Day: October 14, 2023

Azerbaijan Starts New Attack on Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh  Bloomberg

“IDF battalions and soldiers are deployed throughout the country and are ready to elevate their readiness,” the IDF said in a statement.

Palestinians in Gaza face impossible choice: Stay home under airstrikes, or flee under airstrikes?  The Associated Press

What Is the US Military Doing Off Israel-Gaza?  Bloomberg

American Citizens Fleeing Gaza Say Border Crossing Still Closed  The New York Times

First came the darkening skies, then the crescent-shaped shadows on the ground, and finally an eruption of cheers by crowds that gathered Saturday along the narrow path of a rare “ring of fire” eclipse of the sun. 

It was a spectacular show for some parts of the western United States as the moon moved into place and the ring formed. 

There were hoots, hollers and yelps for those with an unfettered view in Albuquerque, where the celestial event coincided with an international balloon fiesta that typically draws tens of thousands of spectators and hundreds of hot air balloon pilots from around the world. 

They got a double treat, with balloons lifting off during a mass ascension shortly after dawn and then the eclipse a couple hours later. Organizers had 80,000 pairs of view glasses on hand for the massive crowd and some pilots used their propane burners to shoot flames upward in unison as the spectacle unfolded. 

Allan Hahn of Aurora, Colorado, has attended the festival for 34 years, first as a crew member and then as a licensed balloon pilot. His balloon, Heaven Bound Too, was one of 72 selected for a special “glow” performance as skies darkened. 

“It’s very exciting to be here and have the convergence of our love of flying with something very natural like an eclipse,” he said. 

Unlike a total solar eclipse, the moon doesn’t completely cover the sun during a ring of fire eclipse. When the moon lines up between Earth and the sun, it leaves a bright, blazing border. 

Saturday’s path: Oregon, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas in the U.S., with a sliver of California, Arizona and Colorado. Next: Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Brazil. Much of the rest of the Western Hemisphere gets a partial eclipse. 

Viewing all depends on clear skies — part of the U.S. path could see clouds. NASA and other groups livestreamed it. 

The event brought eclipse watchers from around the U.S. to remote corners of the country to try to get the best view possible. At Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah tiny lights could be seen along a well-known trail that snakes through a valley of red rock hoodoos as eclipse enthusiasts hit the trail before sunrise to stake out their preferred spots in nooks and crannies along the way. 

With the ring of fire in full form, cheers echoed through the canyons of the park as if the home team just hit a home run. 

“I just think it’s one of those things that unites us all,” said John Edwards, a cancer drug developer who traveled alone across the country to try to watch the eclipse from Bryce Canyon. “I just think it’s seeing these unique experiences that come rarely is what got me here. This is about as rare as it gets.” 

Kirby James and Caroline McGuire from Toronto didn’t realize they would be in a prime spot to watch the eclipse when they planned their trip to southern Utah. Their luck led to what McGuire called an “epic, epic” at the national park. 

“Nothing that you can read could prepare you for how it feels,” said Kirby James, 63, a co-founder of a software company. “It’s the moment, especially when the ring of fire came on, you realized you were having a lifetime experience.” 

For the small towns and cities along the path, there was a mix of excitement, worries about the weather and concerns they’d be overwhelmed by visitors flocking to see the annular solar eclipse. 

As totality began in Eugene, Oregon, oohs and ahs combined with groans of disappointment as the eclipse was intermittently visible, the sun’s light poking through the cloud cover from behind the moon only at times. 

Koren Marsh and her parents drove five hours from Seattle to be within the path of the eclipse. Making the trip to see the ring of fire was part of the celebrations for her 16th birthday. Despite the poor viewing weather, she said it was still cool to witness totality as it peeked between the clouds. 

“I’m underwhelmed but I wouldn’t say I’m disappointed,” she said. “It was worth it to me because I like science.” 

Viewers on the East Coast were prepared to see less of the event — close to a quarter eclipse around midday in some areas, such as New York City — but were nonetheless geared up to watch the skies. In Maine, viewers expected to see only about 12% of the sun covered, but the Clark Telescope on the grounds of the Versant Power Astronomy Center at the University of Maine was open to the public. 

“As the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, it casts its shadow on our planet. In a very real sense, solar eclipses are ‘made in the shade’ of the moon,” said Shawn Laatsch, director of the Versant Power Astronomy and the Maynard Jordan Planetarium. 

Colombia’s Tatacoa desert was playing host to astronomers helping a group of visually impaired people experience the eclipse through raised maps and temperature changes as the moon blots out the sun. 

At the Cancun Planetarium, young visitors built box projectors to indirectly and safely view the ring of fire. The ancient Maya — who called eclipses “broken sun” — may have used dark volcanic glass to protect their eyes, said archeologist Arturo Montero of Tepeyac University in Mexico City. 

Brazil’s Pedra da Boca state park, known for its rocky outcrops for climbing and rappelling was expecting crowds. 

The entire eclipse — from the moment the moon starts to obscure the sun until it’s back to normal — is 2 1/2 to three hours at any given spot. The ring of fire portion lasts from three to five minutes, depending on location. 

Next April, a total solar eclipse will crisscross the U.S. in the opposite direction. That one will begin in Mexico and go from Texas to New England before ending in eastern Canada. 

The next ring of fire eclipse is in October next year at the southernmost tip of South America. Antarctica gets one in 2026. It will be 2039 before another ring of fire is visible in the U.S., and Alaska will be the only state in its direct path. 

Palestinians stand atop an Israeli tank near the broken border fence after Hamas launched an attack into Israel, in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Oct. 7, 2023.
Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/picture alliance via Getty Images

The world has been struggling to find a good historical parallel for the vicious and horrific surprise attack Hamas launched against Israel on October 7.

It is often said that 10/7 is the new 9/11. But 10/7 was more like a prison riot.

For nearly two decades, the Gaza Strip has been bottled up and almost completely blocked off. It has been widely compared to an open-air prison. Israel and the United States have tried to seal Gaza, isolating its nearly 2 million residents on a tiny, impoverished strip of land. Washington and Tel Aviv thought that would let them keep Hamas at arm’s length.

Instead, it just turned Gaza into an overcrowded penal colony where the most radicalized and violent gang leaders eventually gained control. Mass murder and hostage taking have been the result.

Sealing off Gaza didn’t solve anything. Instead, its problems festered until they finally exploded last weekend.

In the days since the carnage erupted, the American media has offered precious little context to the violence. But it really isn’t that difficult to look back over U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian policies and politics of the last 20 years and understand how we got here. Like so much else that has gone wrong in the Middle East in the 21st century, the George W. Bush administration deserves plenty of the blame for what’s happening now in Israel and Gaza.

In the years immediately after the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush doubled down on his enterprise in the Middle East by proclaiming that he wanted to spread democracy throughout the region. So he pushed for elections in Gaza without thinking things through, just as he had in Iraq. Hamas gained power in Gaza after the 2006 elections there, leaving Palestinian territory badly divided between Gaza and the West Bank, where Fatah, a bitter enemy of Hamas, remained in charge.

By then, Israeli politics were increasingly dominated by right-wing leaders. After the second Intifada began in 2000, the Israeli left had largely collapsed, and most Israelis had dropped their support for the “two-state” solution, under which Israel would agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Instead, Israel bricked itself up. It built walls and expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank while blockading Gaza.

The Bush administration, eager to please pro-Israel, right-wing Christian evangelicals and simultaneously win American Jewish voters over to the Republican Party, did little to stop Israel from raising its drawbridges. Foreign assistance to Gaza dried up while the U.S. imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority because of Hamas’s rise to power. The Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip became an international pariah.

When Barack Obama became president, he initially sought to revive Israeli–Palestinian peace talks, but little came of his efforts before he too abandoned them.

As president, Donald Trump ignored the Palestinians while engineering the so-called Abraham Accords, in which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco agreed to recognize Israel. President Joe Biden has sought to expand the accords to include Saudi Arabia. But the agreements are hollow; they have won little popular support in the Arab world, largely because they do not address the status of the Palestinians.

In other words: For two decades, a succession of American presidents has largely ignored the Palestinians and, in effect, gone along with Israeli efforts to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state.

Hamas supporters rally in the northern Gaza Strip, to show solidarity with Palestinians confronting Israeli forces at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, on April 22, 2022.
Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images

One reason the United States has been so unwilling to challenge Israel’s lurch to the right has been the simultaneous rise of right-wing Christian evangelicals in U.S. politics. Evangelicals have become so powerful within the Republican Party that they have changed the domestic American political calculus about Israel.

George W. Bush’s father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, was willing to push Israel and criticize its policies, so much so that when George W. Bush first ran for president, Israeli leaders feared that he would be just as tough on Israel as his father had been.

But that didn’t prove true, and one reason was that Christian evangelicals had become a more important part of the Republican Party by the time he came into office. Evangelicals believe the Bible compels them to support Israel; they believe that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was the fulfillment of the biblically foretold “regathering” of the Jews. They also believe that the Bible says that the Jews will continue to rule Israel until the return of Jesus, so Israel must continue to exist until the “Rapture,” which will occur after the second coming of Christ.   

Evangelicals vigorously debate the many side-plots of this “end times” theology, which have the potential to lead them down weird geopolitical rabbit holes. And in the long run, their theology isn’t good for the Jews; in the Rapture, Christians will ascend to heaven while everyone else, including the Jews, will be destroyed.

But the Rapture is still a long way off. For now, the upshot is that Christian evangelicals are unquestioning supporters of Israel — and that means the Republican Party is too. Trump’s controversial decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 enthralled evangelicals. His administration prominently featured Robert Jeffress, a leading evangelical minister, and John Hagee, a televangelist and founder of Christians United for Israel, at the embassy’s opening.  

(Oddly, that support for the state of Israel has coincided with an explosion of antisemitism on the American right.)

Christian evangelicals’ strong pro-Israel stance has led Republicans to make a play for the votes of American Jews — unnerving Democrats, who worry that Jews will leave their longtime political home in the Democratic Party. As a result, Democrats, just like Republicans, have been unwilling to challenge Israel’s right-wing governments or its refusal to revive serious negotiations about a Palestinian state. The few progressive voices in the Democratic Party who criticize Israel are usually shouted down by both Republicans and by the mainstream of their own party. There are no powerful voices in the United States warning of another bloody Middle Eastern quagmire.

Instead, in the coming weeks, Israel will be operating with something close to an American blank check.

The post Not Israel’s 9/11, but a Prison Riot appeared first on The Intercept.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Wray said the bureau has seen a sharp uptick in threats since last weekend’s attacks in Israel, according to a New York Times reporter.

Wray, who was speaking to a gathering of police chiefs in San Diego, urged locals to be vigilant and share intel to stop “lone actors” inspired by Palestinian militant group Hamas and others, the reporters posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

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NASHUA, New Hampshire (JTA) — The spotlight was on Israel at a Republican Party summit in New Hampshire on Friday, where several Republican presidential candidates and other party leaders spoke to hundreds of local voters and GOP members.

The candidates condemned Hamas’ attacks in Israel and stood universally behind the Jewish state, putting the blame for the violence on Iran and its financial backing of Hamas.

Many also pointed to Joe Biden and his administration’s foreign policy decisions.

“There would be no Hamas if it wasn’t for Iran,” Nikki Haley, the United States’ former representative to the United Nations, told the crowd. “And what did the Biden administration do? He loosened all the sanctions that gave billions of dollars to Iran. Interestingly enough, China, number one importer of oil in Iran. Russia, getting their drones from Iran. Look at the triangle, because the triangle is real.” 

Hamas’ attack requires “an overwhelming response by the state of Israel,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, citing Hamas’ violent attacks, some of which were filmed and shared on social media, including contested reports of “decapitated babies.” 

“The only thing that’s going to end this is for Israel to uproot all the infrastructure that Hamas has done, all the terror accoutrements, and make Hamas no more,” he said. 

Like Haley, other candidates sought to tie the conflict in Israel to other global security issues, including Russia and China.

“We have four real bad actors in this world right now: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran,” said Chris Christie, the former governor from New Jersey. “And they are now working together to try to disrupt the world, to fill a vacuum that unfortunately has been left, in my opinion, by our country in world leadership.”

None of the candidates mentioned the Palestinian casualties that have resulted from Israel’s counterattacks or the mounting humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Over 400,000 people have been displaced in Gaza so far, according to the United Nations, while Gazans have few places to go following a warning issued by Israel to evacuate the north ahead of an expected ground invasion.

New Hampshire will be the first to vote in the primary elections early in 2024, though an exact date has not yet been set. 

As of last week, Donald Trump maintains a strong lead in the Granite State with 49 percentage points followed by Nikki Haley (19%) and Ron DeSantis (10%).

Jews represent less than 1% of the population in New Hampshire, about 10,000 people. With over 70% of U.S. Jews identifying as Democrats in some national surveys, Jewish Republicans were not easy to find at Friday’s event.

But Judy Aron, a state representative from southwestern Sullivan County, was one of them. She said she was “beyond shocked” at the news of Hamas’ attack last week and worries about friends and family living in Israel. In New Hampshire, she says, both Jewish and non-Jewish communities have shown solidarity with Israel and are praying for peace together. 

As for the candidates who spoke on Friday, Aron said she was happy with the Republicans’ condemnations of Hamas and expressions of support for Israel. She’s also disappointed with the Democratic Party for not punishing members of their caucus who have come out in support of “Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.”

“It’s definitely a stark difference between the peace that the Trump administration fostered versus this turmoil and hate that has been fomenting with the Biden administration,” she said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post At New Hampshire event, Republican presidential candidates point to Iran and Biden in aftermath of Hamas attack appeared first on The Forward.

I volunteer with The Road to Recovery, an Israeli NGO that transports sick Palestinian children from checkpoints around the country to hospitals in Israel. When possible, I drive from my home in the Ella Valley of Israel to the Tarkumia checkpoint, close to Hebron, a mere 15-minute journey, to pick up children. I have always felt that small acts of empathy go a long way towards healing the decades-long hatred, that person-to-person contact helps bridge the gap between the two nations. Additionally, I have also always believed that Israelis and Palestinians can make peace, that we all want the same thing at the end of the day — to live quietly, to break bread with our families each evening around the kitchen table. 

I was not born here. I arrived in Israel at the age of 16, because my parents wanted to live here. I knew nothing about Judaism, let alone Zionism. I learned about World War II in school. I had heard about Anne Frank but had very little idea what the Holocaust was. I knew nothing about the history of the Jews, or even the history of my own family.    

As an adult, I worked with Newsweek in its Middle East bureau, and considered myself privileged to be able to speak to people on both sides of the conflict. When I say people, I am referring to those of us who are trying to go about our lives peacefully and respectfully, people like me and you who raise children, who care for our families. I spoke to Palestinians in Hebron, I spoke to Jews in Gush Etzion, I spoke to grieving parents on both sides. I once interviewed a woman in Nablus who had just been released from prison for assisting in a suicide bombing, and a teenager patrolling the barren hills of the West Bank with a gun in a holster. I thought I understood.  

I don’t attend demonstrations, nor am I affiliated with any political groups, but I did participate in an intensive three-month workshop organized by The Bereaved Parents Forum, an NGO that promotes understanding between the Israeli and Palestinians. The idea of the workshop was to both learn about and acknowledge each other’s narrative, but I ultimately came out of those three months with a sense of gnawing pessimism. It was not enough. I met people from Jenin who had spent hours crossing through checkpoints to get to our joint weekends, I met three young women from the West Bank who spent a lot of time giggling together and sending text messages. In one activity, we switched identities and the Palestinians praised me for being a good Arab, and everyone laughed. 

I admit, it was probably easier for me to open my heart to those contesting this troubled land. Unlike my husband, Raz, who remembers selling his own toys and teddy bears to raise money to buy fighter planes for Israel after the Six Day War in 1967, I lived an uncomplicated life. My home was never contested, I never had to sit in a bomb shelter .  

Perhaps this is why I naively stuck to the idea that I could make a difference, even a small one; The Road to Recovery seemed like the perfect way for me to make that difference. I have driven babies and children, accompanied by their mothers, fathers or grandparents to Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv, often early in the morning when it’s pitch dark outside. On these journeys we have conversed in broken Arabic and broken Hebrew and it was enough. Some journeys have been totally silent, the parents exhausted, or worried.

A few months ago, during an early evening emergency pickup, the exhausted mother of a toddler had a panic attack as we turned onto Highway 6. I stopped the car by the side of the road and put my arms around her. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she mumbled. An hour later, I dropped her off at the entrance to the Pediatric ER of Sheba Hospital and I will never forget the little boy, in his mother’s arms, turning his head to me and waving goodbye weakly. That same evening, I gave a five-year old boy and his parents a lift back to Tarkumia. It was late, and I didn’t want my passengers to make the long walk through the checkpoint to the parking lot, carrying their son and numerous bags filled with clothes. I drove through the checkpoint and stopped by the parking lot. They knew not to leave me alone there, so the father stood by my car while the mother went to get a taxi. I was grateful, and so were they.  

But when I was asked this week to drive to the Tarkumia checkpoint to pick up a sick child who needed urgent treatment, I said no. I felt sick to my stomach with fear. Two days earlier, on October 7, I was awoken at 6:35 in the morning by loud explosions as Hamas missiles began falling. Soon after, the sirens began. I watched online as the horrific events began unfolding and as the hours went by, the world as I knew it fell apart. 

Returning to anything remotely resembling hope suddenly seems impossible. I can no longer see the horizon of reconciliation. Last night my entire village stood in silence, heads bowed, at the entrance to our normally quiet community, as the funeral procession of a young man who grew up here traveled out to the local cemetery. Meanwhile, the foundations of my house shudder and shake as Gaza is pounded again and again by Israeli forces, and Hamas missiles continue to fall. 

Unbelievably, a number of volunteers with The Road to Recovery have been kidnapped into Gaza: Haim Perry, Vivian Silver, Oded and Yochke Lipshitz, Tammy Sohman. The daughter and grandchild of Moshe Lotem, another volunteer, are among those kidnapped, according to the letter. I am devastated, I no longer feel safe.

“We are praying hard,” says the newsletter sent out this afternoon to volunteers, “together with the families of our volunteers who were kidnapped on Shabbat by the savage terrorists of Hamas.”

As another hard, sad day draws to a close, I wonder if the road to any kind of coexistence can be rebuilt.

The post I volunteered, transporting sick Palestinian children to hospitals — it hardly seems possible anymore appeared first on The Forward.