By ORLY DREMAN (Jerusalem, August 12, 2024) When the media tell us to prepare lots of water and where the locations for distribution of water will be, it reminds me of my parents’ stories about austerity rations during the long War of Independence. If there is no electricity – there will be no water because the water pumps are connected to electricity. We are living with uncertainty and with existential apprehension.

It is like what we wend through during Covid times when we used to stock up on products. Today we are buying three times more; it gives us a feeling that we can control our destinies. It reduces the pressure. The waiting feels worse… let it happen and it will be over with. Our normality is that I rehearse with my husband how far from the car we have to lie down on the street when the siren sounds. Normal is having stomachaches, headaches, back pain and lack of sleep due to stress. Our normality is bringing water bottles into the shelter, canned food, transistors, batteries, flash lights and more. We go out less and order take out way more.
When our grandchildren come they always ask us to remind them where to hide in case “the bad people” come. Friends call each other to wish good luck – kind of end of the world conversations.

Children do not understand the reality; it depends on how much stress they see in the home. Their survival is being together. They ask what will happen if the siren sounds during their birthday party. We sit down and talk to them. We hug, we eat comforting food and listen to music. We worry when someone says they feel “excellent.”

People walk in the street and look at the sky for unmanned aerial vehicles. They hold their phones in their hands to hear messages from the home front command. They also look behind their shoulders for a terrorist with a knife. We are awaiting the worst.

At the end of July the JNF Canada Resilience Task Force arrived in Israel… good people, like our friend Larry Vickar from Winnipeg, who came to support and contribute. They managed to visit the kibbutzim in the south, learn what security challenges they faced, and about their strength and bravery. They saw the Nova festival sight and heard the plans how to revive the communities devastated on Oct. 7th. They were at hospitals and heard lectures from doctors and mental health professionals. They met survivors and hostages who were freed. They met evacuees from the north and heard speeches by generals. Unfortunately, they only managed to be in Israel half a week when all foreign flights were cancelled and they had to leave the country on whatever flight was possible.

Tonight is Tishah B’ Av – many more Jews will fast today. This day feels more real this year. It is a day with bad tragedies. This is the day when both our temples were destroyed; the Jews from England, France and Spain were deported; WW1 began.

When we think things cannot get worse, they get worse.
Commercials abroad are about advertising clothing, cosmetics, sports goods. Here they are about how to treat anxiety, how to deal with children…
Our four-year-old granddaughter saw an ad on a tree in Tel Aviv about a lost cat. She turned to her mother and said: “This cat is kidnapped in Gaza.”

Every realityshow deals with the subject of the hostages – be it “Big Brother,” “Survival,” or just cooking shows – the text, the songs, the missions, the yellow clothes, all have to do with talking and reminding us of the present situation in the country. The hostages who returned more than eight months ago are opening up and telling of their horror experiences. They want to make Bibi understand not to let the remaining 115 hostages die. The beatings, the sexual assaults, the starving, the terrible sanitary conditions – one toilet for dozens of people, freezing in the winter, sleeping on the floor, the stress that they threaten to kill you all the time, no air in the tunnels, darkness. Some of them were alone so they did not speak for 53 days. No windows, no light – like a grave. The legs feeling stiff. The terrorists dragging the women on the floor by the hair while pointing their rifles and hand grenades at them. The women used to faint, regain consciousness , cry and vomit and faint again. The terrorists used to tell them, “You are going to make me babies.” They felt desperate and scared. Every minute was eternity. One sees the parents here at the demonstrations – with black bags under their eyes that get bigger and bigger. Some young women and men who returned need hearing aids because they were beaten so severely on the head and ears. Now they cannot sleep at night, they cry a lot, suffer from migraines, nightmares and feel dead inside.

In this abnormal country we had some escapism: the Olympics. Each one of our seven medalists dedicated their victories to the hostages, the murdered, the fighting soldiers, and the evacuees.
Remember – a few months ago I wrote that we still had 11 people missing. It took ten months, but all of them were identified – the last one a few days ago. A woman whose house was burned to the ground – only now were they able to confirm she was killed in her home with her husband on Oct 7.

I usually listen to the radio when I drive. Every time one opens the radio there are thousands of personal tragic stories… like stories of grandparents telling how their son/daughter protected their children with their bodies and the children survived to be raised by the grandparents.
When people ask each other: “How are you?” you do not hear “Fine, thank you.” The answer is: ”Sad – like everyone.”

I would like to honor young Jewish adults who come to Israel to volunteer… like our friend Mikaila Levine from California, a 19–year-old medical student who came to volunteer with Magen David Adom – even in these dangerous times. We are very proud of her. She did not think of leaving. She took the example from her grandfather, Dr. Gerry Levine, who came from North America to volunteer in the Yom Kippur War.

In conclusion, pray for us that it will be comfortable living here again. We want our lives back. We are a country that desires life and we shall overcome – like always.
I will conclude the same way we end every conversation- “May we hear good news! Amen”!

Orly Dreman is a 10th generation Israeli. Her cousin, Ruvi Rivlin, was a former president of Israel. Orly’s father was a diplomat who served both in North America and in Europe.
By profession Orly is an English teacher. She has dealt with children suffering from ADD.
Since childhood, Orly has been involved in voluntary work with the disabled, the challenged, new immigrants, the elderly and others. 

Orly is married to former Winnipeger, Solly Dreman who made Aliya.
He’s a professor of clinical Psychology at BGU and treated victims of terrorism and war. 
He was Brigade psychologist in the Yom Kippur War. 

To read previous posts from Orly since October 7, go to:

from-darkness-to-light-december/
life-in-israel-four-months-after-october-seventh
a-complicated-pesach
message-from-israel-a-different-planet

By HENRY SREBRNIK A mere days after the Democratic Party leaders pushed President Joe Biden out the door, Kamala Harris, until then a virtual nonentity, was suddenly recast by the so-called “legacy media,” acting in complete lock-step, as a wunderkind bringing the politics of “joy” to America. 

That was no surprise. She is a creature of the Democratic Party left and its journalistic enablers, themselves beholden to a woke progressive ideology. And this includes an antipathy – if not worse – to Israel.

For many American Jews, the prospect of Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris prompted elation. He was clearly the candidate who could help the party bring back worried Jewish voters. But not so fast! 

Why did Harris go with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a man who can’t deliver a swing state, over a young and glib governor who can? There’s only one reason: Jews are no longer allowed on the Democratic presidential ticket. Shapiro is, after all, a “Zionist,” and that wouldn’t do.

Efforts by left-wing and pro-Palestinian activists to derail Shapiro’s nomination – some called him “Genocide Josh” — worked, and it told us just where Harris stood as she made the first significant choice of her candidacy.

The left attacked Shapiro, considering him too sympathetic to Israel. Heeding their warning, she preferred a bland Minnesota liberal governor who will help her far less. 

Progressive Democrats were elated. CNN senior political commentator Van Jones said “anti-Jewish bias” may have played a part in the selection of Walz and warned that “antisemitism has gotten marbled into this party.”

Remarked Micah Lasher, a New York City Democrat who is running for that state’s legislature, “There was an inescapable sense the selection had been made into a referendum over Israel.” 

We all remember her egregious insult to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he addressed the U.S. Senate July 24, an event Harris boycotted. She instead spoke to the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis. 

“It is unconscionable to see Vice President Kamala Harris shirk her duties as president of the Senate and boycott this historic event,” stated Victoria Coates, vice president of the Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation. “If we can’t stand with Israel now, when can we?”

“I see you. I hear you,” Harris told pro-Hamas demonstrators in Washington during Netanyahu’s visit, as they burned American flags and assaulted police.

On August 7 Harris and Walz met with the leaders of the Uncommitted National Movement in Michigan, a state with a large Arab American population. This is the group that mobilized more than 100,000 people to withhold their votes from President Biden in the Michigan primary last February over his support for Israel. 

Founder Layla Elabed reported that Harris “expressed an openness” to meeting with them to discuss an arms embargo against the Jewish state. “Michigan voters right now want a way to support you, but we can’t do that without a policy change that saves lives in Gaza right now,” she told Harris. “Will you meet with us to talk about an arms embargo?”

Elabed explained that Harris wasn’t agreeing to an arms embargo but was open to discussing one “that will save lives now in Gaza and hopefully get us to a point where we can put our support” behind Harris. At a rally in Arizona August 9, Harris told pro-Palestinian demonstrators that “I respect your voices.” 

Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently stated that she has “prioritized engaging with Arab, Muslim and Palestinian community members and others regarding the war in Gaza.” She herself had maintained that “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

All this led to pushback among some Israel supporters. “Kamala Harris won’t speak with the press. But she will speak with pro-Hamas radicals and suggest she’s open to a full arms embargo against Israel,” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton stated. “Floating an arms embargo against Israel to pro-Hamas activists is disgraceful,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, added. 

“If the group in line with Harris was pro-life and asked for a meeting about banning abortion, she would forcefully say ‘no.’ Don’t tell me it means nothing she said she’s open to an arms embargo on Israel when radical Hamasniks got in line,” declared Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In an interview with the far-left Nation magazine, “Is Kamala the One?”, published July 8, she had already indicated her sympathy for the young people who had mobilized against the war in Gaza and occupied university campuses across the country. 

“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

The Biden administration has assembled an interagency team tasked with finding Israeli individuals and groups to sanction, in order to weaken if not topple Netanyahu.

The International Economics Directorate at the National Security Council (NSC) leads the effort. Ilan Goldenberg, who has now become Harris’ liaison to the Jewish community, has played a very enthusiastic role.

Goldenberg, who has served as Harris’s adviser on Middle East issues, has been an acerbic critic of both Netanyahu and the Palestinian leadership.

All this demonstrates that Harris is no friend of Israel. To take another example, her Middle East guru, Philip Gordon, who has served as Harris’s foreign policy adviser since she ran for the White House in 2020, sees and hears no evil emanating from Iran.

Republicans are already demanding the vice president answer why Gordon wrote a string of 2020 opinion pieces together with a Pentagon official, Ariane Tabatabai, who was tied last year to an Iranian government-backed initiative tasked with selling the 2015 nuclear deal to the American public.

“Before joining your office, Mr. Gordon co-authored at least three opinion pieces with Ms. Tabatabai blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” Cotton and New York Representative Elise Stefanik wrote Harris on July 31.

Gordon has argued that the easing of economic sanctions could have allowed Iranian businesses and civil society to better integrate internationally and potentially moderate Tehran’s clerics. He was among the most vocal Democratic critics of former President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to pull the U.S. out of that landmark nuclear agreement.

But critics have maintained that the loosening of sanctions on Iran has provided Tehran with billions of dollars to fund its terror proxies across the Mideast, leading, among other things, to the Hamas and Hezbollah attacks on Israel, as well as providing the Houthis in Yemen with weapons to strangle Red Sea shipping.

Cotton and Stefanik, in their letter to Harris, asked if Gordon and Tabatabai purposefully spread Iranian disinformation to relieve U.S. pressure on Tehran’s theocratic rulers. “Did you request further investigation into Mr. Gordon when Ms. Tabatabai’s connections to the Iranian Foreign Ministry were revealed in September 2023? Did Mr. Gordon admit and report his ties to this individual?” they wrote. Harris did not reply.

Yet there are Jews who have eyes yet cannot see, so wedded are they to the Democrats. It’s become their ersatz religion. Not long ago the Charlottetown Jewish community hosted a mid-summer event on a beautiful day, which included many of the American summer residents. I was talking to an older man from Massachusetts who said he will (as usual) vote for the Democrat.

I suggested that it should be impossible for any Jew to vote for Harris after she went off to a sorority event in Indiana in July when the prime minister of the embattled Jewish state, suffering a traumatic loss last October and fighting for its survival today, spoke to the United States Senate, where she normally serves as presiding officer. Such a slap in the face would not have been administered to any other head of government. 

And not liking Benjamin Netanyahu is no excuse. Would this man not have supported Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill during the Second World War, no matter what he thought of them? Would he have thought Britain and the United States were not worth defending, due to some of their actions during the war? Such excuses really ring hollow. I can understand why Harris favours the Palestinians, both for pragmatic reasons — there are more Muslim votes than Jewish ones — and ideological ones — progressive woke ideology — but do Jews have to go along with this?

(Yes, we know Harris has a Jewish husband. But this is a man who has had little concern with Judaism in his life. His first wife was non-Jewish and neither are his daughters; indeed, one supports anti-Israel protests. A Hollywood entertainment lawyer, he has only now been trotted out as a supposed expert on anti-Semitism, with absolutely no qualifications, so I doubt too many Jews are impressed.) 

“Jews for Kamala are Living in Denial,” wrote American playwright, film director, and screenwriter David Mamet on August 9 on the website UnHerd. “Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.” We do live in strange times.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.

More than a dozen Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, signed a joint declaration in Beijing last month to create an interim unity government that would operate in both the West Bank and Gaza. But the deal has no implementation mechanism, and there is no apparent settlement of the Hamas-Fatah war that started in 2007 and has been brewing on the West Bank since 2021.

The declaration in Beijing raised a few eyebrows, but mostly for the wrong reasons.

China has recognized “Palestine” since 1988, with little impact on the region. For the Palestinians, especially Hamas, being hosted in Beijing in the post-October 7 period was appealing, even if it didn’t solve any of their problems. But China’s moves in the Middle East and Red Sea are less designed to boost Palestinian statehood than they are to speed the decline in American influence in the region – and China is well placed to do just that.

In 2023, China was the top purchaser of Iranian oil, some 60% above pre-sanction peaks recorded in 2017. With that base, Beijing reached out to Saudi Arabia and brokered a Saudi-Iran “reconciliation” agreement, seven years after the Saudis had severed relations in the aftermath of an Iranian mob setting the Saudi embassy in Tehran on fire.

China has also increased its support of the Iranian-sponsored Houthi terrorist movement in the Red Sea, where the US has been unwilling or unable to prevent attacks on Western shipping, reducing traffic through Egypt’s vital Suez Canal by more than 50 percent.

Bloomberg News reports, however, that the Houthis “have told China and Russia their ships can sail through the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden without being attacked, according to several people with knowledge of the militant group’s discussions.”

China’s hostility toward Israel has also increased, particularly as Israel has limited its technology-sharing with China over the past several years, culminating in China’s pro-Hamas UN Security Council Resolutions after the October 7 massacre.

Some history is in order here.

For centuries, Great Britain was the guarantor of freedom of the seas and security in the Middle East. After World War II and into the mid-1950s, as Britain divested itself of its colonies and responsibilities, the United States took over. It was a major realignment that had both promise and problems.

The standard American schoolroom map of that period (you remember it, right?) placed the US in the center of the world, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The eastern Pacific was ours – Canada, Mexico, Central America and Chile. Then the ocean, and on the western side, a series of American allies or trading partners – Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even, more recently, Vietnam.

We assumed that, from China’s point of view looking to its east, the US was in charge of the Pacific. However, as China worked to change its economic and political fortunes over the past few decades, the country looked to its west – where it has relatively unimpeded access to the energy-rich countries of Central Asia and the Middle East, and then south to Africa — with the Indian Ocean as a vital waterway. The China People’s Liberation Army naval base in Djibouti opened in 2017, just north of the American base at Camp Lemonnier and the French and Japanese bases in the Red Sea.

China’s rise in the Middle East has moved in tandem with Biden administration policy that has irritated our traditional ally Saudi Arabia; offered support, including sanctions relief and financial support, to Iran, the Houthis, and the Palestinians; and frightened the Abraham Accord countries (the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Israel).

As our longtime friends in the Middle East and Persian Gulf see it, the US has abandoned the role we have historically played – the “indispensable nation,” the security guarantor, protecting their ability to pump, sell, and move oil. President Biden is giving Iran waivers to sell oil to China. US power still controls the sea lanes, but China gets the benefit — and they’ve been using their money to build commercial ports all along the route from Iran to the Pacific and then military facilities along the islands they’re building in the Pacific.

China’s political overtures to both sides of the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region, plus increasing presence on the waterways from the Middle East to Asia, and purchases of crucial raw material and mineral assets in Africa – without waging a physical war in any of them – makes the broad picture much more frightening than the hosting of Fatah and Hamas in Beijing.

Many former (or current) US allies are leaning into China. We might think we are “the indispensable nation,” but they may not. China doesn’t talk about “democracy” or “uprooting corruption,” or even “women’s rights.” It goes for political and economic benefit which doesn’t threaten the people of the region. But that might just be for now.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.

The post China’s Malicious Influence in the Middle East first appeared on Algemeiner.com.