admin
Gaza’s Islamist rulers are demanding Israel release more terrorists in exchange for each remaining hostage.
Akiva Van Koningsveld
(JNS)
The Hamas terrorist organization is expected to turn down an offer for a hostages-for-ceasefire deal with Israel along the lines of the previous agreement, which saw over 100 captives being freed in November, the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news channel reported on Sunday night.
As part of that deal, Israel released hundreds of female and teenage Palestinian security prisoners, in addition to pausing its military campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is demanding that Israel release more terrorists in exchange for each of the remaining hostages. Hamas is reportedly also demanding that Israel free terrorists who participated in the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,200 people in southern Israel.
According to Israel’s Kan News public broadcaster, Hamas is also seeking guarantees for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and a total end to the war in Gaza—a stance that is incompatible with Israel’s stated goal of destroying the terror group.
On Thursday, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry claimed that Doha had received an “initial positive confirmation” from Hamas. “Israel agreed to the ceasefire proposal, and we have initial positive confirmation from Hamas,” Al Jazeera cited spokesman Majed al-Ansari as saying.
The Israeli War Cabinet convened at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv on Sunday night ahead of Hamas’s expected response.
“The efforts to free the hostages are continuing at all times,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told journalists earlier on Sunday. “However, we will not agree to every deal, and not at any price.”
“Many things that are being said in the media as if we had agreed to them, such as regarding the release of terrorists; we will simply not agree to them,” Netanyahu said ahead of the weekly meeting of the full Cabinet earlier on Sunday.
Speaking with ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the White House was in “constant contact” with Israel, Qatar and Egypt to get a deal in place “as soon as possible.”
“Ultimately, that comes down to Hamas. And Hamas will have to be willing to say yes to an arrangement that brings hostages home. And we’re going to continue pressing from every direction to try to make that happen,” he stressed, adding that an agreement is not imminent.
“Ultimately, these kinds of negotiations unfold somewhat slowly until they unfold very quickly. And so it’s difficult to put a precise timetable on when something might come together or, frankly, if something might come together,” Sullivan told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Washington regards a ceasefire-for-hostages deal as “critical for getting people home to their loved ones, but also being critical to generate a sustained pause in hostilities that can support the flow of humanitarian assistance and that can alleviate the suffering in Gaza,” Sullivan added.
Under a separate agreement brokered by France and Qatar last month, Jerusalem agreed to allow more goods, including medicine, into Gaza. Under the terms of the arrangement with Hamas, some of the medicines were supposed to go to the hostages.
“A senior Hamas official said that for every box provided for the hostages, 1,000 boxes of medicine would be sent in for Palestinians,” the Associated Press reported on Jan. 18.
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which represents relatives of the captives, has demanded “visual proof” that the aid reached the hostages. However, 19 days after the trucks entered Gaza, there has been no word on whether Hamas held up its part of the deal, the NGO said on Sunday.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office has also been unable to confirm whether the hostages received the medicines intended for them.
According to official figures, around 136 hostages remain in the Gaza Strip, although dozens are believed to be dead. Many of the captives are in desperate need of medical attention, experts previously told JNS.
Image: Families of Israeli captives in Gaza speak to reporters outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art after returning from talks in Qatar, Jan. 7, 2024. Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90.
Israeli bank freezes accounts of Judea farmer accused of ‘settler violence’ by US
Under President Joe Biden’s executive order, U.S. individuals and companies are barred from providing any assets or services to Yinon Levi.
(JNS)
Yinon Levi, a farmer from Judea whom the United States recently sanctioned for alleged attacks against Palestinians, has had his Israeli bank accounts frozen, the Kan News public broadcaster reported on Sunday.
The report says Bank Leumi—one of Israel’s oldest and largest financial institutions—informed Levi by phone that both his private and business accounts would be closed, effective immediately.
On Thursday, the Biden administration issued an executive order sanctioning “persons undermining peace, security and stability in the West Bank,” citing “high levels of extremist settler violence, forced displacement of people and villages and property destruction.”
Adopting what it calls a “holistic approach” to the Middle East regional crisis, the White House named four Israelis whom it is sanctioning: Yinon Levi of Meitarim Farm; David Chai Chasdai of Givat Ronen; Einan Tanjil of Kiryat Ekron; and Shalom Zicherman of Mitzpe Yair.
The State Department accuses Levi of leading a group of Israeli citizens said to have “engaged in actions creating an atmosphere of fear” in Judea, including by carrying out attacks against Palestinian and Bedouin civilians in the village of Khirbet Zanuta and destroying their property.
Levi, who has not been convicted of any crime, denies the accusations. “The executive order is a result of requests to Biden by the anarchist, anti-Zionist left, which hates the Jewish people and made up a bunch of stories about Israel’s pioneers,” he told Hebrew media on Sunday.
“Biden, who is unable to deal with the Houthis who murder American soldiers, doesn’t scare us. We will continue to settle the Land of Israel without fear,” added Levi.
Under Biden’s executive order, U.S. individuals and companies are barred from providing any assets or services to Levi. Local reports suggested that Bank Leumi likely complied with the order out of fear of being cut off from the American financial system.
Israel’s Walla news site reported that Bank Hapoalim is preparing to close the accounts of Tanjil and Zicherman “in the near future.”
“Bank Hapoalim respects the international sanctions and will comply with any legal order. For reasons of banking confidentiality, we will not be able to respond to specific cases,” a spokesperson told the outlet.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blasted the White House’s measures as an “absurd order without justification” and vowed to “make sure that banks do not harm the citizens of Israel.” The Jewish state is “not a banana republic of the United States,” added the finance minister.
Following a visit to Levi’s home on Sunday, Religious Zionist Party Knesset member Zvi Sukkot said he would also urge fellow lawmakers to hold an urgent discussion on the matter.
Meanwhile, Canada announced it would follow the United States in imposing sanctions on Israeli citizens accused of inciting violence in Judea and Samaria, alongside measures against Hamas terror leaders in Gaza.
“We’re working actively on it,” Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp on Sunday, speaking from Ukraine. “I’m making sure that while I’m in Ukraine, the work is being done in Ottawa and I look forward to doing an announcement soon.”
According to Israeli Police figures made public in November, in the period from the current Hamas war’s start on Oct. 7 through Nov. 7, there were 97 incidents of illegal activities attributed to Jews in Judea and Samaria, down from 184 offenses in the same period in 2022.
Between Oct. 7 and Jan. 15, the Hatzalah Judea and Samaria rescue group recorded more than 2,600 terrorist attacks against Israelis in the area, including 760 cases of rock-throwing, 551 fire bombings, 12 attempted or successful stabbings and nine vehicular assaults.
Image: Bank Leumi chairman Samer Haj-Yehia speaks at a conference held at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem, Feb. 21, 2022. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.
“Joe Biden’s fallacious executive order against our ally Israel is another foreign policy failure by the Biden administration,” said Jeff Duncan of South Carolina.
(JNS)
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) blasted U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday for what the congressman called an “irrational executive order that takes aim at Israelis who are defending themselves from a radical terrorist organization by instituting economic sanctions on them.”
Earlier in the day, Biden announced sanctions on four Israelis and announced a “national emergency” due to what he called “intolerable levels” of “extremist settler violence.” The president claimed that violence “constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel and the broader Middle East region.”
“These actions undermine the foreign-policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution and ensuring Israelis and Palestinians can attain equal measures of security, prosperity and freedom,” he added.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the “overwhelming majority” of residents in Judea and Samaria are law-abiding. “Israel acts against all Israelis who break the law, everywhere,” he said. “Exceptional measures are unnecessary.”
Duncan, the South Carolina Republican, agreed.
“Joe Biden’s fallacious executive order against our ally Israel is another foreign policy failure by the Biden administration,” he stated. “The commander-in-chief should unequivocally stand with our ally Israel as they exercise their right to self-defense and fight back against Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, who believe Israel does not have the right to exist—the same cowardly terrorists that kill Americans, behead babies and kidnap children.”
“This is another example in the long line of Biden’s foreign policy failures,” the congressman added. “Mr. President, why do you continually choose to endanger the lives of Americans, turn your back on America’s allies and choose to go easy on or cooperate with terrorist regimes?”
Image: Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.). Credit: Courtesy. Mandatory credit: Rep. Jeff Duncan
Netanyahu is trying to defeat Hamas. The administration’s efforts—and its fictional “doctrine”—seek to depose the Israeli prime minister and re-elect the president.
Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a master political schemer and a cynical seeker of power is so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that there is literally nothing he can do without being accused of acting only to seek some sort of advantage over his opponents. Yet in the current crisis as he seeks to lead his wobbly unity government to achieve what may well be two mutually exclusive objectives—the elimination of Hamas and the freeing of the remaining hostages still being kept captive in Gaza—while being besieged by criticism at home and abroad, it may be that Netanyahu is not the one who is really playing politics.
While no one should ever underestimate the prime minister’s capacity for maneuvering even at a time when, after the Oct. 7 disaster, the end of his career would seem to be in sight, it’s not he who is cynically using the hostage negotiations or the talk about what would follow the end of the war in Gaza to score political points. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu’s character or policies, or whether he should be forced out of office because of the catastrophe that occurred on his watch, the person who is playing politics with the security of Israel and the fate of its citizens is President Joe Biden.
Netanyahu probably still hopes to salvage his reputation and serve out the rest of his term after being returned to office in November 2022. But the widespread characterizations in both the Israeli and the international press of his stand on the hostage negotiations, the conduct of the war and what will happen in Gaza once the fighting ends, as merely another example of his desperate attempts to cling to office is largely inaccurate. He may be pursuing two goals that cannot both be achieved as well as clinging to his pre-war strategic objective of getting Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. Yet the real scheming going on right now is in Washington, not Jerusalem. It is Biden who is playing a double game in which he seems willing to ensure Hamas’s survival in power in order to settle scores with Netanyahu, as well as to defeat former President Donald Trump in November.
A hostage deal trap
That’s the context for the discussions about the latest proposal for a ceasefire and the release of 136 hostages—some living and some presumed dead—in which the double-dealing government of Qatar is playing a central role. Whether or not this effort, like previous ones, will be shot down by Hamas, Netanyahu will continue to face enormous pressure from both the families of the hostages and the United States to either pause or end the war.
Netanyahu’s government is currently beset by a host of domestic and foreign critics. The hostage families understandably want it to do anything to save their loved ones and will—like anyone in that awful position—demand concessions in the form of freeing terrorists or halting the Gaza campaign, whether or not it’s in the country’s best interests. They are being boosted by Netanyahu’s political foes. Most of the Israelis who spent the months before Oct. 7 demonstrating for Netanyahu’s ouster and against judicial reform have put politics aside in the name of a unified effort to defeat Hamas. But the hard-core anti-Bibi resistance has shown that, if given the opportunity, it will try to return to the streets with the aim of forcing the prime minister out of office.
At the same time, Netanyahu is also under fire from those Israelis who fault him for not prosecuting the war against Hamas more vigorously. In particular, they blame the prime minister for bowing to American and international pressure to allow aid to flow into parts of Gaza still under Hamas control, which, though ostensibly a humanitarian gesture, is almost certainly sustaining the terrorist forces and enabling them to continue to hold on. His right-wing critics are correct that the hostage deal is a trap for both Israel and Netanyahu.
Biden’s recycled doctrine
But looming over his domestic troubles is an even bigger problem. Biden and his foreign-policy team may still be sticking to their promise of supporting Israel in the war and the goal of eliminating Hamas. Still, as the war heads towards its fifth month, Biden’s practice of talking out of both sides of his mouth on the conflict—backing Israel while also bashing and pressuring it to scale down its military campaign—has escalated to the point where a tipping point may soon be reached. American involvement in the hostage talks seem not so much to be focused on freeing the captives as they are on hamstringing the Israeli war effort and wrong-footing Netanyahu.
While Washington’s focus on demands for the creation of a Palestinian state as part of a far-reaching postwar deal involving Saudi normalization may be wildly unrealistic, it is only understandable if seen in the context of a gambit to topple the Israeli coalition while winning Biden back the favor of left-wing and Arab-American voters whose anger over his supporting Israel’s right to self-defense has imperiled his re-election campaign.
There may be some credulous observers who take seriously the so-called “Biden doctrine” being touted by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that will supposedly solve all the problems of the Middle East. Friedman has achieved new relevance in the last year because he has served as the administration’s faithful mouthpiece, using his perch at the paper to promote the Biden administration’s pathetic weakness and incompetent maneuvers as brilliant policy-making. He also shares the same bitter feelings toward Netanyahu as the Biden team of Obama administration alumni, who will never forgive. him for opposing their destructive policies on the Palestinians and especially their appeasement of Iran. Their ideas are—like everything else that emanates from Friedman—merely a tired rehashing of unsuccessful policies of the past that sensible people stopped paying much attention to a long time ago.
It would be a mistake to waste too much time unpacking this “doctrine,” whose particulars are also being put forward by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Democrats, but suffice it to say that its Palestinian state proposal is dead-on-arrival for the same reasons that similar ideas have failed before: Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis want one. The Palestinians have rejected numerous deals that would have given them an independent state because they would have required them to live in peace with Israel. And neither the supposed “moderates” of Fatah that run the Palestinian Authority or Hamas will accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
The majority of Israelis were ready to welcome a Palestinian state if it meant peace during the period of post-Oslo Accords euphoria in the 1990s. That foolish optimism died in the violence of the Second Intifada that followed Yasser Arafat’s rejection of statehood offers in 2000 and 2001.
More to the point, Israelis know that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disastrous withdrawal of every soldier, settler and settlement from Gaza in the summer of 2005 led to the creation of an independent Palestinian state in all but name ruled by Hamas. That allowed the terrorists to build a subterranean terrorist fortress from which they fired missiles and rockets at Israel for years, and eventually to launch the terrorist pogroms of Oct. 7.
Can Israelis be fooled?
After that, the Israeli constituency for allowing the Palestinians sovereignty and the freedom of action to repeat those atrocities from either a rebuilt Gaza or a state in Judea and Samaria that would likely also fall under Hamas rule became nearly nonexistent.
Nor should many Israelis, including Netanyahu, be fooled into thinking that a Palestinian state will convince the Saudis to normalize relations and join them in a grand alliance against Iran. No matter what they say publicly, the Saudis aren’t going to risk the wrath of the Muslim world by making a deal with Israel in the foreseeable future and are perfectly satisfied with the close under-the-table relations, including on security, they have with the Jewish state now.
Nor is it likely that anything that Biden does will undo the damage he did in his first three years in office during which he tried to resurrect former President Barack Obama’s dangerous Iran nuclear deal, while distancing the United States from both the governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. This strengthened and emboldened Iran, reviving the threat of Iranian-backed terrorism from the Houthis and other forces that Biden can no longer ignore after the deaths of three U.S. servicemen in Jordan this past week.
It’s also clear that Biden’s attempts to balance his support for Israel and not stopping the flow of arms resupply that enable the continuation of the war (which he has threatened to halt) with talk of a Palestinian state and gestures like sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Arabs are nothing more than cheap political maneuvers.
The narrative about “settler violence” is largely fictional since—although a few residents of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria have broken the law in confrontations with local Arabs—the overwhelming majority of the violence taking place comes from the other direction: the routine daily violent attacks on Jews in the territories. Those Arab attacks have escalated since Oct. 7 as Hamas cells have sought to create a second front against Israel. Yet Biden ignores this and instead talks about relatively rare incidents of Jewish violence.
Biden’s sanctions—a case of legal overkill against four insignificant people—was an attempt to change the conversation about him in Michigan among Arab-American voters. And the floating of Palestinian statehood is similarly a way to convince his party’s intersectional left-wing activist base that hates Israel (and which is in open revolt against his policies) to calm down and return to the fold in order to beat Trump.
Toppling Netanyahu
The only part of the Biden plan that is at all realistic is its impact on Israeli politics. Ending the war on Hamas prior to its complete defeat would topple the coalition of nationalist and religious parties that won a 64-seat majority in the last election. The idea is to try to make Netanyahu choose between the war aims that he has pledged himself to and the freedom of the hostages, and to tempt him with talk of Saudi diplomatic recognition. It also sets up the prime minister to be criticized for prioritizing keeping his government together, along with his hold on power over the fate of the hostages or even the theoretical possibility of normalization with the Saudis.
What that formulation doesn’t take into account is that the will to continue the war against Hamas until it is wiped out isn’t a matter of pleasing right-wing extremist voters or his coalition partners. It’s what the overwhelming majority of Israelis are demanding since they know that anything less than Hamas’s eradication will be a formula for more terrorist horrors in the future.
Netanyahu is in an impossible political position because he can’t both save the hostages and defeat Hamas. And it’s made it even harder by the kind of sniping at him from the military and security establishment, which is equally if not more responsible for the Oct. 7 disaster, and also preaching defeatism about the war in anonymous interviews given the Times. If he chooses to abandon the war effort in order to gain some cheap popularity by obtaining the freedom of the hostages—as he did in 2011 in the disastrous Gilad Shalit hostage-release deal—he might hold on to office for a while at the head of a coalition involving many of his opponents. But it would be a betrayal of his principles, his voters and the security of his country.
No matter how he navigates the current crisis or whether he survives in office, he seems not so much to be playing politics as his opponents claim as clinging to the only stand that makes any sense if Israel is to truly ensure that there will be no more Oct. 7 attacks. Biden, on the other hand, is doing nothing but playing to his party base, seeking to convince them that he shares their contempt for Israeli lives that is a key element in the calls for a ceasefire before Hamas is eliminated.
The president’s prioritizing the winning of Michigan and the seduction of his party’s many Israel-haters can’t be dignified by Friedman’s foolish talk of a doctrine that will supposedly solve the problems of the region with a Palestinian state that nobody really wants. His cynical tricks may or may not gain him votes, but the real loser in his politicization of Middle East policy is the security of a Jewish state that is being endangered by his vendetta against Netanyahu.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
Image: From left: U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. President Joe Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi gather in Tel Aviv to discuss the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 18, 2023. Credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO.
Qatar received an “initial positive confirmation” from the terror group, Doha said.
(JNS)
Qatar has received an “initial positive confirmation” from the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza in response to its most recent hostages-for-ceasefire proposal, Doha’s Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday night, according to Al Jazeera.
“Israel agreed to the ceasefire proposal, and we have initial positive confirmation from Hamas,” the Qatari state-owned network cited Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari as saying.
However, a political source in Jerusalem told Ynet that Israel had not received any official update from Qatar. Israel’s War Cabinet was scheduled to meet on Thursday night at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv to discuss the recent developments in the negotiations.
Earlier this week, Jerusalem agreed to a framework for a renewed deal to secure the release of some hostages in exchange for a ceasefire, reported The Washington Post on Tuesday. Hamas was considering the offer, according to the Post, citing officials familiar with the negotiations.
Civilians would reportedly be released over an initial six-week period, with soldiers and the bodies of dead hostages returned in subsequent stages.
Israel would agree to commute the sentences of an unspecified number of Palestinian terrorists from prison for each hostage. The agreement would also reportedly include “a temporary repositioning of Israeli troops away from high-population areas” in the Gaza Strip.
During a visit to Israel Defense Forces soldiers serving in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza on Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stressed that the ongoing military assault in the city “brings the return of the hostages closer, because Hamas only understands power.”
According to a snap poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 television on Tuesday, 50% of Israelis oppose a hostage deal that would see an extended pause in the fighting in Gaza and the release of thousands of Palestinian terrorists. Only 35% support the terms of the reported agreement, with the rest undecided.
According to official figures, 136 hostages remain in Gaza, although dozens are believed to be dead. Hamas kidnapped an estimated 240 people when it invaded the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7. Its terrorist operatives, along with some Gaza residents, murdered 1,200 people, overwhelmingly civilians, that day, and wounded thousands.
Image: Families of Israelis held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip protest outside the Israeli Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, Oct. 14, 2023. Photo by Tomer Neuberg/Flash90.
The three other men involved in the 2021 beating attack have already received convictions.
(JNS)
All four men who beat Joseph Borgen on May 20, 2021, during a rally associated with Israel’s 11-day conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, will spend time in prison for their crime.
Mohammed Said Othman, 29, received three years in prison on Jan. 31 for second-degree attempted gang assault and third-degree assault as a hate crime. Previous convictions for others included Mahmoud Musa, 25, the ringleader in the attack, who was sentenced to seven years after pleading guilty. Mohamed Othman, 26, received five years.
Waseem Awawdeh received the lightest sentence—six months—due to his joining the attack later on in the beating. While in jail he allegedly said, “If I could do it again, I would do it again” and “I have no problem doing it again.” Awadeh is scheduled for release in June.
Borgen suffered a concussion as a result of the beating nearly three years ago.
“These defendants violently targeted and assaulted another individual simply because he is Jewish,” said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “These multi-year prison sentences make clear that physically attacking someone because of their religion is never acceptable.”
Following the announcement of the sentence, Borgen, who was 29 at the time of the attack, spoke out about current pro-Hamas protests in the city as a result of the war following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, saying “I got texts from my friends the other night … that protesters were marching on the Upper East Side and took over 87th and Second, and were standing for 20 minutes. … Why aren’t they being arrested? They’re breaking the law openly.”
Image:The antisemitic assault on Joseph Borgen in New York City on May 21, 2021. Source: Screenshot.
Double standard in treatment of anti-black racism, Jew-hatred, Nissim Black says
The convert to Orthodox Judaism told JNS about his new album, as well as the pressing need for better black and Jewish-American relations.
Dave Gordon
(JNS)
Antisemites projected “Glory to our martyrs” on George Washington University’s Gelman Library, some five blocks from the White House, on Oct. 24. Six weeks later, some worried that a Chabad GW-sponsored, pre-Chanukah Nissim Black concert at Kogan Plaza, adjacent to the library, would be canceled on Dec. 5.
“Not only did we not get shut down, there were so many different black students that came to this show,” Black, an American-Israeli rapper, told JNS. “They are eating latkes and having sufganiyot.” (The Jewish delicacies refer to potato pancakes and jelly doughnuts.)
Chabad GW lit a menorah on the same site where the antisemitic message had been projected, which afforded some 350 attendees a symbol of light overcoming darkness, according to the 37-year-old, a black convert who identifies as Chassidic.
One attendee—a non-Jewish black man with dreadlocks—approached Black at the concert and told him that the rapper’s message inspired him on a rough day. He gave Black a hug, the rapper recalled.
“That is what we are supposed to be doing with our music and what we could do with our music,” Black told JNS.
He thinks that more can be done to improve relations between black and Jewish Americans, especially amid rising Jew-hatred. He told JNS that relations between the two communities started to sour well before Hamas terrorists attacked Israel nearly four months ago and before Kanye West (“Ye”) increasingly issued antisemitic statements.
“A lot of this started to happen with the riots after George Floyd and the world going back to the Dark Ages three years ago,” Black told JNS. (A white Minneapolis police officer was convicted of murdering Floyd, 46, a black man, on May 25, 2000.)
“On Oct. 7, so many light bulbs went off for me. How do we get back to this place of where we were allies?” Black told JNS. He noted that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish lawyer Jack Greenberg and Rabbi Joachim Prinz, who spoke immediately before Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, marched with King.
Why, Black asked JNS, isn’t an under-represented voice like his, as a black Jewish artist, so absent from news reports on Israel?
“I’ve seen Fox, CNN, the media, and I have not seen so many black Jews speaking. How come nobody has reached out to me and the community?” he said. “If that’s not an ace card against ‘white colonialism,’ I don’t know what is.”
Academic affectation
When he thinks about the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania who testified in a Dec. 5 House hearing that it would not necessarily violate their policies to call for the genocide of Jews, Black was struck by the double standard.
“If the same thing was being called for towards the genocide of black people, how well would that have gone over with the school?” he said. “There is no doubt about it.”
Not enough is being done to counter the blood libels that are proliferating to smear Jews and Israel, he added.
“To think that we are people who would even support or want the deaths of thousands of innocent people—that doesn’t even compute,” he said of Jews and Israel. “We understand that people die in war. But us as a whole, we are painted to be monsters. This is the opposite of what the Jewish people represent. That’s one of the things that needs to be projected more.”
Straight outta Seattle
Born in 1986 in Seattle, Damian Jamohl Black followed in the footsteps of his parents, who were hip-hop performers.
At the age of 13, he recorded his first song with a producer who went by the name “Vitamin D.” At the time, Black thought being surrounded by drugs, gangs and violence, in addition to police raids, was normal. When he was 19, his mother died from an overdose of pain medication.
Then under the name “D Black,” he released the album “The Cause and Effect” in 2007. Two years later, he released “Ali’yah” and began to receive wider attention both from fans and in the industry. The album performed well and was well-reviewed, and Black started getting invitations to perform at major music festivals.
After a religious journey that took him to other faith traditions, Black had a spiritual awakening and underwent an Orthodox Jewish conversion. He changed his name to Nissim (“miracles” in Hebrew), replacing his earlier musical themes of guns, drugs and violence with faith, identity and perseverance. He and his family live in Jerusalem.
“I started to realize, over the years, my responsibility to the world, and I think it came from understanding the Jewish responsibility to the world,” he told JNS. “As a Jew, we are called to be a light unto the nations.”
At press time, Black’s 2020 hit “Mothaland Bounce” had more than 5.2 million views on YouTube.
The internationally acclaimed artist is set to release an 18-track album, “Glory,” this spring. He told JNS that the new album will be an ode to God through soulful melodies, captivating lyrics and powerful production. Single titles include “Scream,” “Speed Dial,” “Better” and “Ayeh.”
“It’s really centered around faith and elevation,” he told JNS, describing the new music as “big black soul, black gospel, mixed with some very high energy pop-rock-type feel.”
Shalom Arush, a Breslov Chassidic rabbi in Israel, and other friends have encouraged Black to globalize his message rather than sticking to a Jewish niche. And so, he has heeded the call.
“I didn’t inherit an idea, or space, where I think my goal is to sit only in this quiet place and not influence or inspire the world,” he told JNS. “From the time I was a kid, this is what God has called me to do.”
“I feel like we all have a purpose, a reason why we are here,” he added. “My story, I hope, will show other people that sometimes you have to open yourself up into knowing what you don’t know.”
But 60% of Arabs in Judea and Samaria told pollsters that Hamas should run Gaza after the war.
Baruch Yedid
(JNS)
An Israel-Hamas ceasefire in Gaza will take place in three stages over several weeks, sources in the Palestinian Authority and Fatah claim.
Parallel to this, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas is said to be preparing certain reforms under U.S. pressure that he hopes would allow him to return to power in Gaza.
The emerging ceasefire agreement will occur in three phases, according to the high-ranking sources and reports in the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news channel.
The basic formula is the release of one Israeli hostage for 30 imprisoned terrorists for each day of the ceasefire. That amounts to 35-40 hostages being released in exchange for Israel commuting the sentences of 1,200 Palestinian terrorists over approximately six weeks.
In addition, Israeli forces would withdraw from positions in Gaza cities, but not from the entire Strip as Hamas has been demanding.
Hamas insists that women and children hostages be released in the first stage, then men and soldiers in the second stage. The final stage will see the release of the bodies of dead captives.
Palestinians would not be permitted to return to homes in northern Gaza, but Israel would allow a U.N. delegation to prepare the area for that eventuality.
Gaza’s new ‘Civil Administration’
According to Al Arabiya sources, during the ceasefire’s first stage, Israel, Egypt, Qatar and the U.S. would discuss a civil administration for Gaza to replace Hamas. The character of this new civil administration is not clear, but high-level P.A. and Fatah sources said the Biden administration is pressuring the Palestinian Authority to reform itself so it can return to running the Strip.
The P.A’.s official position is that it does not want to return to Gaza or take responsibility for its reconstruction unless it is part of an agreement leading to statehood. Israel opposes the P.A.’s return to Gaza.
Sources in Ramallah said Abbas intends to reform the P.A. by cutting back on bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, replacing diplomats representing the PLO abroad and initiating an internal self-investigation mechanism within the Palestinian Preventive Security Service. The U.S. would have access to the internal investigations, sources also said.
In addition, the U.S. demands that the P.A. stop its incitement against Israel and remove inflammatory textbooks from the Palestinian curriculum.
After implementing these measures, the P.A. would supposedly be poised to take over Gaza.
However, nobody in Ramallah believes Abbas will see the reforms through. A November survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 90% of the Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria wanted Abbas to resign, while 60% said the Palestinian Authority is ineffective and should be dissolved.
Moreover, 64% of the respondents said they were opposed to the P.A. participating in meetings with the U.S. or Arab states about Gaza’s post-war future. When asked who should run Gaza after the war, 60% said Hamas, 16% said a national unity government without Abbas, and 7% said the P.A. with Abbas.
Palestinians have not held national elections since 2005 and Abbas is now in the 19th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term. Since then, Abbas has canceled several attempted elections amid Fatah-Hamas disagreements, most recently in 2021.
Sources in Ramallah also said that the Palestinian Authority would invite “soft core” members of Hamas to be part of the new civil administration, something that Israel would surely oppose.
Image: An IDF tank and solder in the Gaza Strip, Jan. 30, 2024. Credit: TPS.
Elliot Resnick spent some 50 minutes in the Capitol building during the 2021 riot.
(JNS)
Elliot Resnick “disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress” to determine the outcome of the 2020 election, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia says.
When Resnick’s name first appeared in the news in connection with the Jan. 6 riot in the U.S. Capitol, The Jewish Press, where he was a top editor, initially said he was on assignment. It later parted ways with Resnick.
Resnick, 40, pleaded guilty on Jan. 30 to a felony, obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder.
“His actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office stated.
It added that Resnick grabbed a police officer’s arm to prevent him from using pepper spray on rioters and also encouraged others to enter the Capitol during the approximately 50 minutes he spent in the building.
Sentencing is scheduled for June 12. A plea deal recommends eight-14 months in jail and between $4,000 and $40,000 in fines.
Image: The U.S. Capitol in Washington during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the building. Photo by Tyler Merbler via Wikimedia Commons.