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Author: David Gerstman

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David Gerstman

David Gerstman blogged as Soccer Dad from 2003 to 2010. Formerly a computer programmer, he is now a blogger for The Israel Project's The Tower blog.

A new song for the High Holidays by Moishey Ney...

Yesterday a jury in a federal court in New  York found the Arab Bank - the largest lender in Jordan - liable for "knowingly supporting terrorism efforts connected to two dozen attacks in the Middle East." The New York Times reports:
Arab Bank, a major Middle Eastern bank with $46 billion in assets, was accused of knowingly supporting specific terrorist acts in and around Israel during the second Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s. The verdict is expected to have a strong impact on similar legal efforts to hold financial institutions responsible for wrongdoing by their clients, even if the institutions followed banking rules, and could be seen as a deterrent for banks that conduct business in violent areas. The plaintiffs in this case, about 300 victims of 24 terrorist attacks, said the acts had been carried out by Hamas, and accused Arab Bank of supporting the organization by handling transfers and payments for Hamas members.
The Times quotes Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on the significance of the verdict.
“What this has done is it’s made the effects of American law felt in far-off places, and that is significant,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former terrorism finance analyst for the Treasury Department. “I don’t think any country, any bank, would want to be cut off from the U.S. financial sector, and they’re going to start thinking very carefully about whether they accept financial transactions” even from people or groups who are not on designated terrorist lists.
The damages were not determined and will be decided at a future  trial.

It is nearly a year since Iran's President Hassan Rouhani spoke before the United Nations General Assembly. Later this week he is scheduled to speak again before the General Assembly, but the enthusiasm expressed last year is nowhere to be seen. In the run up to his speech there was much excitement among the chattering classes. Take, for example, a couple of paragraphs from an editorial in The New York Times from September 22, 2013, a year ago today:
The next few weeks will be critical for capitalizing on a new sense of promise created by a recent flurry of remarkable gestures: Iran’s leadership has sent Rosh Hashana greetings to Jews worldwide via Twitter, released political prisoners, exchanged letters through the Swiss with President Obama, praised “flexibility” in negotiations and transferred responsibility for nuclear negotiations from conservatives in the military to the Foreign Ministry. Mr. Obama eased restraints on humanitarian and good-will activities, including athletic exchanges between the two countries. ... Mr. Rouhani has a sophisticated, Western-savvy team. His foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, received degrees from American universities and spent most of his adult life in the United States. Together they have raised expectations in a world eager to see Iran play a more constructive role, and the charm offensive is in full swing. Policy experts, journalists and business people are jockeying to attend a number of invitation-only breakfasts, dinners and meetings scheduled by Mr. Rouhani and Mr. Zarif while they are in New York. There’s a lot riding on their visit this week.
But the "remarkable gestures" that The New York Times cited were remarkable hollow.

The New York Times earlier this month published an expose of how foreign money influenced think tanks. One of the subjects of the article was the Brookings Institution, its vice president Indyk and $14.8 million grant that the government of Qatar had given Brookings. A former scholar at Brookings cautioned that because of Qatar's influence any report coming out of the institution is likely not to be the "full story." The New York Times didn't seem much concerned with the implication of its reporting but some people did notice. In Tablet this week Lee Smith pounced on the Times for not looking into the implications of what it reported.
Or maybe the editors decided that it was all on the level, and the money influenced neither Indyk’s government work on the peace process nor Brookings’ analysis of the Middle East. Or maybe journalists just don’t think it’s worth making a big fuss out of obvious conflicts of interest that may affect American foreign policy. Maybe Qatar’s $14.8 million doesn’t affect Brookings’ research projects or what the think tank’s scholars tell the media, including the New York Times, about subjects like Qatar, Hamas, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other related areas in which Qatar has key interests at stake. Maybe the think tank’s vaunted objectivity, and Indyk’s personal integrity and his pride in his career as a public servant, trump the large piles of vulgar Qatari natural gas money that keep the lights on and furnish the offices of Brookings scholars and pay their cell-phone bills and foreign travel.
Smith also observed that the Qatar connection made Indyk poorly suited as an interlocutor for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The United Nations announced yesterday that it was withdrawing all of its United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) peacekeepers out of Syria due to "[t]he situation in UNDOF on the Syrian side and the area of separation has deteriorated severely over the last several days."
Armed groups have made advances in the area of UNDOF positions, posing a direct threat to the safety and security of the UN Peacekeepers along the “Bravo” line and in Camp Faouar. All the UN personnel in these positions have thus been relocated to the “Alpha” side. UNDOF continues to use all available assets to carry out its mandated tasks in this exceptionally challenging environment.
The "Alpha side" is Israel. https://twitter.com/LTCPeterLerner/status/511583877295403008

Long time Palestinian affairs reporter Avi Issacharoff yesterday reported that the plot that led to the kidnapping and killing of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel was done with the foreknowledge of Hamas's leadership. Issacharoff's report further buttresses Israel's long held claim that Hamas was responsible for the kidnappings and further undermines reports that Hamas's leadership was not connected. Palestinian security  officials told Issacharoff about another key member of the plot:
The officials said that although the Hamas leadership repeatedly denied involvement in the attack, the terror organization’s military and political wings knew about the plans in advance and had approved similar activities. Abed a-Rahman Ghaminat, one of the heads of a cell in Zurif (a village not far from Bethlehem) and a former resident of the village, was the Hamas military wing’s appointed leader over the Hebron area. Ghaminat was released from an Israeli prison in October 2011, and was deported to the Gaza Strip.
Based in Gaza, Ghaminat is part of Hamas' leadership and works with Saleh al-Arouri, who is based in Turkey, and is in charge of Hamas' operations in the West Bank. Ghanimat worked  with Mahmoud Kawasme in Gaza. Kawasme recruited his brother Hussam, who lives in the Hebron to mastermind the operation. Hussam Kawasme was indicted last week.

Steven Sotloff, the journalist whose beheading by the Islamic State was announced earlier this week, was not only Jewish, but an Israeli citizen. Apparently Sotloff became an Israeli citizen when he attended the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. Given the ease with which one can gather information he understood the risks involved in reporting from a part of world where Jews aren't welcome. He told his "almost-friend" Oren Kessler, "Yeah, Google definitely isn’t my friend.” Kessler was quoted further in The Times of Israel:
London-based analyst Oren Kessler, who corresponded with Sotloff, said he never shared his Jewish identity with anyone in the field, opting instead to tell locals that he had been raised Muslim but secular, without mosque affiliation. He sometimes even chose to tell people that he was of Chechen origin, and that Sotloff – a name that rings decidedly Jewish to those familiar with Jewish names – was actually a Chechen name.
The same report quoted a former hostage who said that despite the risks Sotloff feigned illness on Yom Kippur so he could fast and made efforts to pray towards Jerusalem:

Central to the charge that Israel's conduct warrants an investigation by an "independent" commission to investigate whether it committed war crimes is the premise that Israel, in defending itself against rockets launched by Hamas into its territory, caused a disproportionate number of civilian deaths. Since a commission appointed by the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council is looking to convict, a fair investigation into the violence is in order. Unfortunately, in an article from last week entitled "The U.N. says 7 in 10 Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. Israel disagrees," The Washington Post failed to provide the necessary context to allow a proper understanding of Operation Protective Edge.
The war in Gaza will now continue in a battle between databases to determine who was killed and why. The most contested number, the one that attracts the most stubborn insistence and ferocious rebuttal, is not the total fatalities on the Palestinian side, the more than 2,100 dead in the Gaza hostilities. The controversy centers instead on the ratio of civilians to combatants, or as the Israelis call them “terrorist operatives.”
In the second sentence the reporter, William Booth, mentions the "stubborn insistence and ferocious rebuttal," but doesn't acknowledge his own role in supporting the "stubborn insistence." Booth's articles on Operation Protective Edge have often contained similar language describing "mounting Palestinian civilian casualties." Furthermore, in other instances articles on which Booth was bylined listed casualty totals with no judgment as to their veracity. For example on July 19 a dispatch on which he had a byline reported:
The Palestinian death toll from the conflict rose Saturday to more than 330, including about 60 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. An additional 2,200 have been injured. The United Nations estimates that about 80 percent of the casualties are civilians, many of them children.

A 39 year old man was arrested for beating up notorious anti-Israel MP George Galloway yesterday. The Guardian reports:
The Bradford West MP was released from hospital on Saturday morning having suffered a suspected broken jaw and rib as well as facial bruising. Neil Masterson, 39, has been accused of shouting about the Holocaust and attacking him. The attack, it is claimed, was related to comments Galloway recently made about the conflict in Gaza. The MP was posing for pictures in Notting Hill in west London when the attack took place. He was treated overnight at St Mary's hospital. Police said he was charged with the assault an Galloway and another man. A spokesman said Masterson was due to appear at Hammersmith magistrates court on Monday.
The suspect is not Jewish. A few weeks ago Galloway declared Bradford to be an "Israel-free zone."
Earlier this month the left-wing Respect MP said that goods, academics, and tourists from the “illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel” were not welcome in Bradford because of the country’s actions in Gaza. ”We don’t want any Israeli goods, we don’t want any Israeli services, we don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college,” he added. Galloway’s comments have already attracted attention from the police, and on Monday, in response to the MP’s statement, Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub made a special trip to the Yorkshire town.

Three recent articles have critiqued the media's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially in the context of Operation Protective Edge. Previously, I covered Richard Behar's takedown of reporting from Israel in Forbes and yesterday Prof. Jacobson highlighted Matti Friedman's expose from Tablet Magazine. Behar focused on what gets left out of reporting from the Middle East. Friedman concentrated on how the media's narrative shapes the reporting from the Middle East. To be sure, both covered other issues, but those were their respective focuses. Earlier this month, former correspondent Mark Lavie wrote Why Everything Reported from Gaza in Crazy, Twisted. Lavie explains "why you don’t get the whole story."
Besides the budgetary limitations, news organizations often hesitate to send reporters into Gaza at all because of the constant danger, and not from Israeli airstrikes. In 2007, BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped by Palestinian militants and held for more than three months. Many other foreign journalists were kidnapped there and held for a day or two around that time. There have been no kidnappings recently, but the message was clear—foreigners are fair game. The message was heard and understood. For lack of an alternative, news organizations began to rely more and more on local stringers, giving the regime considerable leverage through intimidation. It’s expected that news organizations will deny all this—it’s part of the dance.

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has appointed a former New York State judge, Mary McGowan Davis to be the third commission member to investigate possible war crimes that might have occurred during Operation Protective Edge. The commission is to be headed by Prof. William Schabas. UN Watch reports:
The President of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ambassador Baudelaire Ndong Ella (Gabon), today announced the appointment of Mary McGowan Davis as an additional member of the Commission of Inquiry charged with investigating human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, in particular the occupied Gaza Strip, in the context of the military operations conducted since 13 June 2014. Justice McGowan Davis will join William Schabas and Doudou Diène whose appointments were announced by the Council President on 11 August. ... In carrying out its work, the Commission of Inquiry will aim to establish the facts and circumstances of human rights violations and crimes perpetrated in order to identify those responsible. The Council also requested that the Commission of Inquiry present a written report to the Human Rights Council at its twenty-eighth session in March 2015.
The report will unofficially be called Goldstone II after the Goldstone report, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa launched by the UNHRC after Israel's Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9 to stop rocket fire by Hamas from Gaza.

Numerous news organizations are reporting today that Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) claims to have shot down an Israeli drone as the drone approached the Natanz nuclear enrichment site. Reuters reports:
The Revolutionary Guards said of the drone incursion: "This wily act further exposed the Zionist regime's adventurous temperament and added yet another black page to a record filled with crime and mischief." If confirmed, an aircraft built by Israel's state-owned Aerospace Industries known as the Heron, or the more powerful Heron TP, is likely to have been involved for such a long-range mission. Military commanders in Israel have described both as a possible means of monitoring Iran and other countries.
The Heron is also called "Eitan" in Israel and it appears to be the only Israeli drone capable of reaching Iran. The BBC reports:
Natanz is Iran's main uranium enrichment site, and contains more than 16,000 centrifuges. The statement from the Revolutionary Guards said the drone was on course to fly over the nuclear facility at Natanz.

At his Muckraker column at Forbes, The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War, investigative journalist Richard Behar exposes many of the problems - really scandals - with the MSM reporting on Gaza. Though he focuses a lot on The New York Times, he focuses on other news outlets too and how, through a combination of credulousness, bias and laziness, they have become in the words of his friend, and fellow investigative journalist, Gary Weiss, "part of the Hamas war machine.” In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal The New York Times led the journalistic pack by hiring a "public editor" to handle complaints in the hopes of averting another similar scandal. But the problem with public editors or ombudsmen, as they are also called, is that they don't challenge the assumptions of the editors and reporters. Rather they seem to be explaining why the readers don't understand the high minded principles that professional journalists adhere to. What's important about Behar's takedown of the reporting is that he challenges the assumptions that news organizations accept. Behar looked at the media in general and specifically at The New York Times "because it is, without question, the most important media outlet in the world, in terms of setting the table each day for other outlets.". I can't cover the whole scope of Behar's critique as it is sweeping and comprehensive, but I'd like to focus on a few of his specific criticisms and then on a few of his observations. Richard Behar Media Intifada Behar's first critique of the Times is for its Gaza based reporter Fares Akram, and what he discovered when he visited Akram's Facebook page.

Following up on an airstrike that hit the house of terror mastermind Mohammad Deif, Israel killed three Hamas commanders last night. Raed al-Attar, Mohammad Abu Shmallah and Mohammad Barhoum. While there are still conflicting accounts as to whether Deif was killed or not, including a disappearing death certificate; three of his colleagues were killed. The IDF provided background on the two primary targets, al-Attar and Abu Shmallah as well as Barhoum. 2014-08-21_121035_IDF_Shamlah_Attar
Raed Attar, who oversaw Hamas forces in Rafah, planned major infiltrations and other attacks that killed Israeli civilians. He was directly involved in the 2006 kidnapping of SFC Gilad Shalit, as well as efforts to hold him captive in Gaza. In addition to planning attacks, Attar oversaw the construction of tunnels used to attack Israel through the Sinai Peninsula. As a senior Hamas operative, his major responsibility was to smuggle weapons into Gaza and oversee efforts to train and arm terrorists.

Israeli newspapers are reporting on the just disclosed coup attempt by Hamas to dislodge Fatah in the West Bank. The Times of Israel reported:
The Shin Bet said it arrested more than 90 Hamas operatives in May and June, confiscated dozens of weapons that had been smuggled into the West Bank, and seized more than $170,000 aimed at funding attacks. It produced photos of the confiscated weapons and cash and a flowchart of the Hamas operatives who had been questioned, and said they planned a series of massive attacks on Israeli targets, including the Temple Mount, in order to start a widespread conflagration. Indictments are expected to be filed against at least 70 of the suspects. Terror cells were set up in dozens of Palestinian West Bank towns and villages — including in and around Jenin, Nablus, eastern Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Hebron — the Shin Bet said.
There were other details at Ynet:
The plan called for using the intifada as cover to seize rule in Ramallah, which would have been led by the "Mohammed Deif of the West Bank" who currently operates out of Turkey. More than 70 indictments were served in recent days at military tribunals in the West Bank, and they expose the largest coordination effort Hamas has attempted in the area since Operation Defensive Shield more than a decade ago.
The "Mohammed Deif of the West Bank" is Saleh al-Arouri who was also implicated in the planning of the kidnappings and killings of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel.

Israel and its supporters have argued for some time that the news media give a skewed view of Operation Protective Edge because reporters in Gaza are intimidated by Hamas. Perhaps one of the most blatant examples was the disappearing tweet of The Wall Street Journal's Nick Casey, showing a member of Hamas sitting for an interview in Shifa hospital. As Prof Jacobson noted, Casey was subjected to online threats. But the disappearing tweet was consistent Hamas' rules for social media (that also apparently applied to major media organizations), which included "[d]o not publish photos of military commanders." Apparently Casey was in violation of that. Last week the Foreign Press Association in Israel (and not an organization that shrinks from criticizing Israel) decried Hamas' "blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods" to intimidate journalists. There were still skeptics. Jodi Rudoren, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, called the FPA's charge "nonsense." The left wing Israeli paper Ha'aretz also covered the story calling the press "divided" over the issue. Even in the Ha'aretz story, the term"divided" seems generous. The one reporter who spoke on the record to say he hadn't been intimidated, was forced to leave Gaza after he violated Hamas' press guidelines. If there was any remaining doubt about the intimidation, it was removed by an unlikely source, Hamas spokeswoman Yisra al-Mudallel. According to the MEMRI transcript, al-Mudallel said:
Moreover, the journalists who entered Gaza were fixated on the notion of peace and on the Israeli narrative. So when they were conducting interviewers, or when they went on location to report, they would focus on filming the places from where missiles were launched. Thus, they were collaborating with the occupation. These journalists were deported from the Gaza Strip. The security agencies would go and have a chat with these people. They would give them some time to change their message, one way or another. ... We suffered from this problem very much. Some of the journalists who entered the Gaza Strip were under security surveillance. Even under these difficult circumstances, we managed to reach them, and tell them that what they were doing was anything but professional journalism and that it was immoral.

Yesterday the Washington Institute for Near East published Six Ways Hamas Hamas Could Limit Civilian Casualties in Gaza by Jeffrey White. All of White's suggestions involve separating the combatants from civilians, but as White acknowledges, "... there is little chance the group will implement any of these measures." And why would Hamas change? Human shields have been an effective strategy protecting its fighters. White concludes:
As long as the world sees Israel as the primary mechanism of civilian casualties, and as long as many Gaza civilians continue to be more concerned with "resistance" than their lives, Hamas has no reason to change its way of war.
Though White doesn't write it explicitly, the media has a responsibility to tell the whole story and not just the one that Hamas tells or allows them to. Oren Kessler says this explicitly in Reporters Have Finally Found Hamas. What Took So Long? that was published in The New Republic.
Let me be clear: I admire the bravery required of war correspondents, and I recognize the onerous conditions under which they work. I see no conspiracy behind the inability of many of them to adequately cover Hamas. Instead, I see a collective failure by much of the world’s press to give an accurate rendering of one party to the Gaza fighting, and to lay bare—whether explicitly or more subtly—the restrictions it enforces upon them in so doing.
Take for example, As war with Israel shatters lives, more Gazans question Hamas decisions that appeared in The Washington Post. While there is important information in the report - that Hamas has been alienating the civilian population of Gaza - the report always reminds readers that Gazans resent Israel more. For example: