The Clock Changed in Jerusalem, Israel last night at 2:00 clock went forward before Shabbat tonight and Pesach on Saturday night and Biden Abandons Middle East Peace By Caroline B. Glick and COKE GOES WOKE AND BROKE By Daniel Greenfield and The Portion of TzavThe Importance of the "Half and The Collapse of Trust in Public Health by Jeffrey A. Tucker and this is my 1500th email on this server--how many have been with me since the beginning and two tours on Chul Hamoed by Sholom Pollock on Monday the 29th and Wednesday the 31st of March
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Pesach tours next Monday and Wednesday, first and 3rd day of Chaul Amoud.
Monday, March 29
We will have a guided tour of the new and highly acclaimed Bible/Natural history museum.
Next we will ride to Yaffo where we will tour the ancient port city and also visit the "Garin Torani" there. These selfless young urban pioneers moved there to create a vibrant Torah community in the midst of Arab encroachment and Jewish flight from the ancient Biblical site. They will be our hosts and show us a side of Yaffo not seen by most.
We will drive up to the highest point overlooking Yerushalayim - Shmuel's tomb and Crusader fortress. Recent excavations and refurbishings have turned the holy site into a must visit. We meet at the Inbal hotel at 8:30 and return around 6:00 280 shekels
Wednesday, March 31
Today we visit the "Land of Benjamin:
We shall visit "Bet El", the biblical site of Jacob's dream and the accompanying biblical excavations and burial tombs. The oldest oak tree in Israel marks the spot of the dream.
Shiloh - The ancient site of the Mishkan with its archeology and history. We will see two very new presentations about the mishkan and the site/history.
We will visit "Noar hagevaot" in their hilltop frontier homes. They will explain what motivates them to accept the challenges and burdens of their pioneering calling.
Meet at the Inbal hotel at 9:00 Return around 6:00 280 shekels
The Portion of Tzav
The Importance of the "Half"
The meal-offering brought twice daily by the High Priest had to include one tenth of fine flour, half in the morning and half in the evening.
What would happen if the High Priest died prior to his bringing the evening sacrifice
His successor could not bring the remaining second half of what had been set aside in the morning. Instead, he must take a new "ephah" (one-tenth), divide it in half, and sacrifice one of the halves.
An allusion to the importance of the 'half" in the totality of the sacrifice is found in the unique manner in which the letter "pei" is written in the word "haephah"". (Remazei Rabbenu Yoel)
A symbol of the Passover holiday is matzo, an unleavened flatbread made solely from flour and water which is continually worked from mixing through baking, so that it is not allowed to rise. Matzo may be made by machine or by hand. The Torah contains an instruction to eat matzo, specifically, on the first night of Passover and to eat only unleavened bread (in practice, matzo) during the entire week of Passover.[52] Consequently, the eating of matzo figures prominently in the Passover Seder. There are several explanations for this.
The Torah says that it is because the Hebrews left Egypt with such haste that there was no time to allow baked bread to rise; thus flat, unleavened bread, matzo, is a reminder of the rapid departure of the Exodus.[53] Other scholars teach that in the time of the Exodus, matzo was commonly baked for the purpose of traveling because it preserved well and was light to carry (making it similar to hardtack), suggesting that matzo was baked intentionally for the long journey ahead.
Matzo has also been called Lechem Oni (Hebrew: "bread of poverty"). There is an attendant explanation that matzo serves as a symbol to remind Jews what it is like to be a poor slave and to promote humility, appreciate freedom, and avoid the inflated ego symbolized by more luxurious leavened bread.[54]
Hand made shmura matzo
Shmura matzo ("watched" or "guarded" matzo), is the bread of preference for the Passover Seder in Orthodox Jewish communities. Shmura matzo is made from wheat that is guarded from contamination by leaven (chametz) from the time of summer harvest[39] to its baking into matzos five to ten months later.
In the weeks before Passover, matzos are prepared for holiday consumption. In many Orthodox Jewish communities, men traditionally gather in groups ("chaburas") to bake handmade matzo for use at the Seder, the dough being rolled by hand, resulting in a large and round matzo. Chaburas also work together in machine-made matzo factories, which produce the typically square-shaped matzo sold in stores.
The baking of matzo is labor-intensive,[39] as less than 18 minutes is permitted between the mixing of flour and water to the conclusion of baking and removal from the oven. Consequently, only a small number of matzos can be baked at one time, and the chabura members are enjoined to work the dough constantly so that it is not allowed to ferment and rise. A special cutting tool is run over the dough just before baking to prick any bubbles which might make the matza puff up;[55] this creates the familiar dotted holes in the matzo.
After the matzos come out of the oven, the entire work area is scrubbed down and swept to make sure that no pieces of old, potentially leavened dough remain, as any stray pieces are now chametz, and can contaminate the next batch of matzo.
Some machine-made matzos are completed within 5 minutes of being kneaded.[39]
It is traditional for Jewish families to gather on the first night of Passover (first two nights in Orthodox and Conservative communities outside Israel) for a special dinner called a seder (Hebrew: סדר seder – derived from the Hebrew word for "order" or "arrangement", referring to the very specific order of the ritual). The table is set with the finest china and silverware to reflect the importance of the meal. During this meal, the story of the Exodus from Egypt is retold using a special text called the Haggadah. Four cups of wine are consumed at various stages in the narrative. The Haggadah divides the night's procedure into 15 parts:
Kadeish/ Qadēsh קדש – recital of Kiddush blessing and drinking of the first cup of wine
Hallel הלל – recital of the Hallel, traditionally recited on festivals; drinking of the fourth cup of wine
Nirtzah/ Niyr·tsah/ Niyr·ṣah נירצה – conclusion
These 15 parts parallel the 15 steps in the Temple in Jerusalem on which the Levites stood during Temple services, and which were memorialized in the 15 Psalms (#120–134) known as Shir HaMa'a lot (Hebrew: שיר המעלותshiyr ha-ma'alôth, "Songs of Ascent[56]
The seder is replete with questions, answers, and unusual practices (e.g. the recital of Kiddush which is not immediately followed by the blessing over bread, which is the traditional procedure for all other holiday meals) to arouse the interest and curiosity of the children at the table. The children are also rewarded with nuts and candies when they ask questions and participate in the discussion of the Exodus and its aftermath. Likewise, they are encouraged to search for the afikoman, the piece of matzo which is the last thing eaten at the seder. Audience participation and interaction is the rule, and many families' seders last long into the night with animated discussions and much singing. The seder concludes with additional songs of praise and faith printed in the Haggadah, including Chad Gadya ("One Little Kid" or "One Little Goat").
Maror (bitter herbs) symbolizes the bitterness of slavery in Egypt. The following verse from the Torah underscores that symbolism: "And they embittered (<a href="https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0xNjQ5NjU3OTEwNTg3ODE5MzA2JmM9aTRrOCZlPTEyOTEyOSZiPTU1Nzk1NDM5OCZkPXg3dzF5Mmg=.0BtoWdOXHtzTKp36kTVb0hB5m7O5dLCQTNe1_4jOLAo" data-link-id="557954398"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language" style="word-break: break-word; font-family: 'Poppins', sans-serif; color: #09c269; text-decoration: underline;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language" title="Hebrew language" >hebrew<="" a="" >:="" וימררו="" <i="">ve-yimareru) their lives with hard labor, with mortar and with bricks and with all manner of labor in the field; any labor that they made them do was with hard labor" (<a href="https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0xNjQ5NjU3OTEwNTg3ODE5MzA2JmM9aTRrOCZlPTEyOTEyOSZiPTU1Nzk1NDQwNyZkPXo2azJyN3A=.IioJ2gjgB0K3JtIC4yZ_ROZtXhr8KqRsBcMmq4wJS2Y" data-link-id="557954407"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus" style="word-break: break-word; font-family: 'Poppins', sans-serif; color: #09c269; text-decoration: underline;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus" title="Book of Exodus" >exodus<="" a=""> 1:14).
Silver seder plate
Four cups of wine
There is a Rabbinic requirement that four cups of wine are to be drunk during the seder meal. This applies to both men and women. The Mishnah says (Pes. 10:1) that even the poorest man in Israel has an obligation to drink. Each cup is connected to a different part of the seder: the first cup is for Kiddush, the second cup is connected with the recounting of the Exodus, the drinking of the third cup concludes Birkat Hamazon and the fourth cup is associated with Hallel.
Children have a very important role in the Passover seder. Traditionally the youngest child is prompted to ask questions about the Passover seder, beginning with the words, Mah Nishtana HaLeila HaZeh (Why is this night different from all other nights?). The questions encourage the gathering to discuss the significance of the symbols in the meal. The questions asked by the child are:
Why is this night different from all other nights?
On all other nights, we eat either unleavened or leavened bread, but tonight we eat only unleavened bread?
On all other nights, we eat all kinds of vegetables, but tonight, we eat only bitter herbs?
On all other nights, we do not dip [our food] even once, but tonight we dip twice?
On all other nights, we eat either sitting or reclining, but tonight we only recline?
Often the leader of the seder and the other adults at the meal will use prompted responses from the Haggadah, which states, "The more one talks about the Exodus from Egypt, the more praiseworthy he is." Many readings, prayers, and stories are used to recount the story of the Exodus. Many households add their own commentary and interpretation and often the story of the Jews is related to the theme of liberation and its implications worldwide.
Afikoman
14th century Haggadah
The afikoman – an integral part of the Seder itself – is used to engage the interest and excitement of the children at the table. During the fourth part of the Seder, called Yachatz, the leader breaks the middle piece of matzo into two. He sets aside the larger portion as the afikoman. Many families use the afikoman as a device for keeping the children awake and alert throughout the Seder proceedings by hiding the afikoman and offering a prize for its return.[39] Alternatively, the children are allowed to "steal" the afikoman and demand a reward for its return. In either case, the afikoman must be consumed during the twelfth part of the Seder, Tzafun.
Concluding songs
After the Hallel, the fourth glass of wine is drunk, and participants recite a prayer that ends in "<a href="https://click.mlsend.com/link/c/YT0xNjQ5NjU3OTEwNTg3ODE5MzA2JmM9aTRrOCZlPTEyOTEyOSZiPTU1Nzk1NDQzNyZkPWs1aTFvNWc=.O2q02EyO4MiODcs58uv_nU30EVrApY2xZuhd6lUuWh8" data-link-id="557954437"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_year_in_Jerusalem" style="word-break: break-word; font-family: 'Poppins', sans-serif; color: #09c269; text-decoration: underline;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_year_in_Jerusalem" title="Next year in Jerusalem" >next="" year="" in="" jerusalemechad="" mi="" yodeachad="" gadya="" <="" a="">
Beginning on the second night of Passover, the 16th day of Nisan,[57] Jews begin the practice of the Counting of the Omer, a nightly reminder of the approach of the holiday of Shavuot 50 days hence. Each night after the evening prayer service, men and women recite a special blessing and then enumerate the day of the Omer. On the first night, for example, they say, "Today is the first day in (or, to) the Omer"; on the second night, "Today is the second day in the Omer." The counting also involves weeks; thus, the seventh day is commemorated, "Today is the seventh day, which is one week in the Omer." The eighth day is marked, "Today is the eighth day, which is one week and one day in the Omer," etc.[58]
When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, a sheaf of new-cut barley was presented before the altar on the second day of Unleavened Bread. Josephus writes:
On the second day of unleavened bread, that is to say the sixteenth, our people partake of the crops which they have reaped and which have not been touched till then, and esteeming it right first to do homage to God, to whom they owe the abundance of these gifts, they offer to him the first-fruits of the barley in the following way. After parching and crushing the little sheaf of ears and purifying the barley for grinding, they bring to the altar an assaron for God, and, having flung a handful thereof on the altar, they leave the rest for the use of the priests. Thereafter all are permitted, publicly or individually, to begin harvest.[59]
Since the destruction of the Temple, this offering is brought in word rather than deed.
One explanation for the Counting of the Omer is that it shows the connection between Passover and Shavuot. The physical freedom that the Hebrews achieved at the Exodus from Egypt was only the beginning of a process that climaxed with the spiritual freedom they gained at the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Another explanation is that the newborn nation which emerged after the Exodus needed time to learn their new responsibilities vis-a-vis Torah and mitzvot before accepting God's law. The distinction between the Omer offering – a measure of barley, typically animal fodder – and the Shavuot offering – two loaves of wheat bread, human food – symbolizes the transition process.[
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Collapse of Trust in Public Health Jeffrey A. Tucker
Maybe you have noticed the rise in public incredulity toward the coronavirus narrative that you hear all day from the mainstream media. More doubts. More opposition. More protests. And far less trust. You are hardly alone. What began as a spark in the Spring of 2020 is now a raging fire. Try as they might to put it out, it is burning hotter and higher than ever before.
The data are already in and the lockdown elites are getting worried. Rightly so.
The great epidemiologist Donald Henderson in 2006 made two firm predictions of the consequences of lockdowns. First, he said, doing so would have no benefit in terms of disease mitigation. Indeed, lockdowns did not work.
Second, he said that doing so would result in discrediting public health and cause a "loss of public trust in government." The loss in public trust – not just officials but also in media – is palpably obvious.
Turn your attention to a new round-up of surveys published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It specifically relates to vaccines but the results reflect a much broader loss of trust in general. Indeed, the surprising lack of public enthusiasm for the vaccines is but a symptom of a much larger problem.
However, despite scholarship emphasizing the role of trust in institutions to provide relevant information, polls suggest that sources of technical information about safety are not greatly trusted. Specifically, there is limited trust in the media or pharmaceutical companies to provide Covid-19 vaccine information: as few as 16% and 20% of respondents, respectively, say they have "a great deal/quite a bit" of trust in these organizations to provide such information. The public also has only moderate trust in information provided by the Food and Drug Administration.
The loss of trust was triggered by using an egregious and destruction means – lockdowns – in order somehow to achieve the unachievable; that is, the control of a widespread respiratory virus with severe outcomes for the elderly and sick but which is mostly mild for everyone else. It so happened that SARS-CoV-2 was not the universally deadly plague it was presumed to be one year ago, so these measures were wildly disproportionate.
Even if the pandemic had been as grim as the models predicted, there is no evidence in the historical record of lockdowns doing anything about a virus except to disrupt and destroy social and market functioning in a way that makes dealing with severe health outcomes even more difficult.
Consider one huge and unprecedented mitigation measure deployed last year: the stay-at-home order. Most states imposed them and enforced them with police power. It was not that different from near-universal house arrest – right here in the United States.
The claim was that this would slow or stop the spread or somehow cause the virus to be controlled, resulting in fewer severe disease outcomes. The propaganda became outrageous at points, with signs everywhere ordering people to "stay home and save lives," as if leaving your house would result in lives lost.
People undertook enormous personal sacrifices to comply, at great personal expense. The economic costs were huge but so were the psychological and social costs. The result was an epidemic in loneliness and a rise in deaths of despair.
How did it work? A new study in Nature by four epidemiologists looked at the experience of 87 countries with a variety of policies, some loose and some extreme in stringency. They sought to correlate state-at-home orders with virus control. The results: they were unable to do so. The relationship does not exist, which is to say that it is consistent with randomness. The policy was worse than useless.
This study is the 31st that AIER has assembled using data nationally and internationally showing that lockdowns achieved nothing and cost everything. You are welcome to peruse the list and share it with your friends, who will be astonished (or maybe not) to discover that the public health edicts were unscientific and pointlessly brutal. All that sacrifice for nothing.
How many other things did the public health authority get wrong? Thanks to a large email dump, from an account used by Anthony Fauci, we know that he was warned in early March 2020 that PCR testing was giving inaccurate results. As a result, almost all the data we thought we had now lives under a cloud. If testing is wrong, so too could be death data and so on. It's a mess of confusion. The same email dump revealed that a US delegation went to China in mid-February to learn from the best in the politics and arts of locking down a society.
Incredibly, these policies were implemented at a time when American trust in government is at the lowest point it has been since 1972. Only 8% are willing to say that they trust the government in domestic affairs a "great deal" whereas 20% say they trust the government "not at all." It will be fascinating to watch these polls move during this year, as more and more information comes out about what our governing elites did to the economy and our lives during the pandemic. It could be generations before trust returns to what it was before.
The last poll taken specifically about public health officials dates to September 2020, and it documented that trust in the CDC and Dr. Fauci were already evaporating. How does that compare with today? And what becomes of that trust over the next six months as more people discover just how terrible and thoroughly unscientific the policies were?
This collapsing trust is hitting about the time that the CDC has finally begun to put on its website some clarifying data. These charts for example make it clear that another public health measure from last year was wildly wrong: that getting the virus was very nearly a death sentence. We are at least getting some accurate data on the demographics of severe outcomes.
In truth, this was known since late March 2020. We reported on it on April 5. Even earlier, from March 8, we reported accurately on the nature of this virus, and fully expected that once the information was revealed, public fear would decline and the world would reopen. Instead, a combination of media and government messaging stoked that fear and fed more and longer lockdowns, disastrous policies that governors are racing to repeal even as the federal government warns against it.
The longer lockdown policies last – in practice especially but also when defended by public health authorities – the more that elites in government and media risk a devastating loss of credibility. The rebuilding of reputation might prove impossible for at least a generation or two.
There is a potential social cost to this loss in trust. Public health in the last century largely did good for humanity, with its emphasis on holistic perspectives on human well-being, the distribution of therapeutics and vaccines, the education on clean water and wise disease mitigation, its focus on rational science and calm over disease panic, and so much more. With lockdowns, and the tremendous public confusion sown by so many, this entire well-deserved reputation for science in the public interest is in tatters.
Get woke, go broke", is a conservative meme about the cost of political correctness that has it the wrong way around. Brands don't go broke because they get woke, they go woke because they're going broke, and don't know how to stop the slow but steady collapse of their business.
The big brands that go woke infuriate conservatives because, like Coke, Gillette, or Nike, they have a storied name that seems entwined with America and the success of capitalism. But it's those old, familiar brands that go woke because their products and business models are dated. Virtue signaling is their way of adapting to a changing market without really innovating. Behind every big woke brand is a company slowly going broke and with no clue what to do about it.
The wokeness vocabulary joins the thesaurus of corporate buzzwords used by executives trying to hide from their investors that they don't know what they're doing. Making headlines for their wokeness changes the conversation from their business model to their politics. Touting a brand as socially responsible evades questions about its financial viability.
Take Coke, please.
Coca-Cola's global sales fell 28% in the second quarter of 2020 from $10 billion to $7.15 billion. The corporate giant blamed the pandemic which had shuttered movie theaters and bars, and began cutting its small brands while concentrating on its big signature brands.
But Coke was struggling even long before the pandemic.
Despite all the international marketing, North America is still the biggest soda market. And the average American is down to drinking 40 gallons of soda from 50 gallons two decades ago. The shift was driven by the same demographic that tends to go woke, young white urban lefties, who became more likely to drink bottled water. Coke chased them by going into bottled water and vitamin drinks, but also by shifting away from a family brand once associated with Santa.
Santa and the polar bears reflected a Coke that was marketed to children. But fewer parents are comfortable with their children living off soda. That's why one survey found that the number of children drinking over 3 cans of soda a day fell from 10% to 3.3%. The drop in soda consumption, once again, was heaviest among younger and wealthier urban white lefties.
The economic consequences of young white wealthy lefties dropping soda wasn't just a sales issue. Wokes are a politically narcissistic demographic that legislates its tastes into law, pursuing the legalization of drugs, and bans on soda. Both drug legalization and soda bans were, as usual, done in the name of oppressed minorities, but had little impact on them.
Legal drugs are too expensive for minorities and the infamous soda taxes don't work. But the soda industry remembers what happened to tobacco and other lifestyle habits that fell afoul of the cultural values of the new woke ruling class. That's another reason why it went 'woke'.
Banning soda from schools and taxing it in stores precedes the class action lawsuits and national legislative activities that would effectively eliminate sodas from the marketplace.
Coke isn't just virtue signaling to prop up sales in a declining market: it's also afraid.
And it should be. Bloomberg isn't just fighting coal and guns, he's also spending a fortune pushing his soda ban in cities and states around the country. The soda industry has ramped up spending to defend itself against everything from soda taxes to its links to slave labor. But it understands that the real threat is cultural as the new woke ruling class destroys the habits of the old America that it associates with conservative, working class, and flyover country.
That's why cigarettes are a deadly menace, but pot is a civil rights crusade. The health issues are a pretext for a cultural revolution. And Coke went woke to convince the wealthy young urban lefties to incorporate its signature products into their lives by joining the cultural revolution.
The Left bet that if it could radicalize the children of the wealthy that Corporate America would bend the knee. And that's exactly what happened. The radicals used their leverage over academia and the entertainment industry to create radical generations. But that radicalism was heavily concentrated among the Ivy League and the children of the elites who would become the corporate leaders and also be the consumers with the most disposable income.
Economics, like politics, proved to be downstream of the culture. Capturing the ecosystem at its base allowed the Left to take over the economy and turn some of the country's biggest brands into megaphones for its propaganda. But these are corporate brands that have all the qualities of the ossified elites that have always been an easy target for the revolutions of the radicals.
Coke, like the average big woke brand, has a majority share of a declining market. It has limited growth potential within that market. Coca Cola's fortunes are closely tied to movie theaters, which were in a catastrophic state of decline even before the pandemic, and to McDonald's.
McDonald's, like a lot of traditional fast food places, is experiencing its own slow decline. The clown joint, like Coke, tried to reinvent its brand as being about healthy food and leftist politics. Just like Coke, going 'woke' hasn't stopped its decline, or the threat of the cultural Left regulating it out of business to protect minorities from the pernicious threat of its Happy Meals.
When McDonald's brought in its new British CEO Steve Easterbrook, he promised to make it over as a "modern progressive burger company". The company hired Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, to head communications. McDonald's flipped its arches upside down to celebrate International Women's Day. And then Easterbrook was forced out for allegedly having affairs with three female employees. Meanwhile the decline in foot traffic is still going on.
The Coca Cola Company meanwhile has a British CEO who pledged allegiance at Davos to a "new social contract" and an "economy that works for everyone". He took over from the company's previous Turkish CEO, and the Turkish CEO's South African predecessor. The head of Coca Cola in North America is a Honduran who came out of its Latin American division.
The other thing about these iconic American brands is that they don't have American leaders.
Coke won't shut up about social justice and the evils of whiteness because that's a better conversation than its failed portfolio of new brands, dumping its bottling operations, and its desperate efforts to refocus by launching a thousand different varieties of Coke aimed at the one lefty demographic that holds its future in the palms of its soft white manicured hands.
Otherwise its whole massive distribution network will be used for little more than moving orange juice, vitamin drinks, and milk around as soda and fast food go the way of cigarettes.
Coke is going woke because its future is broke. That's true of most of the big woke brands. And the closer Coke gets to the cliff, the more hysterical its performative wokeness will become.
'Wokening' is a social disease of stale companies with stale brands whose products are overpriced and have fallen out of touch with the needs of many consumers. And the country's consumer marketplace is dominated by these collapsing giants whose leaders are just marking time and cashing big checks while trying to co-opt the revolution threatening to destroy them.
European monarchs tried to co-opt leftist revolutions because they no longer had confidence in their own roles and had no idea what to do next. Coca Cola and the woke corporate giants share the same decadent sense of decline and their urban elites are selling out their rural base to appeal to the young radical generation to which their children and their social circle belong.
Wokeness is the consequence of a moral and economic brokenness among the nation's elites. The Left conquered the corrupt infrastructure of a decaying political and economic system. Now it's using that infrastructure to brainwash and suppress the country's middle and working classes by lecturing them on their racism, and redefining them as domestic terrorists.
It's not just Coke that went woke and broke: it's the entire system that's going broke.
The Trump administration was on the verge of securing a peace agreement between Israel and Indonesia in its final weeks in office, according to a former senior Trump administration official involved in the efforts. The official divulged that the negotiations between Israel and the world's most populous Muslim state were run by then-President Donald Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner and Adam Boehler, then-head of the International Development Finance Corporation.
Israel was represented by then-Ambassador Ron Dermer and Indonesia by Minister Mohamed Lutfi. To secure peace, Boehler told Bloomberg News last December, the United States would be willing to provide Indonesia with an additional "one or two billion dollars" in aid. Indonesia was interested in Israeli technology and even wanted the Technion to open a campus in Jakarta. It wanted visa-free travel to the Jewish state and Arab and U.S. investment in its sovereign wealth fund. Israel wanted Indonesia to end its economic boycott of the Jewish state. Direct flights from Tel Aviv to Bali were on the table.
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The advantages of peace between Israel and Indonesia for both sides are self-evident. But such a peace would also pay a huge dividend to the United States in its burgeoning cold war with China. An expanded strategic and economic partnership with the archipelago and ASEAN member would be a setback for China's efforts to dominate the South China Sea, particularly with Indonesia playing a role in an Islamic-Israeli alliance led by the United States.
"We got the ball on Indonesia and Israel to the first-yard line," the official explained. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has dropped the ball on the ground and walked off the field.
On the surface, the Biden administration is interested in promoting peace. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have praised the Abraham Accords, as well they should.
For 26 years, the Arab conflict with Israel was ignored and left to fester. Then suddenly, in Trump's last year in office, the situation was reversed as four Arab states rapidly normalized their ties with Israel. Expanding the accords to Indonesia, with its massive population and strategic location outside the Middle East, would have transformed a strategic regional shift into a game-changer throughout Asia.
But despite the strategic logic of expanding the Abraham Accords and the praise Biden and Blinken have given them, starting in its first week in office, the new administration's actions have served to undermine the accords by removing their American foundations.
A week into the Biden administration, the State Department announced it was "placing a hold" on the $23 billion sale of F-35s to the United Arab Emirates. The move was presented as "a routine administrative action typical to most any transition."
But suspending the sale was a strategic move, not an "administrative action." The normalization deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates was a three-sided agreement. The Americans were full participants. The F-35 sale was America's way to solidify the UAE's membership in an American-led regional alliance of which the Abraham Accords were an expression. Suspending the deal indicated that unlike its predecessor, the Biden administration will not work to strengthen its alliance with the Sunni Arabs and Israel, and will not fulfill the commitments that the Trump administration took on to develop and maintain that alliance through Arab-Israeli peace.
Biden's abandonment of the Abraham Accords can be understood in the context of U.S. politics. In keeping with the expectations of Democrat voters, Biden and his team are making efforts in domestic and foreign policy to erase the entirety of Trump's record in office. Although remaining a party to the Abraham Accords and expanding them to Indonesia and beyond would probably win Biden the Nobel Peace Prize, it would put him in the partisan doghouse for the crime of failing to kill something Trump created.
But while political logic exists, not everything is political. For Biden and his administration, ideology trumps politics.
The Biden administration is the most ideologically rigid and radical administration in U.S. history. Hyper-partisan politics are a function of the administration's ideological radicalism. As far as the Middle East is concerned, its ideological commitments drive it to empower the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority and Iran.
From their first days in office, senior Biden administration officials have pledged to restore U.S. funding of the P.A. There are significant legal roadblocks to implementing that pledge because so long as the P.A. continues to pay the salaries of terrorists and advances war crimes allegations against Israel before the International Criminal Court, the United States is barred from funding it or reopening the PLO representative office in Washington. But all the same, the administration is intent on moving forward.
The administration's intense desire to empower the P.A. despite the legal roadblocks indicates one aspect of its opposition to the Abraham Accords. The accords weaken the P.A. by removing its power to block Arab and Islamic states from making peace with Israel.
For decades, as Israel's Palestinian "peace partner" spurned peace and waged terror and political war against Israel, the Arab states accepted that peace between themselves and Israel had to wait. By ignoring the U.S. obligations to Abraham Accords partners and pushing to restore U.S. support to the P.A. despite its illegality, the administration signals its desire to restore the Palestinian veto.
The Abraham Accords represent an even greater problem for the administration's efforts to empower Iran. In a speech on Monday, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo said, "The Abraham Accords would not have happened … without the United States changing its policy with respect to Iran 180 degrees from how the previous administration had addressed the issue."
Now that the Biden administration wishes to move U.S. policy 180 degrees back to reinstate the Obama administration's policies, the Abraham Accords are a nuisance.
Hours before Biden and his advisers accused Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of approving Jamal Khashoggi's murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, i24News reported that Israel, Saudi Arabia the UAE and Bahrain were forming a military alliance against Iran. While the events may or may not be related, both make clear why the Biden administration doesn't want Arab-Israeli or Muslim-Israeli peace deals. Such deals impede the administration's efforts to empower Iran.
Biden's declared goal vis-à-vis Iran is to restore Iranian compliance and U.S. participation in the 2015 nuclear deal forged by the Obama administration. The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action places temporary limitations on Iranian nuclear activities in exchange for a massive inflow of capital. To convince Iranian leader Ali Khamenei to get on board, the new administration has provided a near-continuous stream of concessions to Iran and its Yemeni proxy, the Houthis.
It removed the Houthis from the State Department's list of foreign terror organizations and suspended arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The administration's campaign against MBS is an obvious effort to unseat him and replace him with a less stridently anti-Iran leader. This week the administration's green-lighted South Korea's agreement to pay Iran some $7 billion in exchange for the release of a South Korean ship and its crew that Iran unlawfully seized and has held captive since early January.
Not only has Iran rejected America's gestures, but it is also expanding its regional aggression and sprinting to the nuclear finish line. In recent weeks the Iranians attacked the Israeli embassy in New Delhi. They damaged an Israeli-owned ship in the Persian Gulf. And there is growing suspicion that the massive oil spill off Israel's coast last month which caused massive ecological damage to marine life and to Israel's coastline was an act of environmental terrorism carried out by a Libyan ship smuggling crude oil from Iran to Syria.
Iran's Houthi proxies have expanded their missile strikes against Saudi Arabia since coming off the U.S. terror list. And while the U.S. uses MBS's alleged role in killing Khashoggi to justify downgrading its relations with Saudi Arabia, the Iranians are killing scores of democracy protesters in its Baluchistan province. Whereas Khashoggi was a former Saudi intelligence officer and ally of Osama bin Laden who was working with Qatar to undermine the Saudi regime at the time he was killed; the Baluchis are innocent civilians whose sole crime is opposing the repressive regime.
As far as Iran's nuclear program is concerned, in recent days, the Iranians canceled snap inspections of their nuclear sites by U.N. nuclear inspectors. The International Atomic Energy Agency released a report accusing Iran of carrying out prohibited nuclear work at multiple undeclared nuclear sites. Khamenei has threatened to escalate Iran's uranium enrichment levels to 60 percent. And rather than respond by escalating sanctions against Iran, the European Union—presumably with U.S. approval—scrapped plans to condemn Iran for its illegal behavior at the IAEA's Board of Governors' meeting last week.
In a press briefing Monday, State Department Spokesman Ned Price said, "We seek to accomplish a great deal with the Saudis: To end the war in Yemen and ease Yemen's humanitarian crisis; to use our leadership to forge ties across the region's most bitter divide, whether that's finding the way back from the brink of war with Iran into a meaningful regional dialogue or forging a historic peace with Israel."
In other words, the administration holds the Saudis solely responsible for the war in Yemen. It also blames Saudi Arabia (and presumably, Israel, the UAE and Bahrain) for being at "the brink of war with Iran," rather than blaming Iran for bringing the region to the "brink of war" through its terrorist aggression and illicit nuclear activities.
The order of Price's "to-do" list made clear that reaching "a historic peace" between Israel and Saudi Arabia is the administration's lowest priority.
Price served as National Security Council spokesman during the Obama administration. There he played a key role in marketing the JCPOA and developing what his colleague, then deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, referred to as the information "echo chamber" for selling the deal to ignorant reporters in Washington. Last year, in a speech before the National Iranian-American Council (a group widely viewed as the Iranian regime's unofficial lobby in Washington), Price said that a Biden administration would remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department list of foreign terror groups.
Taken together, the administration's moves make clear that beyond paying occasional lip service to the Abraham Accords, ending the Arab and Islamic world's conflict with Israel and forging a wider peace between them is not a goal it wishes to pursue. Indeed, for Biden and his advisers, Arab-Israel peace is an impediment to their ideologically motivated efforts to empower the PLO and Iran.
