West will share responsibility for devastation of south Lebanon

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Recently we’ve been hearing — both from Hezbollah and Israel — about the massive installations the terrorist group has been building just across the Lebanese border with Israel, and what will happen when war breaks out.

Omri Ceren of The Israel Project explains:

They’ve taken their arsenal – 100,000+ rockets including Burkan rockets with half-ton warheads, ballistic missiles including Scud-Ds that can hit all of Israel, supersonic advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, anti-aircraft assets, drones and mini drones, tunnels, etc. – and embedded it across hundreds of villages and probably thousands of homes. …

The Israelis can’t afford a war of attrition with Hezbollah. The Iran-backed terror group has the ability to saturation bomb Israeli civilians with 1,500 projectiles a day, every day, for over two months. They will try to bring down Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers with ballistic missiles. They will try to fly suicide drones into Israel’s nuclear reactor. They will try to detonate Israel’s off-shore energy infrastructure. They will try to destroy Israeli military and civilian runways. And – mainly but not exclusively through their tunnels – they will try to overrun Israeli towns and drag away women and children as hostages. Israeli casualties would range in the thousands to tens of thousands.

And so the Israelis will have to mobilize massive force to shorten the duration of a future war. One of the things they’ll do is immediately is move to eliminate as much of Hezbollah’s vast arsenal as possible. Hezbollah is counting on the resulting deaths of their human shields – and they’ve guaranteed to that the body count will be significant – to turn Israel into an international pariah.

Hezbollah has adopted the most extreme form of the human shield strategy pioneered by Hamas in Gaza. The IDF will be forced to choose between killing thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Lebanese civilians and seeing its own country laid waste.

Until recently, a strategy like Hezbollah’s would have been considered ludicrous. When the RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF devastated Germany toward the end of WWII, it wasn’t even a question of collateral damage — civilians were a large part of the target. Sir Charles Portal of the RAF issued a directive in 1943 to combined British and US air forces that

Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.

But times have changed. Although I do not think that the legalities involved have changed much since then, such “morale bombing” would be considered morally indefensible by most people today. So we can expect that when the next war does start, and when Israel bombs Hezbollah installations in South Lebanon with an unavoidably great loss of civilian life, there will be outcries against Israel for its brutality. There are a few things we should keep in mind:

First, the IDF response to a Hezbollah rocket attack — and it will be a response, not a preemptive attack — will have as its objective the neutralization of rocket launchers, attack tunnels, and other military targets. Unlike the allied air raids over Germany and Japan, civilian casualties will be entirely collateral damage, not part of the objective.

This means that the requirement of proportionality found in the international law of war, that the use of force that could cause collateral damage be limited to what is necessary to achieve a military objective, will be met as long as the IDF attacks military targets rather than bombing indiscriminately, doesn’t use WMD, etc.

But even if it’s legal, isn’t it wrong to kill innocent civilians, women and children who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

There is certainly a moral evil here, but even though the immediate cause of the catastrophe will be the IDF, what Aristotle called the “final cause” — the ‘for what’ that an event occurs — is Hezbollah’s intention to deter Israel from defending herself.  The civilians who will be hurt are deliberately intermingled with military targets, just in order to act as human shields.

In a 2013 article, Ron Ben-Yishai described one way Hezbollah implemented its strategy after its 2006 war with Israel:

…the Shiite terror group launched a major social/real-estate project that bolstered its political standing: It purchased lands on the outskirts of the villages, built homes on these lands and offered them to poor Shiite families at bargain prices (to rent or buy), one the condition that at least one rocket launcher would be placed in one of the house’s rooms or in the basement, along with a number of rockets, which will be fired at predetermined targets in Israel when the order is given.

There can be no doubt of Hezbollah’s intentions, and thus no doubt of its responsibility if these families suffer. Israel’s reaction, on the other hand, is morally justified as an application of the principle of self-defense. That is, because of their action we are forced to choose between causing massive civilian casualties or suicide.

The use of human shields is not only morally reprehensible, it is illegal according to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and other statutes of international law. Of course, the asymmetric warfare strategies used by terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, etc. deliberately contravene international law, which gives them an advantage over nations like Israel that are bound by these principles.

This leads to the absurd consequence that the more a nation tries to behave morally and legally, the more of its advantage it gives up. Further, the more technologically advanced a nation is, the more it is expected to use its technology to protect the enemy population. Quite a change from the past, when military technology was only used to kill and terrorize.

It has also created a de facto alliance between the barbarians of Hezbollah and Hamas and sophisticated, supposedly morally conscious Western leaders.

Israel has been fighting an information war in parallel with its military conflicts. Its enemies in this non-violent but ultimately deadly struggle include not only the Arabs and Iranians, but Europe, the UN and the Obama Administration (usually through intermediates such as “human rights” NGOs). Their objective has been to promulgate the idea that the IDF deliberately targets civilians, acts disproportionately and with unnecessary brutality.

Once implanted, this false perception can be rolled out at the time of military conflict and deployed in international fora and by governments (e.g., the arms embargo applied by the US during last year’s Gaza conflict) to justify actions that limit Israel’s ability to defend herself. The EU and Mr. Obama will not launch any rockets against Israel, but they will do what they can to force her to absorb those fired by the terrorists.

It is a sign of Western moral weakness and reality inversion that instead of taking the difficult path of preventing the Hezbollah buildup after 2006, as promised, it joined the infowar against Israel. In a real sense, the West will share responsibility with the terrorists for the devastation of southern Lebanon that is sure to come.

Israel will take the actions it must to survive, despite the hypocritical cries that will be heard from those that have been building the case for the terrorists all along. And, to paraphrase Naftali Bennett, there will be no reason to apologize.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Information war, Terrorism, US-Israel Relations, War | Comments Off on West will share responsibility for devastation of south Lebanon

For Obama, it’s a moral crusade

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Barack Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg

Barack Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg

What to make of the bizarre interview that Barack Obama gave to Jeffrey Goldberg recently, and his talk at a DC synagogue?

My wife thinks that I’m wasting my time. “Why do you take anything he says seriously?” she asks. And a little voice inside me, the voice of a respected teacher from the past, says: never pay attention to what someone says; look at what he does.

But even if his public statements are no more than palliatives designed to calm and distract us while he prepares to plunge the knife into our national back (that he claims to protect), there may be important clues in them to his worldview and the actions he is likely to take in the future.

His comment on the antisemitic nature of the Iranian regime is interesting because it displays an appalling ignorance of recent history:

Obama: Well the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations. You know, if you look at the history of anti-Semitism, Jeff, there were a whole lot of European leaders—and there were deep strains of anti-Semitism in this country—

Goldberg: And they make irrational decisions—

Obama: They may make irrational decisions with respect to discrimination, with respect to trying to use anti-Semitic rhetoric as an organizing tool. At the margins, where the costs are low, they may pursue policies based on hatred as opposed to self-interest. But the costs here are not low, and what we’ve been very clear [about] to the Iranian regime over the past six years is that we will continue to ratchet up the costs, not simply for their anti-Semitism, but also for whatever expansionist ambitions they may have.

Jew-hatred doesn’t cause leaders to make irrational decisions? Ask the ghosts of Hitler or Stalin! If there ever was a paradigm case of an irrational ideology that has caused irrational, nationally self-destructive actions, antisemitism is it.

Bret Stephens points out in the WSJ today that as a matter of fact Iran has been behaving irrationally ($) because of Jew-hatred since 1979:

Iran has no border, and no territorial dispute, with Israel. The two countries have a common enemy in Islamic State and other radical Sunni groups. Historically and religiously, Jews have always felt a special debt to Persia. Tehran and Jerusalem were de facto allies until 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and 100,000 Jews still lived in Iran. Today, no more than 10,000 Jews are left.

So on the basis of what self-interest does Iran arm and subsidize Hamas, probably devoting more than $1 billion of (scarce) dollars to the effort? What’s the economic rationale for hosting conferences of Holocaust deniers in Tehran, thereby gratuitously damaging ties to otherwise eager economic partners such as Germany and France? What was the political logic to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s calls to wipe Israel off the map, which made it so much easier for the U.S. and Europe to impose sanctions? How does the regime shore up its domestic legitimacy by preaching a state ideology that makes the country a global pariah?

Obama claims that American policy has imposed a “cost” on Iran for its leaders’ anti-Jewish actions. This is emphatically not the case: when PM Netanyahu suggested a linkage between the nuclear deal with Iran and its threats to destroy Israel, US officials rejected the idea.

He makes another untrue and self-serving statement in a discussion of whether sanctions relief — and the billions of dollars in “signing bonus” — that Iran will get will be used to support terrorism, in particular to build up Hizballah’s offensive rocket system:

…the issue though with respect to rockets in south Lebanon is not whether [Iran has] enough money to do so. They’ve shown a commitment to doing that even when their economy is in the tank. The issue there is: Are we able to interdict those shipments more effectively than we do right now? And that’s the kind of thing that we have to continue to partner with Israel and other countries to stop.

The fact that the regime was prepared to sacrifice the well-being of its population in order to prepare for war against Israel means that it would be even more likely to build up Hizballah if more money were available. But more important, when has the US ever done anything to “interdict” Iranian shipments of weapons to Hizballah? Indeed, when Israel took action to do so by bombing depots in Syria, administration officials leaked information about those operations in order to embarrass Israel and entangle it with Syria!

Obama continues,

…there has been a very concerted effort on the part of some political forces to equate being pro-Israel, and hence being supportive of the Jewish people, with a rubber stamp on a particular set of policies coming out of the Israeli government. So if you are questioning settlement policy, that indicates you’re anti-Israeli, or that indicates you’re anti-Jewish. If you express compassion or empathy towards Palestinian youth, who are dealing with checkpoints or restrictions on their ability to travel, then you are suspect in terms of your support of Israel. If you are willing to get into public disagreements with the Israeli government, then the notion is that you are being anti-Israel, and by extension, anti-Jewish. I completely reject that.

I’ve heard this before, the dishonest straw man argument. Who exactly are “some political forces” that would insist on “a rubber stamp?” Who says that his empathy for “Palestinian youth” make him anti-Israeli? Who says that his “public disagreements” with the government do?

Some of the reasons I and others find Obama anti-Israel are these:

1. His stubborn attempts to force Israel into a suicidal agreement with the Palestinians.

2. His acceptance (regardless of his words) of a nuclear-armed Iran, and his efforts to stop Israel from acting against it.

3. His open contempt for our Prime Minister.

4. His taking the Turkish president’s side in the Mavi Marmara affair, and forcing PM Netanyahu to apologize to the Turks.

5. His acceptance of Hamas claims that the IDF acted ‘disproportionally’ in Gaza (as shown by his demand for an immediate cease-fire and imposition of an arms embargo during the recent war).

6. The aforementioned leaks about Israeli actions in Syria and elsewhere.

7. His acceptance of the anti-Israel narrative that Israel’s right to exist rests on the Holocaust and that it must be balanced against the rights of the ‘deserving’ Palestinians (as expressed in his 2009 Cairo speech).

8. His attempts to interfere in Israeli politics, including trying to defeat Netanyahu at the polls. It’s ironic that American money was used to help get out the presumably anti-Netanyahu Arab vote — and then Obama bitterly criticized Netanyahu for telling his supporters that they should get out and vote because the Arabs were!

9. The double standard he displays: compare his condemnation of the PM for his election-day remark with his lack of response to the daily barrage of Israel-hatred and veneration of terrorists coming from the official Palestinian media. Or look at his expressed concern for Palestinians suffering the indignities of checkpoints against his failure to mention the almost daily Jewish victims of Palestinian terrorism.

I could go on, but this should be enough to show that the belief that Obama is anti-Israel is substantive, not simply a political reflex as he suggests.

Obama’s words expose the roots of his anti-Israel attitude, even though they are intended to illustrate his reasons for supporting Israel:

I said in a previous interview and I meant it: I think it would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States, and a moral failing for America, and a moral failing for the world, if we did not protect Israel and stand up for its right to exist, because that would negate not just the history of the 20th century, it would negate the history of the past millennium. And it would violate what we have learned, what humanity should have learned, over that past millennium, which is that when you show intolerance and when you are persecuting minorities and when you are objectifying them and making them the Other, you are destroying something in yourself, and the world goes into a tailspin.

And so, to me, being pro-Israel and pro-Jewish is part and parcel with the values that I’ve been fighting for since I was politically conscious and started getting involved in politics. There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law. These things are indivisible in my mind. But what is also true, by extension, is that I have to show that same kind of regard to other peoples. And I think it is true to Israel’s traditions and its values—its founding principles—that it has to care about those Palestinian kids.

Obama’s language (“objectifying them and making them the Other”) is reminiscent of Edward Said. Said, who taught at Columbia while Obama was a student there, saw the ‘objectification’ of third-world peoples by the West as a sin which rendered it morally despicable, and he viewed Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian Arabs as emblematic of that sin. Obama clearly has a vision like Said’s, in which the root cause of the Middle East’s problems is Western colonialism and imperialism.

While Obama says that he supports Israel because not to do so would be to favor “discrimination and persecution,” these principles also allow for the view that Israel, itself, is guilty of such crimes, something that Said (a member of the Palestinian National Council and an admirer of Arafat) strongly believed. And in the second paragraph I quoted, Obama makes it clear that he he does see Israel as persecuting “Palestinian kids.”

The implication is that he wants to support Israel, but that it must be true to its “founding principles,” which the government and especially the Prime Minister, he thinks, have lost sight of. If these moral principles are reasons to be pro-Israel, for Obama they are also reasons to be anti-Israel.

The comparison to the American civil rights movement is typical Obama, and shows that he understands neither the Zionist struggle for self-determination nor the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the land of Israel. But it does explain his continued obsession with Netanyahu’s remark about Arabs voting, which he seems to see as equivalent to opposing the Arabs’ right to vote rather than an attempt to energize his own voters:

…when, going into an election, Prime Minister Netanyahu said a Palestinian state would not happen under his watch, or there [was] discussion in which it appeared that Arab-Israeli citizens were somehow portrayed as an invading force that might vote, and that this should be guarded against—this is contrary to the very language of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which explicitly states that all people regardless of race or religion are full participants in the democracy. When something like that happens, that has foreign-policy consequences, and precisely because we’re so close to Israel, for us to simply stand there and say nothing would have meant that this office, the Oval Office, lost credibility when it came to speaking out on these issues.

Either the President is misinterpreting what Netanyahu said because of the strength of the civil rights analogy for him, or he is deliberately lying in order to find a reason to impeach our Prime Minister with the most terrible character defect of the present era, the stain of racism.

Obama does not actually love Israel. Possibly he loves some kind of idealized version of Israel, in which Israelis behave like good Christians, turning the other cheek at terrorism and “taking risks” to the point of sainthood. Of course, such an Israel wouldn’t last two weeks in this Middle East.

What he does seem to believe is that the Palestinian Arabs, like American blacks, are denied civil rights. He believes that this is due to the racism of the Israeli government and Prime Minister; that this is a special case of Western colonialism a la Edward Said; and that Barack Obama ought to use his power to right this ‘wrong’.

For Obama, like Said, the Palestinian Cause is a moral crusade.

Posted in US-Israel Relations | Comments Off on For Obama, it’s a moral crusade

Political perversity in Israel and the US

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Why are elites in Israel and the US helping their deadly enemies?

The phenomenon of Israel-hating Jews has been discussed a great deal, and there are some theories that go a long way toward explaining the prominence, even leadership, of Jews in BDS and other anti-Israel movements. The extremism of the Left in Israel, particularly among academics, is a case study in epidemic insanity.

Israel is a small country, and it has been fighting a continuous war in the military, diplomatic and information arenas since its inception. It isn’t helped by the activities of anti-State Jews, but they have been increasingly marginalized politically since the debacle of Oslo.

I have always liked Kenneth Levin’s “Oslo Syndrome” explanation for the perverse behavior of some Jews, a special case of the Stockholm Syndrome in which  a victim finds himself identifying with and supporting his victimizer in the subconscious belief that it will keep him from harm. Oppressed by the endemic Jew-hatred of their Diaspora hosts, Jews begin to accept their anti-Jewish narratives themselves and try to mitigate the hatred by becoming ‘better’ (i.e., less Jewish or Zionist) and making concessions to their enemies. It rarely works.

The Christian majority in the US does not have an ‘Oslo Syndrome’. It never suffered the kind of persecution that Jews in Europe and Muslim countries in the Mideast and North Africa did — and yet, the plague of political correctness that includes the toleration of blatant subversion of Western ideals, and even the acceptance of calls to destroy the nation, has taken root in America just as deeply as in Europe and Britain.

One reason is that the culture of an organization — a corporation, a motorcycle gang or a nation — comes from the top.

Unlike Israel, the US and Europe haven’t marginalized their anti-Western extremists. Sometimes they hold the reins of power. The US elected a President — twice — who rejects the idea that the world should be led by the developed West, in particular the US.

His reaction to 9/11 is a case in point. Although we may be too close to see it, Sept. 11, 2001 was a historical inflection point of great significance.

George Bush responded in the traditional way, declaring war on those he perceived as the perpetrators. But Obama saw it differently, agreeing with Osama Bin Laden that the attack was a consequence of Western colonialism in the Middle East (especially support for Israel). While he still believed that those who were directly responsible and should be punished, he took the position that we ourselves are indirectly responsible, guilty of oppressing Muslims and meddling in their affairs. Like Charlie Hebdo or Pamela Geller, we brought it on ourselves.

It’s certainly true that the West has exploited the less-developed world, and that wealth has been extracted — stolen, even — from it by amoral corporations. But the question is, should we therefore reject the principle that the world is better off under the enlightened (if sometimes coercive) leadership of the more developed cultures, and hand control to the ones that practice female genital mutilation, murder vaccinators, hang gays, and dream of genocide? The ruling Western culture might have its flaws, but there are far worse alternatives.

Unfortunately, it seems that the President of the US doesn’t agree.

Obama is a mystery that I don’t want to try to unravel today, but his attitude meshes with other things that are happening in the larger society. One of them is simple fear. There is nothing like a terrorist attack to make people think twice about doing or saying anything that might anger those prone to terrorism. Associated with the fear is the Stockholm Syndrome I mentioned before. Terror attacks are specifically intended to induce this syndrome.

There is also the idea, which I think is derived from Christian doctrine, that a ‘good’ person loves all humanity, even enemies. Conflict is seen as something that should be handled by making a greater effort to understand the other side and to help him to understand your own feelings. As you can imagine, negotiations with an enemy who does not share this mindset can easily be exploited.

All this combined with the normal human expectation that the near future will resemble the recent past creates a very dangerous situation. We assume that because the West is massively more powerful than the Islamic State or Iran, that we could crush them like a bug if they ever really challenged our supremacy. But don’t forget the dictum that civilization involves a tradeoff of many small inconveniences for a few major catastrophes. The more technologically advanced an entity is, the more vulnerable it is to disruption. Terrorism can be a weapon of mass destruction.

In other words, the West could lose.

Israel is smaller than the US or Europe, but although the fact is obscured by the noise generated by the Left, Israel may be more unified and focused on the challenges it faces (this will be hard to believe for media-consuming Israelis, but I think it’s true).

If the US falls, then the time of Western ascendance is over. The civilized world can’t afford the luxury of an anti-Western president in Washington.

Posted in American politics, Israeli Politics, Jew Hatred | Comments Off on Political perversity in Israel and the US

How to meet ‘Palestinians’

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Palestinian social media cartoon encouraging vehicular homicide Today there was yet another case of attempted murder by car. Luckily, several policewomen who were struck were only lightly injured -- and when the driver tried to back over them, he was shot dead.

Palestinian social media cartoon encouraging vehicular homicide. Today there was yet another case of attempted murder by car. Luckily, several policewomen who were struck were only lightly injured — and when the driver tried to back over them, he was shot dead.

Peter Beinart complains that Republican presidential hopeful Scott Walker visited Israel and didn’t meet any ‘Palestinians’:

The trips Jewish groups organize for American politicians include more Christian holy sights than the ones they organize for their own members. But what they have in common is that Palestinians are talked about, yet rarely spoken to. Which means that politicians like Scott Walker return to the United States thinking they know something about Palestinians when, in important ways, they know less than when they left.

Maybe I can help him learn more. What have ‘Palestinians’ been up to lately? Here is some data (slightly abridged) from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center:

***

During the past year there has been an increase in the number of vehicular attacks carried out in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, and they have become a frequent modus operandi of the campaign the PA and Fatah call the “popular resistance.” The campaign takes many forms, including the throwing of Molotov cocktails, rocks and stones, and stabbing and vehicular attacks. It enjoys the support of the PA and Fatah (See below).

Since the beginning of 2015 there have been six vehicular attacks and/or attempted vehicular attacks; one Israeli civilian was killed and ten injured, eight of members of the Israeli security forces. Three attacks took place in Jerusalem and three in Judea and Samaria. The number of vehicular attacks began rising in the second half of 2014; during the year there were twelve vehicular attacks, half of them in Jerusalem (compared with two such attacks in 2013).

Vehicular Attacks Carried Out and Attempted, 2014 – 2015

Vehicular attacks are encouraged and supported by Fatah. Senior PA figures also regard them as legitimate attacks within the so-called “popular resistance.” They do not condemn the attacks, and give the perpetrators moral and political support. They consistently accuse Israel of responsibility for the situation and blame it for “escalation.” Hamas and the other terrorist organizations also glorify the vehicular attacks and their perpetrators, and call for more anti-Israeli terrorism. They urge the so-called “popular resistance” be turned into a military campaign, the so-called “third intifada.” The violence within the “popular resistance” continues despite the ongoing preventive activities taken by the PA’s security forces and its security coordination with Israel.

***

In other words, for our peace partner pals, murder by car (like murder by firebomb, murder by stoning and even murder by knife) doesn’t count as terrorism. It is “popular resistance,” which is apparently unobjectionable.

So the advice I have for Gov. Walker is this: be very careful crossing the street in Jerusalem, unless you really want to meet some ‘Palestinians’.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | Comments Off on How to meet ‘Palestinians’

Jerusalem Day: exercise sovereignty or lose it

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Jerusalem Day march at the Damascus Gate to the Old City

Jerusalem Day march at the Damascus Gate to the Old City

Yesterday was Jerusalem Day. One of the events was a march through the city to the Western Wall, including the Muslim quarter of the Old City. Most of the participants are teenagers from nationalist-religious schools. There have been complaints from Arab residents that some of the marchers shout anti-Arab slogans, and that they have to close their shops and stay inside; and of course some of the Arabs throw stones and other objects at the marchers. There are also (how could there not be) left-wing Israelis demonstrating against the march.

This year there were several violent incidents. Several policemen were lightly injured. Left-wing organizations had filed a petition to the High Court of Justice to stop the march, but the court decided that there was not enough evidence that there would be ‘racist incitement’ to justify stopping the march.

Clearly it is an inconvenience to the Arab residents, and it requires the presence of several thousand policemen to prevent violence (to be honest, to keep the Arabs from killing the participants). And there will always be at least one idiot who yells “death to Arabs,” which is embarrassing. So why do it?

Because we can’t afford not to.

When Israel conquered the Old City in 1967, the Arabs expected that they would be kicked out. After all, that is what they did to the Jews in eastern Jerusalem in 1948. That is what a victorious people in a national conflict over possession of land have always done, if they didn’t kill or enslave the population. But that is not what Israel did. When Israeli law was extended to eastern Jerusalem in 1967, Arab residents were offered Israeli citizenship. Most refused and became permanent residents, with the right to vote in municipal elections, health and social security benefits, etc.

The most important piece of real estate in eastern Jerusalem is, of course, the Temple Mount — the holiest place in Judaism, and the site of the al Aqsa mosque. When the IDF took control of the Temple Mount, IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren wanted to build a synagogue there (he did not, as he is often accused, want to destroy the mosques and rebuild the Temple). But Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had other ideas: he prohibited Jews from praying on the Mount, and placed its administration in the hands of the Jordanian waqf.

Dayan thought his action would reduce friction with the Arabs, and make it less likely for the conflict to become a religious one. Unfortunately, he didn’t understand Arabs very well.

The Arabs were doubtless confused, but they drew the appropriate conclusions. If the Jews allowed them to stay in eastern Jerusalem, gave them all the privileges of Israelis, and were even willing to compromise control of their own holiest site, there could only be one reason: they are too weak to enforce their will. Thus were the seeds planted for the current situation, which includes absurdities like Israeli police officers arresting Jews who are seen to move their lips when visiting the Mount, and shrieking Arab women confronting Jews who want to just stand there.

In the larger arena, the granting of full rights to the Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem (and the thousands of Arabs from Judea/Samaria who migrated there) had a similar effect, strengthening their ‘Palestinian’ identity rather than giving them an Israeli one.

Today the conflict is very much a religious one, with the cry ‘al Aqsa is in danger’ used to mobilize Muslims throughout the world, and particularly in Jerusalem. And sensing the weakness of Israel’s commitment to a unified Jerusalem (despite official pronouncements) the PLO has made its division a priority among their demands. On the ground, Arab rock-throwers have made parts of Jerusalem no-go zones for Jewish drivers, and Arab vandals and hoodlums are desecrating graves in the historic Mount of Olives cemetery and denying access to it for Jews.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Facts on the ground override promises on paper. Use it or lose it. The Arabs understand these things, but many westernized, liberal Jews do not. If Jews don’t live in eastern Jerusalem, if they don’t walk through the Old City, if they don’t pray on, or even visit, the Temple Mount — and especially if they don’t do these things because of fear of Arab violence — then how does it differ from the situation prior to 1967?

Sovereignty is like free speech. If you don’t exercise it regularly, after a while you find that you don’t have it anymore. This is an important lesson not just for Israelis, but for Europeans and even Americans. Your sovereignty is under attack. Don’t let it leak away a bit at a time.

Jewish soldiers, that is to say, ordinary Israeli Jews with families waiting for them at home, fought and died for sovereignty over Jerusalem in 1967. The students that walked through the Old City yesterday did their part, too.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Politics, Israeli Society | 1 Comment

Foreign money again; the slander against Ayelet Shaked

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
One of the milder examples of the propaganda attacking Ayelet Shaked.

One of the milder examples of the propaganda attacking Ayelet Shaked.

Yesterday’s post about foreign money financing anti-state activities here in Israel was also posted on the Elder of Ziyon blog, where it attracted a few comments. To my surprise (OK, not so much), several of them were opposed to the idea of limiting donations from foreign sources to NGOs in Israel. “Putin would be proud of this,” said one.

Putin aside, keep in mind that neither Ayelet Shaked nor I advocates limiting the free speech of Israelis. Although there is a part of me that would enjoy seeing the leaders of Breaking the Silence (for example) imprisoned for treason, I understand that free speech is a fundamental pillar of democracy — you can’t have the latter without the former.

But look at what is happening here: our enemies — yes, I have to place the EU in that category — are paying individuals and groups in Israel to act against the policies of the democratically elected government. If this isn’t treason, it is something like it.

Yes, I know that the saintly Israelis who are involved in this enterprise would claim that they are doing it for moral reasons, not for the money. In that case, though, they should be prepared to finance their activities themselves, or to accept donations only from other Israelis.

Don’t limit the speech — but cut off the foreign money.

***

I also want to add a few words about Ayelet Shaked, whom I mentioned yesterday. The vicious slander that accuses her of being a racist who calls for “indiscriminate killing of Palestinians” at best and genocide at worst is being repeated over and over in the international and Israeli media. You can read an accurate translation of the original Facebook post that prompted this attack, which I quoted here, and make up your own mind.

Shaked also wants to tilt the balance of power between the Knesset and the Supreme Court more towards the Knesset. This has triggered hysteria on the part of her opponents (you can read a very good, non-hysterical, discussion of the issue here).

The Left fears Shaked precisely because she is not the ranting ideologue that they present her as, but someone who does her homework and argues rationally, albeit aggressively. As my wife said, “sometimes it’s beneficial that women have to be twice as good as men to get anywhere — because then they are twice as good.”

Shabbat shalom!

Posted in Israeli Politics | 2 Comments

Stop foreign subversion of the Jewish state!

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Are Israelis paranoid? Much of the world is out to get us, and I’m not talking about the Arabs.

In his travels about Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Tuvia Tenenbom (Catch the Jew) tells of encountering massive European-funded projects, costing millions of Euros. They arrange propaganda tours (including one to Yad Vashem that is all about how Israelis are the new Nazis), pay for illegal Arab construction in Judea/Samaria,  fund lawfare against the state and IDF personnel, support dozens of NGOs that work overtime generating material to demonize Israel, interfere with IDF soldiers and try to provoke violence, bring international volunteers to act as human shields in violent protests against the security fence, encourage boycotts and divestment, and — above all — support those Jewish left-wing extremists that are so important to the overall objective: to take down the Jewish state of Israel.

Ah yes, those Jewish left-wing extremists. Tenenbom interviews many of them, some well known like Gideon Levy and Arik Ascherman, and others that you never heard of, like tour guide Itamar Shapira, whose job is to take Europeans to see how Jews have ‘stolen Palestinian land’ and are the new Nazis. Tenenbom sometimes calls them ‘self-haters’ and sometimes ‘narcissists’, but I think the second description is better. These are people whose pathological obsession — there’s no better description — is to present themselves as great moral beings, saints as it were, by virtue of their unique ability to perceive the inherent evil of the Jewish state in which they live and take action against it.

Tenenbom interviews numerous Arabs, including Hanan Ashrawi, Jibril Rajoub, taxi drivers, university students and professors. All of them appear secure in their belief in the rightness of the ‘Palestinian cause’ (getting rid of the Jews) and in its ultimate success. In fact, he finds them much more appealing in their straightforwardness — for example, for the way they make up outlandish stories to support their position, and are completely unfazed when they are shown to be false — than the anti-Zionist Jews, who are self-absorbed, hypocritical, angry, bitter and consumed with hatred.

He also talks to Haredim, members of the Knesset, whores, journalists, soldiers, etc. But the one theme that recurs — in addition to how annoying the Israeli left-wing intellectuals are — is the presence of foreign money put to destructive purposes.

The line between criticism of Israel and Jew-hatred is a fine one which has long since been crossed by the anti-Israel establishment. Tenenbom’s book is anecdotal, but there is hard evidence, collected by the NGO Monitor organization, that the anti-Zionist project of the European Union, its member countries, church groups, the American New Israel Fund and other foreign sources have done much to ignite and fuel the wave of Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred that is sweeping the West today. When European football fans chant “Jews to the gas,” behavior that their governments officially deplore, they are only expressing the logical outcome of the demonization that these governments are paying for.

Recently, it was revealed that the group Breaking the Silence, which travels the world telling exaggerated, decontextualized, undocumented and plain made-up stories about IDF behavior has actually contracted to provide such ‘testimonies’ in return for payments from European government funded charities! BTS reports are used as ‘evidence’ for UN condemnations of Israel, to demonize her and to provide justifications for actions to limit her ability to defend herself.

The degree of irresponsibility shown by the governments — or maybe the out-and-out evil motive behind their project — is shocking. While the EU ambassador to Israel tells Tenenbom about solving conflicts and improving the lives of all the residents of the Middle East, Jews and Muslims alike, the concrete actions that Europeans and Americans are buying with their taxes and donations, if successful, will be the violent destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab Muslim entity.

Although we can do little to prevent the dissemination of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda in the West, in Israel we still have the ability to rein in the pervasive anti-state groups operating here.

Naturally, the Left in Israel, many of whom depend on foreign money for their livelihoods, oppose any such action as “anti-democratic” and claim that it restricts free speech. But I fail to see how ‘democracy’ extends to inviting hostile foreign elements to operate in our country and paying home-grown traitors to subvert it.

Israel’s new Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, has made the control of foreign money one of her highest priorities. This is probably one of the reasons that she has been viciously attacked with fabricated accusations of racism and support for genocide (as well as crude sexist insults). As a result of death threats, it has been necessary to provide her with bodyguards. Even her sworn political enemy, Zahava Galon of the left-wing Meretz party, found it appropriate to defend Shaked from the slime being thrown at her.

There have been attempts to put limits on foreign-financing for left-wing NGOs before, which have been bitterly opposed (and derailed) by the Left. In 2011, a bill was passed that required NGOs in Israel to report foreign donations, but enforcement has been spotty.

I’m hopeful that the new government will strongly support a law to control this practice, and to limit access of foreign activists to the country. What other country in the world would permit this?

We don’t have to. Let’s stop the flow of money and kick out foreign saboteurs.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

The Washington Post sinks to Mondoweiss level (updated)

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Character assassin Ishaan Tharoor.

Character assassin Ishaan Tharoor.

The usual suspects have been pulling out all of the stops to attack Israel’s new Justice Minister, MK Ayelet Shaked. Shaked has been called a racist, accused of inciting genocide, even compared to Hitler. Until recently, this kind of verbal excrement has been confined to marginal outlets like that running sewer of Jew-hatred, the Mondoweiss blog (you can google it if you wish; I don’t provide links to running sewers). But now, amidst the overall degradation of discourse about Israel and Jews, it even appears in the Washington Post.

The sewage is recycled by Post writer Ishaan Tharoor, who does link to Mondoweiss and regurgitates the slander that he finds there:

In July [2014], in a controversial post on Facebook, the then-member of the Knesset posted the text of an article by the late Israeli writer Uri Elitzur that referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes” and appeared to justify the mass punishment of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation….

Even if these aren’t Shaked’s own words, the sentiment is noteworthy, and it reflects what critics say is the Israeli nationalist right’s widespread intolerance of the Arabs in their midst, who make up one-fifth of the Israeli population.

Shaked’s Facebook post was selectively quoted at the time by a writer named Gideon Resnick, and pushed to go viral in the left-wing blogosphere by Ali Abunimah of “Electronic Intifada.” Shaked responded,

Let’s start with my July 1 Facebook post. It was written some 12 years ago, but never published, by a dear man, the recently departed journalist Uri Elitzur. The gist of his article was that once one side in a war attacks the other side’s civilians, they can no longer morally claim a special status for their own civilians.

Go ahead, ask a Hebrew speaking friend to translate it for you, they’ll confirm this is what my Facebook post [here, in Hebrew, see update below for English] was about. But you’ll find not a trace of that in Resnick’s account. Perhaps it’s his own ignorance of the Hebrew language. After all, he got the text from Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to daily and hourly vilification of my country.

All Resnick had to do to make Elitzur’s sober, legally minded discussion sound like a speech made by Hitler himself, was to cherry pick words out of context. A call for the indiscriminate killing of children is a terrible thing. But what if the statement was that any time you attack our children, you’re exposing your own people to the same fate? Still unsettling, but rational when you consider their civilian population is actively supporting and participating in their war and terror efforts. It’s not a call for indiscriminate murder.

That’s it. She didn’t write the text in question, and it doesn’t call for genocide. Even in Mondoweiss’ translation, it’s clear that the “little snakes” referred to are terrorists, not Arab children. Now that she is about to take an important post, the story is making the rounds again.

This isn’t so much about Ayelet Shaked, who can and will defend herself. It is more about the Washington Post, supposedly a serious newspaper, which paid a hack journalist to write a hit piece based entirely on material taken from what another Post contributor, David Bernstein, persuasively argues is a “hate site.”

Ishaan Tharoor’s technique of expressing his political prejudices is to link to anti-Israel articles with phrases like “some would call [her views] extremist,” or “some have likened [Naftali Bennett’s plan for Palestinian autonomy] to the bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa.” This enables him to write a massively biased piece without taking ownership of his bias.

There is no sign in the Post article that he made any attempt to contact Shaked, or indeed anyone connected with her. In fact, just about everything in his piece can be found in the Mondoweiss article he references. This is barely blogging, much less journalism.

Tharoor, a Yale graduate and the son of prominent Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor and NYU Humanities professor Tilottama Mukherji, seems to have led a charmed life as a journalist, with writing positions at Time and the Washington Post. Many actual journalists would kill for such jobs.

But here’s the best part, from an Indian publication:

However, [Tharoor] is frustrated about the sloppy writing and poor ethical standards in the English-language media in India. He also fears the mainstream private media in the country is picking up the same sensationalist, somewhat vacuous tricks of their counterparts in the US. [my emphasis]

I suppose it takes one to know one.

***

Update [10-May-0922 IDT]: I originally called the Mondoweiss translation ‘tendentious’. I have removed the word; I carefully read the original Hebrew text and can compliment the translator on her accuracy. I translated the last two paragraphs that did not appear in the Mondoweiss version myself. Here is the whole thing, with the part about the “snakes” emphasized. Read it and draw your own conclusions:

The Palestinian people has declared war on us, and we must respond with war. Not an operation, not a slow-moving one, not low-intensity, not controlled escalation, no destruction of terror infrastructure, no targeted killings. Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to define reality with the simple words that language puts at our disposal. Why do we have to make up a new name for the war every other week, just to avoid calling it by its name. What’s so horrifying about understanding that the entire Palestinian people is the enemy? Every war is between two peoples, and in every war the people who started the war, that whole people, is the enemy. A declaration of war is not a war crime. Responding with war certainly is not. Nor is the use of the word “war”, nor a clear definition who the enemy is. Au contraire: the morality of war (yes, there is such a thing) is founded on the assumption that there are wars in this world, and that war is not the normal state of things, and that in wars the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.

And the morality of war knows that it is not possible to refrain from hurting enemy civilians. It does not condemn the British air force, which bombed and totally destroyed the German city of Dresden, or the US planes that destroyed the cities of Poland and wrecked half of Budapest, places whose wretched residents had never done a thing to America, but which had to be destroyed in order to win the war against evil. The morals of war do not require that Russia be brought to trial, though it bombs and destroys towns and neighborhoods in Chechnya. It does not denounce the UN Peacekeeping Forces for killing hundreds of civilians in Angola, nor the NATO forces who bombed Milosevic’s Belgrade, a city with a million civilians, elderly, babies, women, and children. The morals of war accept as correct in principle, not only politically, what America has done in Afghanistan, including the massive bombing of populated places, including the creation of a refugee stream of hundreds of thousands of people who escaped the horrors of war, for thousands of whom there is no home to return to.

And in our war this is sevenfold more correct, because the enemy soldiers hide out among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

This week there are celebrations of mourning and honor in two homes of two suicide murderers. I suppose that they set up mourning tents, and all the notables of the city are coming to honor the mother and father that raised the devil. Those two homes should be bombed from the air, to destroy and to kill. And it should be announced that from now on we will do the same to every house of every martyr. Nothing is more just than this, and it appears that nothing is more efficient than this. Every suicide [bomber] should know that he also takes with him his parents, his house, and some of his neighbors. Every Umm Jihad [the nickname of a woman that raised several suicide bombers; literally “mother of jihad”] heroine that sends her son to hell should know that she goes with him. Together with the house and everything in it.

Killings can’t be targeted. That’s how it is in war. What is targeted doesn’t kill and what kills isn’t targeted
[מה שממוקד לא מסכל ומה שמסכל לא ממוקד]. We didn’t start this hateful war and we can’t end it. The keys to a ceasefire are in the hands of the Palestinian people. We can only scorch their fingers until they want to use them.

The meaning ought to be clear to anyone who can read either English or Hebrew. This is not a call for genocide, it is a realistic assessment of the ugly nature of war. In particular, the “snakes” he refers to are suicide bombers. He does not call for the murder of children; rather he proposes to deter the parents from making their children into murderers.

Update [1049 IDT]: The Jewish Press reports that

Ayelet Shaked (Bayit Yehudi) has been assigned a full-time security detail and armed guards, by the Knesset security department, after incitement and threats by Israeli leftists were posted on social media, according to Galei Tzahal.

Posted in Israeli Politics, Media | 2 Comments