Pamela Geller is right

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Bosch Fawstin's winning entry in the "Draw Muhammad" contest in Garland, Texas

Bosch Fawstin’s winning entry in the “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas

I’m seeing lots of criticism of Pamela Geller for almost getting murdered as a result of organizing a “Draw Muhammad” contest as part of a free speech event. I don’t buy any of it. Here are some of the things people are saying:

1. It’s hate speech.

As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in connection with pornography, it may be difficult to define, but “I know it when I see it.” And I don’t see hate speech in the cartoon at the top of this blog. I see a political statement that sharply criticizes an ideology. We are allowed ideological criticism (at least in the US and some, but not all, other ‘free’ countries).

2. It’s stupid. Didn’t she know it would cause trouble? It’s been done — why did she need to take the risk of doing it again?

Probably she did expect ‘trouble’ of some sort. But to not do it would have been to accept the so-called “assassin’s veto” of the principle of free speech. Which is why she had to do it, and why people have to continue doing it. If we don’t, then we start down a slippery slope: Today we can’t draw Muhammad. Tomorrow, what else can’t we do, say or draw?

3. It’s deliberately provocative. She did it to get a reaction and shouldn’t be surprised that she did.

Yes, it is deliberately provocative. See 2) above. But should we allow 7th century barbarians to decide what the appropriate reaction to provocation should be? This is beginning to sound like the argument that the woman in the short skirt deserved to be raped!  And in fact, this very argument is used by the same barbarians to justify forcing women to wear burqas.

4. She just did it to get attention.

Everything she does is to get attention — to make the point that Islam is waging war on the West and the West is pretending that it’s not. Geller is not crazy and is not a ‘bigot’ (a word that is way overused). She is an ideological warrior in what she believes is a civilizational conflict with an aggressive, expansionist Islamic ideology.

Her partner in organizing the event, Robert Spencer, points out that no matter how careful we are to restrain our expression, we will still be targeted by the jihadists: “the more we submit to violent intimidation, the more violent intimidation we are going to get. Why should the jihadis abandon a winning formula?”

Geller thinks that the way to defeat an enemy is to oppose him, not to submit to his demands.

I know, I know. That’s a pretty radical idea today.

 

Posted in Islam, Terrorism | 1 Comment

The worst way to form a government, except for all the others

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Earlier this week, Avigdor Lieberman decided, for some reason, that he would not join PM Netanyahu’s coalition (yes, he gave ‘reasons’, but nobody takes them seriously). Coalition negotiations with Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, the last to get on board, continued until a few hours before the deadline for Netanyahu to present his putative coalition of 61 Knesset members to President Rivlin.

As I make the final update to my post on Thursday morning, the excitement is over. Bennett demanded and got the Justice Ministry portfolio for Ayelet Shaked. There will be a Likud government with 61 mandates, the narrowest possible margin, a government that can be knocked over by the defection of a single member.

There were other possibilities. Netanyahu and Bennett might not have come to agreement, or some other member of the coalition suddenly might have decided to make a new demand despite having signed an agreement. Netanyahu might have chosen to invite Labor’s Herzog into a unity government; given the proper inducements, he would have agreed despite his protestations.

If Netanyahu hadn’t succeeded at the last moment, the President might have given the job of forming the coalition to some other Knesset member, like Herzog, who would probably have had even more trouble than Netanyahu. He might have tried to force a unity government. There is even the possibility that no member of the Knesset could form a coalition, in which case there would have to be new elections.

This is tremendously frustrating. There are big problems — internal and external — that require attention, and the PM and various party leaders who are ministers have spent almost two months negotiating with each other, having meetings (open and secret), hatching plots (Lieberman), etc. This is after the excruciating election campaign that went on from December to March.

I admire PM Netanyahu for being able to carry on at least the most important affairs of state during this protracted period, but this system is dysfunctional. And a 61-member coalition means that it isn’t over — Netanyahu will have to try to broaden the coalition after its inauguration unless he wants even more instability.

The parliamentary system is a good one, because it makes the government highly responsive to the will of the electorate, as expressed by their representatives in the Knesset. An ineffective government can be removed at any time. If only the US had such a system, Obama would be long gone! But the coalition process is problematic.

One suggestion is to simply get rid of the process by appointing as Prime Minister the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats. But this could have unintended consequences, if there are more than two parties in the race. Suppose there were three parties, two on the Right and one on the Left. If the right-wing parties received 39 seats each, and the single left-wing party got 52, the latter would win by a large margin — but the clear preference of the electorate for a right-wing government would be thwarted.

Another possibility would be to elect the Knesset and then have the MKs choose a Prime Minister from among themselves, by majority vote. One problem with this is that it removes the direct connection between the voter and the PM that is important if the people are to have confidence in the PM. Worse, it would produce backroom wheeling-and-dealing similar to what goes on in coalition negotiations, except that there wouldn’t be explicit coalition agreements.

What about direct election of a Prime Minister? Israel tried American-style separate elections for the Knesset and the Prime Minister in 1996 and 1999. This proved unsatisfactory because the elected PM didn’t necessarily have the base needed in the Knesset to form a stable coalition. Other suggestions that detach the PM from the Knesset could bring about the kind of paralysis that has characterized the relationship between the US President and the Congress.

Yet another idea would be to raise the minimum percentage of votes needed to enter the Knesset from the present 3.5% (5 Knesset seats) to a much larger value and then require that each party designate another party that would get its votes if it did not reach the threshold. This would make it more likely that one of the larger parties would get a majority, and simplify coalition negotiations if not. But it would also reduce the representation of minority views in the Knesset, in effect disenfranchising their voters (it could also produce an outcome with two large Jewish parties, each without a majority, and one smaller Arab party holding the balance of power).

Despite the frustration, this isn’t a simple problem, especially since the political propensity is to find ways to exploit unplanned loopholes in any system. Possibly, to paraphrase Churchill’s famous comment on democracy, the coalition system is the worst way to form a government — except for all the others.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

Ethiopian-Israelis are fed up

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
PM Netanyahu meets with Damas Pakedeh, IDF soldier who was beaten by police

PM Netanyahu meets with Damas Pakedeh, IDF soldier who was beaten by police

We have long been the punching bag and scapegoat for everything in this country. People say that they’re with us, that they brought us here. They didn’t bring us here. We came because of Zionism, not like others who came for economic benefits. When you’re a Zionist, you believe with a full heart that this is your country.

Our forefathers lived here, and we also have the right to live here. But what is going on now is simply a catastrophe. It is racism for the sake of racism. You look for a job today, and even if you’re the best around, there’s a price. Your color carries a price.

But we will not stay silent any longer. We are not our parents’ generation, who kept quiet, kept their heads down and said ‘amen’ to everything. That period is over. We are a new generation fighting for our rights.

— Dana Silbaho, who made aliyah from Ethiopia in 1991, at Tel Aviv protest last week

The protests that became violent in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by Israel’s Ethiopian community shocked the nation. Ethiopians in general are peaceful, polite and hard-working people who have had a difficult time integrating into Israeli society. Although there was aliyah from Ethiopia as early as the late 1970s, most of the Ethiopian Jews came to Israel in the 90s, from a place where many lived in huts without electricity or running water. Today about half of them live below the poverty line, and they report discrimination in employment and other areas, and — especially — harassment by police.

The recent protests began after an IDF soldier of Ethiopian origin, Damas Pakedeh, was beaten up by police (video) for no apparent reason. This certainly wasn’t the first case of police brutality against Ethiopians — or others — but the video made a big impression.

The Prime Minister met with Pakedeh, a policeman was fired, and the police promised to behave in the future. This is a start — a small one. There are big changes that need to be made, in the police and in other areas.

The police say that the demonstrations began peacefully but suddenly turned violent after ‘anarchists’ incited the crowds, especially in Tel Aviv when demonstrators blocked a main highway at rush hour. The details are still unclear, although the ‘official’ leaders of the demonstrations said they were intended to be peaceful. News reports referred to ‘social activists’ joining the protest.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the social activists were the same extreme Israeli and European left-wing militants that regularly take part in Arab protests against the security fence, which also regularly become violent. But at this point this is speculation.

What I find troubling is the application of the concept of ‘racism’, the parallels being drawn between these events and riots in Baltimore and Ferguson, and the gleeful comments in social media about ‘racist Israeli society’.

I would argue that there is very little racism as such in Israeli society. There is a great deal of discrimination against newcomers, who are always seen as less cultured, more aggressive, and a danger to the position of the ‘veteran’ Israelis. Polish, German, Iraqi, Yemenite, North African and Soviet Jews all faced this. In the case of the Ethiopians, the cultural gap for the first generation was so great that the phenomenon was much worse than, say, for the Poles (the national conflict between Jews and Arabs is entirely different, but is also not racially-based).

The leaders of the Ethiopian movement are making a mistake if they interpret the discrimination against them as classical racism (of course, they are being encouraged to do so by activists with an axe to grind against the Jewish state). Unlike race-hatred, which is almost impossible to eradicate, the problems facing the Ethiopian community have solutions, assuming that the broader society and its leaders have the will to do more than talk about them.

Americans, too,  are quick to make analogies to a situation with which they are more familiar, but they will be wrong.

The situation of African-Americans is different in almost every respect, except for the most trivial one of skin color. African-Americans are not new immigrants. Ethiopians were not slaves of the ancestors of today’s Israelis, they did not live under a Jim Crow regime, and they were never considered subhuman by the majority around them.

These demonstrations have brought the concerns of the Ethiopian community to the attention of the rest of the nation. It may take time to solve all of the problems, but some can be fixed right away.

I suggest we start with the police.

Posted in Israeli Society | 1 Comment

Coalition agreement with Haredim includes too many concessions

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu signs coalition agreement with United Torah Judaism party this week.

Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu signs coalition agreement with United Torah Judaism party this week. (l-r) Meir Porush, Moshe Gafni, Ya’akov Litzman.

I have great respect for those Jews who are more observant than I am. I made my personal decision about the degree of observance that is right for me, and for some that makes me an apikoros. But they have their way and I think I’m old enough to choose mine.

Unfortunately, I find it necessary today to criticize the political expression of some of the more observant members of the Israeli Jewish community. Our broken electoral system, favors those who hold the balance of power in coalition negotiations. As a result, a small party can demand and get concessions that are more than minority rights — they become impositions on the will of the majority, sometimes to the real detriment of the nation.

The United Torah Judaism party, the “Ashkenazi Haredi” party, received 5.03% of the vote in the recent election and won 6 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. Yet they will have the chairmanship of the Knesset Finance Committee and the Science and Space Committee, control of the Ministry of Health, and a deputy Minister of Education. In addition, they demanded and got several very significant commitments from Netanyahu:

The coalition agreement states that the law will be amended so that the defense minister will have the authority to establish enlistment targets from the haredi sector, and that no sanctions will be imposed on any haredi yeshiva student who does not perform military service.

Funding for ultra-Orthodox schools is to be unaffected regardless of whether they teach the required hours of core curriculum topics, and legislation is to be enacted guaranteeing this status.

The agreement stipulates that the government will restore National Insurance Institute child allotments to their 2012 levels.

… The Conversion Reform Law passed by government order last year is to be amended to preclude its central reform, allowing municipal chief rabbis to establish their own conversion courts…

A law guaranteeing a minimum of four women on the Committee for Appointing Rabbinical Judges is to be revoked in accordance with the deal…

And the agreement includes a stipulation that no legislation is to be passed that changes the so-called status quo on religion and state, effectively meaning that no reforms to issues of religion and state would be possible in the next government.

Most of this is not good for either the State of Israel or the Haredim, who are isolated from mainstream Jewish Israeli society and will continue to be so if they do not serve in the army or study ‘secular’ subjects (for example, mathematics) in school.

There is also tolerance of extremist, even violent, behavior toward those from their community who do serve in the army. In addition, their increasingly extreme and demeaning attitudes toward women are inconsistent with a modern democracy.

Haredim do not have a monopoly on morality nor do they have a right to define Judaism for the Jewish world. It is not anti-Jewish to say that they, too, should try to understand and accept those who are less observant, and shoulder more of the burden of defending the state that makes it possible for them to live the kind of lives that they value.

What were Netanyahu’s alternatives? The only one I see would have been a unity government with the ‘Zionist Union’, and that, too, would have been a slap in the face to the will of the majority of the electorate.

The real solution is a change in the electoral system so that small parties do not have the ability to extort big concessions.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 3 Comments

Bending the arc — away from Israel

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Alex, the son of anti-Zionist billionaire George Soros, is starting a Jewish political action committee:

Bend the Arc PAC will back progressive candidates by making direct contributions to their campaign committees. It will focus on issues such as income inequality, marriage equality, social justice and immigration reform.

Alex Soros explained that

There’s an opportunity to launch something that actually speaks to what the American Jewish community cares the most about and to show the narrative of what the real American Jewish experience is.

But what’s the point of creating yet another ‘progressive’ PAC? Why specifically target Jews when there is no specifically Jewish issue that it is concerned with? The answer lies in what it is not concerned with:

Hadar Susskind, who has previously worked for other Jewish organizations including J Street, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, will serve as director of Bend the Arc PAC…

“We don’t touch any foreign policy stuff,” he said. “One of the reasons behind doing this is that [the other Jewish groups] aren’t really representing the views of the American Jewish community…” [my emphasis]

Does that sound familiar? It’s J Street without Israel! This PAC will undoubtedly fund the very same candidates that the J Street PAC does. But J Street has been losing its appeal, as the Obama Administration’s anti-Israel policies have begun to make even some ‘progressive’ Jews uncomfortable.

Since Roosevelt’s presidency, American Jews have leaned left because of their concern about social issues, as exemplified by the civil rights movement. Reform Jews have even been criticized for acting as though Judaism was synonymous with liberal politics. Most, however, strongly supported Israel — and so did most Democratic politicians. With the advent of Obama, that is no longer the case, and liberal Jews are caught in the middle.

Soros has come along with a brilliant solution to their dilemma: be progressive, but don’t think about Israel.

Bend the Arc will be able to funnel Jewish contributions to the left-wing politicians that support and will continue the administration’s policies, including its anti-Israel ones. But because it won’t “touch any foreign policy stuff” none of those hard questions about Hamas and Iran need come up. Jewish progressives will be able to donate to it with the clearest of consciences, with warm and fuzzy feelings about gay marriage and immigrant rights, without any nagging doubts that perhaps they are betraying their people.

The traditionally liberal Jews who have been forced to choose between their progressive domestic agenda and their love for Israel will now have a home.

And it won’t be a lightning rod for criticism by Zionist Jews the way J Street was. Anyone who opposes Bend the Arc can be dismissed as a right-wing ideologue, or even a Republican.

Finally, it is a diversionary tactic. It will work to focus the Jewish community on domestic issues. The less any American, Jewish or otherwise, thinks about the radically anti-Israel and anti-American policies of the Obama wing of the Democratic Party, the better it will be for them.

I doubt that any of the Democratic presidential candidates — yes, I expect challenges to Hillary — will explicitly campaign on the foreign policy record of the Obama Administration (it’s too gruesome), but I do expect that at least one will embody the same philosophy of helping America’s enemies and hurting its friends.

And you can bet that that candidate will be the favorite of Bend the Arc.

Posted in American Jews, American politics | Comments Off on Bending the arc — away from Israel

American Jews: don’t re-make your mistakes

Posted on April 28, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Israelis overwhelmingly think this man is the worst US president for Israel in 30 years

Israelis overwhelmingly think this man is the worst US president for Israel in 30 years

You know that I think, and have said over and over, that the Obama Administration is the worst ever for Israel. Now a new poll shows that most Israelis, even those that identify as left-wing, agree with me:

When it comes to the “best” President [in the past 30 years], Israelis hesitate, as they have more than one candidate for the top spot. But when they are asked about the “worst” there is no such hesitation. One President stands head and shoulders above all others: Obama – with 63% of Jewish Israelis choosing him. Carter comes at a distant second with 16%, and other presidents are barely mentioned (the Bushes with 4% and 3%, Reagan with 2%).

…today only one in ten respondents (9%) would apply a “pro Israeli” tag to the US administration. 60% of respondents call the Obama administration “pro Palestinian”.

In fact, even among respondents that identified themselves as “left”, only 16% believe that the Obama administration is “pro Israeli”, with 46% calling it “neutral” and 33% calling it “pro Palestinian” (“neutral” is not a positive assessment). Naturally, when we look at right-leaning respondents, and at religious respondents, the belief that Obama is pro Israeli hits rock bottom. 77% of right-wing Jewish Israelis call the administration “pro Palestinian”. 81% of religious Jewish Israelis call the administration “pro Palestinian”.

This is stunning. You can’t blame PM Netanyahu or Sheldon Adelson for this. Nor can you blame an imagined Israeli ‘Republicanism’, or Obama’s support for a two-state solution, because the absolute favorite of Israelis turns out to be America’s first “black and Jewish,” president, Democrat and 2-stater Bill Clinton (37%, with George W. Bush at 34% and Reagan a distant third with 8%).

In other words, the overwhelming support of American Jews for Obama shows that either they don’t care much for Israel, or are very badly informed about Obama’s policies and the realities of the Middle East. I hope it’s the latter, and I still believe it is.

The biggest issue in Israel today is not the question of the Palestinian Arabs, because most Israelis understand that there is no good option open at this time; both partition and annexation have big problems associated with them. What they are worried about is Iran and its proxies, and it is in this area that Obama is acting directly against Israel’s interest — and I mean its interest in surviving terrorism and war, even nuclear war.

Before the election, labor party standard-bearer Yitzhak ‘Buji’ Herzog said that he “trust[ed] Obama to get a good deal” with Iran. Either because the election is over (and Obama’s support didn’t help him) or because the parameters of the deal are even worse than expected, Herzog has changed his tune and is now saying that there is “no division between the coalition and the opposition” on the Iranian bomb, and that the deal about to be finalized poses “real potential risks in the long term.”

From here, it looks like America has big problems: extreme polarization, a breakdown in the relationship (poor as it was to begin with) between the races, a pathological political correctness and radicalization in the universities, and an administration that appears to be trying to change the image of the nation from a proud leader and force for good in the world to a repentant and supplicant sinner (there are more issues, but these pop to mind). So I can understand that American Jews don’t have a lot of mind space available for Israel.

Indeed, the son of anti-Israel financier George Soros is starting a new PAC that will try to divert the attention of Jewish voters from Israel:

Alex Soros’ new “Bend the Arc” PAC is said to be the first Jewish PAC not to make foreign policy a top priority, Politico reports. Instead, it will focus on issues like immigration reform, social justice, marriage equality and income inequality.

“One of the reasons behind doing this is that [the other Jewish groups] aren’t really representing the views of the American Jewish community,” Politico cited the PAC’s director, [former J Street official — ed.] Hadar Susskind, as saying.

I don’t know who will be nominated by either party in 2016, and I understand that it is hard to determine how a candidate will behave in office — look how wrong so many were about Obama.

If American Jews still care about Israel as I think they do, then they should look carefully and critically at the candidates, and not re-make the mistakes of 2008 and 2012.

Posted in American Jews, American politics, Iran, US-Israel Relations | 1 Comment

The real motive for Arab terrorism

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
The murder weapon in the April 15 killing of Shalom Sherki

The murder weapon in the April 15 killing of Shalom Sherki

On April 15, Khaled Koutineh, a resident of eastern Jerusalem who was angry about having been delayed at a checkpoint drove his car into a bus stop, killing Shalom Yohai Sherki, 25, and seriously injuring Shira Klein, a young woman. Yesterday there was another vehicular attack, in which four police officers were injured, one ‘moderately’. There were also two separate incidents on the same day in which Jews were attacked by knife-wielding Arabs.

There have been at least 5 vehicular attacks on Jews by Arabs since November 2014, and numerous knife and meat-cleaver attacks. Every single day, Jewish cars are bombarded with rocks and firebombs, sometimes resulting in death. Sure, they are always angry and “frustrated,” but there is a deeper ideological reason for what they do.

I want to rerun an article I wrote last year, after a particularly horrible firebombing, and add something to it.

***

My personal Kishinev

Posted on December 27, 2014 by Vic Rosenthal

You probably heard about the 11-year old girl who was critically burned on Thursday when the car she was riding in was struck by a firebomb thrown by an Arab terrorist. And you certainly know about the attack on the Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in Jerusalem in which four worshipers and a policeman were brutally murdered. You probably know about the several incidents in which Arabs drove their vehicles into groups of Jews, including one in which a 3-month old baby and a tourist from Ecuador were murdered, and another in which the driver got out and ran back to his not-yet-dead victim and cut her throat.

If you follow these things, you may also know that Jews are afraid to go to the historic Mount of Olives Cemetery in Jerusalem because of continued violent attacks on buses, cars and people. You may also have heard about the daily rock-throwing attacks on the light rail in Jerusalem, against Jewish-driven cars on the roads in Judea and Samaria, the acid thrown on a Jewish family, etc. I could go on. And on.

The horror of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom was a turning point for many Jews, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jew-hatred was finally seen to be implacable and a permanent feature of Diaspora life, and only a complete separation from the haters by the establishment of a Jewish state and the relocation of the Jewish people to it could be a permanent solution.

I think the firebomb incident was my own personal Kishinev experience. Now there is a Jewish state, but the problem of hatred-spawned violence against Jews has not ended, even here.

There is a simple reason for that: we allow it.

The Palestinian Arab leadership and its official media as well as their legions of social media propagandists incite murder every day. They pay the salaries of incarcerated murderers, treat released terrorists as heroes, and call for violent action against Jews, sometimes in remarkably ugly ways. We don’t stop them. We could, but we don’t.

We could stop the terror on the roads of Judea and Samaria. When an Arab village harbors terrorists, we could destroy it. But because we are afraid of being accused of ‘collective punishment’ by the less-than-objective UN, EU and Obama Administration, we don’t.

We don’t believe that Arab populations can be forced to move when they breed and support terrorism. We take seriously the idea of removing Jews from their homes — and do it, in Gush Katif and Amona — but expelling an Arab would be a violation of his human rights, another nakba. We talk about destroying the homes of terrorists, but rarely do it.

We don’t have a death penalty for terrorist murder. Instead, we keep the murderers in jail until their supporters kidnap a Jew, and then we ransom the Jew by releasing them, sometimes in a ratio of 1027 terrorists to one Jew. The terrorists go home to a victory parade and then go back to trying to kill Jews.

The Zionist imperative is to preserve the Jewish state in order to preserve the Jewish people. That is our highest priority — not to try to live up to the hypocritical and cynical double standards set by people in Brussels or Washington who would just as soon see the Jewish people gone anyway.

We need to change the way we are fighting the long war that we are in, because today we are losing. We are losing Judea and Samaria, we are losing eastern Jerusalem, and we are losing the Galilee and the Negev. Soon it will be impossible for a Jew to drive even in Kfar Saba without an armored vehicle. And after that?

The solution is not to talk to them about ‘peace’. They have given us their answer with their firebombs and meat cleavers, their cars and their knives, as well as their words. How many times do they have to show us their intentions before we get it?

Do we, civilized people, understand what it means to be in a struggle with barbarians? Do we understand that the choices are victory or the end of our state, death and dispersal? But we seem to care more about Arab rights than our own right to exist.

We are at a turning point. We need to choose between victory and destruction. There are no other alternatives.

***

Khaled Koutineh may have been angry about the checkpoint, but the deeper motive for his attack, like all Arab terrorism here, is to make life so bad for us that (they think) we will give up, get up and leave the country.

Very little has changed in recent months. We had an election, but I didn’t hear any of the candidates talking about how the Arabs are trying to drive us out of our land (and if one had, he would probably have been banned as a Kahanist).

The way to respond to terrorism is not to become “more democratic” (i.e., to give more power to Arab citizens) or to make concessions to the PLO/PA. It is to move in the other direction: to emphasize the Jewish nature of the state, and to strengthen our hold on the territories. Rather than encourage the Arabs, we need to make them lose all hope of throwing us out. We must make them understand that if they want to live in the land of Israel, then they must accept Jewish sovereignty (and if not, there are 22 Arab countries, Europe and the US).

For this reason, I hope the new government will pass a “Jewish State law“.

Toward the end of an interview (video), Tuvia Tenenbom, author of Catch the Jew, was asked “Can there be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians?” In part he said,

The history of nation-building — of human nation building — is this: we are in America. What happened? There were some Indians. Then some white people came and they killed the Indians, and they took over. That’s what happens with countries. If I get your territory, if I win a war, I either kill you, I subjugate you, or I expel you. In rare cases I would make you citizens, on my terms. That’s the way the world works.

The Jews were survivors of [the] Holocaust and of pogroms, and did not have a state for 2000 years. So they can re-invent the wheel. ’67 war? They decided not to annex, and not to kill the people. Not to expel them, but to do some kind of — God knows what it is — a very complicated Talmudic thing, nobody knows, even the Jews cannot figure it out.

This is not the way to do it. You want to be nice? And you think you can build a state like this? I’m sorry. Go somewhere else. This is the reality, this is how it works.

This is how it works. The Arabs understand it. Why don’t we?

Posted in Jew Hatred, Terrorism | 1 Comment

Independence and self-defense

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Today is יום העצמאות, Independence Day, and I’m reading lots of articles about the significance of an independent Jewish state. “The meaning of independence in my view is, first of all, the ability to defend yourself,” said PM Netanyahu. On the other hand, left-wing journalist Nehemia Shtrasler doesn’t think that Israel is independent at all. “We are no more than an American protectorate,” he argues, because the US could stop selling us weapons and take steps to wreck our economy.

Shtrasler is wrong, because the fact that the US could destroy any country in the world if it cared to doesn’t mean that there are no independent countries. But he is correct that we are far too dependent on the US, something which is being made clear today as we face an unfriendly — arguably, even antisemitic — administration in Washington.

Netanyahu is right that independence requires the capability of self-defense, but of course that is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. It is also necessary to have the will to use your capabilities, which in turn depends on the conviction that you are morally justified in doing what is necessary to defend yourself.

This is precisely what is being attacked when Israel is delegitimized and demonized by anti-Zionist groups, NGOs and media. They say that Israel stole its land from the rightful “Palestinian” owners, and that it has neither the legal or moral right to possess it. We are told that Israel’s birth was facilitated by the commission of crimes against humanity, that Israel has continued to commit war crimes in its wars, which are portrayed as offensive and genocidal instead of defensive. Recently, even the pretense that it is only Israel’s presence in the territories that is illegitimate is being abandoned. Every inch of our country is contested.

The so-called “Palestinian narrative” is an example of the Big Lie technique, in which facts and history are inverted and the inversions repeated so often that they become conventional wisdom. ‘Inversion’ is a good word, because it really does turn the truth upside down. In fact, it was Arabs who perpetrated ethnic cleansing and massacres during Israel’s war of Independence, and it is the Jewish people who are truly indigenous to the land of Israel. It is the “Palestinians” who wish to establish an apartheid state, and it is they who target noncombatants and particularly children.

Unfortunately these big lies are effective, even — especially — in Israel, where one would expect that the truth would be more likely to prevail. The myths have become deeply ingrained, even in some of our politicians, even if they don’t realize that they are touched by them.

Self-defense sometimes means deterrence, but sometimes it means war. A political leader or officer in time of war must be able to justify extraordinary actions, actions that he knows will kill people. Some of them will be innocent noncombatants, no matter how careful an army is and how restrictive the rules of engagement — and Israel is very, very careful. Some of them will be our own children, husbands or fathers. Can someone who doesn’t truly believe that his cause is just take such actions?

Confidence in one’s moral and legal position is also required in less lethal pursuits, like diplomacy. Consider the negotiations with the PLO. As I think I’ve written before, the idea of land swaps for settlement blocs implies that the land across the Green Line ‘belongs’ to the Arabs. But anyone who knows the history knows that the Palestine Mandate was intended to provide a national home for the Jewish people, and that the Green Line was agreed by both sides to be nothing more than an armistice line with no political significance. So how did we get the idea that it separates Israel from “Arab land?”

One of the things that distinguishes a protectorate or satellite from an independent nation is that an independent nation has an independent foreign policy and doesn’t simply parrot the party line of its patron. I think this is a good starting point for improving relations with the US: we should try to educate the administration, to the extent that it is possible, about the true legal and historical facts about the State of Israel.

In effect, we need to make a ‘diplomatic declaration of independence’ from the US. Such a declaration would be an important step in reducing our overall dependence on it — and also in improving our ability to defend ourselves. Of course, in order to do this we will need to educate ourselves first, to extirpate the crippling guilt complex that our enemies have succeeded in creating.

One concrete step would be to officially adopt the Levy Commission Report of 2012. The commission, headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, examined the legal status of the Israeli presence in the territories and concluded that according to international law, Israel is not an occupying power, and the 4th Geneva Convention — the usual basis for the argument that “settlements are illegal” — does not apply. The government took no action on the report. It should.

PM Netanyahu’s statement that there would be no two-state solution in the near future was a breath of fresh air, despite the fact that Obama seized upon it as an excuse to distance the US from Israel. The interminable pointless negotiations with the PLO/PA only served to provide leverage to extract concessions from Israel without any promise of reaching an agreement. As for Obama’s reaction, if Netanyahu hadn’t said it, he would have found another excuse to do what he was determined to do.

There are other things that we can do to increase our independence and improve our ability to defend ourselves. We should try as much as possible to develop our own weapons systems and to integrate systems from other suppliers than the US, so that it would be harder for an unfriendly US administration to cut us off without recourse. We should develop trade with India and the Far East to help offset the damage that a European boycott could cause. But most important, we should remind ourselves of who and what we are, while rejecting the invidious descriptions provided by our enemies.

No, we aren’t a protectorate. Not yet. But to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the founders of the State of Israel gave us independence — if we can keep it.

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