The 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War will be commemorated in many ways in the coming days. Media retrospectives, conferences, new documentaries and first person remembrances of the battles and their aftermath will be seen and heard in Israel, here in the United States and elsewhere.
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For those of a certain age, we’ll be asking each other: “Do you remember where you were on June 5, 1967?” I do.

I vividly recall being in my high school cafeteria waiting for the bell to ring for first period. Each morning, a group of us would gather at the back of the cafeteria, just shooting the breeze, as high school seniors do. But this morning was different; one of my friends, who had obviously seen the news before leaving for school, perhaps on the Today Show, said to me, “You guys are really beating the Arabs.”
 
I knew immediately that the war had begun. It was the culmination of more than three weeks of threats to destroy Israel emanating from Cairo and Damascus. Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Syria’s President Nureddin al-Atassi, and those who represented them, were clearly signaling their intention to finish off the Jewish state.
Actually, these threats began months earlier. A New York Timesheadline on October 15, 1966, read: “Israel Tells UN Syria Plans War to Destroy Her.” Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, addressed the Security Council, referencing dozens of Syrian threats against the Jewish state.

​Between then and May 1967, hardly a day passed without threats from Nasser. On March 8, he declared: “We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil covered in blood.” A month later, Syria Information Minister Mahmoud Zubi predicted that, “this battle will be…followed by more severe battles until Palestine is liberated and the Zionist presence ended.”

The pace picked up throughout May, with both official radio outlets in Cairo and Damascus promising to defeat the “Zionist entity.” Egypt demanded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, who had been stationed there since the Suez campaign of 1956. Then Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, considered by some to be an act of war. Neither the UN, nor the international community, seemed willing — or even the slightest bit interested — in taking Israel out of its isolation. The best UN Secretary-General U Thant could utter, after Egypt’s demand that the peacekeeping forces leave, was a weak, “…may I advise you that I have serious misgivings about it… [the] withdrawal may have grave implications for peace.”

The closing of the Straits was criticized by both the United States and the United Kingdom as contravening international law, with Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson stating “[Egypt’s blockade] must not be allowed to triumph; Britain would join with efforts to open the Straits.” But, in the end, nothing was done to stand up to Cairo and Damascus’ march toward war.

The Egyptians and Syrians were so confident of victory that Hafez Assad, then Syria’s defense minister and later its president, said on May 20: “Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse any aggression, but to initiate the act ourselves, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland of Palestine. … I believe that the time has come to begin a battle of annihilation.”

Sitting in our living room in New Hampshire, my family watched and listened to this litany of threats unfold, one more belligerent than the next. Egypt’s UN Ambassador Mobared El-Kony and Syria’s, George Tomeh, were particularly threatening in Security Council debates on the crisis. We worried endlessly about our relatives living on a kibbutz not far from the Syrian border.

​Each day brought even greater boasts from the region, and we took them all seriously. We comforted ourselves only by watching and listening to the oratorical skills of Eban, whose speeches at the UN Security Council not only outlined the Arab threats, but the rightness of Israel’s cause.

On May 30, Nasser ratcheted up the tone even more: “The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel…to face the challenge, while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. The act will astound the world…”

And Iraq’s President Abdul Rahman Arif couldn’t have been more direct, when he said on May 31: “The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified. This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear — to wipe Israel off the map.”

The rest is history. Israel’s defense forces routed the Arab armies in six days, and the war — which was named for its length — has been enshrined in Jewish history as one of its most glorious chapters.
I rushed home from school on the afternoon of June 5, turning on CBS News on our local station, WKNE, to hear Michael Elkins reporting from Israel that the Israeli Air Force had destroyed the combined Arab air forces on the ground. We were jubilant.

Back at school the next day, I was able to follow events on the radio in the high school office. In the small city in which we lived, my father took a petition supporting Israel to merchants and friends on Main Street, asking that they sign in support of Israel. Nothing else in our lives mattered that week. As the days passed, the feelings of relief turned to triumph and then to pride in what we never imagined happening.

​Today, it is the Iranian regime that is making the threats to annihilate Israel. The Jewish state is a “cancer” that needs to be eradicated, its leaders say. Tehran paints those very words on the sides of ballistic missiles that it parades, with hubris, in full sight of international TV coverage. Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and it makes no difference, really, if it is in mothballs for a few years. Already, European officials say that Tehran is shopping for dual use technologies to utilize when it is ready to do so. And Iran provides thousands of rockets to Hezbollah, and mentors and supports Hamas, both of which call for Israel’s destruction many times daily.

And the United Nations, which stood idly by in 1967, today has under its roof agencies like the UN Human Rights Council and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which year after year have sought to delegitimize, demonize and marginalize Israel.  In 1967, Britain’s Sir Alec Douglas-Home, speaking about the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, presciently said: “…the first casualty (of this crisis) had been the United Nations. It would need an immense effort, an almost superhuman effort, to restore the prestige of that organization.” The more things change, the more they stay the same. The UN continues to risk irrelevancy by allowing the pummeling of Israel to continue.

The Six-Day War was a miracle, aided by courageous leaders and soldiers who had no choice but to win. It was a defining moment for young Jews of our generation. And it fortunately established the Jewish state as the regional power it is. But the battles that followed, including the Yom Kippur War, the First and Second Lebanon Wars and the Gaza campaigns, attest to the continuing desire of Israel’s enemies to bring it down — one way or another.
Iran is only the latest of these foes to threaten Israel, and its newfound bounty, by way of the nuclear agreement, has left it flush with cash to attempt to carry out its objectives. While we observe those momentous six days, let us all be sure to sleep with one eye open.

​WATCH B'nai B'rith International EVP Dan Mariaschin as he reflects on the life of Shimon Peres.
 
Mariaschin calls Peres the "last of his generation" of "those men and women who were present at the creation and who were responsible for founding the modern state of Israel."

Through this summer’s din and uncertainty of Brexit, the migration crisis and a wave of terror, Europe has remained constant in one respect: its singular fixation on a wrong-headed policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

If the Middle East were an arrivals and departures board at a train station, the Israeli-Palestinian question would be down somewhere at the fifth or sixth spot, behind the war on ISIS, the Syrian civil war, the Libya fiasco and Iranian hegemonism. All those decades in which the mantra “if you solve the Palestinian issue, all outstanding issues will fall into place,” has been proven to be nothing more than hollow conventional wisdom. The Sunni-Shia divide has become a roiling ocean, creating aftershocks in nearly every corner of the region — and beyond.

For years, the Palestinian leadership has become accustomed to “pride of place” on the issue, picking up supporters and apologists globally, but no more so than in Europe itself. Explanations for this are varied: some countries were concerned at one point about the spread of PLO terrorism in Europe, and sought accommodation with the terrorist organization. Some European governments were driven by ideological considerations and looked the other way at the thuggery, then the obstructionism of the PLO and its successors, while coming down hard on a succession of center-left and center-right Israeli governments. Some European leaders saw themselves as mediators and interlocutors, worrying that a shortage of obeisance to the Palestinian narrative would disqualify them from being “honest brokers.”

Indeed, since its 1980 Venice Declaration, in which the then-EEC (European Economic Community) supported the Palestinian’s call for “self-determination,” Europe has always tilted to the Palestinian side, despite the existence of generally good bilateral relations between a number of European Union (EU) countries and Israel.

As the EU grew in size, some differences in this approach became discernible. After the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, a number of the new democracies could be found voting against, or abstaining on issues considered to be biased against Israel at the United Nations (U.N.) and other international fora. Increasingly, though, the demand for consensus in EU voting has seen the voting independence of the former Central and Eastern European states dissipate in the face of pressure from Brussels and from a number of the senior EU member capitals.

The 2012 decision to upgrade the status of the Palestinians to “non-member state”—despite the EU’s call for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, with the object of reaching a two state solution—was supported by no less than 14 EU members. Only the Czech Republic voted against; 12 others abstained. The message to the Palestinian Authority couldn’t have been clearer: why negotiate with Israel when the international community, including key European countries, could do the heavy lifting for it?

Gaming the U.N. system has become a PA specialty.

One recent case in point is a resolution singling out Israel recently adopted at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Health Assembly in Geneva. The measure, introduced by Kuwait on behalf of the Arab Group and Palestine, singled out Israel for “physical and procedural barriers to health access” in the territories, east Jerusalem and what they call the “Syrian Golan.” The text also cited the “prolonged occupation and human rights violations on mental, physical and environmental health…”

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of the daily lives of Israelis and Palestinians knows that emergency rooms and hospital wards in Israel treat Palestinians on a daily basis. Indeed, the Israeli organization, Save a Child’s Heart, which performs, gratis, pediatric cardiac surgery, has treated more than 2,000 Palestinian children since its inception in 1996. Beyond that, Israel has been treating hundreds of cases of civilians from across Syria who have been wounded in the barrel bombings and other carnage of that bloody war in medical facilities in the northern part of Israel.

And yet, 107 countries supported this libelous WHO resolution, including all 28 EU member states. On a continent where the blood libel against Jewish communities was a prominent fixture of life in the Middle Ages, and on the basis of facts widely known in European capitals, it is both incomprehensible, and reprehensible that Israel should be castigated in this way.

Another recent example of Palestinian influence at the U.N. is the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Executive Board’s vote in favor of a resolution on “Occupied Palestine.” There are 40 points in the resolution, some of it rehashing previous resolutions condemning Israel for all manner of absurd accusations of “desecrating” holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. But this measure makes no reference at all to the Temple Mount, only to its Islamic/Arabic name, Al-Haram Al-Sharif. In the resolution, the plaza in front of the Western Wall is referred to as the Al-Buraq Plaza; “Western Wall Plaza” is noted in quotes only.

This isn’t only a matter of semantics, or “sensitivity.” In the past, the United Nations documents have referenced the holy site by both the name recognized by Judaism and Christianity (the Temple Mount) and Islam (Al-Haram Al-Sharif). This current re-writing of history, and the elimination of both the Jewish and Christian places in that history, was supported by 33 countries overall. Four EU countries actually supported the measure, and five did oppose, with two abstentions. But why was there a division in Europe over this blatant historical revisionism?

To the Palestinians, all of this has a purpose: to erase or delegitimize Israel’s, and the Jewish people’s claim to the land. That European countries, no strangers to either the Jewish narrative on their own continent or to the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, would, for the sake of diplomatic expediency, dismiss that history with a simple keystroke or a voting show of hands, is unacceptable.

There’s even more counterproductive meddling beyond the U.N. system. Case in point: Last fall’s EU directive to label products from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights prejudges an issue (settlements) that belongs in a direct negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians. The EU itself, as a member of the Quartet (which also includes the United States, the United Nations and Russia), wants to have it both ways. Calling for face-to-face negotiations but siding with the Palestinians before those talks have even begun on this issue.

This all amounts to flawed diplomacy. Those European countries which engage in this kind of voting behavior or in extra-curricular diplomacy could better spend their time encouraging the Palestinians to end their quixotic sullying of Israel, rather than enabling it. These resolutions set back what remains of the peace process, they don’t advance it. Palestinian expectations are inflated when Europe backs these initiatives, and in Israel, the belief that it can never get a fair break at the U.N. and other international fora is reinforced.

It’s time for Brussels and other European capitals to send a simple message to Ramallah: if you’re serious about peace, get to the table. If not, there is no shortage of crises to occupy our time and attention.

It has been business as usual at the U.N. Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva this month.

​Here’s why it matters.

Notwithstanding the need for urgent attention to such serial abusers as Syria’s Assad regime, which continues to barrel-bomb its own citizens in the midst of a destructive civil war, and Iran, which most certainly vies for the lead in any number of human rights abuses, including the execution of juvenile offenders, Israel is still singled out for special opprobrium.

If this sounds like a broken record, it is. Each year, all countries up for discussion are lumped together into one agenda item, while Israel is always separated out from the rest for individual scrutiny under Item “7” which applies solely to the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East. Subsumed under that item this year are a basket of separate resolutions, as well as six reports. The resolutions, which make no pretence at being objective, hammer Israel for “the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” settlements, human rights abuses in the Golan Heights and a call for Palestinian self-determination.

The special reports include updates on the infamous Goldstone Commission Report, which was written in the wake of the 2009 Gaza war, and which suggested Israel might be guilty of war crimes. Judge Richard Goldstone, who chaired the group which wrote the report, ultimately backed away from its one-sided findings. In the U.N. system, however, vituperation against Israel has a life of its own, so the report lives on.

What does all of this have to do with the real world in 2016? The Middle East is not only in chaos, it is in meltdown mode in Iraq and Syria. Libya has now become the new ISIS target of opportunity. Iran, soon to be flush with cash from the nuclear deal with the P5+1, sends its Revolutionary Guards to Syria, along with its wholly-owned subsidiary Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that has taken over control of Lebanon, to back the Assad regime. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost in this conflict, Christians and Yazidis have been massacred and subject to humiliation, eviction and dispersal, with millions becoming part of the biggest refugee migration in decades.

This situation has received scant attention from a U.N. body “re-formed and reformed” 10 years ago to address real human rights crises. Its 47 members have really done no such thing. It is dominated by countries from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, and something called the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries, said to represent 50 percent of the world’s population, whose worldview includes protecting many of those countries who are in the first line of human rights abusers.

This session, as a result of membership rotation, the United States is not on the Council. Nevertheless, it has spoken out strongly against the double standard Israel receives at the hands of the members of the body. Neither is Canada, which has been a staunch defender of Israel over the past decade. The EU countries choose not to participate in the debate on Item 7, though several of its member states, critical of Israel, find a way to do so. The EU could act more forcefully against this on-going diplomatic charade, but it refrains from doing that—another example of how its actions often don’t measure up to the values it claims to uphold.

As for the Palestinians it once again proves that, though largely crowded out of the news because of events in the region, their ability to manipulate the U.N. system continues. Whether it was attaining full membership at UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), non-member state status at the General Assembly, or getting its flag flown in front of the U.N. in New York and other U.N. venues (including Geneva), they continue to plug away, not feeling any pressure to return to the negotiating table with Israel. And why should they? The Palestinians feel they have the international community’s blindly supportive wind at their back—even at a time when the Middle East neighborhood in which the Palestinians are based, is imploding.

One European diplomat I met in Geneva, after a spirited discussion about how annual denunciations of Israel only embolden the Palestinians and discourage the Israelis, told me point blank that if they were to say “no’ to Item 7, “the Palestinian door would be closed to us.” My rejoinder was that if the EU—which has often been the Palestinians’ friend in court and which has for years funded the salaries of Palestinian Authority (PA) civil servants—really sought to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian issue, they would spend their time urging the PA to move to the negotiating table, rather than allow this yearly lacerating of Israel to continue.

So as the Middle East burns, Nero—in this case—the Human Rights Council, fiddles. An aversion to doubling down on real abusers of human rights, and a propensity to let the anti-Israel rhetoric flow in Item 7 and its accompanying reports, speaks to the hypocrisy and emptiness of the Council and the system that has produced it.

Living in a time where, from our smart phone screens we can learn, real time, about the abuses of human rights everywhere, a global conscience is AWOL. Each day it stays that way, real opportunities to help those who suffer, pass. Instead, at the Human Rights Council and elsewhere, there is always time to unfairly castigate Israel.
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What a terrible waste.

The sight of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani now globetrotting his way to world capitals on what he surely sees as a victory lap after signing the nuclear agreement is yet another reminder of how quickly the Tehran regime is being rehabilitated.

He’s not yet made his way to Latin America, but he may yet do so: Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have been staunch friends of Iran over the years. Surely those countries will want to bask in Tehran’s newfound diplomatic luster and supp at the trough of its economic promise, now that most sanctions have been lifted.

Iran’s penetration of Latin America goes back more than 20 years. The bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, and the attack on the AMIA social welfare building in 1994, which killed more than 80 people, can be laid at the doorstep of Iranian operatives and their terrorist proxies, Hezbollah.

With the coming to power of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Iran ratcheted up its operations in the hemisphere, including the infamous Tehran-Caracas IranAir flight, which symbolized the close ties the two regimes established. Fellow travelers Bolivia and Ecuador — part of the South American anti-West club — soon joined eagerly, surely benefiting from Tehran’s “walking around” largesse, used to expand its influence in the region.

Indeed, Venezuela has fallen further into an economic abyss under Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, making more likely Caracas will become even more indebted (and not just financially) to the Iranians.

The result has been not only an Iranian friendship circle, but a bloc of countries pledged to anti-Israel rhetoric and activity at the United Nations and other multilateral fora.

A recent report in London’s Al-Awsat Arabic newspaper speaks of Hezbollah cells operating in at least five countries in the hemisphere, which comes as no surprise. Similar reports have been cropping up over the now nearly 25 years since the terrorist acts in Buenos Aires.

Against this backdrop of Iranian activity in our backyard, there is some encouraging news. The new government in Argentina, led by Mauricio Macri has rolled back a “memorandum of understanding” between the previous Argentine government and Iran, the purpose of which was to bury the longtime investigation into the AMIA bombing — and with it Tehran’s clear fingerprints — and its terrorist presence in that country. It has also given new impetus to an investigation into the mysterious death of Alberto Nisman, the chief Argentine prosecutor in the case — and who was on the verge of disclosing details that may have incriminated Argentine government operatives, as well as the Iranians.

As a result, Argentine-Israeli relations are expected to vastly improve. That may also be the case in Uruguay, which now holds a UN Security Council seat, and whose previous government was often seen as sympathetic to Palestinian and radical positions on a wide range of issues. Uruguay’s new (and former) President Tabare Vazquez did post-doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute years ago, and takes a much more open-minded view of Middle East issues than his predecessor.

And then there is Paraguay. For years, the locus of one third of the infamous tri-border area (together with Brazil and Argentina), a lawless center for smuggling and hospitable to radical elements, the country is led by a president, Horacio Cartes, who has taken principled stands — at odds with his neighbors — including votes at the United Nations relating to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

Our attention is often so riveted on the concentric circles of chaos, terrorism and violence in the Middle East and North Africa, we sometimes lose sight of what transpires south of our border. For more than two decades now, Iran has seen our neighborhood as a target of opportunity, and has cultivated it with impunity: terrorist bombings for which it has never paid a price, flattering the likes of Chavez and his circle for strategic gain and creating cells of agents moving about from here to who-knows-where.
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Now out-and-about that they are free of official international opprobrium, the ties they have created in Latin America bear special scrutiny. Rather than having to work largely out of the public eye, they can do so now to a large extent above board. Look for “official visits” of Rouhani and others to our hemisphere, in short order. Ignoring this threat, like so many others that characterize the regime in Tehran, would be at our peril.

Israel’s announcement that it will soon open an office in Abu Dhabi recalls a period in the mid-1990s which demonstrated some promise about the possibility of Israeli ties to the Arab world.

When considering those ties, the right place to begin the discussion would be the Camp David agreement and the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt in 1979.The Israeli-Jordanian treaty of 1994 could be considered either the bookend of that effort begun in Jerusalem and Cairo, or the beginning of a second—and what appeared to be promising—stage in Israel’s relations with the Arab world. In the wake of the 1991 Madrid Conference, which openly brought Israelis and Arabs into the same room together, a number of Arab countries opened “offices” in Israel. Included among them were Morocco, Oman, Tunisia and Qatar. Little publicity surrounded the presence of these offices, which were not embassies or consulates, per se. They were billed primarily as “trade representations.”

The post-Madrid period produced other important results. India, which had diplomatic ties with Israel since 1950, upgraded its relations to full ambassadorial status. That “era of good feeling” also produced the relatively short-lived “multilateral talks” aimed at moving forward a nascent Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Indeed, no less than 11 Arab states participated in these discussions, on such topics as economic development and the environment. In addition to the core participants—Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinians—the multilaterals included 26 other countries (primarily from Europe and Asia) and several agencies of the United Nations.

I recall visiting Tunisia with a B’nai B’rith mission in December 1994 where, coincidentally, the Arms Control and Regional Security multilaterals were being held in Tunis. There was a real sense that a diplomatic and psychological Rubicon had been crossed, with Israelis and Arabs mingling and talking alongside diplomats from key members of the European Union and Asian economic giants.

Though Saudi Arabia participated in the multilaterals, I have always believed that had Riyadh not been a fence-sitter at a crucial moment, had it taken the leap and itself opened an “office” in Israel, we might have been much further along on the road to some kind of Israeli-Palestinian accommodation than we were then—or certainly are, today. Had the Saudis sent a clear message in that direction by actually opening an office or some other demonstration of cooperation, the Palestinians (who were certainly major recipients of Saudi largesse in those days), might have had to sit up and take notice.

Instead, the Yasser Arafat-led Palestinians pushed away intense efforts to strike a deal in the closing months of the second Clinton Administration. That rejectionism, in turn, fueled the Second Intifada, which took 1,000 Israeli lives in a paroxysm of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.

That then began a regression from the once-promising steps on a path toward normal relations with the Arab world, culminating in the abrupt closure of the Moroccan, Qatari, Omani and Tunisian offices in Israel in the wake of the Second Intifada.
The conventional wisdom at the time was that if the Israeli-Palestinian problem could be solved, all other Middle East issues would fall into place. But looking back, it suggests that the Palestinian leadership had no serious interest in any deal that was not zero-sum in its favor.

Fast forward to 2015. The decades-old Arab fixation on the Palestinians has faded rapidly in some quarters with an ascendant and threatening Iran and the rise of ISIS. Iran’s hegemonistic designs on the region have created palpable apprehension in a number of Arab capitals, generating an important commonality of interest between Israel and some of its Middle East Arab neighbors.

Hamas makes no bones about calling for Israel’s destruction. The Palestinians are divided into two warring camps, in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian leadership in the latter seems unwilling, or unable, to move toward a free and fair negotiation with Israel. The shibboleth that solving the Palestinian issue would fix all of the region’s problems has given way to a Sunni-Shiite fight-to-the-finish in one country after another in the region. The Arab Spring has become a misnomer, now commonly derided as the Arab Winter. Big powers now compete in Syria, as the old World War I-era borders are erased in a blaze of religious-secular warfare. New definitions of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ are being written daily.

From all of that comes the announcement of the Israel office in the UAE. It will not be a diplomatic mission; instead it will be a representation among some 144 countries who sit at the International Renewable Energy Agency, which is headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

This is not something that was done in the dark; announcements about the office have appeared and have been reported on everywhere. Where this welcome development will lead is not clear; it may just end with this; or, it may foretell a return to the promise of the mid-1990s, which began with the Madrid Conference.

There is clearly now a realization in some places in the Arab world that, contrary to being a threat, relations with Israel can serve everyone’s interest, and not just on the threat posed by Iran. Arab states have squandered decades in which, had they widely accepted Israel, they could have created a different environment in the region. But that need not be the case going forward.
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As chaos grows in the region, some important things, fortunately, seem not to be spinning out of control.

“This latest Palestinian uprising is a Facebook intifada” (USA Today 10/15/15) mimics the Palestinian narrative instead of presenting the facts.

The article ignores organized incitement from Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and others at the top levels of the PA and in the terrorist group Hamas. Instead, it explains away the latest murderous attacks on the Jews of Israel in the gentlest terms.

The report states: "Like the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 and the recruitment success of the Islamic State, the spreading violence against Israelis in recent weeks seems to have been sparked by spontaneous combustion on Twitter and Facebook, rather than by organized political groups.”

When Hamas urges Palestinians to form “stabbing squads” and then praises the attackers and honors their families, and when the head of the PA publicly denies Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel and warns Jews to get their “filthy feet” off the Temple Mount, which is considered the holiest site to Jews, that is hardly the foundation of a “spontaneous” uprising. 
Palestinian incitement has been a major obstacle to peace for decades. But that fact is not in the report.

The reporter ignores the daily reality faced by Israelis when she characterizes the “weapons of choice” in the attacks on Jews as “rocks, knives and social media.”  In reality, Palestinians are using knives and meat cleavers to repeatedly stab Jews, they have driven cars into groups of people standing at bus stops and they have used fire bombs.

The real cause of the rise in these murderous attacks is not social media. It’s deep-rooted, officially sanctioned anti-Semitism and anti-Israel fanaticism and incitement.

Daniel S. Mariaschin
B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President
Washington, D.C.

The report “New security measures considered amid continuing violence in Israel” goes through highly preposterous contortions to avoid using the word “terrorists” to describe the Palestinian perpetrators in the wave of murderous attacks on Jews. 

The use of the nebulous “violence” to characterize the shootings, car attacks and knifings of Jews in recent days maliciously mischaracterizes the situation by omitting who is perpetrating these deadly attacks—Palestinians. And omitting who the victims are—Israelis.

The report states: “And neither side appears willing to back down.”  

How are Israelis supposed to back down when the Palestinian government is openly and successfully inciting these unprovoked attacks across Israel? Where is the examination of this incitement?

This attempt at equalism is extremely offensive. The reporters’ transparent effort to protect the Palestinian terrorists is suspect throughout, including in this summary: “…one person died and eight were injured when a man drove into a bus stop, ran over three people, then get out of his car and began stabbing people.”

In just calling him a “man” the report blindly adheres to the Palestinian narrative. The “man” was a Palestinian, and the people he attacked were Jews. Why is that not in the story?

CNN’s incomplete and irresponsible reporting ignores the facts on the ground.

Seemingly lost in the debate over the Iran nuclear deal is any focus at all on that country’s horrendous human rights record. In choosing to negotiate only on the nuclear program, the P5+1 (the United States plus China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany) lost an opportunity to exert leverage on Tehran’s serial human rights abuses, as well as its support for terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.

It was only in 2011 that the UN Human Rights Council approved the appointment of a special rapporteur on Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, a respected diplomat from the Maldives. From the Iranian regime’s takeover in 1979, it has been a serial abuser of human rights: of political opponents, women, the LGBT community, journalists, adherents of the Baha’i religion and others. It has done so with impunity, unmoved by international exposure of its brazen abridgment of basic freedoms.

This month in Geneva, the Human Rights Council will open one of its thrice-yearly six-week sessions. With the signing of the nuclear deal and the UN Security Council’s endorsement of the agreement, the rehabilitation of Iran in international forums has begun. A number of European states have already embarked on a headlong rush to do business there. Notwithstanding remaining sanctions (for five years) on the acquisition of advanced conventional weapons, it is believed Tehran already is anticipating an armaments buying spree. And Iran will surely bolster its backing (and direction) of Hezbollah and other terrorist proxies.

The forthcoming session at the Human Rights Council should give us a good indication of whether or not Iran will get a pass on its human rights record. Already, some diplomats are reported to have urged “giving Iran some space” on the issue, now that it has agreed to the nuclear deal. That would be bad news for Shaheed, whose 2014 report on human rights in Iran runs 81 pages.

His report, which includes a detailed annex of individual cases, makes for a powerful charge sheet. He notes that there were 753 individuals executed in Iran in 2014, the highest number in 12 years. They included 25 women, and there were 53 public executions. This, while the Tehran regime was negotiating the nuclear deal with the P5+1 powers.

Absurdity is the rule: Shaheed cites the case of a death sentence pronounced on Mohamed Ali Yehari, an expert in alternative medical theories, for “corruption on earth.”

He was originally sentenced to five years for “committing blasphemy.”

Under the category "reprisals against individuals for contact with human rights organizations and U.N. human rights mechanisms," 15 persons were prosecuted or “faced intimidation.”

​The report covers countless examples of arbitrary detention of journalists, lawyers and student activists. Four leaders of the failed 2009 Green Revolution remain under house arrest. Shaheed cites the cases of 30 journalists who were detained on charges of “national security crimes” and “propaganda against the system” and “spreading falsehoods.” Five privately-owned religious TV stations were closed down for “working illegally for satellite TV stations in the United States and Great Britain.”

Last November, 24 Kurdish prisoners went on hunger strikes to protest inadequate medical treatment; they had been arrested on “national security” charges for commemorating International Mother Tongue Language Day. From the outset, followers of the Baha’i faith have been a special focus of social stigmatization. The report notes that 135 Baha’i remain jailed for their religious beliefs. Last year, a Baha’i cemetery was desecrated; to date, no perpetrators have been apprehended. Burials of Baha’is have been delayed or proscribed.

Christians have often been a target in Iran. On Christmas Day last year, nine persons were arrested for celebrating the holiday in the town of Rudehen.

In response to complaints of discrimination against the gay community, the Shaheed report notes that “the government responded by stating its total rejection of homosexual behaviors.”

Violence against women and juvenile offenders is a staple of the human rights abuse catalog: Shaheed cites nearly hundreds of acid attacks on women, many of them for wearing “improper clothing.” No arrests in these cases were reported.

Even with this shameless and pervasive record of rights abuse, one would have thought that Tehran would have released the four Americans it is holding (Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian; Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor from Idaho; Amir Hekmati, a dual citizen and Marine Corps veteran; and Robert Levinson, a US government contractor). The temerity of the Iranian rulers seemingly knows no bounds. Not to have made their release a condition for agreeing to the nuclear deal is one of the major criticisms of its opponents.

Addressing Iranian human rights abuses must be made a visible priority by the P5+1 and others in the community of democracies. Placing Ahmed Shaheed’s reports in the circular file and not acting more forcefully to isolate Iran on these issues will only embolden a regime already brimming with hubris over the nuclear deal.

"Giving Iran some space" is surely the wrong approach.