Batya Ungar-Sargon Meets Amon Göth

Posted on October 14, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Batya Ungar-Sargon, Opinion Editor of the Forward, is shocked, hurt, and very angry after coming face to face with antisemitism at Bard College.

Invited to participate in several panels, she was informed that one of them – on  “Racism and Zionism: Black-Jewish relations” – would be disrupted by the local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). For those who might say “so what?” this means that there would be no such panel. Thanks to a combination of cowardice, laziness, and ideological stupidity, administrators in numerous universities have granted radical groups like SJP the right to veto of any activity that they don’t like. It is a “heckler’s veto” that needs no rationale and permits no appeal. Security personnel may prevent physical injury, but they won’t remove the disruptive students.

Ungar-Sargon tried to reason with them. In a cringe-inducing example of liberal not-getting-it, she begged:

As the protesters started to gather in the lobby, I approached them. I told them that I respected their passion and commitment to what they thought was right, but asked why they had picked this panel.

“Come to my panel tomorrow,” I said. “Come protest my comments on Zionism. I’ll be talking about the occupation. Bring your signs.”

I told them I’d reserve the first and second audience-questions for members of their group, but that protesting the all-Jewish anti-Semitism panel was undercutting their work.

“Don’t you see that?” I asked. Didn’t they see that protesting Jews over Israel when they are not even talking about Israel is racist? Didn’t they understand that saying we were responsible for the behavior of the Israeli Jews just because we shared their ethnicity was racist? That making every conversation with Jews about Israel is racist?”

The students weren’t buying it. “The conversation about anti-Semitism is already inherently about Israel,” one said, whatever that is supposed to mean in their world. And some of the other speakers and faculty members came to their defense.

When I read this, scene 14 from Schindler’s List  (video) came to mind. That’s the one in which a young Jewish woman engineer attempts to reason with the Nazi Amon Göth, and gets a bullet for her trouble. It’s not what she says or her competence that is important. There is only one relevant fact, and that is her Jewishness. And so it was for Ungar-Sargon, and she is rightly angered.

Ungar-Sargon does not understand that the student was correct. The conversation about antisemitism is about Israel. Had the state of Israel been in existence in 1940, perhaps the young woman engineer would not have been a slave of Amon Göth in the Kraków-Płaszów labor camp. If there were no Jewish state today, perhaps Ungar-Sargon would have gotten a bullet instead of an antisemitic insult. Who knows?

Ungar-Sargon’s opinion section in the Forward reflects her respect for the “passion and commitment” of those that want to see the Jewish state disappear in a puff of blood, like Peter Beinart who called for a Palestinian intifada on her pages.

Her commitment to the Jewish community, at least in America, is strong. She stood up to Ilhan Omar and other leftist antisemites, and didn’t just pick the low-hanging fruit of white nationalism. But she’s a diasporist, not a Zionist. In her opinion, Israel is “an increasingly illiberal ethnostate with a serious civil and human rights problem.” So when she gave the other academics at Bard a well-deserved piece of her mind, she made a point of disassociating herself from Israel:

The next time someone says, ‘What have you done to help Jews as anti-Semitism has spiked across the nation, as Jews have been murdered at their place of worship and Orthodox Jews get beaten to a pulp day after day in Brooklyn,’ you can say, ‘I sat idly by as Jews were protested for trying to talk about anti-Semitism. I allowed a Jewish woman to be held accountable — because of her ethnicity — for the actions of a country halfway around the world where she can’t even vote. I egged the protest on, in fact. And then I went to a party. [my emphasis]

American Jews helped Israel greatly in her early years, with financial contributions and political support. Now the financial contributions are not needed, and the political support is ebbing. Some of the distance between the two Jewish communities is caused by the very real differences in their experience. It is hard for an Israeli to appreciate the “passion and commitment” of SJP for the folks who are stabbing their friends and family members in the streets, or to agree with Peter Beinart’s call for another Intifada, when the last one cost more than a thousand Jewish lives (and no, it will not be “nonviolent” even by the Palestinian understanding of that term, which permits the use of  knives and automobiles as weapons).

But there is also the feeling by Americans that they are the senior partner in the Jewish enterprise, and that Israelis ought to be more grateful and take their advice more. They are hurt and resentful. That is unrealistic in today’s world, when the center of Jewish life has moved to Israel.

What I want to say to Batya Ungar-Sargon is that the diasporism she endorses is dying. It is being crushed by academic fascism in the universities and colleges like Bard, it is being nibbled away at by politicians like Ilhan Omar, shot down by homicidal white nationalists, and beaten to death by black and Hispanic thugs in Brooklyn. In a different way, the Reform Movement is also weakening the community by replacing traditional Judaism with a kind of liberal Unitarianism such that Jews will soon be indistinguishable from most other Americans. I suspect that some see this as a good thing, which is a symptom of the problem. The rest of the world is in even worse shape, from a Jewish point of view.

The central insight of Zionism is more and more being proven correct: much of the world is not a friendly place for Jews, and a flourishing and powerful Jewish state is the key to our survival as a people. Batya Ungar-Sargon learned the first part of this painful lesson at Bard College. The second part still eludes her.

Posted in Academia, American Jews, Media, Zionism | 1 Comment

Have we Learned to Learn Lessons?

Posted on October 10, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Israel’s Security Cabinet met on Sunday, according to reports, to discuss the Iranian threat and in particular the dangers exposed by the September 14 attack on a Saudi Arabian oil facility by Iranian cruise missiles and unmanned aircraft (UAVs or drones).

The Iranian attack was very successful in hitting key targets precisely, and in avoiding Saudi missile defense systems. It demonstrated advanced capabilities in coordinating the attack using multiple weapons systems. Although Israeli defensive capabilities are probably much better than those of the Saudis, the small number of critical power stations, industrial installations, communications facilities, airports, fuel depots, roads and more, means that a great deal of damage to Israel’s ability to fight, her economy, and daily life could be done even if a relatively small number of Iranian weapons were to find their targets. There are very important military targets, some of which I know about but won’t mention, as well as others that I don’t know about but the Iranians might. And then of course there is the Dimona nuclear reactor. Such an attack could be launched against Israel from Iranian bases in Iraq, which bring us within the range of the missiles used in the attack on Saudi Arabia.

PM Netanyahu reportedly asked that the defense budget be boosted by billions of shekels, in part to develop a better defense against cruise missiles. Although some might be tempted to attribute political motives to his statements, the comments by independent analysts Uzi Rubin and Uzi Even, as well as expressions of concern (albeit guarded) by defense officials, indicate that the danger of attacks by “low and slow” weapons like cruise missiles and drones should not be minimized.

If we needed to add billions to our budget, why wasn’t this known beforehand? I’m not reassured by those like Moshe Ya’alon, the shadow Defense Minister of the Blue and White party, who said that the attack on Saudi Arabia revealed “nothing surprising.” Let me remind readers of the way that warnings about the threat of tunnels under the Gaza border given by Naftali Bennett in 2014 were ignored by Ya’alon, who was Minister of Defense at the time.

Questions immediately arise: what would we do if a drone/cruise missile attack were aimed at our key infrastructure tomorrow? Do we know how many of Hezbollah’s missiles have already been modified to give them precision guidance capability? Do we have countermeasures in place?

It seems that there were significant things we didn’t know about Iranian capabilities before the attack on Saudi Arabia. How is it that the people who stole the nuclear archive out from under Iranian noses didn’t know about conventional weapons?

I understand that our strategic doctrine is not to preempt an attack unless it is truly imminent, because of expected international reactions. Is it possible that we will wait until precision-guided missiles are striking our airbases and critical infrastructure, or will we be able to realize the very great advantage of striking first?

Iran is preparing for the conflict by trying to improve the quantity and quality of Hezbollah’s rocket inventory, by positioning its proxy militias in Iraq and Syria, and by trying to set up missile launchers there. We are trying to stop them, but although we can slow them down, we can’t stop their progress entirely. The American withdrawal from Syria will probably result in gains for the Assad regime and Iran, in particular by allowing Iran to complete its “land bridge” through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

At this time of year, it’s impossible to forget the way Israel’s defense establishment was unprepared for the Yom Kippur war, the failures in intelligence gathering and – perhaps worse – the failure to translate intelligence into practical recommendations and to transmit it to the commanders in the field. For example, a new study by a former tank commander, Oded Meggido, explains how Israeli tank forces suffered great losses on the Egyptian front because they were not prepared to deal with infantry armed with effective anti-tank weapons. The IDF had already encountered “Sagger” shoulder-fired antitank missiles in the early 1970s, but “the information was not assimilated … practice drills were not carried out,” he said. “There was a shortage of machine guns,” necessary to protect tanks against infantry armed with antitank weapons.  “Overconfidence,” “hubris,” “arrogance,” “negligence,” and “lack of professionalism,” are all expressions used by Meggido to describe the higher echelons of the tank corps in 1973.

I think these words could fairly be applied to our leadership today. The home front must be reinforced, as much against earthquakes as against enemy rockets, and it is barely being done. The security situation is often used as an excuse to put aside worries about social problems, the transportation infrastructure, and more. And yet, what percentage of their day do our politicians spend working on these questions as opposed to intriguing against their political opponents and defending themselves against such intrigues? How many buildings could be made more secure for the cost of one national election?

We would like to believe that today the lesson to learn lessons has finally been learned. We recall the war against Hezbollah in 2006, in which the IDF ground forces were seriously hurt by poor intelligence, logistical and communications failures, and incompetence at the highest levels, especially including the political echelon. As we draw nearer to the next war, which will be fought against an inventive and relatively sophisticated enemy, I wonder what, if anything, we have learned.

Posted in Iran, Israeli Politics, War | 2 Comments

Nobody Can Be Prime Minister Forever

Posted on October 5, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Binyamin Netanyahu, whether you like him or not, has been one of Israel’s great Prime Ministers. There is no doubt that in many respects he is simply the most competent person that has ever held that position, in foreign affairs, economics, and strategic matters. He, more than anyone else in the government, recognized the strategic threat from Iran and is taking action against it.

And Binyamin Netanyahu has been treated abominably by the press and the legal establishment in Israel. The way bits of the “confidential” contents of his police interrogations were gleefully reported every night on the hostile TV news programs was unforgivable, and the leakers should have been prosecuted. His enemies threw mud at him from the beginning of his term and never stopped. Now it seems that some of it is sticking, but who remembers that they even accused his wife of redeeming deposit bottles paid for by the government, and keeping the money? Has there ever been a more ludicrous and picayune complaint?

The legal, academic, cultural, and media establishments, are all against Netanyahu, sometimes in the most vile ways possible. For a year or more there have been regular demonstrations in front of the home of the Attorney General, calling for his indictment (which that official has been diligently developing for months).

Netanyahu has been accused of “destroying democracy” because he wanted to limit the power of foreign-funded NGOs and of the nepotically appointed Supreme Court, two of the most anti-democratic forces in the political arena. He has been accused of being a “racist” because he supported the Nation-State Law affirming that Israel is a Jewish state. His “racist” government also passed a historic $4 billion program to provide funds for development of Arab communities.

Israeli voters have time and again returned majorities for the Likud and its partners in the right-wing bloc. The Israeli Left, which once dominated Israeli politics, now flirts with the cutoff percentage for entering the Knesset at all.

But Netanyahu is in trouble today. Avigdor Lieberman leads a secular right-wing party, and he has decided that he will no longer support a narrow right-wing coalition with the religious parties. Blue and White, Bibi’s “centrist” electoral competition, is an artificial amalgamation of former generals and a journalist, Yair Lapid, led by a mediocrity, Benny Gantz. They have no consistent ideology except hating Bibi, and they distrust each other so much that Gantz hired a private investigator to keep tabs on his partners. They can’t create a coalition themselves, even with help from the Arab parties. But after Lieberman’s defection and with Bibi’s legal issues draining support, they have enough seats in the Knesset to prevent Netanyahu from forming a government.

Neither side wants to give in. Both sides threaten a third election, which would cost another billion shekels, take a few months, and probably be no more definitive than the last one.

The precise details of how this happened are unimportant. What is important is that if you consider the right-left spectrum on issues like the Nation-State Law, whether or not to annex the Jordan Valley, the posture toward Iran and Hamas, and similar issues, the nation voted strongly for a right-wing platform. If somehow Blue and White manages to form a narrow government, it would lean Left, and be dependent on Arab support. That would be as anti-democratic – and dangerous – a result as you can imagine.

There is only one practical solution, which is a unity government that would include the more centrist elements of both sides. Such a government would be right-wing on the important security issues, and it would not be dependent on support either from the Arab parties or the Haredi ones. The nucleus of the coalition would be the Likud plus Blue and White. It could be beefed up by the addition of Lieberman or with the parties to the immediate right and left: the New Right (Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett) and Labor/Gesher (Amir Peretz and Orly Levy).

Today this can’t happen, and the reasons center around Netanyahu. He has insisted on a “broad unity government” by which he means a government that includes the Haredi parties, probably so he can have a majority for some kind of legislative solution to his legal problems. But that is impossible given the differences between the Haredim and Lieberman, and the anti-Haredi Yair Lapid. At the same time, Gantz insists that he won’t agree to a Prime Ministerial rotation that includes Bibi, if he should be indicted. And it will probably be months before there is a definite decision on the indictment.

We need to move ahead with a unity government, and the way to do that is for Bibi to turn over the reins of the Likud to someone else. There are several possibilities: Gideon Sa’ar and Yuli Edelstein are often mentioned as possible successors. Possibly the Attorney General could offer Bibi a deal in which he would not be indicted in return for giving up his role as head of the party.

Is this unfair and ungrateful to Bibi? Possibly. The legal cases are complicated, but even if he is not indictable, there is certainly an appearance of impropriety in some of his affairs. And he has become progressively less able to deal with the affairs of state as his own situation has become more uncomfortable. For what it’s worth, the leaders of the Haredi parties are more corrupt and more deserving of prosecution, but that doesn’t change Bibi’s situation.

Bibi Netanyahu has been a great Prime Minister and he has been treated badly (David Ben Gurion would have said the same about himself, and both would have been right). But like Ben Gurion, nobody can (or should) be PM forever. As I wrote recently, we don’t have the luxury of time. Our enemies are not sitting quietly and waiting for our political turmoil to end.

I know that nobody cares about the State of Israel and the Jewish people as much as Bibi. But now he has to make the decision that is the hardest one of all for any great leader: even though he believes that nobody can do the job as well as he can, it’s time to let go and become an elder statesman.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 4 Comments

A Welcoming Host for the Virus of Antisemitism

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

In the US, there is a Jewish Voice for Peace, an If Not Now, a J Street, an Open Hillel, and a Tzedek Chicago – and probably a hundred other Jewish organizations with the same general objective. All would deny it, but they act politically to bring about the end of the Jewish state and the re-imposition of the historic exile of the Jewish people.

Although some of these groups claim to support “nonviolent change,” if they were to be successful in their endeavors, Jewish blood would flow (again) like water. And make no mistake about this – the conditions that enabled the Jewish people to survive as a people in the 2000+ year diaspora don’t hold in the 21st century. The end of the Jewish state would most likely be the end of the Jewish people.

Can they be that naïve? I am surprised that the ones with three-figure IQs believe that the ideal of nonviolence is attainable. But they seem to be able to accept a remarkably great degree of cognitive dissonance.

This phenomenon is rare among other peoples. I haven’t encountered a “Hindus for a Pakistani Kashmir” group, or a Greek “Keep Northern Cyprus Turkish” organization, have you? But in addition to the countless Jewish and Israeli groups dedicated to ending Jewish sovereignty in what they relish calling “Palestine” (or “Israel/Palestine” at best), there are countless Jewish activists in Students for Justice in Palestine and similar non-Jewish groups. Some are even leaders in the anti-Israel movement.

Sometimes they reconcile the contradiction by believing that justice supports the case of the Palestinian Arabs. The can think this despite the actual history of the conflict as well as the warfare and truly horrific terrorism that have been the tactics of the Arab side, because they buy into a narrative that casts the Arabs as the indigenous “brown” inhabitants of the region who have been colonized by (primarily) “white” European Jews, supported by the rest of the white, privileged, world.

This narrative was initially introduced by the KGB’s presentation in the 1960s of the antisemitic Palestinian Arab opposition to the Jewish presence and especially sovereignty in the region as a movement of national liberation, despite the fact that Palestinian nationalism had never been particularly strong before then, and decolonization, despite the fact that half of Israelis were native to the Middle East (and the rest represented no colonial power).

In the years since then, the narrative – which by now became a full-fledged self-consistent conceptual scheme – was given impetus by the UN which passed its “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1974, and then widely popularized by Edward Said’s book, Orientalism (1978), which fallaciously delegitimized attempts by non-Arabs to take any position at all on the Middle East. The connection to racism was reestablished after the 1991 repeal of the UN resolution, when the 2001 Durban Conference on racism turned into a theatrical anti-Israel festival and gave birth to the BDS movement that so many of today’s anti-Israel Jews support. Finally, the 21st century idea of “intersectionality” linked Palestinianism with other popular causes of the Left, especially in the universities.

All of this appears from the outside to be a house of cards, resting on faulty historical analysis. But once inside, the argument that the Jews are the paradigmatic “white” oppressors of the oppressed (and therefore innocent by definition) Palestinian Arabs seems reasonable. In this scheme, the Jewish state appears as emblematic of all that is unjust in the world, matched in its devilishness only by the United States of America.

But the Jewish proponents of this misozionist* world-view are sometimes uneasy. There is the problem of Arab violence, which is not so easily justified, especially when it involves beheading babies or slaughtering 13-year old girls in their beds. There is the problem of the Palestinian failure to meet modern standards for decent treatment of LGBTQ people, women, and even animals. And finally, there is the need to wriggle and dance to try to establish that misoziony is not antisemitic, given that it involves delegitimization, demonization, and double standards, the “Three D” criterion of Natan Sharansky.

One way that misozionist Jews have found to ameliorate their discomfort is to argue that their position is actually an expression of their Judaism. An early (1990s) proponent of this view is Michael Lerner, the publisher of Tikkun Magazine and author of The Politics of Meaning. Emphasizing the “social” commandments of the Torah and the writings of the prophets, Lerner and his followers redefined the mitzvot of Judaism in terms of (formerly) secular leftist social action. Given the position of the Left that justice is on the side of the Palestinian Arabs in their conflict with Israel, a “Tikkunist” Jew could see his misoziony as not only compatible with, but commanded by, Judaism.

And now, making it even more explicit, comes a new book by Atalia** Omer, a Jewish woman born in Jerusalem with a Harvard doctorate who teaches Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at Notre Dame University. The book is called Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity With Palestinians. It is a study of the Jewish misozionist movement from an appreciative standpoint, and it brings together all the concepts so beloved of the contemporary “woke” academic Left. Here is an almost randomly selected passage from the book:

I hadn’t noticed the alliance between the white power types and Jewish Zionists that she mentions, but I do note that she hits absolutely every note on the intersectional scale, including the ever-potent image of Trump, as she struggles to neutralize the fundamental antisemitism of her position. And if Zionism is chauvinistic, masculine, heteronormative, [and] homophobic,” what is the Palestinian movement with which she is so proud to show solidarity?

The “reimagining” of Judaism in terms of leftism is an act of enormous arrogance. The twists and turns that it requires are remarkable, and demonstrate, yet again, the great adaptability and virulence of the virus of antisemitism – which has found a susceptible, even welcoming, host in the Jewish Left.

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* Misoziony is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.

** Atalia (also spelled “Athalia” in transliteration) was the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. She reigned as Queen of Judah for six years, and was known for killing all possible claimants to the throne and for introducing the worship of Baal into Judah before she herself was assassinated.

Posted in Academia, American Jews, Jew Hatred, Post-Zionism, Zionism | 1 Comment

An Open Letter to Netanyahu and Gantz: Do your Jobs

Posted on September 28, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Over the coming weeks, 100% of the words uttered by our politicians will be lies, obfuscations, spin, dissimulation, disinformation and other forms of useless verbiage. I’ll try not to report on it, because what’s the point? – Ya’akov Lozowick, in a tweet about a week after the recent election

Dear Bibi and Benny:

I’ve had enough of your egos. All of Am Yisrael has had enough.

Seventy years ago, a Jewish state was re-established in the Land of Israel after thousands of years during which the Jewish people were forced to live under one or another foreign regime; years when they did not know what to expect tomorrow; years when they had to keep their suitcases packed.

After the horrors of war and Holocaust, a remnant of European Jewry was saved, here in Eretz Yisrael. When the Muslim world expelled most of its Jewish population in a paroxysm of Jew-hatred, they came and were brought here. Threatened Jews came from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Yemen, Ethiopia, and other places.

Some people believe that the creation of the state and its survival was a miracle, a gift from Hashem. There is no doubt that it also required a price in blood to be paid by our people, our sons and daughters who fought, and continue to fight for it against ever-changing but also ever-vicious enemies. Almost every day our people make payments in blood, on our borders and even on our streets.

The external threats we face are great. Iran advances its project of encircling us with its rockets and proxy armies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, while developing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. The Palestinian Arabs continue their project of educating generation after generation of young people so that their greatest ambition will be to shed Jewish blood. Hamas throws its people against our border fence every Friday. This spring and summer, they burned hundreds of acres of agricultural land in the south of the country with arson balloons and murdered our citizens with their rockets and mortars. The home front is unprepared for the next war. And the all-encompassing cognitive struggle, paid for in Arab and Iranian petrodollars and European Euros, marches on, conquering hearts and minds in the universities and even grade schools of the West.

Instead of dealing with any of this, or even the price of apartments for young families in Israel, you two – followed by your legions of sycophants – are locked in a struggle for dominance that seems unamenable to compromise. Only total victory will satisfy you. Meanwhile, we’ve had two elections, and neither of them has produced a result. Our government is non-functional, its ministers primarily concerned about their personal futures and the perquisites thereof.

While you both piously pretend to want to establish a unity government, you insist on conditions that you know the other side will be unable to meet. You use the threat of a third election – at the cost of additional months of paralysis and more than a billion shekels (including the cost of the mandated day off) of our money – to play chicken.

We have had enough.

Regarding a third election, know that if – God forbid – it should happen, the results will be even worse for both of you. Many Israelis won’t vote in protest, some will vote for smaller parties, and the Arabs, who have gotten a taste of the power that it can give them, will vote for Arab parties in even greater numbers.

Be aware that the regard both of you are held in your country is dropping rapidly every day that this farce continues. History will judge both of you harshly, especially if the nation goes to war unprepared because you wasted your own and everyone else’s time, money, and attention.

You know what you have to do. Stop lying, obfuscating, spinning, dissimulating, and dis-informing. Sit down with the other side and compromise. That means each of you will have to give up the idea that you will get everything, or even most, of what you want.

Tomorrow is Erev Rosh Hashana. The coming week is the perfect time to put aside your egos and your personal considerations and think about what you owe the Jewish people and their state. Perhaps do tshuva [repentance] for some of the ways in which you have not lived up to your obligations to the state and its people.

Think about the thousands that gave their lives in the War of Independence in order to create the state, and of those who died to preserve it. Think about the defenders of the Emek HaBakha on the Golan Heights in 1973, or the battle of Bint Jbeil in 2006. You have it easy. Nobody is asking you to fall on a grenade to save your comrades like Roi Klein at Bint Jbeil. Just do your jobs.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

We Need a Government and We Need it Now

Posted on September 26, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Start with this: Israelis really, really do not want a third round of elections.

The cost is astronomical, and the paralysis is dangerous. The Trump Administration, which has so far been in our corner, is showing frustration with our inability to establish a government that can respond to its much-vaunted “deal of the century,” and is itself under pressure as the American election draws closer. If there is any possibility for us to mitigate the threat in Gaza or to move closer to improving the situation in Judea and Samaria (for example, by annexing Area C), it will have to happen while we have a friendly administration in Washington.

The Iranian threat will not get any less urgent regardless of what the West does. If the sanctions are maintained or tightened, the regime may provoke military action against it that will drag us in; if they receive concessions, these will translate into increased pressure on us from their proxies in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq. Despite Obama’s nuclear deal, Iran is progressing in the direction of nuclear capability. The actions of Western governments today can either speed this process up or slow it down, but it is very unlikely that it can be stopped by non-military means. It’s certain that we will be involved.

There are other issues that are less exciting but also important that are stalled by the present situation. Politicians like elections: they are exciting and put them in the spotlight. Advertising agencies and media elections also like them, for obvious reasons. Most ordinary citizens do not. It just brings home to us how much we are paying these prima donnas to strut around and not do the jobs that we have hired them to do.

We need a government, and we need it now. We cannot afford to wait months for another election, not to mention the additional time for coalition negotiations.

We also need a government that will understand and respond properly to the security challenges facing us. Many Israelis, especially younger ones, are tired of hearing about security all the time. But as Pericles said about politics and Trotsky about war, although you may not be interested in it, it is interested in you.

I think the politicians are smart enough to know that if they continue to stubbornly resist a solution, the people will rise up and burn down the Knesset. What can be done now to put our politicians to work?

There will certainly not be a narrow left-wing government unless Gantz is prepared to take the Arab parties into his coalition, which is very unlikely. There could be a narrow right-wing government if Avigdor Lieberman and the Haredi parties could reach agreement on drafting Haredim, which is slightly less unlikely. But probably there will be a unity government that includes at least the Likud and Gantz’ Blue and White party. Such a government would include a rotating Prime Ministership.

This will require that Gantz give up his condition that he will not sit with Netanyahu when he is under an actual or recommended [by the Attorney General] indictment, or unless the Likud puts someone other than Netanyahu at the head of its list. I am predicting that Gantz will find a way to climb down from his tree.

The next big problem will be deciding who will go first as PM under the rotation, Gantz or Netanyahu. Since a PM can continue in his position even if he is indicted, it is essential for Netanyahu that he go first. My guess is that Gantz will back down, simply because he can afford to do so and Netanyahu can’t.

Therefore, I conclude that when the smoke clears, we will have a unity government including at least Likud and Blue and White, and possibly a few others. Netanyahu and Gantz will take turns being PM, and the cabinet will be enlarged (today they are talking about an absurdly inflated cabinet of 32 ministers, 16 from each side).

Will it function? Probably. The differences between Gantz and Netanyahu are much smaller than they appear during the mud-slinging of an election. It would probably be possible for Netanyahu to bring along Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett to his right, and for Gantz to include the vestigial Labor Party, led by Amir Peretz, to his left. Both sides could bypass Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu, as well as the more extreme parties on the right and the left if they wished.

Personally, I would very much like to see this happen. We need a strong ruling coalition to face the security challenge posed by Iran, as well as to be prepared for a possible American government that will be far less friendly to Israel than Trump’s has been. And a strong centrist government would not be hobbled by commitments made under pressure to the extreme Right or Left.

Can they do it? They’d better. Ordinary Israelis are stocking up on tar and feathers in case they can’t.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

A Unity Government, Without Arabs and Without Haredim

Posted on September 22, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

The study of Torah is good in combination with an occupation, since the toil of both makes sin forgotten. All Torah that is not combined with work will eventually cease and lead to sin. — Rabban Gamliel, son of Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi (Babylonian Talmud, Avot 2:2)

Without Herut and Without Maki – David Ben Gurion*

I like reading about Jewish history and especially the modern history of the State of Israel. One thing I learned about were the almost incomprehensible sacrifices made by some people in order to get here, to create an actual Jewish state in our homeland after millennia of often oppressive exile, and to defend it in essentially a 71-year long war. Maybe longer. The land is soaked in our blood, the blood of Jewish people.

The world is full of Jew-haters. It seems that it has always been so, since the day we left Egypt. When they didn’t hate us, they tolerated us as second-class humans. Sometimes not even as humans.

In most places, they got what they always said they wanted. Much of the world is now Jew-free. Hitler and Stalin eliminated the Jews of Europe, and the Muslim world vomited them out in response to the “insult” of the re-establishment of our state. The Jewish state has become the center of the Jewish universe, in one human lifetime. The conditions that allowed the Jewish people to survive as a people in diaspora are now gone. If the Jewish state does not continue to exist, neither will the Jewish people.

Unfortunately, the State of Israel is in serious danger now. And not just from the Iranian regime and the Palestinian Arabs (although these are serious threats too).

In an article published a few weeks ago demographer Dan Ben-David notes that the academic accomplishments of Israeli children are among the worst in the developed world. Without a well-educated population, we will not be able to maintain our first-world economy, or for that matter, our first-world military. This is in part because of the combination of the lack of a core curriculum including “secular” subjects like mathematics and English in Haredi schools, and an astronomical Haredi birthrate of “7.1 children, in contrast to 4.0 among [non-Haredi] religious Jews, 3.4 among Muslim Arab-Israelis and 2.2 among secular Jews.”

Here is a graph that projects the likely size of these groups in 2065:

It is reassuring to know that Meir Kahane’s prediction that the Arabs would out-reproduce us  will not be fulfilled, but the explosive growth of a Haredi population that is not prepared to contribute to a modern technology and information based economy is unsustainable. In 2014 only 13% of Haredi 12th grade boys took matriculation exams required for admission to universities, compared to 78% of non-Haredi boys (figures for girls are higher, 32% vs. 87%). Although entrance requirements to universities are often waived for them, there is a high dropout rate. In 2014 only 2.4% of Haredi men and 8.3% of Haredi women aged 25-35 held academic degrees, compared to 28% and 45% respectively in the non-Haredi population.

“High-tech” is only a solution for those who can read documentation in English and do mathematics. Gemara may or may not have spiritual value, but it isn’t helpful in microprocessor design, for example.

Although non-Haredim are angered by the refusal of the Haredi parties to agree to allow a reasonable percentage of their youth to do military service (or other national service), the worse problem is that they are not suited for it, or for many other kinds of employment – intellectually, physically, or temperamentally.

This is a politically-caused problem. The laws that would require secular subjects to be taught in any school that receives government funding either don’t exist, have no teeth, or are not enforced. The government supports the yeshivot in which young men study Torah, and liberal welfare benefits make it possible for underemployed families (supported primarily by women, who mostly work in education or child care in their communities for low salaries) to grow unaffected by economic constraints.

The fact that almost every Israeli government since the first has included the Haredi parties, with them often holding the balance of power, means that little is done to change the situation.

I am not anti-religion and I am not anti-Haredi. But the existence of a large class of Jews whose only occupation is study has never before existed in Jewish history. Perhaps there are 100 or even 1000 Torah scholars so important that they should be supported by the state – but tens or hundreds of thousands?

I am aware that the Left uses these facts as ammunition against the Right, which most recently has been depending on support from the Haredi parties to form its coalitions. But nevertheless they are facts, and we have to face the truth that the Right, for which I vote, has been irresponsible, caving in to the exaggerated demands of the Haredim.

It seems to me that war with Iran and/or its proxies is inevitable, and analysts agree that this will be one of Israel’s most difficult wars, both for the IDF and for the home front, which will be exposed to the huge missile arsenals accumulated by Hamas and especially Hezbollah. At this moment, tension is especially high, and it seems clear that we need a strong national unity government capable of both managing the war to come and bringing together the population.

Unfortunately, Benny Gantz is a mediocrity with a mediocre record who should not be Prime Minister, and his associates are worse. Binyamin Netanyahu is under a legal cloud and will probably be indicted. Despite his brilliance, Netanyahu seems to only be able to function as a dictator, one who believes that he is both omnipotent and immortal, and doesn’t need to delegate authority or allow for a successor.

As I write, the anti-Zionist Arab parties are considering recommending Gantz to the President to form the government. They haven’t recommended a Zionist party since 1992, when they recommended Rabin’s Labor Party. If they do, they will have received some significant promises in return. If Gantz were to make a deal with them, it would be something less than treasonous, but still a betrayal.

The best practical solution seems to be a unity government without Arabs (or acquiescence to their demands) and without Haredim, with the Likud led by someone other than Netanyahu. And yes, there would have to be a rotation of the PM job between Likud and Blue and White.

Is such a thing possible? I don’t know. Certainly today it looks unlikely.

But one thing is certain: there will not be another election. Only politicians and ad agencies like elections, and the people have had enough. We need a government, and we need it now – before we are at war.

_____________________________
* A campaign slogan of Ben Gurion’s, meaning that neither Herut – the predecessor of today’s Likud and a party that Ben Gurion wanted to paint as extremist – and Maki, the communist party, could join his coalition.

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli Politics, The Jewish people, War | 2 Comments

Antisemitism: Far Worse than You Thought

Posted on September 19, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

I just finished Bari Weiss’ book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism. I suggest that you read it.

Not because I agree with everything in it, especially her answers to the question implied by its title. Be proud of being Jewish, she says, stay liberal, don’t hide your Jewishness, don’t let the Linda Sarsours push you around, live your life according to Jewish principles (by which she seems to mean the ones you learn about in a Reform synagogue, not the traditional mitzvot) and more. Even “support Israel.” All good things, but – with the exception of an injunction to take measures to protect the security of Jewish institutions – not much that you can use when they are banging at your door in the middle of the night.

I also think that she goes a bit far when she asserts that Donald Trump “trashed – gleefully and shamelessly – the unwritten rules of our society that have kept American Jews and, therefore, America safe.” His legacy is “a culture demolished, smashed, twisted beyond recognition,” according to Weiss.

No. A great deal has gone wrong in America in the last few decades, but there are plenty of villains to go around, including Trump’s recent predecessors and the over-the-top insanity of the Left’s reaction to Trump. If the culture is smashed, Trump is one of the fragments, not the one who smashed it.

And although Weiss’ historical chapters, including her analysis of the three directions from which Jews are being bombarded today – the Right, the Left, and “Radical Islam” (I think her editor stuck in the word “radical”)  – are well written and very informative, they are also not why I am recommending the book.

I want people to read this book because there is no way you can do so and still maintain that there is no runaway antisemitism problem in North America. There is no way you can maintain that Jews in the last remaining safe diaspora stronghold will continue to be safe, and not just from a few heavily armed neo-Nazi wackos. If she does one thing exceptionally well in this book, it is to accurately convey the extent of the phenomenon. The neo-Nazis, the intersectional leftists smugly categorizing Jews as exploiters with no rights, the Farrakhanists on New York subways, the imams preaching about killing Jews – there are more of them every day.

Weiss talks a lot about Europe, where everyday life for Jews is rapidly becoming more difficult and dangerous, mostly because of the influx of Muslim migrants from places where, as she points out, Jew-hatred is normative. In other words, it’s part of almost everybody’s repertoire of common knowledge. Is the Pope Catholic? Does the bear defecate in the woods? Are the Jews a subhuman race descended from apes and pigs? Ask anyone in Iraq. In Somalia, when you stub your toe you curse the Jews. Muslim migrants from places like that do not leave their antisemitism at the airport along with any prohibited invasive plants.

Should French Jews proudly wear their kipot? She doesn’t know if, in their place, she would. But Europe provides a clue as to why her solutions won’t work in the US. France has the third largest population of Jews in the world (about half a million), after Israel and the US. But they comprise only about 0.7% of the French population. If the non-Jewish population and the government can’t protect them, then it doesn’t matter how proud they are of their Jewishness, how liberal they are, or how “out” they are about being Jewish. And many French Jews have already decided to either move to “safe” neighborhoods in large cities – you could call them ghettos – or to abandon careers or sell businesses and leave the country.

In the UK, there are fewer than 300,000 Jews, about 0.44% of the population. Weiss notes that a recent poll had some 40% of British Jews saying they would “seriously consider emigrating” if the antisemitic – there’s no arguing this point – Jeremy Corbyn were to become Prime Minister. They, too, are making the same calculation.

The US and Canada have larger percentages of Jews – 1.8% and 1.1% respectively. But that is still minuscule in comparison to the non-Jewish majority. If they lose the support of that majority, then their position becomes untenable. And as Corbyn has shown, shockingly, it is even possible for a major political party in a democratic country to take a turn toward antisemitism.

Weiss’ point of view is that of a liberal Jew living in the US, and why she wants to “fight anti-Semitism” is to try to bring back the golden age of American Jewry, which she sees as slipping away. She would like to reverse some of the trends, but – revealingly – she wants to do it by changing the Jews. As Kenneth Levin has pointed out in his book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, that can’t work. It isn’t up to the Jews. Antisemitism is irrational and the antisemites will hate them regardless of how they behave. And when you are less than 2% of the population (and getting smaller), you don’t have the leverage to move the country, despite what antisemites may believe about Jewish power.

I would like to look at the problem from a broader perspective: what do we need to do to preserve the Jewish people in the face of its enemies?

The first thing I notice is that much of the diaspora is already lost. There are almost no Jews left anywhere in the Muslim world, and Hitler and Stalin put an end to the Jews of the former Russian Empire and Central Europe. There is no future for Jews in France. The UK is on the cusp of a similar fate, dependent on the political whim of the 99.56% of the population that is not Jewish. Even if Corbyn is not elected, conditions for Jews in the UK are almost certain to be worse in the future than they are now.

That leaves the US and Canada. Perhaps, as Weiss suggests, if the Jews could be more unified they could resist antisemitic trends and personalities better. Perhaps; although it seems to me that the Jewish communities are just as polarized as the society as a whole. If – just for example – the left wing of the Democratic party in the US were to “Corbynize” the party, there would be little that the tiny minority of Jews could do.

Weiss wants to fight antisemitism by being honest, liberal, proud, and enlightened. All those qualities are useless against enemies that are precisely the opposite in all respects, and that is the case with antisemites. There is only one way to deter your enemies, and that is to be more powerful than them – and to demonstrate this whenever the occasion arises.

This can’t happen within a country where Jews are a tiny minority, but it may be possible on the world stage. Israel, as Weiss notes, has a powerful army and nuclear weapons. It also has less visible assets, like a very high level of technical competence. Israel is the heart and soul of the Jewish people, and the way to preserve the people and its culture, is for Israel to survive and thrive. Insofar as it does, it can be a place of refuge for the inhabitants of those diaspora communities that may not.

I don’t think that Weiss has the answers for North American Jews. But maybe her description of exactly how bad the situation is, and how it is likely to get worse, will impel some of them to think seriously about aliyah.

Posted in American Jews, American politics, American society | Comments Off on Antisemitism: Far Worse than You Thought