Jacob Magid is The Times of Israel's US bureau chief
The Times of Israel liveblogged Monday’s events as they unfolded.
Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, blasts “Bolshevik” leftists, who he claims are accusing the right wing camp of being “Nazis” and “fascists” for supporting the nation-state law passed last month.
“The nastiness of the left-wing ‘Bolsheviks’ labeling of the right (which is the real liberal camp in Israel) as ‘Nazis’ and ‘fascists’ is nothing new,” writes the prime minister’s son on Facebook.
“After all, they also called Ze’ev Jabotinsky ‘Vladimir Hitler,'” he adds, referring to the pre-state founder of Revisionist Zionism.
With the Trump administration set to re-impose some sanctions on Iran today, the country’s Central Bank lifts a ban on exchange offices, allowing them to resume work in a move aimed at bringing in badly needed hard currencies.
The bank also gives the green light for Iranian “legal institutions and businesses” to bring gold and foreign currency into Iran, according to the governor, Abdolnasser Hemmati.
A first set of US sanctions that had been eased by the Obama administration under the terms of the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal will take effect again today, following President Donald Trump’s decision in May to withdraw from the accord.
Those sanctions target Iran’s automotive sector as well as gold and other key metals. Renewed sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry and banking sector will resume on November 4.
Hemmati had told state TV late on Sunday that “money exchangers are allowed to sell and buy foreign currencies” once again, to help Iranians get better access to “services and travel abroad.”
The official exchange rate of the national currency, the rial, will remain at 42,000 rials to the dollar for vital imports such as medicine and food, he adds.
The decision goes into effect tomorrow. Hemmati says the Central Bank will try “not to intervene in deciding on the price” of foreign currencies.
— AP
The EU says it deeply regrets the US reimposition of sanctions on Iran after President Donald Trump pulled out of the 2015 nuclear pact, and vowed immediate steps to protect European companies.
The statement by EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini and the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany says it would also work to keep “effective financial channels” open with Iran.
“We deeply regret the re-imposition of sanctions by the US, due to the latter’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the statement issued in Brussels says.
The EU said it would now swiftly bring in legal cover for firms in the 28-nation bloc to work with Iran, after the Trump administration rejected European calls for an exemption.
“We are determined to protect European economic operators engaged in legitimate business with Iran,” the statement adds
— AFP
Senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi asserts that “the US has no jurisdiction to disband UNRWA (the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency) or to deprive Palestinian refugees of their rights.
Ashrawi’s statement comes after a Friday report in the US-based Foreign Policy magazine claiming that Jared Kushner, Mideast adviser to US President Donald Trump, called in an email this year for a “sincere effort to disrupt” UNRWA and has been pushing to remove the refugee status of millions of Palestinians as part of an apparent effort to shutter the agency.
The PLO official also blasts Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn, who introduced legislation last month aimed at altering the US definition of a Palestinian refugee and limiting US aid to UNRWA.
“Such a campaign targets more than 5.3 million people, many of whom continue to endure grave hardships and deprivation and have suffered repeated displacement, and threatens to defund UNRWA; in addition to being illegal and irresponsible, it is also extremely cruel and inhumane,” says Ashrawi.
Since this morning, firefighters have worked to extinguish two blazes caused by incendiary balloons in Israeli communities along the Gaza Strip, a spokesman for the Israeli Fire and Rescue Services says.
PA President Mahmoud Abbas has announced that the Palestinian people stand by Saudi Arabia after the latter expelled its Canadian ambassador due to calls by Ottawa to release activists jailed by Riyadh.
Like Saudi Arabia, Abbas accuses Canada of “interfering in the internal affairs” of Riyadh and calls on other Arab countries to reject Ottawa’s actions.
Canada last week said it was “gravely concerned” over a new wave of arrests of women and human rights campaigners in the kingdom, including award-winning gender rights activist Samar Badawi.
“We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful #humanrights activists,” the foreign ministry tweeted on Friday.
Syria’s government is to set up a coordination committee to repatriate millions of its nationals who fled the country’s seven-year conflict, state media says.
The cabinet on Sunday “agreed to create a coordination body for the return of those displaced abroad to their cities and villages,” state news agency SANA reports.
The conflict has displaced more than five million Syrians outside the country, the United Nations says, with more than half displaced to Turkey and most of the rest split between Lebanon and Jordan
The committee “will take the necessary measures to settle the status of all those who were displaced and secure their return as security and basic services return to different regions,” SANA says.
It would take steps toward “ensuring they can lead normal lives and practice their jobs as before the war” started in 2011, it adds.
The coordination body is to “intensify contact with friendly countries to provide all facilitations and take suitable steps towards their return,” SANA says.
President Bashar Assad’s regime has pushed back rebels and jihadists in large parts of Syria since its ally Russia intervened militarily on its side in 2015.
— AFP
Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman says US President Donald Trump’s decision to reinstitute sanctions against Iran “will be remembered for generations.
“US President Donald Trump has changed direction with Iran. No more agreements and subservience, rather a determined struggle to end the murderous ayatollahs’ regime that spreads terror across the Middle East,” he tweets.
Two Palestinians are said to have been injured after the IDF targeted a group of Gazans launching incendiary balloons at Israel, the Hamas-linked Palestinian Information Center reports.
The army confirms the strike, saying it took place in the northern part of the coastal enclave.
Canada says it is “seriously concerned” after Saudi Arabia announced it is expelling Ottawa’s ambassador and recalling its own envoy in protest over “interference” in its internal affairs.
The shock Saudi move, announced by the foreign ministry on Twitter, came in response to Ottawa’s vigorous demands that jailed human rights activists be released.
“We are seriously concerned by these media reports and are seeking greater clarity on the recent statement from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” says Marie-Pier Baril, a Canadian foreign ministry spokeswoman.
“Canada will always stand up for the protection of human rights, very much including women’s rights, and freedom of expression around the world. Our government will never hesitate to promote these values and believes that this dialogue is critical to international diplomacy.”
— AFP
“Egypt is no less responsible” for the situation in the Gaza Strip than Israel is, says Environmental Affairs Minister Ze’ev Elkin.
“As far as we are concerned, after Israel left Gaza, responsibility should not be imposed on us,” Elkin tells the Ynet news site, referring to the Jewish state’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the coastal enclave.
“We left Gaza. If someone strikes at us from Gaza, they will get hit back. Let the Arab world resolve the internal, humanitarian problem of the Gaza Strip. Why should we bear responsibility for this?”
Some 200 ultra-Orthodox members of the extremist “Jerusalem Faction” have blocked off a pair of roads in the central city of Bnei Brak, protesting the recent arrest of a Haredi draft dodger.
Demonstrators are chanting “we will die before we enlist,” and a number of them are clashing with police, who have arrived at the scene in the dozens.
There are no reports of arrests made thus far.
The Shin Bet security service denies having questioned a pair of left-wing American Jewish activists at Israel’s border with Egypt.
The agency says that while it had ordered that Simone Zimmerman and Abigail Kirschbaum be questioned upon their re-entry into the Jewish state, it asserts that the interrogation was run by border crossing officials.
“At no point were the two passengers questioned by the Shin Bet at the Taba crossing,” the Shin Bet says in a statement carried by the Haaretz daily. “When they arrived at the border crossing the two were questioned by a border control official.
“This questioning raised information that was referred from the border control official to the Shin Bet. Therefore, the official was asked by the Shin Bet to ask the passengers several questions, especially regarding their participation in a violent protest against security forces in Judea and Samaria,” the Shin Bet adds.
Ben Gurion International Airport faces three million cyber attacks against its infrastructure every day, according to Hadashot news.
The report comes with the opening of a new cybersecurity defense system at Israel’s main air hub that will better equip it to fight off such attacks.
Police say they have arrested three ultra-Orthodox demonstrators at a protest in Bnei Brak against the arrest of a Haredi draft dodger.
Hundreds have blocked off a pair of streets in the central city, and are clashing with officers.
As opposed to much of the Western world, Israeli senior officials cheer the reimposition of nuclear-related US sanctions on Iran as a historic turning point that could ultimately lead to the Islamic Republic’s downfall.
“This courageous decision will be remembered for generations,” Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman writes on his Twitter account.
US President Donald Trump has been sending mixed messages on Iran recently, imposing sanctions and threatening with war and also signaling readiness to negotiate without preconditions. But Liberman says he had “changed the direction regarding Iran.”
“No more agreements and subservience, but rather a determined struggle to stop the murderous ayatollah regime, which spreads terror, violence and hatred throughout the Middle East,” he vows.
Intelligence Minister Israel Katz says the sanctions, which will snap back at midnight US time, will leave Iran two choices: either it will fulfill the US administration’s requirements regarding its rogue nuclear program and regional aggression, as formulated in May by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, or it could risk a financial crisis and the fall of the regime.
“The first option is good, the second is excellent,” he tweets. “I welcome the US president’s tough and justified policies.”
Deputy Minister Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, calls the return of the sanctions a “return to sanity.”
“No longer will a regime that supports world terror, massacres hundreds of thousands of civilians, demands Israel’s destruction, oppresses its own people, and lies about its nuclear program be rewarded,” he tweets.
— Raphael Ahren
US President Donald Trump says he remains open to forging a new nuclear deal with Iran, as he confirmed Washington will go ahead with reimposing sanctions against Tehran.
“I remain open to reaching a more comprehensive deal that addresses the full range of the regime’s malign activities, including its ballistic missile program and its support for terrorism,” Trump says in a statement after he signed the executive order officially launching the sanctions.
A first phase of US sanctions against Iran goes into effect at midnight in Washington.
— AFP
Facebook says it has taken down four pages belonging to rightwing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, including two featuring his “Infowars” show, for violating its hate speech and bullying policies.
The social media giant says in a statement Monday that it also suspended Jones’s account for 30 days because he repeatedly posted content that broke its rules.
The company said it “unpublished” the four pages after receiving reports that they contained content “glorifying violence” and used “dehumanizing language” to describe Muslims, immigrants and transgender people.
Jones says his shows, which are broadcast on radio, YouTube and other platforms, reach at least 70 million people a week.
Among his claims is that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, which left 20 children and six adults dead, was a hoax. Families of some of the victims have sued him for defamation and he now admits the shooting occurred but says his claims were free speech.
— AP
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomes US President Donald Trump’s reimposition of sanctions against Iran that are set to go into effect at midnight, Washington time.
|I congratulate President Trump and the American administration on its important decision to impose sanctions on Iran. This is an important moment for Israel, for the United States, for the region, and for the entire world,” Netanyahu says in a video-recorded statement.
“It symbolizes the determination to curb Iran’s regional aggression and its ongoing plans to arm itself with nuclear weapons,” adds the prime minister.
“I call upon the European countries, which are talking about stopping Iran, to follow suit. It’s time to stop talking, it’s time to do. That’s exactly what the US did and that’s what Europe needs to do. “
Police say they have arrested 19 ultra-Orthodox demonstrators at a protest in Bnei Brak against the arrest of a Haredi draft dodger.
Among them is one man suspected of vandalizing a police vehicle.
Hundreds blocked off a pair of streets in the central city, and clashed with officers.
Authorities are finishing clearing off the streets.
The IDF says soldiers uncovered a self-produced weapon during a search of a Palestinian vehicle at a checkpoint near the West Bank settlement of Beit El.
Since this morning, firefighters have worked to extinguish nine blazes caused by incendiary balloons in Israeli communities along the Gaza Strip, a spokesman for the Israeli Fire and Rescue Services says.
The forces have managed to gain control of every fire, but are still working to completely extinguish a number of them.
A group of US senators, on a visit to Moscow, say they have invited Russian lawmakers to Washington later this year, in a bid to help ease tensions between the two countries.
On the second trip by US politicians to the Russian capital in just over a month, the delegation is this time being led by high-profile Republican lawmaker senator Rand Paul.
Paul says that members of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the upper house of the Russian parliament, the Federation Council, had been invited “to come to the United States to meet with us in Washington.”
“I think this is incredibly important,” the US lawmaker has been quoted as saying in translated comments by Interfax news agency.
The “main aim of the trip” was to “create a dialogue” and “improve relations” between Moscow and Washington, Paul adds.
— AFP
Poland has obtained a World War II-era archive that documents the efforts of Polish diplomats in Switzerland to get Jews out of Europe by issuing phony passports from Latin American countries.
The Culture Ministry and the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum announce that Poland had obtained the archive after more than a year of negotiations with a private owner in Israel.
The ministry and the museum say 330 people were known to have survived the Holocaust as a result of having one of the faked passports, and another 387 were killed despite having the false documents. The fate of 430 others has not been determined.
The rescue effort was led by the Polish ambassador to Switzerland, Aleksander Lados, and included three other Polish diplomats and two representatives of Jewish organizations. The archive is named for one of the Jewish representatives, Rabbi Chaim Eiss, who died of a heart attack in late 1943.
— AP
Hundreds of Russian accounts originating from Russia have sought to influence relations between the United States and Israel, Channel 10 reports.
A group of researchers cited by the TV channel found that from three million posts from fake Russian accounts, tens of thousands of them had to do with Israel and the broader region.
Sixty percent of the posts on Israel worked to bolster the relationship between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump, oftentimes by criticizing former president Barack Obama.
Roughly a quarter of the posts on Israel sought to cast Netanyahu as corrupt and highlighted the police investigations into his conduct.
The researchers cited by Channel 10 found that the Russian bots were not trying to influence the Israeli conversation, but rather the American one, where the Jewish state has become a more polarizing issue.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the US “wants to launch psychological warfare [against] the Iranian nation and create doubts among the people.”
In his first interview since US President Donald Trump signed an executive order reinstituting sanctions against Tehran, the Iranian president says he will not negotiate with Washington while being sanctioned at same time.
He calls on the White House to return to the JCPOA (Iran deal) if it is serious about reaching a deal with Iran.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says US President Donald Trump, through his withdrawal from multiple international treaties, has eroded the “first principle” in negotiations, that of creating “trust and confidence.”
Washington must prove, he says, “whether it wants to resolve the problem through negotiations.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani ridicules the notion that a new nuclear deal can be renegotiated while the US is renewing sanctions against Iran at the same time.
He compares Trump’s conduct to stabbing someone with a knife, while claiming one desires to talk.
“They’re imposing sanctions upon Iranian children, patients, and the people,” Rouhani says.
Amazon has removed racist and anti-Semitic products from its site being offered by third-party sellers.
Amazon announced the move in a letter to Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., dated July 31. In mid-July, Ellison, in a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, called for the company to stop selling “products that promote hateful and racist ideologies.”
Among the products removed were a Nazi swastika pendant, a Nazi eagle sticker and a cross-burning onesie for baby boys, according to BuzzFeed, which published the letter. Amazon also was offering books by white nationalist printing houses, including on Kindle.
In its letter to Ellison, Amazon said that it prohibits the listing of products that “promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views.”
The company said it had reviewed the products and contents referenced in Ellison’s letter and “removed the listings that were found in violation of our policies and permanently blocked the seller accounts that were in violation of Amazon policy.” Amazon also said it is reviewing seller accounts for potential suspension.
— JTA
