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Having given up on the US, Palestinians look to China to mediate a peace deal with Israel.
By World Israel News and Associated Press
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas wrapped up a trip to China Friday that saw the octogenarian seeking economic aid and voicing support for Beijing’s repressive policies toward Muslim minorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Abbas’ four-day visit was part of a bid by Chinese President Xi Jinping to boost Beijing’s status in the Middle East and sideline the U.S.’ influence.
For its part, the Palestinian Authority is also looking at China as a viable alternative to the U.S. to broker a peace deal with Israel that would see the emergence of a Palestinian state.
PA Social Welfare Minister Ahmad Majdalani told The Times of Israel in an interview that China is ca leverage billions of dollars in trade with Israel to encourage Jerusalem to make concessions.
“We don’t think the destiny of the world is in American hands. There are other emerging powers in the world,” said Majdalani, who has a close relationship with Abbas.
“What frustrates us most about the U.S. is the double standard that they apply to the Palestinian people,” he continued. “They paid billions to support Ukraine to confront Russian occupation, all while supporting Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians.”
On Wednesday, China announced that it had established a “strategic partnership” with the Palestinian Authority.
“We are good friends and partners,” Chinese president and head of the ruling Communist Party Xi Jinping said alongside Abbas. “We have always firmly supported the just cause of the Palestinian people to restore their legitimate national rights.”
The two leaders then issued a joint statement endorsing Beijing’s domestic and foreign policies and repudiating Western concepts of human rights.
In the statement, the Palestinian Authority said issues regarding China’s policy toward Muslims in Xinjiang have “nothing to do with human rights and are aimed at excising extremism and opposing terrorism and separatism.”
“Palestine resolutely opposes using the Xinjiang problem as a way of interfering in China’s internal affairs,” the joint statement said.
That echoes Chinese propaganda surrounding the detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in prison-like detention centers on little or no legal grounds — often merely for having a relative studying abroad or downloading the Koran onto their phones.
China says the widely-documented complex of heavily-guarded centers were intended to instill patriotism, purge radicalism spread over the internet and provide vocational training — and have now been shut down. Critics say many have been turned into prisons.
China has campaigned furiously to counter the outside criticism, and in the competition for resources and markets, Arab states have almost never openly expressed concern over Beijing’s treatment of Muslims.
Followers of the religion make up around 2% of the population. The country is led by an officially atheistic party dominated by the majority Han ethnic group.
The post Abbas wraps up China trip with expression of support for regime’s murder of Muslims, hope that Beijing will broker Palestinian statehood appeared first on World Israel News.
A man who has been living for close to 50 years in an labyrinthine cave hewn from the cliffside in Herzliya is being threatened with eviction by Israeli authorities.
The post WATCH: Israeli hermit living in fantastical cliffside cave threatened with eviction appeared first on World Israel News.
A defense ministry official said demand for Israel armory is at an all-time high with countries hoping to replenish stocks depleted by the war in Ukraine.
The post WATCH: Is Israel selling Merkava tanks to Ukraine? appeared first on World Israel News.
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The decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan at the end of the Second World War remains one of the most controversial issues in American history. I have argued in numerous places (for instance here, here, here, and (with Bill Miscamble) here) that the bombing of Hiroshima (and subsequently Nagasaki) was not only morally permissible, but, given the context of the times and the actually available options, morally obligatory. This is taking things a bit further than sometimes—even most times—done. While some Christian thinkers have agreed with the assessment that the bombing was the right thing to do, they tend to frame it as a matter of having to choose the lesser of a bevy of greatly evil alternatives. In response to this and similar claims, I am finishing up (and have been for some time) a book-length defense of the bombing on just war grounds. My long-gestated assertion is that dropping the bomb was not a lesser evil. It was, in the horrible milieu of the Asia-Pacific in 1945 in which the intransigence of Japan’s militaristic leaders forced choices between conflicting moral duties, the greatest possible good that could have been done because it presented the most discriminate and proportionate available chance to end the war through the unconditional surrender of Japan in the quickest possible time. I will leave begging, here, a great number of assertions that require defending. Suffice it to say, the decision to drop the bomb did not render American leadership guilty of moral wrongdoing, because they didn’t do anything wrong.
Not everyone thinks so. In a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, Adam Mount, a nuclear strategy thinker and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, argues that during President Biden’s recent trip to Hiroshima, Japan to meet with G-7 leaders, the president fumbled an opportunity to atone for American sins there and in Nagasaki.
If you’re left wondering what precisely America has to atone for in ending the Asia-Pacific War, it’s probably because you’ve imbibed the historical Kool-Aid. Throughout the essay, Mount has centers in his crosshairs what he takes to be the traditional narrative about why the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki: U.S. officials were forced to drop the bombs in order to end the war, to avoid a devasting invasion, and to save the lives of both U.S. warfighters and Japanese civilians. He clearly doesn’t believe this. Rather, he contends that the traditional narrative is fueled by “lies, censorship, and racism.” To defend his polemic, Mount grounds assertions in a series of overly simplistic historical claims, generally eliding complicating facts, factors, and counterarguments that would upset his own narrative.
It is a widely canvassing essay and there is a lot to push back against. Space demands that I limit myself to what I take to be Mount’s central complaint. Against the traditional view that the bombings were done to minimize civilian casualties, Mount asserts that “the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a deliberate act of government policy to kill civilians.” As such, he notes, what occurred on the 6th and 9th of August in Japan was a crime. The crime was murder. Indeed, he further suggests, what occurred was close to being a crime against humanity.
The case begins, at least, circumstantially. Mount is quite exercised about where Little Boy and Fat Man landed. Regarding the former, he notes that the aiming point of the Hiroshima attack was inconsistent with claims that Little Boy was targeting military assets. He rightly observes that the bombardier in the Enola Gay aimed for the Aioi Bridge, a distinctive landmark in the center of Hiroshima. He believes this is significant. So too the fact that Nagasaki was not the primary target on August 9th. Kokura, which had significant military targets was supposed to be Fat Man’s objective. Kokura, however, dodged a literal bullet. The weather over the city had suddenly changed and by the time the bombing team in Bockscar had reached the city it was obscured in clouds or smoke. After circling for some time, the flight crew was beginning to run low on fuel and was forced to turn back. Nagasaki, the secondary target, was on the return route. Bockscar had to circle Nagasaki several times as she too was encased in clouds. In the last possible moment, however, a break appeared in the clouds and the bombardier released his weapon. While there is some contention as to exactly what the aiming point in Nagasaki was, it seems generally accepted that Fat Man hit nearly three quarters of a mile off target, detonating over a residential area and destroying hospitals, houses of worship, schools, and homes.
Mounts insists that if Hiroshima’s airfield, ordinance depots, heavy industry, and navy units clustered around her port were the true targets, then Little Boy would have been released some two miles south of its actual aiming point. As it was, these military assets were only modestly damaged. Neither the blast nor the fires reached them, leaving in doubt the degree to which their destruction was deemed essential. The attack on Nagasaki, meanwhile, appears far too cavalier. Mount, I think, is doubtful whether the bombardier really had any reliable visual on the intended target. It appears likely, instead, that they simply did not want to waste the bomb by dumping it into the ocean before attempting to make their way home. Taken together, Mount finds the planning for the use of the atomic bombs “cursory and careless.”
The best explanation, Mount asserts, is that military targets were never really the primary aim. Instead, “killing large numbers of civilians was the primary purpose of the attack.” He goes on to cite documentary records that show that U.S. officials hoped that the destruction of civilians would shock the Japanese leadership into surrender. Exhibit A in this claim is the minutes from the third meeting of the U.S. Targeting Committee—the presidentially appointed team that, as its name implies, helped determine where the bombs would be used. In this meeting, the Committee recommended that the bomb should be dropped not on isolated industrial targets but in the “center of selected city.”
How do we assess this? It’s certainly true that the Targeting Committee made such recommendations. More precisely, they determined that bombing crews “should avoid trying to pinpoint” military or industrial installations because they were “small, spread on fringes of cities, and quite dispersed.” More precise details are helpful.
We need to understand that the aircraft releasing the atomic bombs had to do so from tremendous heights—approximately 30,000 feet—in order to escape the shock wave and avoid the radioactive cloud. The small, isolated industrial targets were simply impractical—they couldn’t be easily located at that altitude. The center of large urban areas—and easily identified landmarks like the T-shaped Aioi Bridge, could be more reliably spotted from the air. While the attack on Nagasaki might have seemed haphazard, it’s important to grasp that not dropping the bomb carried significant problems. As Mount noted, Bockscar’s crew would likely have had to drop the bomb in the ocean. The loss might have been catastrophic. Little Boy and Fat Man constituted a kind of one-two punch. Little Boy made the Japanese leadership realize that America had an atomic bomb. Fat Man, release a mere three days after the first bomb, made the Japanese suspect we had more than one. If we lost Fat Man, another bomb would not have been ready for more than week. The delay might have given the Japanese confidence that America did not have a ready supply of atomic weapons. Bockscar could not have simply carried the bomb back to base. Landing with it posed unknown hazards and, in any case, they wouldn’t have made it back. As it was, even without the heavy weight of the bomb, Bockscar barely reached Okinawa for an emergency landing. One engine failed from fuel starvation on her final approach and a second failed just as she touched down.
The military status of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki is incontrovertible. While neither, of course, was a purely military target, each had important assets. Hiroshima, among much else, was home to the Japanese Second Army, which, not incidentally, was responsible for coordinating the defense of southern Japan. The headquarters was destroyed in the blast. Fat Man, however off-target it was, destroyed two military industrial installations. But it’s true, I would argue, that the military status of the target cities was somewhat secondary.
The primary criteria for the target cities was that they were essentially untouched by conventional bombing attacks. It was essential that the power of the bomb be fully displayed. Intact cities, full of structures, was the means to demonstrate just how powerful the bombs were. This is also why the center of the cities were the aiming points. To aim at isolated targets on the fringe of the cities would leave much of the city intact. The bombs were intended to shock the Japanese leadership into recognizing that there would be no need to launch a land invasion. This would render obsolete the Japanese intention of fighting a final battle so bloody that the Allies would agree to negotiate terms more beneficial to Japan.
Because of this, it can be asserted that civilians were not, in fact, the direct targets in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the direct targets. The true object of attack was the city itself.
This is more than semantics. The intent was never to kill as many civilians as we could, nor, simply, to kill “large numbers” of them. We know this in part because of the target lists themselves. Of the several cities on the original prospective list, two cities, Yokohama and Kyoto, didn’t make it to the final four. Both cities had significantly greater populations than Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, or Niigata. Yokohama was taken off the list, in all likelihood, because by August it had been heaviy damaged in a conventional attack. With over 40% of its cities already devastated, it was not a good candidate for demonstrating the power of the bomb. Kyoto, on the other hand, remained largely untouched by conventional bombs because of her cultural significance. It’s an odd thing, if our primary ambition was killing large numbers of civilians, to ignore no populous a city on account of cultural sensitivity. Moreover, while Hiroshima was the most populous city of the four remaining on the list, it was also the best candidate for demonstrating the bomb’s power due both to its size, construction, and the presence of low hills on either side of her that would service to help contain and concentrate the blast. Finally on this point, recall that Kokura was supposed to be the primary target on August 9th and not Nagasaki—despite having a smaller population than Nagasaki. Again, there’s no indication that mass slaughter was ever a primary concern. Indeed, when one reads the memoirs or biographies of some of the men behind the bombs and the use of the bombs, we get the indication that the death of Japanese civilians was never intended for its own sake, nor as an end in itself.
None of this makes the death of civilians easy to bear. Mount laments, rightly, that we will never know just how many died in the two cities that we reduced to rubble. In exploring the grim tally, he gives the contrary estimates offered by American officials and contemporary Japanese researchers, low and high. He isolates the number of dead children. He notes the array of non-Japanese killed: the possibly tens of thousands of Koreans, most forcibly transported from their homes to Japan to be interred and utilized in forced labor camps; the Javanese, Dutch, British, Australian, American, and other prisoners of war. It is right and just to do all this.
Another point of potentially strong agreement I have with Mount is his assertion that even if we believe the traditional narrative about why the U.S. destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—or, I would add: whatever the reason we support the atomic bombings—we nevertheless “should regret that the bombs killed children, doctors, teachers, religious leaders, Allied prisoners of war, and forced laborers.” We should regret that. And I do.
But I also regret that elsewhere throughout the Asia-Pacific War other children, doctors, teachers, religious leaders, Allied prisoners of war, and forced laborers were killed. So, while Mount is right to count the dead, he would do well to count all the dead.
It is almost a truism to point out that innocent people were dying all across the Asia-Pacific in the late summer of 1945. Some of these innocent were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the innocent dead and dying were prisoners in their own lands, held captive under Japanese occupation. The numbers are staggering. By late 1944 and throughout 1945, reliable estimates suggest that the number of innocent civilians and noncombatant POWs who died in Japanese hands totaled upwards of 200,000—250,000 souls per month, or somewhere in the vicinity of 8,000 lives per day. This toll can be placed at the feet of one nation.
The Asia-Pacific War was launched, and prosecuted, by a nation whose highest ideals had become, in John Lewis’ words, “violently hostile to human life.” Key Allied decision-makers at that time would have known this. Various entities, including the U.S. ambassador in Chungking, British and American military commanders in theatre, and the Office of Strategic Service teams in China, Thailand, and Indochina kept Washington informed about the suffering of Asia. Werner Gruhl summarizes the macabre accounting:
By August 1945 the Allies in the Far East and Pacific had paid a price for the long years of resistance to aggression that is incomprehensible to most of us today. In this vast geographic crucible, some 20 million innocent Allied civilian lives, of whom at least three million were children, were snuffed out by the war. Another estimated 85 million civilians or more suffered forced labor and refugee ordeals, malnutrition and disease, wounding, maiming, rape, and torture; internment hell, war orphan and widow anguish, and Japanese supported opium addiction.
The death toll among civilians in Japan was terrible, without question. But Japanese noncombatant deaths may have reached, at the upper limit, 1.2 million. A rough calculation, then, tells us that for every Japanese noncombatant death some 17 or 18 noncombatants from other Asian nations died—12 of them would have Chinese—by Japanese hands. Japan’s military controlled the destiny of the Far East and could have brought this suffering to an early end with a simple word. But every day that Japan refused to acknowledge its own defeat, was another day that thousands of noncombatant deaths were added to toll of their intransigence.
A final cluster of innocent people who were dying in the Asia-Pacific were Japanese civilians themselves. Japan, of course, while they doled out staggering amounts of death, sustained death as well. When the Soviets overran Manchuria and other areas on the Asian continent, they captured around 2.7 million Japanese, about two-thirds of whom were civilians. Between 340,000-370,000 disappeared in Soviet captivity forever. In the homeland itself, Gruhl estimates that by the end of the summer of 1945, upwards of 50,000 Japanese died each week. As a cluster of innocent people, the Japanese civilian population was also, if abstractly, in conflict with itself. What I mean is this: there were only so many scenarios by which the war was going to end. Different amounts of Japanese civilians were going to die in each scenario. It is instructive to compare those numbers. For instance, under the blockade and bombardment campaign, Japanese were presently being killed by the relentless American bombing runs. But as the casualty estimates for the proposed land invasion continued to mount, interest began to increase for simply tightening the blockade and keeping Japan under siege until she surrendered. The cruelty of this strategy would have been mindboggling. It would have resulted in millions of starvation deaths. Had American planners stuck with the invasion, the numbers of Japanese civilian deaths would likely have been less than in a blockade, but they would certainly have far exceeded the deaths due to the atomic bombs, especially given the universal conscription orders and the shocking willingness among the Japanese to die rather than give in. In the macabre world the Japanese made, one can conjecture across time and space the existence of various clusters of innocent Japanese civilians whose interests were in competition with one another. It was the Japanese leadership who determined that some one cluster of its innocent civilians or another would die before the war ended. The only thing the Americans could do was to limit that death as much as their available options made possible.
The point is this. For every day that the war continued, thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians died throughout the Asia-Pacific. Every day that Japanese leadership continued to gamble on a decisive final fight, their intransigence was measured in the heaping mounds of the innocent dead. The tragic reality is that there were clusters of innocent lives scattered across the Pacific and not all of them could live. Every decision, every action or inaction, would doom one or another of them.
If Mount’s thing is the saving of innocent lives. He should be in support of the dropping of the bombs. And he should regret the necessity of it. But regret does not necessarily signal wrong. Just as grief does not necessarily signal guilt.
Parts of this essay come from Moral Horror: A Just War Defense of the Bombing of Hiroshima, currently under review, and early drafts of the chapter “Military Necessity As Moral Imperative: Just War and Hiroshima” from Returning Military Necessity to Just War Statecraft, co-edited by Marc LiVecche and Eric Patterson, forthcoming from Routledge.
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The agreement taking shape between Washington and Tehran will bolster Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, bringing closer a clash with Israel, experts tell JNS.
By Israel Kasnett, JNS
Washington and Tehran are engaged in indirect negotiations to close a deal with regard to its illicit nuclear program that will effectively bring Iran in from the cold.
While the precise details of the emerging deal are not yet known, it will reportedly limit Iran’s uranium enrichment to its current production level of 60%.
According to The New York Times, it will also reportedly require Iran to halt attacks against U.S. contractors in Syria and Iraq, increase cooperation with international nuclear inspectors and cease ballistic missile sales to Russia.
In exchange, Washington would agree not to increase economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic, to stop confiscating Iranian oil as occurred in April and to not seek punitive resolutions against Iran at the United Nations or at the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to the report.
However, the real question is what happens the day after the deal is signed. According to various experts who spoke with JNS, the answer isn’t good.
Such an agreement will bolster Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, increase the regime’s support for its terror proxies, deepen its growing defense ties with Russia and bring closer a clash with Israel, they said.
According to veteran Israeli Arab affairs and diplomatic commentator Yoni Ben Menachem, the secret negotiations between the United States and Iran “are based on the principle of ‘less for less.’”
He said the parties aim to reach a temporary agreement only on specific issues that they can agree upon, which means the focus is on Iran halting uranium enrichment in exchange for releasing its sanctioned assets abroad, “which amount to several hundred billion dollars,” he said.
(In its report on Wednesday, the Times reported that while Iran wants the United States to unfreeze billions in Iranian assets in exchange for the release of three Iranian American prisoners, Washington has not confirmed that this is part of the emerging deal.)
With such an influx of funds, Tehran is expected to boost its support for its terror proxies, from Hezbollah in Lebanon to Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.
The U.S. State Department has declared Iran “the leading state sponsor of terrorism.” According to the department’s most recent Country Reports on Terrorism, Iran “continued its support for terrorist-related activity, including support for Hezbollah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various terrorist and militant groups in Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East.”
The State Department currently lists four countries as state sponsors of terrorism—Iran, Syria, North Korea and Cuba—“for having consistently provided support for acts of international terrorism.”
And according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), “Iran has been building and training forces to target and kill U.S. personnel and expel U.S. forces from Syria.”
Ben Menachem said he is perplexed by the U.S. rush to an agreement, given that Iran has continued to threaten the world even during the negotiations. For example, it recently revealed a hypersonic ballistic missile that could potentially threaten numerous countries in the West.
Furthermore, in recent weeks, the Biden administration itself has released intelligence showing the deepening defense relationship between Russia and Iran, as Iran manufactures drones and ships them to Russia. Iran is also helping to build a drone factory in Russia. As repayment for its support of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Iran is seeking to acquire large numbers of Russian attack helicopters, warplanes and air-defense systems, according to U.S. officials.
“This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful to Ukraine, to Iran’s neighbors and to the international community,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said last week in a press conference.
But despite Iran’s severely troubling behavior, the Obama and Biden administrations have long believed that diplomacy with Iran will ultimately work, and that the Iranian leadership will be willing to stop uranium enrichment and overall terrorism-related activities in the region and beyond.
And yet, Iran has dragged out negotiations while fooling the American and European negotiators.
In May, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said, “We have always believed, we continue to believe that diplomacy is the best way to reach that solution, but we have seen no progress in terms of actions from the Iranian government in the region.”
Now, Iran has shown willingness to make progress, or is at least pretending, and the United States appears intent on cementing an agreement at all costs, even as Iran supports Russia as it attacks Ukraine, which is backed by the Biden administration.
David M. Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, a new think tank in Jerusalem headed by former Israeli National Security Adviser Meir Ben Shabbat, believes a U.S.-Iran agreement is problematic for the entire region.
“We know from experience that U.S. capitulation to Iran on nuclear matters emboldens, not restrains, the hegemonic ambitions of the mullahs,” he said. “Tehran’s regional swagger certainly will be bolstered by sanctions relief and the release of embargoed Iranian assets in Iraq and Europe.”
Regarding Israel, Weinberg said a “weak U.S. deal with Iran moves a frontal Iran-Israel clash closer than ever.”
A deal which provides Iran with billions of dollars “is even more illogical given Tehran’s supply of weapons to Russian President Vladimir Putin for Russia’s war in Ukraine,” he added. “One would think this might bother President Biden who just asked Congress for billions of dollars more in support of Kyiv.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei commented this week on the talks, saying “There is nothing wrong with the agreement [with the West], but the infrastructure of our nuclear industry should not be touched,” according to state media.
On June 7, U.S. State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel declined to specifically comment on Khamenei’s remarks, reiterating the Biden administration stance that the United States “is committed to never allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.”
Patel also admitted that “Iran continues to expand its nuclear activities in a way that [has] no credible civilian purpose,” and that “cooperation from the Iranian regime remains significantly lacking.”
Even so, Patel reiterated that the administration wants an agreement and continues to believe that “diplomacy is the best way to achieve that goal on a verifiable and durable basis.”
According to Ben Menachem, a new interim agreement poses several dangers, including the expectation that an influx of hundreds of billions of dollars would immediately flow from Iran’s coffers to its terrorist proxies in the Middle East, causing major problems for Israel, the region, and beyond.
He also noted that last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) closed one of its three open investigations into the remains of highly enriched uranium discovered at unrecognized nuclear sites in Iran. The IAEA was investigating the origin of uranium particles enriched to up to 83.7% at its Fordow enrichment plant. Iran claimed it was due to “unintended fluctuations” in enrichment levels.
According to Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “Iran’s explanation that it unintentionally produced near atomic-weapons grade uranium is not credible—Tehran was likely experimenting with higher enrichment and was caught red-handed.”
Israel accused the IAEA of having surrendered to the Iranian regime in what is now understood to likely be a preparatory step towards a new nuclear agreement with Iran. This comes even as the IAEA estimates that Iran currently possesses 114 kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity, a level that is only a short step away from nuclear weapons grade purity.
“Khamenei is trying to throw sand in the eyes of the West,” Ben Menachem said. “Israel has provided the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Europe with decisive intelligence evidence that Iran has a secret military track to produce a nuclear bomb and that this is the ultimate goal of its nuclear program.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday during a closed-door, three-hour meeting with members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Washington and Tehran are nearing a “mini-agreement, and not a nuclear agreement,” and it is something Israel “will know how to deal with.”
He reiterated that whatever the terms of the agreement, “Our position is clear: No agreement with Iran will be binding on Israel, which will continue to do everything to defend itself.”
The post What to expect the day after a new US-Iran deal appeared first on World Israel News.
Alex Soros, who recently inherited his father’s $25 billion empire, is just as anti-Israel as his father, Amichai Chikli charged.
By World Israel News Staff
Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and social equality blasted Alex Soros, son and recent heir of anti-Israel billionaire philanthropist George Soros, telling Fox News Digital that he was “a replica of his father.”
Amichai Chikli pointed to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and J Street, two American NGOs funded by George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, as organizations that routinely attack and delegitimize Israel, as well as show unbridled support for Iran’s regime and the Palestinians.
Chikli slammed J Street for endorsing a Congress event led by Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, which drew comparisons between the Nakba – the Palestinian term for the “catastrophe” of Israel’s creation in 1948 – and the Holocaust.
He also blasted the Soros Foundation’s financial support of smaller radical Palestinian organizations within Israel. Chikli cited Adalah, an NGO that envisions a future for Arab society in Israel that denies Israel’s vision as a Jewish state. As of the time of publication, neither Adalah, HRW, nor J Street responded to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.
Chikli also criticized George Soros and his funded NGOs for their reluctance to acknowledge the modern definition of antisemitism as proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). He described Soros as the “No. 1 activist fighting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,” and expressed disbelief at a Holocaust survivor opposing the IHRA.
Alex Soros, in a recent CNN opinion article, criticized the IHRA definition of antisemitism, arguing that it includes language that considers some criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. Critics, however, view Alex Soros’ actions as a step back in the fight against antisemitism.
Alex Soros also voiced concerns that the IHRA definition has been misused by some pro-Israel groups to shield the Israeli government from accountability for its human rights policies. He argued that tools to combat antisemitism should not be repurposed to target those voicing support for Palestinian human rights.
In response, Chikli stated, “Shamefully, his son is fighting the International Holocaust Remember Alliance.”
“It looks like the son is a replica of his father. We have no expectation that his son will be a big Zionist,” Chikli told the outlet.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, suggested that if he had a fortune like the Soros family, he would distance himself from politically-linked institutions and focus on transforming societies by guaranteeing universal education and health care. He urged Alex Soros to show respect to the Jewish state and to help the poor and indigent directly.
“If Soros Junior wants to make a long-lasting contribution to transforming the world, he would also do well to roll up his sleeves and personally help the poor and indigent. Money alone will never guarantee results – not in parts of the world where billions in aid have poured into countries, some of which are failed states,” Cooper told Fox Digital.
He added: “Show respect to the lone Jewish state, which had it existed in 1939, the Nazi Holocaust, the murder of 6 million Jews and the disastrous impact on children, like his father, would never had happened.”
Various other voices weighed in on the issue. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “The Soros Agenda,” speculated that Alex Soros will likely increase his funding of progressive left, globalized, and woke agendas, and support anti-U.S. and anti-Israel organizations. Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Will Scharf, a co-founder of Jews Against Soros (JAS), encouraged Alex Soros to steer clear of politics to prevent further damage to the United States, Israel, and other countries where Soros groups are active.
However, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Joel Rubin, stated, “American Jews are overwhelmingly liberal and democratic. Their support for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is accepted.” He suggested that Chikli’s argument ignores the reality of the American Jewish community
The post Israeli minister slams ‘replica son’ of George Soros for delegitimizing Israel and antisemitism appeared first on World Israel News.