1) At the Jewish Chronicle, David Hirsh discusses the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.
“The working definition does not seek to see a person’s essence to find out whether they are antisemitic. What it does instead is to help in the recognition of antisemitic actions and ways of thinking. It is concerned with what people do, what they say and what they tolerate; not what they are.
Many in the movement to boycott and to de-legitimize Israel are afraid of the working definition. They say that it defines criticism of Israel as antisemitic. It actually does the opposite. It helps us to make the distinction between what kinds of criticism may be legitimate and what kinds of hostility or demonization may either lead towards, or result from, antisemitism.”
2) The JCPA has a paper by Liora Chartouni titled “70 Years after UN Resolution 181: An Assessment“.
“Initially, both Jews and Arabs were shocked by the idea of partition. “The Zionist movement viewed the whole of Eretz Yisrael as a Jewish patrimony,” according to Israeli scholar Prof. Shlomo Avineri, “and the effort to reach a Jewish majority was aimed at giving this claim international support and legitimacy. And the emerging Palestinian national movement … viewed Falastin as integral a part of the great Arab homeland as all other lands from Morocco to Iraq.”
However, although the two sides shared the surprise, their reaction to the partition plan diverged significantly. The Jews accepted the plan with a mixture of joy and hesitation, while the other rejected it and launched a war to forcibly prevent its implementation.
Although both parties claimed a legitimate right to inhabit the area, the Arabs denied the Jews any right whatsoever in their ancestral homeland, and a large majority still maintains this view to this day. The adoption of UN Resolution 181 was seen as cataclysmic by the Arab side; not only did they not abide by it, but they went to war against the nascent Jewish State to express their discontentment and their refusal to allow a such a state to exist.”
3) Following the UNGA’s adoption of resolution 181 on November 29th 1947, Arab forces launched immediate attacks on the Jewish community in Palestine and acts of violence also took place against Jews in several Arab countries. The Israel State Archives recently put online documents relating to the pogroms in Aden, Yemen (at the time a British protectorate) that took place between December 2nd and 4th 1947 in which 82 Jews were murdered, 76 wounded, synagogues destroyed and property looted. The file – mostly in English – can be found here.
4) Writing at Newsweek, David Daoud and Jason Brodsky provide some insight into the domestic politics behind the recent story concerning Lebanon’s prime minister.
“Hariri’s dramatic resignation arose from an awareness that he no longer inspires the confidence of his Lebanese Sunni base, and that will cost him in parliament—his pro-Western camp’s last holdout—in the upcoming May 2018 elections. For over a decade, he’s been consistently outmaneuvered by Hezbollah and its political allies even while in power. Worse yet, his concessions over the last two years have made him look like a polite fig-leaf for creeping Iranian domination of Lebanon, further eroding his Sunni support—a fact he bemoaned in a recent interview from Riyadh. […]
Hariri’s Future Party is currently parliament’s largest—with 28 of 128 seats. With his broader allies, he theoretically has a slim majority. However, that is a holdover from the country’s last parliamentary elections in 2009. With his eroded credibility and Lebanon’s new electoral law placing a higher premium than before on popular support, he’s guaranteed to lose it the 2018 elections. Given parliament’s power of electing the president and confirming the prime minister and his cabinet, it is a particularly important body to lose.”
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