In light of Russia’s opposition to extending the arms embargo on Iran, which expires on October 23, the only way forward is to cancel the JCPOA entirely by triggering “snapback” sanctions, which no side can veto

By: Caroline Glick

There is a growing chance that by October, the nuclear deal with Iran, otherwise known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will be dead.

Under the deal with the United States, China, Russia, Germany, Britain and France, Iran purported to accept limitations on its nuclear program. These limitations included capping its low-enriched uranium stockpiles at 300 kilograms (661 pounds), restraining its enrichment activities, and accepting the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) right to inspect its declared and undeclared nuclear sites.

In exchange, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany, agreed to cancel the Security Council sanctions resolutions that had been imposed on Iran due to its illicit nuclear activities over the previous decade.

The JCPOA, which was never formally signed, was anchored in UNSC Resolution 2231, which was passed immediately after the JCPOA was concluded. At the time, the JCPOA was vociferously opposed by U.S. lawmakers from both sides of the partisan divide. Their opposition owed to the fact that even if Iran abided by the restrictions on its nuclear activities prescribed by the JCPOA, it would still be able to develop a full-blown nuclear arsenal within 10 to 15 years.

To placate the deal’s opponents, and secure its approval in the Senate, the Obama administration added two safeguards to Resolution 2231. The first imposed a five-year embargo on conventional weapons sales to Iran. The second enabled all sides to the agreement to end the JCPOA by triggering the reimposition of the U.N. sanctions canceled under 2231.

According to Articles 10-12 of the resolution, if a party to the agreement informs the Security Council that Iran is in breach of its commitments under the agreement, such a declaration will automatically trigger the reimposition of the sanctions within 30 days. The Obama administration dubbed this mechanism “snapback sanctions.”

Now both of these safeguards are being tested.

In May 2018, due to incontrovertible evidence of Iranian bad faith both during the negotiations process and following the implementation of the JCPOA, President Donald Trump announced that the United States was washing its hands of the nuclear deal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo set out the U.S.’s new “maximum pressure campaign” that replaced the JCPOA as the central element of U.S. policy towards Iran.

The strategy of maximum pressure involves applying harsh U.S. economic sanctions against Iran’s oil, financial and shipping sectors in particular. The goal is to weaken the Iranian economy in order to destabilize the regime and minimize its financial capacity to fund its nuclear operations and its terror proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and beyond.

The other parties to the JCPOA did not follow America’s lead. On the contrary, they sought to undermine U.S. sanctions. Led by Germany, the European Union clung ever more tightly to the nuclear deal. Germany, France and Britain attempted to create a financial mechanism that would enable Iran to bust U.S. sanctions. They also continued to develop Iran’s heavy-water reactor at Fordo.

The Russians maintained and intensified their alliance with Iran in Syria. China breached the U.S. sanctions and continued importing Iranian oil and gas. Currently, China is working closely with Iran in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban.

The Europeans, Russians and Chinese have all been playing for time in the hope that Trump loses the presidential election in November. The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, has pledged that if elected, he will return the United States to the nuclear deal and end U.S. economic sanctions against Iran.

The problem for all of these parties is that time, and the facts, aren’t on their side.

The Iranian regime which they are so keen to keep afloat is not playing along with them. Instead, it is systematically and openly breaching all of its commitments under the JCPOA. In March, the IAEA revealed that between November 2019 and March 2020, Iran increased its store of low-enriched uranium from 373 to 1050 kilograms (822 to 2315 pounds)—more than three times the quantity permitted under the agreement.

The IAEA also reported that Iran had increased the number of advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to prohibited levels in operation by approximately 20 percent since last November.

In January, the Iranian regime rejected IAEA requests for information regarding three newly discovered undeclared nuclear sites and subsequently rejected IAEA requests to dispatch inspectors to two of them.

Earlier this month, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced that Iran was building two more nuclear reactors at Bushehr. He added that “a new generation of centrifuges would soon come online at the Natanz fuel enrichment plant.”

Salehi explained that Iran is now in full breach of the JCPOA, saying, “Nuclear activities, as well as research and development on the nuclear fuel cycle, uranium conversion, and enrichment —including production and storage—are being carried out without any restrictions.”

Iran’s apparent race to develop the ability to build a nuclear arsenal on-demand—or what has been dubbed “breakout capacity”—is happening in the context of the quickly approaching deadline for the conventional arms embargo imposed under Resolution 2231. The embargo will expire on October 23.

Over the past six months, Pompeo has stated repeatedly that the United States will not permit the embargo to be lifted. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, Russian defense firms have already concluded deals to sell Iran advanced aircraft, tanks and air defense systems the moment the embargo is lifted.

In a press briefing on Wednesday, Pompeo set out how the administration intends to prevent it from being lifted. Pompeo explained that the administration is pressuring the Europeans to put forward a Security Council resolution calling for the arms embargo to be extended even as Russia has vowed to veto any such resolution.

In light of the Russian position, the only way to extend the arms embargo is to cancel the JCPOA entirely by triggering 2231’s snapback sanctions clause, which no side can veto.

To prevent the Americans from triggering the snapback clause, since May 2018, the Europeans, Iranians, Russians and Obama administration officials have claimed Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement canceled America’s standing as a party to the JCPOA and so abrogated the U.S.’s right to trigger the snapback sanctions.

Last year, the State Department’s legal department published a brief rejecting this position. The U.S. action did not abrogate Security Council Resolution 2231, and Article 10 of the resolution clearly names the United States as a party to the agreement.

At Wednesday’s briefing, Pompeo repeated this key claim.

“The U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 is very clear: We don’t have to … declare ourselves a participant. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 is unambiguous where the United States is a participant,” he said.

Pompeo added, “We’re going to … [make] sure that come October of this year, the Iranians aren’t able to buy conventional weapons that they would be given what President Obama and Vice President Biden delivered to the world in that terrible deal.”

As the sides set up for a confrontation, the fact is that the administration will come out on top under all circumstances. This is true for three reasons:

First and foremost, the United States will benefit if the administration invokes the snapback sanctions articles because it is the right thing to do. As the IAEA reported and Salehi acknowledged, the Iranians are comprehensively breaching all of their commitments under the JCPOA. There is no substantive justification for maintaining the fiction that the deal is still salvageable. There is clearly no substantive justification for selling Iran conventional weapons.

This brings us to the second reason, and to Iran’s defenders—particularly the European Union and the Democrats:

If the United States triggers the snapback sanctions, the move will critically harm the European Union which, under German leadership, has consistently advanced a harshly anti-American foreign policy. If the European Union responds to a U.S. move to trigger the snapback sanctions by insisting the United States has no authority to act, the position will boomerang.

Even before the appearance of the coronavirus pandemic, many E.U. member nations were rejecting the European Union’s authority to dictate a unified anti-American, pro-Iranian foreign policy.

In February 2019, Poland co-hosted a summit on Iran in Warsaw with the United States. Then EU Foreign Policy Commissioner Federica Mogherini refused to participate in the conference that bought more than a dozen key E.U. states, along with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, together to discuss the threat Iran poses to global security.

The European Union’s utter failure to manage the coronavirus pandemic has struck it a massive blow. Its incompetence has convinced millions of Europeans who had previously supported the union that they have nothing to gain from it, and that national governments are the only instruments to protect their lives and liberty.

The European Union’s weakening was apparent earlier this month when several E.U. member states angrily rejected an attempt by current E.U. foreign policy commissioner Josep Borrell to pass a resolution condemning the Trump Middle East peace plan and Israel’s intention to apply its law to parts of Judea and Samaria in the framework of the Trump plan.

If the European Union subverts a U.S. effort to restore U.N. sanctions on Iran, its action is liable to destroy whatever is left of Brussel’s power to dictate a unified E.U. foreign policy.

Perhaps to block this prospect, and perhaps due to Iran’s reduced economic prospects after two years of U.S. sanctions, Germany announced on Thursday that it is finally outlawing Hezbollah’s “political” wing and blocking its operation in Germany.

Until now, Germany has blocked the European Union from recognizing Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organization and so enabled the Iranian proxy army to raise funds and draft operatives throughout Europe. Germany’s action Thursday indicates that, aware of the dangers to the European Union, Germany may support a U.S. move to impose the snapback sanctions and end the JCPOA.

Thirdly, there is Biden. If the administration moves to implement the snapback sanctions and so end the ill-begotten JCPOA, which was the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy in Obama’s second term, Biden and the Democrats will be harmed no matter how the move plays out: If the United Nations blocks the U.S. move, the Trump administration will claim—rightly—that Obama and Biden deliberately lied to the American people when they said the snapback sanctions provision would ensure Iran could not get away with breaching the JCPOA.

If the administration is successful and snapback sanctions are imposed, scuppering the JCPOA, its success will expose the madness at the heart of Biden’s pro-Iranian Middle East policy. It will demonstrate that the key component of the Obama-Biden foreign policy was to provide America’s most dangerous enemy in the Middle East with the ability to develop a nuclear arsenal while building itself into a regional hegemon.

It isn’t clear how events will transpire in the coming weeks and months. But as things now stand, the Trump administration seems to recognize that there is no downside to triggering the snapback sanction articles in Resolution 2231 and ending the JCPOA by October.

(JNS.org)

Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”

This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.

Jewish pride is not something we should hide—I learned that a long time ago from an organization called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society

By: David Suissa

After six weeks of writing only about the coronavirus, finally, I can sink my teeth into a good-old-fashioned Jewish controversy. The controversy, as I see it, is this: For a Jewish organization such as HIAS, what is the appropriate balance between helping Jews versus non-Jews?

The issue caught my eye because of a related controversy: The nomination of HIAS immediate past chairman Dianne Lob as the new chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

The backlash against the nomination from some right-wing groups has been heated, with HIAS being accused, under Lob’s tenure, of associating with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic forces, prioritizing Muslim refugees and failing to advocate for Israel and Jews.

I’ll leave the controversy over Lob’s nomination to others. I’m more interested in HIAS’s responsibility as a Jewish organization. As far as I’m concerned, HIAS has every right to assist non-Jewish refugees in any global hotspot, regardless of religion or ethnicity. The notion that most of the refugees they help are Muslim doesn’t faze me one bit.

What does faze me is this: What about the Jews?

I grew up with HIAS. When my family emigrated from the warm Mediterranean climate of Casablanca to the frigid winters of Montreal in the 1960s, it was HIAS who helped us with everything from lodging to furniture to winter coats. When stuff would just appear at our apartment, I would often ask my mother, “Where does this come from?” and she’d always answer: “La JIAS!” (JIAS was the Canadian equivalent).

This was my introduction to Jewish solidarity.

Years later, as I got more involved with the Jewish community, I came to recognize the unique power of Jewish peoplehood. I would imagine wealthy Ashkenazi Jews at some HIAS fundraiser in Beverly Hills in the 1960s hearing this appeal: “Our Jewish brothers and sisters in Morocco need your help!”

All they needed to know was that we were Jewish, and they stepped up. Who cares if we looked nothing like them and had totally different customs and traditions? Jewish was enough. To this day, that idea still moves my heart: Jewish was enough.

In America, I came to value the ideal of Jews helping non-Jews. If we are to be a light unto the nations, it’s not enough to help our own. We were once struggling immigrants and refugees, so why not help the new ones? Every human being is created in the image of God.

That’s why I find it virtuous when a Jewish organization such as HIAS shows compassion for refugees of all races and religions.

I come back, though, to my earlier question: What about the Jews?

Have Jews succeeded so well that we no longer need assistance?

Have we run out of Jews throughout the world who are endangered by anti-Semitism, poverty, isolation or other hardships? Are there no persecuted Jews who’d love nothing better than to make a new life in America, Canada or, say, Israel?

I’m not suggesting HIAS has totally abandoned Jews. A January 2017 article in the Forward noted that during the previous year, HIAS assisted 4,188 people from 36 different countries—169 of whom were Jewish, mainly from Ukraine and Iran.

That’s 4 percent.

I guess that’s better than zero, but, seriously, a Jewish organization can’t do more than that?

I get it. The world has changed. When HIAS was founded in 1881, there was no shortage of Jewish refugees who needed help, primarily those fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. This focus on Jews lasted for well over 100 years.

“Starting in the 2000s,” its website explains, “HIAS expanded our resettlement work to include assistance to non-Jewish refugees, meaning we became involved in the aftermath of conflicts from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Hungary, Iran, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Tunisia, Vietnam, and the successor states to the former Soviet Union.”

I applaud all that. But when HIAS uses language like “expanded” and “include,” it suggests that Jews are still very much in the picture. Are they? I went through the HIAS annual report and couldn’t find one program to help Jews. Why not?

The world may have changed, but it’s not as if there are no longer Jews in trouble, as any recent ADL report on the rise in anti-Semitism can attest. In fact, just this week, a bipartisan group of 28 senators asked for more funding to fight global anti-Semitism, writing: “Tragically, 75 years after the end of the Holocaust, [anti-Semitism] is on the rise around the world.”

I realize there are Jewish groups like the Jewish Agency and Nefesh B’ Nefesh that help Jews emigrate to Israel, and groups like the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), or the “Joint,” that assist Jews throughout the world. But with its unique and deep expertise in the complex field of immigration and resettlement, HIAS can certainly add a valuable Jewish contribution.

I realize also that “immigrant” is not the same as “refugee” and that the great majority of refugees today are not Jewish. But why not “grandfather” in some immigration assistance to Jews who may not technically qualify as “refugees,” but who feel under siege due to growing anti-Semitism or are experiencing extraordinary hardships?

Aren’t they worth helping too?

In any case, while HIAS acknowledges that it is a Jewish organization, it’s worth noting that it has abandoned what its name stands for: Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

As its website explains: “As we expanded our mission to protect and assist refugees of all faiths and ethnicities, we realized our name no longer represented the organization.”

So they kept the initials, but lost the words. If a little kid in Kenya or Syria wonders what the acronym HIAS stands for, I guess they can just ask Google.

But regardless of who HIAS is helping, why downplay its “Hebrew” identity? After all, if Jews seek to be a light unto the nations, don’t we want to identify as Jews when we do, in fact, help those nations?

In its annual report, HIAS makes a big deal of its Jewish character and its pride in honoring Jewish values. If this Jewish pride and identity is good enough for donors, why not for the outside world?

I once asked the late Rabbi Harold Schulweis why he named his anti-genocide group Jewish World Watch, instead of something more universal, like Genocide Watch. I don’t remember his exact words, but I remember his point: He wanted the world to know that Jews were behind the initiative. That was as essential as anything else.

HIAS is a major Jewish organization, with an annual revenue of just over $50 million. I can’t see why they couldn’t allocate 4 percent of that budget– $2 million– to a “Jewish desk” dedicated solely to its century-old mission expressed in the first two letters of its acronym: “Hebrew Immigrant.” Will they find enough Jews who need assistance? I have little doubt.

In the meantime, HIAS can use some of its budget to fully reclaim its Jewish name. Jewish pride is not something we should hide.

I learned that a long time ago from an organization named Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

(JNS.org)

David Suissa is editor-in-chief and publisher of Tribe Media Corp and Jewish Journal. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

This article was first published by the Jewish Journal.

By: Phyllis Chesler

Occupation is a word that dominates most debate about Israel, but the truth is that pro-Palestinian propagandists are occupying Google and Wikipedia to keep debunked narratives alive.

This was recently confirmed when I attended a webinar featuring a physician who worked in Israel’s undercover “Duvdevan” unit, which is the basis for the popular series Fauda. She talked about her work in Gaza and on the West Bank during Operation Protective Edge.

“I thought nothing would surprise me. But many things did,” she said. The physician told the story of trying to save the life of a 2½-year-old West Bank boy accidentally run over by his father. They rushed the boy to an Israeli hospital, providing treatment along the way.

“Despite all our efforts,” she remembered, “the boy died. When I asked this father if he would donate any of his son’s organs to another child, he said: ‘Only to an Arab Palestinian child, not to an Israeli Jewish child.’”

This was a father who had just seen the enormous effort that Israeli Jews had undertaken to save his son’s life; it was a very dramatic and emotional moment. Old prejudices might have died on the spot, at least momentarily. Instead, this man’s Jew and Israel hatred kicked in immediately. The doctor was stunned by the sudden appearance of such “political realities.”

This is the kind of psychological enemy Israel is up against. And then there are the Palestinian terrorist leaders, who indoctrinate their own people and use them to carry out terrorist attacks against civilian Israelis. This fact is minimized by Western media and global leaders.

Given the world’s diabolical double standards, Israeli soldiers stand accused of atrocities they did not commit, while Palestinian terrorists—Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Liberation Organization, Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—who torture, kidnap, hijack, use human shields, including children, are still viewed as innocent victims.

Contrary to public opinion, the IDF is exceptionally ethical, and military leaders from other countries have attested to it. Israeli soldiers are haunted by any accidental civilian deaths and grief-stricken by the deaths of their own comrades. Unlike the Palestinian terrorist leaders, they do not glorify death and they mourn each life lost in necessary battle. This must be said, not once, but over and over again to counter the monstrous propaganda against Israel.

Yet, poisoned anti-Israel propaganda continues to overwhelm all platforms. For example, remember Israel’s alleged 2002 massacre of civilians in Jenin? It generated international headlines.

But it never happened.

For nearly two years, Arab Palestinian terrorists had been attacking Israeli civilians non-stop. The death toll and the numbers wounded were very high. In March 2002, terrorists murdered 100 Israeli civilians. On March 27, a suicide bomber blew himself up inside the Park Hotel in Netanya, just as Jews were seated for a Passover Seder. Thirty people were killed, mostly elderly. Another 140 people were injured.

This was a final straw. Reservists voluntarily flew home to Israel from all over the world. Many of the suicide bombers attacking Israeli civilians had come from Jenin.

The IDF sent soldiers into Jenin. They went from one booby-trapped house to another, all while under fire, just so that Israel would not be accused of bombing civilians from the air or committing a massacre.

Reports from the Palestinian side described a wanton Israeli killing fest, leaving hundreds of innocents dead. Some said thousands were killed. The entire town, they claimed, was destroyed.

In truth, 56 Palestinians died, most of whom were armed. Israel lost 23 soldiers. Despite that, if someone wanted to look into it now and Googled “Jenin,” here is what they’d find.

The first five pages about “Jenin” feature 27 anti-Israeli articles promoting a false history and only seven articles that tell the truth about what really happened.

Search Google for “How many Palestinians died in Jenin, 2002,” and here’s the first thing you see today:

It was a lie then. It’s a lie today.

News coverage, two excellent films—Pierre Rehov’s The Road to Jenin and Gil Mezumen’s Jenin Diary: The Inside Story—and a very moving book, Brett Goldberg’s A Psalm in Jenin, easily rebut Google’s pernicious history-by-algorithm and remind us what really happened.

Here’s what’s important. The propaganda about the non-massacre in Jenin is not confined to 2002-2003. The falsehoods continued throughout the 21st century.

As of 2017-2018, Islamist propagandists Yvonne Ridley and Ilan Pappe continued to engage in this blood libel.

Just last week, Ridley referred to the Jenin massacre-that-wasn’t as one of its “biggest war crimes of this century.”

There are more than half a million dead Syrians that might take issue with that.

But propaganda like Ridley’s inevitably leads to real massacres and lynchings—of Jews and Israelis.

Part of the problem is Google’s linkage to Wikipedia, which is fully dedicated to an anti-Israel and pro-Palestine position. For example, look at what pops up when you search the phrase “Palestinian terrorist groups” today:

The first thing you see is a Wikipedia summary of “Palestinian political violence.”

“Palestinian political violence refers to acts of violence or terror motivated by Palestinian nationalism. These political objectives include self-determination in and sovereignty over Palestine, the ‘liberation of Palestine’ and recognition of a Palestinian state, either in place of both Israel and the Palestinian territories, or solely in the Palestinian territories. Periodically directed toward more limited goals such as the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, another key aim is to advance the Palestinian right of return.”

Like the so-called “massacre” at Jenin, the al-Dura Affair concerns the alleged cold-blooded murder in 2000 of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy by Israeli soldiers at the Netzarim junction. Yasser Arafat had again rejected peace and launched his long-planned intifada against Israel. The Muslim world embraced al-Dura as a martyr and ran his photo over and over again in the media, on t-shirts, mugs, posters, etc. They still do.

Journalist Nidra Poller describes the al-Dura matter as a “long range ballistic myth.” For many years, the entire world believed Israeli soldiers deliberately murdered a child. Even the IDF quickly ventured an apology, which it later retracted—all due to the heroic and persistent work undertaken by Poller and by Richard Landes, Esther Schapira, Philippe Karsenty, and Nahum Shahaf, an Israeli physicist.

Over time, it became clear that if al-Dura was shot at all, it was not by Israelis.

Although Google continues to automatically link to Wikipedia, it eventually included the fact that a controversy about what happened actually exists. However, the controversy section appears at the very end of the Wikipedia entry, long after the false narrative has had its way with most readers.

The 2019 Gaza protests on the Israeli border provide the latest example of Palestinians instigating violence, only to grossly exaggerate the Israeli response.

The anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace joined a chorus of voices claiming that Israel was gunning down peaceful protesters. “Israeli snipers,” it claimed, were deliberately targeting “children and persons with disabilities,” among others.

It turns out the overwhelming majority of casualties were members or affiliates of terrorist organizations. About half of those killed were Hamas members and affiliates.

We learned this from Hamas officials.

But search “Gaza border protests,” and these facts are nowhere to be seen.

It is clear that this deadly disinformation campaign will never end, but those who direct traffic on the internet should not aid and abet this crime.

            (Investigative Project on Terrorism)

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the author of 18 books, including “A Politically Incorrect Feminist,” “Islamic Gender Apartheid,” and “A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and “An American Bride in Kabul.” She is a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.