WHILE TRUMP’S WIN WILL IMPROVE U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONS, POST-CLINTON DEM’S TURN FURTHER AGAINST JEWISH STATE

Israel and the 10 Commandments of a Trump Presidency: Yoram Ettinger, Algemeiner, Nov. 16, 2016— The outcome of the November 8, 2016, US election was predicted by those who doubted the accuracy of the polling samples.

Hillary’s Loss Accelerates the Democrats’ Turn Against Israel: Seth Mandel, New York Post, Nov. 14, 2016— Israel’s supporters were hoping Hillary Clinton could forestall the Democratic Party’s seemingly inevitable turn against the Jewish state.

Can Iraq’s Christians Finally Go Home?: Mindy Belz, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 27, 2016  — Noura Diyha wrestled a phone from her pocket to show me a photo of herself at age 3.

Yaffa Eliach, Historian Who Captured Faces of the Holocaust, Dies at 79: Joseph Berger, New York Times, Nov. 9, 2016—Yaffa Eliach, who as a 4-year-old survived the Nazi massacres of Jews in her Lithuanian town, and went on to document their daily life in a kaleidoscopic book and a haunting, three-story canyon of photographs at

On Topic Links

Obama Lobbies Against Obliteration by Trump: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016

In Post-Arab Spring Egypt, Muslim Attacks on Christians are Rising: Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, Nov. 13, 2016

Mideast Christians Facing Islamic State Genocide Hopeful Trump Will ‘Secure Peace’: Edwin Mora, Breitbart, Nov. 15, 2016

Turkey Targets Oldest Syriac Orthodox Monastery: Robert Jones, Gatestone Institute, Nov. 16, 2016

ISRAEL AND THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF A TRUMP PRESIDENCY

Yoram Ettinger                                                              

Algemeiner, Nov. 16, 2016

The outcome of the November 8, 2016, US election was predicted by those who doubted the accuracy of the polling samples. In fact, it is doubtful that credible samples can be currently formulated, due to the fluctuating ground of the social, economic, political, demographic and ethnic environment in the 435 congressional districts, the 50 states and the many county lines in the US.

The outcome of the November races for the White House, 34 Senate seats, 435 House seats, 12 governorships and all state legislatures spotlights the reasserted profile of the flyover areas of relatively small-town-America, the blue-collar and six-pack-Joe and lunch-pail-Mable America (“Reagan Democrats”), the moderate “Blue Dog” and conservative America, the national and homeland security hawks and the evangelical constituency, which was not significantly registered in prior election cycles.

The November 8, 2016 election was a victory of the anti-establishment and politically incorrect folks over the politically correct media, academia, political, business and foreign policy establishments. The term “alt-right,” which nobody had heard of until the unexpected emergence and rise of Donald Trump in the US…

What impact will the Trump victory have on US-Israel relations? Just like all Western democracies and other allies of the US, Israel is mostly concerned with the US posture of deterrence, which has played a critical role in restraining global radicalism and reassuring free societies. However, the US power-projection has been significantly eroded during the Obama administration, generating tailwinds for rogue regimes and headwinds for America’s allies, as has been strikingly demonstrated in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East at large. It has fueled global turbulence, instability and Islamic terrorism, which is asserting itself in Europe and increasingly on the US mainland.

The Trump presidency is expected to reboot the US posture of deterrence by reversing the recent draconian cuts in the US defense budget and the size of the US armed forces – in the face of intensifying clear and present terrorism, conventional and nuclear threats to the US and its allies — and to replenish the rapidly depleted and aging US military stockpiles; compensate for the declining purchase power of the US dollar; restore the size of the armed forces, and reassess the July 2015 agreement with Iran. The latter has caused all pro-US Arab countries to downgrade their confidence in the US posture of deterrence and seek closer ties with Russia.

The track record of President-elect Trump, Vice President-elect Pence, and their foreign policy and national security advisers, suggest that US-Israel relations are expected to experience less tension and substantial enhancement, driven by the 400-year-old foundation of Judeo-Christian values of liberty and justice, as well as long and short-term mutual interests and threats, Israel’s unique and increasing contributions to the US commercial and defense industries and to scientific, technological, irrigation, agricultural, space and military US concerns.

President and Vice President-elect Trump and Pence, and most of their advisers on US-Israel relations and foreign policy, are prone to adhere to the following “10 commandments:” 1. Jewish sovereignty over the land of Israel is a derivative of a unique historical right – which was enshrined by the early pilgrims and the US Founding Fathers — rather than a compensation for the Holocaust; 2. Israel is a most effective, unconditional geo-strategic ally of the US, willing to flex its muscles, extending the strategic hand of the US, while employing its own – not American — soldiers, performing within the framework of a two-way-street, mutually beneficial, win-win US-Israel relationship;

3. The scope of US geo-strategic interests, and therefore US-Israel relations, dramatically transcends the Palestinian issue; 4. Irrespective of the Arab talk — but based on the Arab walk — the Palestinian issue is not a core cause of Middle East turbulence, nor a centerpiece of Arab policy-making, nor a trigger of anti-US Islamic terrorism, nor the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict;

5. Based on the intra-Arab Palestinian track record (stabbing the backs of their Arab hosts), the relationships between the Palestinian Authority and anti-US regimes and terror organizations, the anti-US incitement on the Palestinian street, Palestinian hate-education, and the strategic implications of the raging anti-US Arab tsunami, a Palestinian state would be a strategic liability, undermining regional stability and vital US interests in the Middle East;

6. The Trump team’s order of priorities will minimize the US involvement in the mediation/negotiation process of the Palestinian issue. The Trump team is aware that the US has introduced numerous Israel-Arab peace initiatives, none of which succeeded. The only two successful peace initiatives, Israel-Egypt and Israel-Jordan, were initiated – and directly negotiated — by the parties involved. The US involvement has always radicalized Arab expectations by further pressure on Israel, thus radicalizing Arab positions, which undermines the prospects of peace.

7. The Trump/Pence state of mind does not consider Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria an obstacle to peace nor a violation of international law. 8. The Trump/Pence team recognizes that the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria are critically required for Israel’s existence, as demonstrated by a map submitted to President Johnson by former chairman of the Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff, General Earl Wheeler: “The minimum requirements for Israel’s defense include most of the West Bank.”

9. The Trump/Pence team is aware that Jerusalem is the ancient capital of the Jewish state – not an international city — and therefore should be the site of the US Embassy in Israel. The refusal to relocate the US Embassy to Jerusalem has undermined the US posture of deterrence, and has strayed from the legacy of the US Founding Fathers, who considered Jerusalem a cornerstone of their moral and cultural worldview, as reflected by the 18 Jerusalems and 32 Salems (the original Biblical name of Jerusalem) on the US map.

10. Trump’s anti-establishment worldview is also targeting the State Department, which has been systematically wrong on Middle East issues, including its 1948 recommendation not to recognize the establishment of Israel, and its current insistence that Jerusalem is an international city. Therefore Foggy Bottom will not lead — but follow — the Middle East policy of the Trump administration, which will not subordinate the US unilateral action to multilateralism and the UN…                                                         

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]                       

Contents                                                                                                                                                                      

HILLARY’S LOSS ACCELERATES                                                                          

THE DEMOCRATS’ TURN AGAINST ISRAEL                                                                                        

Seth Mandel                                                                                                          

New York Post, Nov. 14, 2016

Israel’s supporters were hoping Hillary Clinton could forestall the Democratic Party’s seemingly inevitable turn against the Jewish state. Clinton’s loss last week means we’re officially après Hillary — and must prepare for the flood. This could be the last US presidential election that Israelis don’t have to watch with existential dread.

At least, the first signs of a post-Clinton Democratic Party aren’t good. Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, a fiery critic of Israel, is the front-runner to be the next Democratic National Committee chairman. As Scott Johnson detailed in The Weekly Standard when Ellison was on the verge of winning his House seat in 2006, before his congressional career Ellison had worked with Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and even defended Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism.

Ellison has left Farrakhan far behind, but his Israel criticism remains scathing. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, Ellison “has organized letters urging pressure on Israel, and was an advocate of drawing lessons from the UN Goldstone Report following the 2009 Gaza War.” Even Richard Goldstone, the author of the infamously anti-Israel report, wound up essentially disowning it.

On a trip to Israel last summer, Ellison posted a photo of a sign in Hebron declaring Israel to be an apartheid state and land thief. He has also called for Israel to end the blockade on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip — despite the fact that Gaza-based terrorists have launched over 11,000 rocket attacks on Israeli civilians since Israel withdrew from the strip in 2005. Amid the 2014 war to stop those attacks, Israel discovered that Hamas had built a vast system of underground tunnels from Gaza to Israel in preparation for mass terror attacks.

Yet Ellison is far from a lone voice among Democrats; indeed, he’s co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In his quest for the party chairmanship, Ellison has the backing of soon-to-be Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer — who prides himself on his pro-Israel bona fides and is now using his credibility on the issue to elevate Ellison. (Retiring Sen. Harry Reid offered his own endorsement over the weekend.) Schumer might just be bowing to the new reality. According to the Pew Research Center, Democrats sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians by a 43-29 margin — but that’s far closer than just a few years ago.

And among liberal Democrats, it flips: Liberals prefer the Palestinians by a 40-33 margin. We saw this play out over the summer, as Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Sanders had massive support among young liberals, who are increasingly hostile to Israel. Hillary won the nomination, but the message was clear: The future of the Democratic Party clearly belongs to those backing Sanders.

Diving into the numbers only paints a bleaker picture. In their book “Our Separate Ways: The Struggle for the Future of the US-Israel Alliance,” Dana Allin and Steven Simon (the latter a former Mideast adviser to President Obama) argue demographics will pull the two countries apart. Hispanics, who accounted for more than 50 percent of US population growth between 2000 and 2014, according to Pew, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, as do African-Americans. Allin and Simon predict that minorities will see more in common with the Palestinians than with Israel (the daft comparisons between Jim Crow and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians get ever more common), and Democratic priorities will reflect that. “And,” the authors write, touching on what really worries the pro-Israel community, “it will inflame the left-right divide in America.”

Democrats are in the minority now, but won’t be forever, and will obviously field a presidential candidate in 2020. What happens then? “In the absence of active demonization by” Obama, says one official at a pro-Israel organization, “I think we’re still a cycle or two away from Democrats turning on Israel” full force. But, he notes, the future isn’t bright — and “progressives are lost, of course.” Israeli officials are used to being able to count on bipartisan support in Congress, and they didn’t seem too worried no matter which way the US presidential election went this year. It might be the last time they have that luxury.            

Contents           

CAN IRAQ’S CHRISTIANS FINALLY GO HOME?                                                                                      

Mindy Belz                                                                                      

Wall Street Journal, Oct. 27, 2016

Noura Diyha wrestled a phone from her pocket to show me a photo of herself at age 3. She’s wearing a bonnet and riding a tricycle on a grass lawn. Some 14 years later, Noura is one of nearly 1 million internally displaced people in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her family fled from the mostly Christian village of Batnaya in August 2014, when Islamic State militants captured territory throughout northern Iraq. She now lives in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. As coalition forces—Iraqi government forces, allied militias and Kurdish soldiers, backed by U.S. air and on-the-ground support—advance toward Mosul and retake villages like Batnaya, Noura’s family hopes to return home soon. Yet even success on the battlefield won’t guarantee a safe return for exiled Christians and other religious minorities.

ISIS fighters dug in at Noura’s town and came under heavy fire on Oct. 20. They used rocket launchers and suicide bombers against coalition ground troops, but the village was retaken earlier this week. Coalition forces, aided by U.S. airstrikes and mortar rounds, covered significant ground and retook dozens of other villages controlled by ISIS. Nearing Mosul’s city limits, the armies face intense resistance. For Noura and thousands of others, these are days of waiting, only now with the possibility of returning home. “A military defeat of Daesh [ISIS] is only the first step,” says Father Emanuel Youkhana, an Assyrian priest who heads an Iraqi relief organization. “We must deal with root causes that allowed Daesh to arise and take this territory, in order to permit all Iraqi people to return home.”

Turkey, a NATO member, now stands in the way of the Christians’ return. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inserted thousands of Turkish forces into Nineveh months ago, and he insists they participate in the fight against ISIS. Mr. Erdogan told an Arab news channel this month, “only Sunni Arabs, Turkomens, and Sunni Kurds” should remain in the Mosul region once it is liberated. Under martial law in his own country, Mr. Erdogan has closed churches and detained Christian clergy.

Father Youkhana and others fear Turkey seeks to re-establish its own empire out of the crumbling ISIS caliphate, one similar to the Ottoman empire—the same government that killed an estimated 1.5 million Armenian and Assyrian Christians in genocides a century ago. Iraq opposes Mr. Erdogan’s overtures. “The Turkish insistence on its presence inside Iraqi territories has no justification,” said Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at a recent press conference in Baghdad. Iraq’s Parliament called the Turkish troops “hostile occupying forces.”

Yet the Obama administration is pressuring Baghdad to accept a role for Turkey. Given the strength of Turkish influence, and Christians’ lack of political clout, this is likely to finish the Christians’ right to return. This despite the fact that Christians have lived in this part of the world since the first century. I’ve walked through church ruins in Nineveh that archaeologists estimate were constructed in the second or third century. “I believe we stand at a crossroads for the future of Christianity—and pluralism—in the Middle East,” said Carl Anderson of the Knights of Columbus at an event this month in New York City. “Either Christianity will survive and offer a witness of forgiveness, charity and mercy, or it will disappear, impoverishing the region religiously, ethnically and culturally.”

Mr. Anderson’s organization compiled a 300-page report at the request of the State Department documenting ISIS genocide of Christians in Iraq. Besides the toxic level of displacement, the report contains graphic detail confirming that at least 1,100 Christians have been murdered by Islamic militants in Iraq since 2003, though the number is almost certainly higher now. Yet U.S. officials seem to be ignoring these findings, even though the report pushed Washington to legally declare ISIS’s actions a “genocide.”

Exile is at the heart of the Christian message. The Old Testament Jews wandered in the wilderness and the savior Jesus Christ “had no place to lay his head.” His apostle Paul wrote four of his New Testament epistles from prison. The Christians in Iraq know this is their story, too. Yet being vanquished forever from this heartland is a terrible fate to contemplate…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]     Contents           

YAFFA ELIACH, HISTORIAN WHO CAPTURED FACES

OF THE HOLOCAUST, DIES AT 79                                                                           Joseph Berger                                                                           New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016

Yaffa Eliach, who as a 4-year-old survived the Nazi massacres of Jews in her Lithuanian town, and went on to document their daily life in a kaleidoscopic book and a haunting, three-story canyon of photographs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 79. Her death, after a long illness, was confirmed by Thea Wieseltier, a family friend.

After a childhood that might have throttled a person of lesser spine, Professor Eliach (pronounced EL-ee-akh) dedicated herself to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust and its victims. Starting in 1969, she did so as a professor of history and literature in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College, and by founding the pioneering Center for Holocaust Studies at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. Though modest in scale, its collection of taped interviews, diaries, letters, photographs and artifacts became a model for dozens of such centers. Her mission, she said many times, was to document the victims’ lives, not just their deaths, to give them back their grace and humanity. She determined to do so as a member of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust during a visit to the death camps, where she realized that the victims were portrayed only as bulging-eyed skeletons in ragged striped uniforms, not as the vital people they once were.

Professor Eliach decided to recreate the shtetl she had known in Lithuania — Eisiskes, known in Yiddish as Eishyshok — where 3,500 Jews, almost the entire Jewish population, were killed, by collecting photographs of its inhabitants. Starting with a nucleus of family photos she and her older brother had squirreled away in hiding, she spent 15 years traveling to all 50 states and many countries searching for photographs, diaries and letters of other shtetl residents. In Israel, she knocked on 42 doors of an apartment building to track down one family and unearthed a cache of material buried in cans under a palm tree. In Australia, she told a radio station that she was searching for a family known as “the Mice” and was fortunate to get a tip from a caller. She hired security guards to help her gather materials in a former synagogue in a rough section of Detroit. And in several cases she resorted to a kind of bribery — medication, a color TV, four jogging suits — to persuade families to part with precious photographs temporarily so that she could reproduce them. She spent more than $600,000 of her own money and loans, then supported the project with a Guggenheim fellowship.

Professor Eliach ultimately collected 6,000 photographs of townspeople posing at bar mitzvahs, graduations and weddings, and in family groups — accounting for 92 percent of the village’s slaughtered Jews. Some 1,500 were selected for the Holocaust museum’s “Tower of Faces,” sometimes called a “Tower of Life,” where photographs are arranged in a narrow, soaring chasm that visitors walk through. The faces render the lives of so many ordinary Jews intimate and vibrant. By 2016, 40 million people had visited the museum since its opening in 1993. Professor Eliach assembled hundreds of the photographs and oral histories into an 818-page book, “There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok,” published by Little, Brown & Company in 1998. It was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award and joined her earlier book, “Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust,” as among her major contributions.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a leader in organizations of survivors’ children, said that Professor Eliach had made the Holocaust a subject both “accessible and kosher” for Orthodox Jews after years in which it had “presented far too many theological problems,” like how God could allow such things to happen.

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]    

CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!

On Topic Links

Obama Lobbies Against Obliteration by Trump: Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2016 —You know how desperate President Obama is — as he contemplates all his accomplishments going down the drain at the hands of a man he has total contempt for — when he is willing to do something so against his nature.

In Post-Arab Spring Egypt, Muslim Attacks on Christians are Rising: Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, Nov. 13, 2016 — The Christian and Muslim villagers grew up together, played on the same soccer fields as kids, and attended the same schools in this riverside hamlet.

the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 79.

Mideast Christians Facing Islamic State Genocide Hopeful Trump Will ‘Secure Peace’: Edwin Mora, Breitbart, Nov. 15, 2016—Leaders from the minority Christian community in the Middle East have commended President-elect Donald Trump on his victory last week, saying they are hopeful the new American leader will strengthen and support the ethno-religious minority groups in Iraq and Syria victimized by the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).

Turkey Targets Oldest Syriac Orthodox Monastery: Robert Jones, Gatestone Institute, Nov. 16, 2016—The European Commission has recently issued its 2016 Turkey Progress Report, which contains serious criticism of the country's increasingly grave human rights record.