner journal,” an offering open to the public at large without restriction.

Shortly after paying the $200 fee, Bibliotechnical received an e-mail, signed by the Guild’s National Office, informing that the sale would not be completed because the Guild had an organizational resolution barring it from accepting funds from Israelis. In other words, this self-proclaimed champion of human rights refused to do business with another party purely because of the latter’s national origin.

Such a refusal is explicitly forbidden under the New York State Human Rights Law (and nearly identical New York City law), enacted in 1976 in response to boycotts of Jewish businesses related to the Arab League Boycott of Israel. Under these laws, it is unlawful to boycott, refuse to buy from sell to or otherwise discriminate against anyone based on national origin, just as it would be illegal to discriminate against anyone based on race, religion or other protected statuses.

In a major victory for Israelis and the American-Jewish community, the Guild committed itself in the legally binding settlement to refrain from this discrimination in any of its activities. It also affirmed that no existing or future organizational resolutions are to be interpreted as to require discrimination against Israelis.

Moreover, as a demonstration of its newfound dedication to compliance with the applicable laws, the Guild agreed to break its own boycott by selling ad space to Bibliotechnical in its next dinner journal or equivalent publication.

While the Guild and its members are entitled to freedom of speech, they can never again act in furtherance of this unlawful boycott, lest they find themselves back in court.

Benjamin Ryberg is Chief Operating Officer and director of research at The Lawfare Project.

Over recent weeks, the United Arab Emirates flew two commercial flights into Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, loaded with medical supplies to help the Palestinians fight COVID-19.

The Palestinian Authority rejected both deliveries, because they considered the UAE flights a step toward “normalization” with the Zionists. Which they were. But the purpose of the flights was to save Palestinian Arab lives.

This contradiction symbolizes a sea change in Israel’s—and the Palestinians’—relationship with leading Arab nations.

On one hand, Israel’s patient, below-the-radar nurturing over the last decade of diplomatic relations with key Arab states is starting to bear fruit. This, combined with profound shifts in the geopolitical landscape, has given the Arabs powerful, practical reasons to seek closer ties to the Jewish state.

At the same time, Palestinian leadership is suffering a deterioration of support among Arab states. Arabs are losing patience with the P.A.’s spiteful refusal to negotiate with Israel, their failure to reconcile with the Hamas government in Gaza, their new-found friendship with arch-enemy Iran and their waste of billions of dollars in Arab aid with no economic or political progress to show for it.

Israel’s cooperation and communications with the leadership of eight Arab nations—the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Morocco, Bahrain and Sudan—is greater than ever. However, despite increased warmth, none of these countries is yet ready to forge a formal alliance with Israel. Nor are their “streets” yet remotely sympathetic to the Zionist cause.

Nonetheless, numerous gestures by Arab political and thought leaders strengthen Israel’s standing in the court of world opinion, and slowly, even on the Arab street:

• Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE encouraged Palestinian leaders to embrace the Trump peace plan as a foundation for new talks with Israel—understanding that such a move would almost surely force them to accept Israel’s application of sovereignty to significant portions of Judea and Samaria.

• Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev visited Oman in 2018, and the two nations have had cordial ties back to 1994, giving Oman the opportunity to serve as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.

• Bound by a peace treaty, Egypt and Israel share a close relationship, coordinating air strikes against Al-Qaeda affiliates in northern Sinai, as well as Palestinians’ transit between Egypt and Gaza.

• Also linked by a peace treaty, Jordan depends on Israel for water and security, particularly from the Palestinians, who pose a constant threat since 80 percent of Jordan’s population is Palestinian. Jordan has said it does not want a Palestinian military presence on its border. Further, a Jordanian official recently asserted “We have no interest or intention of damaging our security relations with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians.”

• In January 2020, Morocco’s military signed a deal for three Israeli drones at a price of $48 million.

• After Israel launched military strikes in 2019 against Iran in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, Bahrain’s foreign minister in 2019 came to Israel’s defense, noting that “one who strikes and destroys [Iran’s] piles of ammunition is not to blame. This is self-defense.”

• In February 2020, Netanyahu met with Sudan’s transitional council leader in a two-hour secret meeting in Uganda, agreeing “to start cooperation leading to normalization of the relationship between the two countries.’

On the other side, the Palestinians have continued their obstinacy regarding negotiations with Israel. They’ve refused any talks at all since 2014, and currently also refuse to speak to the United States, which earlier this year mounted a major initiative to bring Israel and the Palestinians to the table.

Both Palestinian governments—in Ramallah and Gaza—remain at bitter odds, an internecine conflict now in its 14th year.

What’s worse, both Palestinian groups have active outreach, diplomacy and aid deals with Iran. Since the Islamic Republic is considered enemy number one by Arab Gulf states and the West, these Palestinian flirtations threaten relationships with their Arab brethren, the U.S. government, members of Congress and even member states of the European Union.

As tensions escalate dangerously between Iran and the United States, Europeans, Arab Gulf states and Israel, the greatest geopolitical threat to all the parties is a spark that could ignite a costly, destructive regional war. Concern about the Palestinians’ self-inflicted failure to achieve independence ranks miles behind this world-class conundrum.

What’s more, the recent U.S. peace plan offers a vision of cooperation between the Gulf states, Israel and America—not only to solve the “Palestinian problem,” but also to set the stage for economic and military collaboration between Israel and the Arab nations. This vision has a goal of both mutual protection among the parties, but also of greater economic diversity and prosperity for the Jewish and Arab states.

While the Arab Gulf nations and Israel seem poised to profit from this new alignment of forces and interests, the Palestinians are teetering on the brink of economic bankruptcy and political isolation.

Absent humble and heroic peace overtures from the Palestinian Arabs—which today seem like a fantasy—it’s hard to imagine that the hopelessly splintered Palestinian factions will make any progress toward their putative goal of independence, let alone their obsessive dream of destroying Israel.

James Sinkinson is President of Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States.

The great English novelist George Eliot once wrote: “But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

Recent days have seen the release of two very interesting polls on Palestinian attitudes regarding a myriad of issues regarding the conflict with Israel, especially relating to the anticipated application of Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria.

Both polls, one conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) and the other by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, paint a picture of Palestinian despair.

According to the PSR survey, a large plurality of Palestinian respondents do not think that Jordan, Egypt or Europe will take any meaningful steps against Israel in response to its application of sovereignty, while 78 percent do not expect Arab countries in the Gulf to end normalization measures with Israel.

Furthermore, very high percentages of Palestinians believe the consequences of the Israeli application of sovereignty beyond the Green Line, the armistice line created by Jordanian and Israeli negotiators in 1949, will be dire for them.

Seventy-three percent say they are worried that people will not be able to travel from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank or Israel for medical treatment, while 70 percent are worried that they will soon witness shortages or a complete cut-off of supplies of water and electricity from Israel. Sixty-five percent are worried that armed clashes will erupt with Israel. Another 65 percent are worried that the Palestinian Authority will collapse or fail to deliver services. Finally, 63 percent are worried that security chaos and anarchy will return to Palestinian life.

These results demonstrate a population in despair.

The Washington Institute’s surveys have been taking the pulse of Palestinian society for ten years now. In the past six years, Palestinian acceptance of the principle of “two states for two peoples—the Palestinian people and the Jewish people,” has massively eroded. In 2014 43 percent of the Palestinian population definitely or probably accepted this international standard for an end to the conflict, while today only nine percent do. A full 67 percent of the Palestinian population definitely reject this formula for a resolution to the long-standing conflict.

Taken together, these surveys actually might offer a glimmer of hope to those who wish to see the conflict finally ended.

Historically, wars and conflicts have ended when one side gives up and understands it will not be able to achieve its war aims.

Historically, wars and conflicts have ended when one side gives up and understands it will not be able to achieve its war aims.

The Israel-Palestinian conflict began in earnest over a century ago, before there was one Israeli foot in Judea and Samaria and even before the State of Israel was established in 1948.

The bloody conflict began in the early part of the 20th century when the Jewish people’s national liberation movement began to pick up momentum and achieve international legal, diplomatic and political successes. The Palestinian leadership reacted with a strategy of violent rejectionism and upheld a maximalist position that it would not countenance any reestablishment of sovereignty in the indigenous and ancestral land of the Jewish people.

The conflict was not about land because the Jews had none, and not about power and control because the Jews remained a largely subjugated and marginalized community, as opposed to the Arab community which had direct access to the colonial powers, whether Ottoman or British.

Unfortunately, violent Arab rejectionism to the Jewish people’s legal, historical and moral right to return as a state among the family of nations did not abate with time or reality. While a Palestinian state was offered on the vast majority of all of the territory of Mandatory Palestine in 1937 and by the international community in 1947, the reaction was more violence and rejection.

The Palestinian leadership has continued to reject any peaceful resolution to the conflict, as long as their goals remain intact.

In recent years, as opposed to the strongly held views of many in the West, the Palestinian leadership has continued to reject any peaceful resolution to the conflict, as long as their goals remain intact.

In 2001 and 2008, successive Israeli prime ministers offered a Palestinian state in all, or almost all, of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as a division of Jerusalem and control of the holy sites. These overly generous offers were rejected out of hand, even though they constituted full Israeli agreement to almost every ostensible Palestinian demand.

However, in 2008, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas gave an indication as to what the conflict was really about when he walked away from negotiations, even as the offer sat on the proverbial table, because he would have to sign end-of-claims and end-of-conflict clauses in any final status agreement.

In other words, this was never about territory, borders, settlements or Jerusalem. It was about recognizing the permanence of the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish People.

In 2014, Abbas said he would in “no way” ever recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

It is clear that this absolutist position has influenced a steadily increasing rejectionism among his population in the intervening years, as the poll by the Washington Institute indicates. Palestinians have demonstrated that they would rather not have a state than have to recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state.

This obviously means that there is little hope for the “two states for two peoples” formula, used by every president, both Democrat and Republican, for decades, to end the conflict.

This was true when Israel made generous offers and when it made substantial concessions, like disengaging from Gaza, freezing the building of settlements and releasing Palestinian terrorists from its prisons.

However, perhaps despair will succeed where promise and compromise failed.

Perhaps the idea of Israel applying its sovereignty to territory that the Palestinians have long seen as theirs will finally break their will to continue fighting, to violently resist a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and finally bring them back to negotiations.

Perhaps the idea of Israel applying its sovereignty to territory that the Palestinians have long seen as theirs will finally break their will to continue fighting, to violently resist a peaceful resolution to the conflict, and finally bring them back to negotiations.

As Eliot noted, despair can be the painful eagerness of unfed hope. It might be time to feed this hope through a prism of despair that finally convinces the Palestinians that the end of the conflict is in their best interests and that the longer they continue to resist it, the more painful the process will be.

Nave Dromi is an Israeli commentator and director of the Middle East Forum’s Israel office.

It turns out The New York Times has lower standards when it comes to those who spread anti-Semitic canards than even Britain’s controversial Labour Party. Tweeting an anti-Semitic blood libel about Israel being responsible for teaching American cops the tactics that led to the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer led to the firing of a member of parliament from the opposition party’s leadership. Yet tweeting a similar lie about Israel training American cops to commit human-rights abuses was no bar to a journalist being hired this month to be one of the American newspaper of record’s top editors.

The fate of the two figures in question—Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey and Charlotte Greensit, the Times’s new managing editor of its Opinion section—does indicate that Britain’s opposition party may be serious about wanting to change course after becoming a home to Jew-hatred under its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn. But it also shows that the Times, which has a lamentable history when it comes to Jewish issues, is heading down a path in which it is being bullied into taking radical stands that are antithetical to liberal values.

Long-Bailey got into hot water this week when she retweeted an article about Maxine Peake, a British actress who is also a fervent opponent of Israel, as well as being one of Corbyn’s biggest fans. Peake is a respected actress, best known for roles in British films and television series like “Silk.” In her youth, she was a member of the Communist Party. In recent years, she has been a vocal public supporter of Corbyn, the leftist anti-Semite who led Labour to a catastrophic election defeat in December.

In an interview with Britain’s Independent newspaper, Peake, who says that she was “in Palestine, liaising with activists” before having to go home because of the coronavirus pandemic, claimed that “the tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services.”

The notion that Israelis teach Americans tactics used to kill blacks is a big lie that has been championed in recent years by BDS supporters like Jewish Voice for Peace and other anti-Semites. American cops and first responders get training in Israel that teaches them better community policing tactics, as well as how best to deal with medical emergencies, natural disasters and terrorist attacks—not how to kill people.

The idea of blaming Jews for terrible things that have nothing to do with them is not new. Such blood libels have been a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda since the Middle Ages. Anti-Zionists like Peake are reviving the trope to help delegitimize the right of the one Jewish state on the planet to exist.

Long-Bailey retweeted the article with the lie about Israel and Floyd’s death with the comment, “Maxine Peake is an absolute diamond.”

Labour’s former leader might have joined her in that sentiment. But Corbyn’s successor, Keith Starmer, is trying to rid the party of the anti-Semitic extremists that had flocked to it under his predecessor. A spokesperson rightly denounced Peake’s comment as “an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.” The statement went on to say that “restoring trust with the Jewish community is a number one priority. Anti-Semitism takes many different forms and it is important that we all are vigilant against it.”

Starmer fired Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary, a post that would have ensured her membership in Britain’s cabinet if Labour were to win the next election. That was a message to Corbyn’s supporters that there would be no room in Labour for them or their inherent anti-Semitism in the future.

But while Labour was attempting to change course, the most important newspaper in the United States has been heading in a different direction.

Charlotte Greensit was hired as part of a changing of the guard at the Times after a staff revolt led to the resignation of James Bennet, the paper’s opinion-page editor. Bennet was committed to trying to promote ideological diversity at the paper, something he proved by hiring writers like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss.

But Bennet got into trouble after he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that advocated the use of troops to quell riots after Floyd’s death if local authorities were unable to do so. This outraged woke Times staffers, who claimed that such an opinion “endangered” African-Americans. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who spoke of the paper’s obligation to publish views contrary to its own, initially supported his decision. But Sulzberger was intimidated by Black Lives Matter advocates into backing down. That led to Bennet’s forced resignation.

Sulzberger then vowed to change the way the opinion section operated, and to do that, he has hired Greensit. Her previous post was at The Intercept, the radical left-wing outlet that is known, among other things, for its promotion of conspiracy theories aimed at the Jewish state.

Greensit has personally tweeted defenses of the anti-Semitic statements by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and argued that Hamas was justified in seeking to invade Israel. But in 2017, she also specifically tweeted that “Israeli security forces are training American cops despite history of rights abuses,” while promoting a conspiracy theory libel of Israel published by The Intercept.

After her hiring, Greensit deleted most of her past tweets, though enterprising reporters posted them before they disappeared. Yet there has been no hint from the Times that they have any second thoughts about bringing on someone who spreads anti-Semitic blood libels. To the contrary, the paper’s decision to tilt even farther left and to ensure that contrary opinions will be silenced appears to be popular with its readership and staff.

It says something that in an institution that had become as thoroughly infiltrated by anti-Semitism as Labour, there’s now a new commitment to ridding the party of such hate. At the Times, however, left-wing anti-Semitism isn’t merely tolerated; it’s the sort of thing that can help you to rise to the top.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.