Foreign Minister Yair Lapid warns that Israel will face intense pressure in 2022 over accusations that it is an “apartheid state”. One manifestation of this is the recently published report by Amnesty International (AI), whose largely debunked findings seem to have found its mark in the minds of anti-Israel adherents who using incorrect statistics accuse Israel of practicing apartheid.
It is extremely difficult for rational people to understand the motivation of those who live in Europe, the UK, North America and elsewhere in the West, yet embrace monstrous dictators, ideologies, real apartheid, racism, and policies that leave only death and destruction in their wake.
A letter written to my friend of many years. He has always been critical of Israel and my letter is in response to articles he sent me a few years back, from The Guardian in which he points out quotes from Illan Pappe and Noam Chomsky, whom he characterises as Jews critical of Israel.
With much being written about the Middle East it was inevitable that much hyperbole, if not outright distortions, lies and propaganda would flourish. The arguments and counter-arguments that have been bandied about are not to most Jews a debate or an intellectual exchange of ideas, but rather a matter of life and death.
Throughout history antisemitism to succeed invariably had to hide its motives. It did so in the Middle Ages by accusing Jews of killing Christian children and spreading the plague. In Nazi Germany it cited medical terms by saying Jews were the cancer in the midst of the Aryan population. Today it does so by blaming Israel or Jews invoking the classic Blood Libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A dossier of authenticated historical reports that gives a coherent picture of Israel’s honest efforts to find that peace only to be stymied at every turn by an Arab programme filled with lies and subterfuge, and propaganda.
Several unrelated events in the latter half of the 19th Century in France and throughout the 20th Century brought about a conflagration that killed 60 million people and engulfed Europe before spreading to the rest of the world.
Water, or rather the lack of it, is an issue that looks set to affect the lives of every person on earth. Governments and the media quite rightly give high priority to the consequences of the devastating droughts being encountered throughout the world.
Reliance on natural and traditional water resources are coming under increasing strain and this will touch every person living, rich and poor, first-world and third.
There is a misguided belief that a child’s education begins when he or she starts school. How much influence can any teacher really have, particularly as they are not around in the infant years, a period of vital preparation for learning?