People in the West and Israel have a certain deranged view on Palestinians, yet we see how Israel schools and families indoctrinate their children into behaving this way. It’s not safe to be around them. Palestinians shouldn’t be living in fear.
Source: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcHQXvDtrum/?igsh=endvMHcxODByZDls
For example sake, the claim was recently made:
>Before you say "Jews are safe in the United States", no they are not. Jew Hate is at an all time high. Laws discriminating against Jews are as recent as 60 years ago.
While in reality, the only actual law discriminating against Jews for being Jews in the US was a 1862 military order expelling them from the south during the Civil War, passed by Ulysses S. Grant and quickly rescinded by Abraham Lincoln. Grant collectively blamed Jews for cotton smuggling but rightly apologized for his bigotry when called on it, and in the long run:
>In the 1868 presidential election, he won a majority of the Jewish vote. During his presidency, Grant named more Jews to public office than all previous presidents combined. He became the first president to attend a synagogue dedication and intervened on behalf of persecuted Jews in Russia and Romania.
And as explained in the article, that was considered a matter of religious discrimination, not ethnicity. As far as racist laws like segregation and anti-miscegenation, those essentially all came down to divisions of white, black, native, Asian, and Pacific Islander. Jews were and remain all white by those standards which are still part of the US census, and in that categorizations Jews along with Arabs and and Hispanics as long as they present as more European than native, other than black and Asian Jews obviously. Of course there was considerable discrimination against many groups including Jews that remained legal until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but aside from that military order, never any actual laws against Jews like there were against other groups.
Also, another argued in that same thread:
> it was illegal for Jews to be openly Jewish in Spain until 1968.
When according to B'nai B'rith "The laws of the Inquisition were reversed with the 1869 constitution, proclaiming religious tolerance." And of course there's also sorts of exaggerated claims about what dhimmi status entailed throughout the Muslim word, many who don't even realize the Ottoman Empire repealed it in 1856. Furthermore, a while back someone insisted to me:
>ALL the West (and the Soviet Union) is to blame for the Holocaust. It was a coordinated restriction of Jews. The N*zis were just barely more antisemitic than the rest of the West, they put into action what the rest wanted to do.
Are there any Zionists here who are willing to acknowledge how such grossly exaggerated narratives inspire unhealthy levels of distrust which undermine efforts towards peaceful coexistence?
Notions that Palestinian Arab identity is a recent invention are quite commonplace among Israelis and Zionists more generally, but even just a simple search of Google Books turns up plenty of proof to the contrary, unambiguous evidence like a 1930 pamphlet from the Jewish Agency titled The Palestinian Arabs Under the British Mandate. Beyond such examples referring explicitly to Palestinian Arabs, there's also instances were the Arab part is implicit, including one from 1921 which gets right at the root of the conflict:
>The Orthodox Church community has sent this telegram to the Palestine Arab Delegation now in London-
>>"Under Ordinance No. 1B dated September 1st, 1921, Government appointed Commission consisting of officials and representatives of Patriarchate and Government nominee on behalf of community. Commission to liquidate Patriarchate's debts. Protest first against ordinance, second against body being neither representative nor responsible to community, third Commission proposed sale large plots valuable urban lands impossible for individual Palestinians to purchase, leaving Zionists sole prospective purchasers at the price they fix."
So when people promote conspiracy theories about Palestinian identity being fabricated by the Soviets in the 1960s and other and such nonsense, I hope anyone reading this might take the time to provide the aforementioned proof to the contrary.
Also, given how prevalent such ahistorical rejection of Palestinian identity seems to be among Israelis, I'm curious if any here knows: do Israeli schools tend not to teach the truth about this history?
Adding other examples, starting with this 1922 US Congressional record, quoting a Palestinian-America, Dr. Fuad Isa Shatara:
>We are a majority now, but we do not want any people to come into Palestine and become a majority. This is our national home, the national home of the Palestinians, and I think those people are entitled to priority as the national home of the Palestinians and not aliens who have come in and have gradually become a majority.
From the a 1920 article in The Yale Review:
>Thus far we have left out of consideration the point on which the whole problem should turn. Since Palestine is an Arab country in which the Jews are outnumbered eight to one, naturally the question to be asked first of all is what the Palestinians desire.
From a 1920 article in Literary Digest:
>The entrance of the English into Palestine, we are told, was hailed joyfully by native Palestinians, who hoped England would give ear to their national desires and their earnest protest against Zionism. But when it became evident that England would carry out the Balfour policy to make Palestine a national home of the Jews, the Palestinians turned their faces to Syria to King Faysal and his Nationalist supporters as the means of their salvation. It was only on this platform of "liberation from the Zionists" that the Palestinians joined the Syrian Independence movement with Faysal at its head.
For anyone who isn't familiar with the global consensus on the legal status of East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, as explained by the International Court of Justice:
>the prohibition of acquisition of territory by force was emphasized by the Security Council in its resolution 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967 (see paragraph 58 above). The Security Council affirmed this principle by resolution 252 (1968) of 21 May 1968, where it also declared that “all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid and cannot change that status”. The Security Council has since reiterated this principle in several resolutions dealing with Israel’s purported annexation of Arab and Palestinian territory (for example, Security Council resolutions 267 (1969) of 1 April 1969, 298 (1971) of 25 September 1971 and 478 (1980) of 20 August 1980). More recently, the Security Council, in its resolution 2334 (2016) of 23 December 2016, stated that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace” (para. 1).
And as court goes on to explain, the same consensus can be found piles of General Assembly resolutions such as their annual Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine resolution that passed last December with a vote of 151 to 11. Previous versions of that resolution have been calling for a two-state solution negotiated on the basis of international law for decades now, and that's been more or less the case since the second year of the resolution back in 1994 when it was 131 countries in favor with only Israel and the US against.
Anyway, I'm not sure I've ever come across an Israeli who is even familiar with that longstanding consensus, and to the contrary have conversed with many who have a variety of different arguments regarding the legal status of the terrorizes, including more than a few arguments the Israel government has never officially made.
I'm very curious to hear from Israelis though: were you aware of this longstanding consensus, and if so do you know many others who are? And as a bonus question, do you realize much the same as the Golan Heights, but that's Syrian territory and they've been a UN member state since October 1946, two and a half years before before Israel was admitted in May of 1949?
It seems many people believe the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was ethnically cleansed in much the same sense that Kfar Etzion was and that Palestinians were from hundreds of localities during the war through which Israel was established. The situation was quite different in the Jewish Quarter though, as explained in Benny Morris's 1948. Of course the Arab Legion's capture of the neighborhood was violent, but as he concludes his telling of that history:
>On the morning of 28 May a delegation of rabbis arrived at the quarter’s Haganah command bunker and announced that they intended to surrender. The commander, Moshe Roznak, agreed that they open “truce negotiations.” Glubb described what followed: “Two old rabbis, their backs bent with age, came forward down a narrow lane carrying a white flag.” In no man’s land they met a Jordanian officer and said that they were empowered to negotiate. [Abdullah] Tall demanded to see the quarter’s mukhtar, Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten. Weingarten, accompanied by his daughter, Yehudit, duly appeared, and the negotiations began in a nearby café. A brief ceasefire was agreed, and Weingarten returned to the Jewish Quarter, where representatives of the inhabitants and the defenders voted almost unanimously in favor of surrender; only the IZL representative abstained. Shaltiel was not consulted or informed. Rosnak, Weingarten, and Tall then signed an instrument of surrender. Tall agreed that the civilian inhabitants and all the women would be free to leave for West Jerusalem; army-age males (or “combatants”) would become prisoners of war. Seriously wounded combatants were to be set free. By then, of the 213 defenders, thirty-nine were dead, and 134 were wounded.
>The fears of the quarter’s inhabitants proved groundless; the Legion had learned its lesson from Kfar Etzion. The Legionnaires deployed in force and protected the Jews from the wrath of the gathering Arab mob. The soldiers shot dead at least two Arabs and wounded others as they guarded the Jews. One POW recalled: “We were all surprised by the Legion’s behavior toward us. We all thought that of the soldiers [that is, Haganah men] none would remain alive. . . . [We feared a massacre. But] the Legion protected us even from the mob, they helped take out the wounded, they themselves carried the stretchers. . . . They gave us food, their attitude was gracious and civil.”
>The Legionnaires took prisoner 290 healthy males, aged fifteen to fifty—two-thirds of them, in fact, noncombatants—and fifty-one of the wounded. The other wounded and twelve hundred inhabitants were accompanied by the Legionnaires to Zion Gate and freed. The quarter was then systematically pillaged and razed by the mob. The fall of the Jewish Quarter, an important national site, dealt a severe blow to Yishuv morale.
Also notable is the fact the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists who lived in the Jewish Quarter didn't own much of it at all, as can be seen on the Jewish Agency's land ownership map, the neighborhood being just a bit north west from the dot for Silwan. As far as I'm aware they only owned two synagogues, including one Morris curiously describes as having been blown up "without reason" when the reason is that Haganah were hunkering down in the synagogue and refusing to evacuate.
Anyway, I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this history, and particularly those of anyone who had previously imagined it differently.
The traditional Israeli narrative of what they call their War of Independence, as surely everyone here knows, is essentially that the United Nations decided to partition Palestine on November 30 of 1947 and Arabs responded with war. More colorfully, the story goes that Arabs collectively decided they'd rather drive all the Jews into the sea or worse, leaving the peace-loving Zionists with no choice but to defend themselves and their UN-ordained state as the most moral army in the world.
However, that narrative overlooks the fact that the UN resolution was merely a non-binding recommendation to partition the country, not a license to do so, and more importantly it also fails to mention that the self-declared supremely moral Amy was formed by terrorist organizations that had previously carried out a wide range of atrocities. Such terrorist attacks went back well over a decade prior to the recommendation for partition, but intensified in response to Britain's 1939 pledge to leave Palestine as a unitary state shared by Arabs and Jews, went strong for months until mostly dying down during the early years of WWII, and then picked up again:
>A relative quiet of late 1943 was the calm before an ever-deadlier storm building to statehood. After five bombs exploded in the lorry park of Steel Brothers in Jaffa on the night of 28-29 January, wrecking a lorry, pamphlets dropped at the scene accused the firm of being “parasites of the foreign [British] government”. The Irgun claimed responsibility for the attack in a letter to the Hebrew Press. Lehi, too, had been quiet, as many of its key people had been captured; but three months earlier, on 31 October, some twenty Lehi operatives in the Latrun Detention Camp slipped to freedom through a 176 foot long tunnel they had bored. The terror organization was now back in operation, and St. Georges Cathedral—where Israeli whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu would sequester himself after his release from prison sixty years later, in 2004—was the target of a Lehi bombing on the 3rd of February. At 3:00 in the morning, alerted by a Palestinian taxi driver, police found the bombers planting an electrically triggered device (an “infernal machine”, as they described it) in the Cathedral wall. They escaped, murdering a Palestinian civilian who had assisted the police.
>Nine days later (12th), Lehi opened fire in Tel Aviv’s Hashomer Hatzair Club in retaliation for that socialist party’s favouring a binational state. The Irgun was busier that night, bombing the Immigration Offices in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, using inventive methods to defeat building security. In Jerusalem, the building’s guard was distracted with cries for help from a staged street ‘attack’. In Tel Aviv, a sympathetic locksmith supplied a key to an adjoining building, by which four Irgun operatives carried sacks of explosives over the roof. The ruse was most colourful in Haifa: a decoy ‘couple’ passed in deliberate view of the guard’s post, then slipped into a nearby doorway and staged a wild sex encounter whose loud moaning was too much for the guard to resist ‘investigating’—at which the bombers slipped past, bombing an air raid shelter and demolishing the building. The Irgun again claimed credit in a letter to the Hebrew Press. “All non-Jewish bodies holding this country”, the Irgun decreed in a pamphlet that month, “are our mortal enemies”. Its terror was “a holy battle ... a sacred war, and God will help us”.
>“We are living through a period of almost official admiration for underground activities”, the Hebrew daily Haboker acknowledged, as the Irgun warned newspaper editors not to oppose them. But the chief rabbi of Egypt reacted angrily to the ‘Jewish terrorism’, and refused to endorse the Zionist stance on immigration to Palestine, even as Weizmann publicly claimed again to speak for all Jews in supporting it. The Jewish Agency and the American Zionist organizations, meanwhile, were engaged in a world-wide campaign to abrogate the White Paper, which was spun as “anti-Bible”, and framed any impediment to funnelling Jews (only) to Palestine as the final genocide—“before it is too late to save even the remnant”, in a typical phrase from the Jewish Agency. The Palestinians themselves remained tolerant, even as British Political Intelligence in the Middle East (P.I.C.M.E.) speculated that Zionists “would welcome if not actually provoke Arab reaction” to the terror, “in order that they might use the argument of self-defence against the Arabs as further justification for their own illegal acts”. (The writing is on the wall that Palestine will be made a ‘Jewish state’, one British official wrote in a ‘most secret’ memo in January; Surely Babylon, another pencilled in.)
So while Israelis obviously like to insist Arabs started the war in late 1947, that just doesn't rightly make sense. The return to Zionist terrorism in early 1944 is a far more sensible date, given that they essentially kept up their fight until the armistice agreements of 1949. The partition recommendation was just a blip on the timeline were some some Palestinians began joining the battles after it became clear that Britain was ducking out, while the war had started years prior in 1944.
Note: This article is from 2019, so all the talk of "AIPAC does not engage in political fundraising; it would be illegal for it to do so" is outdated in the sense that AIPAC created their own PAC in 2021 though which they now can legally do exactly that, which is why for example if you check their totals page on OpenSecrets you'll find nothing prior to 2022.
However, that PAC is just a side-project while the article explains what remains AIPAC's primary functions since they first got started all the way back in 1954.
Original link and archive link
This Is How AIPAC Really Works
An AIPAC and Capitol Hill veteran explains the lobby’s tactics of reward and retribution.
-M.J. Rosenberg
One thing that should be said about Representative Ilhan Omar’s tweet about the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (more commonly known as AIPAC, or the “Israel lobby”) is that the hysterical reaction to it proved her main point: The power of AIPAC over members of Congress is literally awesome, although not in a good way. Has anyone ever seen so many members of Congress, of both parties, running to the microphones and sending out press releases to denounce one first-termer for criticizing the power of… a lobby?
Somehow, I don’t think the reaction would have been the same if she had tweeted that Congress still supports the ethanol subsidy because the American Farm Bureau and other components of the corn/ethanol lobby spend millions to keep this agribusiness bonanza going (which they do). Or that if she had opposed the ethanol subsidy, she would have been accused of hating farmers. That’s American politics; the only difference between all the domestic lobbies that essentially buy support for their agenda is that AIPAC is working for a foreign government, a distinction but not much of a difference when the goal is to maintain a status quo that is not necessarily in the national interest.
What did Omar tweet that was so terrible, anyway? Actually it was two tweets that produced the unsettling but oh-so-telling coming together of President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in common denunciation of the first-term member of Congress. Omar’s crime: daring to suggest that campaign contributions orchestrated by AIPAC play a large part in achieving bipartisan support for anything proposed by the Israeli government and/or its lobby, AIPAC.
This is, of course, something everyone knows and which even a former president of AIPAC once admitted in a conversation that was recorded by an interlocutor. In fact, as early as 1988, 60 Minutes did a segment on how AIPAC divvies up the money. (Moreover, I, as an employee of the lobby from 1973 to 1975 and 1982 to 1986, repeatedly and personally witnessed the whole process of funding and defunding, which is anything but a secret within the organization. Additionally, I spent close to 20 years as a legislative assistant to Democratic House and Senate members and saw AIPAC’s tactics of reward and retribution from that vantage point too.)
Officially, of course, AIPAC does not engage in political fundraising; it would be illegal for it to do so, and the lobby is vehement on the point that it doesn’t. And it is true that, to my knowledge, it does not directly raise money to support or defeat candidates. But that is just a technicality. Political fundraising is a huge part of AIPAC’s operation. One of the three top positions in its massive Washington, DC, headquarters is that of political director, who runs both the Washington political operation (his annual salary is over $450,000) and deputy regional directors around the country. Here is how AIPAC describes what these officials do, as described in a “help wanted” description for a Los Angeles deputy regional political director:
Not mentioned is what all the information is used for: political fundraising. That means making sure that pro-Israel PACs know what to do with their money. And making sure that individual donors know what to do with theirs. That is why AIPAC has a large national political operation. If it were not in the money-distribution business, it would simply rely on its legislative department to lobby for and draft legislation for members of Congress. Nor would its political director make a half-million dollars a year. In short, AIPAC’s political operation is used precisely as Representative Omar suggested.
Again, I know this because I witnessed it over and over again. I sat in AIPAC staff meetings at which the political director discussed whom “we” would be supporting in this campaign and whom “we” were going to “destroy” in that one. I also sat in on meetings at AIPAC’s huge annual policy conference, attended by as many as 20,000 AIPAC members and virtually the entire Congress, at which fundraising pitches were made.
AIPAC, of course, denies that anyone raises money at its policy conference. And it’s true. No one does… in the official AIPAC rooms. However, there are also the side rooms, nominally independent of the main event but just down the hall, where candidates and invited donors (only the really wealthy donors get the invites) meet and decide which candidate will get what. This arrangement is almost a metaphor for the whole AIPAC fundraising operation. The side rooms are nominally not AIPAC, so AIPAC can deny that any fundraising takes place at their conference. But in fact, they are the most exclusive venues in the country for candidates to raise money in the name of advancing the AIPAC cause.
AIPAC denies fundraising precisely the way Captain Renault in the film Casablanca declared he was “shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on” in his establishment. As he is saying it, one of the club’s crooks hands him a wad of cash, saying, “Your winnings, sir.”
Same with AIPAC: “We don’t donate to campaigns. Here’s your check.” Or, more usually, a bundle of checks that are not traceable back to AIPAC because, on paper at least, they come from individuals who like a candidate’s stand on Israel or Iran sanctions (as told to them by AIPAC’s political operatives).
So enough about AIPAC’s fundraising denials, which insult the intelligence of anyone who hears them. Except, check this out: Political activist Ady Barkan describes how a congressional candidate he worked for scored $5,000 from an AIPAC representative just by promising to support AIPAC’s pet issues. Easy money!
Back to Representative Omar. The first tweet, which resulted in ominous storm clouds over her head, was her response to a journalist who asked, by tweet of course, what accounted for such fierce defense of a foreign country by US political leaders even if it meant attacking the free-speech rights of Americans. Omar responded, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” breezily referring to $100 bills. This was bad enough, suggesting that campaign contributions plays a part in AIPAC’s success at garnering support for legislation that reads like it’s written by the Likud Central Committee.
But that was nothing compared to the monsoon of invective produced by her response to a reporter from the Jewish newspaper Forward, Batya Ungar-Sargon, who (again in a tweet) disingenuously asked Omar who she thought is “paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.”
Even before Omar responded “AIPAC!” Ungar-Sargon had resorted to the lobby’s (and its media friends’) favorite tactic when exposed or criticized: charging Omar with anti-Semitism; specifically, for using what Ungar-Sargon described as an “anti-Semitic trope.” That opened the floodgates for the full “she’s an anti-Semite!” onslaught. One by one, other Jewish organizations weighed in (AIPAC is designated by virtually all the mainstream Jewish organizations as their official lobby, and they invariably jump when AIPAC tells them to). And then AIPAC’s congressional enforcers weighed in, led by Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, who has been AIPAC’s man on the House floor for decades, Pelosi, and others. They all said the same thing: that Omar’s tweet was anti-Semitic, with many adopting Ungar-Sargon’s characterization of Omar’s words as “an anti-Semitic trope,” by which they seem to mean using the words “Jewish” and “money” in the same tweet.
But that is not what Omar said. She wasn’t even talking about Israel per se. When asked whom she is accusing of buying members of Congress, Omar responded with one word: AIPAC. Period.
And here’s the thing: AIPAC is not synonymous with Jews. By its own admission, AIPAC has 100,000 members out of an American Jewish population of about 6 million. Of that number, most are Jewish but, as it proudly proclaims, many are evangelical (and other) Christians. Implying that criticizing the power of a predominantly Jewish organization is anti-Semitic is like saying that those who point to the Catholic Church’s pedophile scandal are anti-Catholic, or that condemning violent Islamist extremists is tantamount to hating Muslims. It is ridiculous. It is also clever, because it deters legitimate criticism of Israel or, God forbid, of the lobby by sending a clear message to politicians that any such criticism will cost them mightily. Watching what the lobby and its acolytes, in Congress and out, are saying about Omar would cause anyone in politics to think long and hard before saying anything at all about Israel, other than the effusive statements of praise AIPAC wants. And that is the lobby’s goal: to ensure that Congress never questions Israel about anything, that it just shuts up and keeps the billions of dollars in aid coming. And above all, without conditions, like requiring Israel to take steps to end the occupation, the blockade of Gaza, or to grant equal rights to Palestinians inside Israel and in the occupied territories.
The only thing wrong with Ilhan’s tweets about AIPAC is the seeming suggestion that money is all there is behind US support for Israel. There are many, many reasons why the United States supports the existence of the State of Israel and the security of its people. One of them has always been the Holocaust, which demonstrated that Jews do need a secure refuge because, as has been dramatically illustrated in the United States since the rise of Donald Trump, anti-Semitism remains a contagion that can infect a xenophobic population anywhere. Tell me that there is no need for a Jewish state anymore, and I’ll point to the massacre at the kosher supermarket in Paris or, even more frightening, the slaughter of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (the worst act of anti-Jewish terrorism in the history of the United States).
But believing that Israel has every right to exist in peace is not the same as saying that it should continue to occupy or blockade Palestinian lands or deny full democratic rights to the people who live there. It does not mean that we should enact laws that penalize people who choose to boycott Israel because they oppose its policies toward the Palestinians. It does not mean that we should continue to support members of Congress who refuse to put conditions on our aid to Israel, just as we impose conditions on other congressional appropriations, including those that go to our own states and local governments. It certainly does not mean that we have to embrace AIPAC’s number-one priority of recent years: preventing and then destroying President Obama’s nuclear pact with Iran simply because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers to deter an Iranian nuclear bomb through war (preferably an American attack) rather than diplomacy.
No, supporting Israel has very little, if anything, to do with keeping quiet about the dangers represented by its out-of-control lobby. In fact, it more likely represents the opposite. AIPAC is bad for America, but it could well be catastrophic for Israel, if it hasn’t been already. This is something more and more Jews (particularly the young) now understand, which is why groups like J Street, IfNotNow, Americans For Peace Now, and Jewish Voice for Peace have come to the fore in recent years and have grabbed their share of the congressional turf, which was once exclusively owned by AIPAC.
Joining them are the newly energized Arab American Institute and a significant new player, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, as well as various Palestinian student groups which are ensuring that Palestinian voices are heard, sometimes in concert with the progressive Jewish groups and sometimes on their own. But finally heard.
The bottom line is that despite all the congressional denunciations of Omar and the hysterical denials that AIPAC buys support for Israel with its “Benjamins,” the times are changing. On February 5, when AIPAC’s “Combating BDS” bill passed the Senate, 22 Democrats voted against it. That is a decent number, but the real sign that AIPAC’s power is on the wane is that every Democratic senator who is a candidate for president (except Amy Klobuchar) voted No. They voted No because they are seeking to win support from the Democratic grassroots, which, naturally enough, skews younger and younger, more and more progressive, and less and less white, leading naturally enough to more sympathy for Palestinians and less for Netanyahu’s Israel. That wouldn’t have happened before 2016, when Bernie Sanders embraced Palestinians and their cause as part of his coalition and not only did not lose support because of it but gained it. By 2020, it will be close to impossible for any Democrat to claim the progressive mantle while aligning with AIPAC.
For now, with the Baby Boomers still the most influential segment of the population, AIPAC is holding its own, even happily raising money over the whole Omar incident. But its future looks dim, especially its post-Trump future. And that is very good news.
