Gideon Levy detained, released

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal
Ha'aretz writer Gideon Levy.

Ha’aretz writer Gideon Levy.

Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz, probably the most anti-Israel of left-wing Israeli journalists (and that is quite an accomplishment), was detained by the police yesterday.

I’ve been advocating this for a long time, since Levy clearly belongs in prison. Unfortunately, Israel is a liberal democracy, and we don’t arrest writers for sedition. So in order to be arrested, Levy had to spit and curse at IDF personnel who tried to prevent him from entering Area A — the part of Judea/Samaria under full Palestinian Authority control — without a permit.

The permit is required in order to protect Jewish Israelis from Arabs who might tear them limb from limb or stone them to death. Levy would probably write that this is because of their frustration with ‘the occupation’, but actually it is for the same reason that they cut the throats of 3-month old babies, run people down with cars (and if they don’t die, jump out and stab them), or invade synagogues with meat cleavers.

It is more than a political issue, it is very personal and would not be solved if we met all of their demands. Do I ‘dehumanize’ Palestinians? Levy would say yes. I say they do it themselves.

The police released Levy after questioning. I can imagine the conversation:

“Mr. Levy, why did you spit at and curse the soldiers who were protecting you by doing their jobs?”

“Because I hold the Jewish state in contempt and I have absolutely no respect for the government, police or IDF.”

“Oh, well, that’s perfectly normal for a Ha’aretz writer. You can go now.”

Levy created a stir when he wrote an article in July viciously criticizing Israeli pilots who bombed targets in Gaza during the recent war (as well as practically every Israeli who is required to fight to protect his home from screaming Arabs with meat cleavers). Here is a bit of it:

They sit in the cockpit and push buttons and joysticks. It’s a war game. They determine life and death, from their lofty place in the sky they see only black dots running around in panic, fleeing for their lives, but also some who wave their hands in terrible fear from the roofs. The black arrow points at the target, and already a mushroom of black smoke rises – poof, a slight tremor in the wing, as the saying goes; a “good” hit, and they’re already embarking on the next sortie. …

And they will forget what they did during their military service. Forget? They never really knew. From the F-16 you can’t see very much. They are not Border Policemen who chase children in the alleyways, beat and abuse them. They aren’t members of the Golani Brigade who invade homes in the middle of the night, in search and kidnap operations. Nor are they soldiers from the Kfir Brigade who stand at the checkpoints. Nor members of the undercover Duvdevan unit or the Duchifat battalion. Nor do they use foul language or humiliate others. Their language is clean. They are the pilots. His Majesty’s pilots, in the most moral army in the world. …

I would like to meet the pilot or the operator of the drone who pushed the death button. How do you sleep at night, pilot? Did you see the pictures of the death and destruction you sowed – on television, and not just in the crosshairs? Did you see the crushed bodies, the bleeding wounded, the frightened children, the horrified women and the terrible destruction you sowed from your sophisticated plane? It’s all your doing, you excellent young man.

The article goes on to suggest that the pilots should refuse to obey orders, and because of this a complaint was filed with the Attorney General. But as I said, Israel is a liberal democracy and we don’t imprison writers for writing almost anything, unless they are Meir Kahane.

If they are Gideon Levy they are paid a handsome salary.

Posted in Post-Zionism | 2 Comments

Livni and Peres conspire with Kerry — against Israel

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal
"OK, here's my idea for how we can stick it to Bibi..."

“OK, here’s my idea for how we can stick it to Bibi…”

As you may remember, Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin carried on pre-Oslo agreement negotiations with the PLO behind the backs of Prime Ministers Shamir and Rabin, and then presented the deal as a fait accompli to Rabin. One doesn’t know how Rabin felt about it in his heart (although the look on his face when he shook hands with Arafat on the White House lawn might give us a clue), but publicly he had no choice but to embrace the initiative and do his best to minimize the damage.

Communicating with the PLO was still against the law in Israel in 1992, and while a Foreign Minister — as Peres became in Rabin’s administration — is certainly permitted to engage in secret diplomacy, to do so in such a sensitive context without notifying the PM is unethical and borders on treason.

But Peres got his Nobel prize (and Israel got the Second Intifada and more than a thousand fresh graves) as a result. And now he — along with one of the most cynical of Israeli politicians, the drooling-with-lust-for-power Tzipi Livni, he has apparently engaged yet again in private diplomacy.

Livni confirmed that she and Peres, now a private citizen,  approached US Secretary of State John Kerry and suggested that he delay the UN Security Council vote on a PLO proposal to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria until after Israeli elections, because a vote now would help her opponents Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett. According to a report in Foreign Policy Magazine, Kerry told EU envoys at a recent meeting in that the US would indeed follow their advice.

“Kerry has been very, very clear that for the United States it was not an option to discuss whatever text before the end of the Israeli election,” according to a European diplomat.

The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the luncheon was confidential, said that Kerry explained that Israel’s liberal political leaders, Shimon Peres and Tipzi Livni, had expressed concern that a Security Council move to pressure Israel on the eve of election would only strengthen the hands of Israeli hardliners, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Naftali Bennett, an implacable foe of a Palestinian state and leader of the right-wing Jewish Home party. Netanyahu is also fiercely opposed to the Palestinians effort to secure Security Council backing for its statehood drive.

It’s hard to imagine worse behavior for a political candidate than to conspire with a foreign power — one whose objectives in this area are clearly opposed to Israel’s — in order to advance her candidacy, which is what Livni has done (with the help of practiced conspirator Peres).

The State Department has recently strongly suggested that the US would veto such a Palestinian resolution. Postponing the vote might well be against Israel’s interest, since it’s hard to predict what the US attitude will be in the future.

But apparently Livni and Peres think it is in the interest of the Labor party. Because nothing is more urgent for the impotent Left than getting into power.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 2 Comments

Rabbi Yoffie loses it

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal
Bennett

Bennett

Yesterday I wrote a post arguing that the EU’s problem with Israel is fundamentally insoluble. I am beginning to think that we are going to have an equally difficult time with liberal American Jews.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie is the former head of the Union for Reform Judaism and is a moderate, pro-Israel voice in the Reform movement, many of whose rabbis are significantly farther to the left. But today he published a hysterical diatribe against Naftali Bennett in which he refers to him as ‘crazy’:

American Jews are wondering: Just how crazy is Israel’s economy minister and head of the Habayit Hayehudi party, Naftali Bennett? And how much damage will he do to Israel’s wellbeing and standing in the world? While no one is saying so out loud at the moment, the fear is that he is indeed crazy – in the sense that he is profoundly out of touch with political realities and is capable of inflicting tremendous harm to Israel’s good name.

One of Yoffie’s main arguments is that Bennett’s proposal to annex Area C constitutes an “abandonment of democratic principles.” This is nonsense, because Bennett proposes to offer citizenship to the Arabs in the area to be annexed, and to give the Arabs in the rest as much autonomy as is consistent with demilitarization and continued Israeli control over borders, airspace, etc. — which is absolutely necessary for our security.

Maybe Yoffie thinks that a completely sovereign Arab state can be allowed to arise in the territories, but if so then he is the ‘crazy’ one who is out of touch with reality. Even Labor candidates Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni would have to agree that there must be limitations on the sovereignty of a Palestinian state. They too talk a lot about ‘democracy’, but the dirty secret about a ‘two-state solution,’ regardless of its precise borders, is that a sovereign ‘Palestinian’ state is inconsistent with Israel’s secure existence. No rational Israeli leader will allow it.

American Jewish leaders, says Yoffie, were “shocked” by Bennett’s presentation (video) at the recent Saban Forum, calling him “dismissive of American concerns and of democratic values.” There is that word again, ‘democratic’. Yoffie seems to think that a lack of commitment to democracy is the biggest problem with Bennett.

But Yoffie notes that Bennett is doing well in the polls and his party might even get as many seats in the Knesset as the Likud.  And he believes that Bennett is not trying to fool the electorate:

The political profession is not necessarily a noble one, and it is fair to ask whether Bennett really believes every word of what he is saying, or whether he is putting on a carefully choreographed election performance from which he will begin to retreat the day after the March 17 vote. I am betting on the former; the sincerity that Bennett proclaims and sees as a source of his electoral strength seems to be real. And there is nothing in his public record or the record of his party to suggest that his positions are put forward out of convenience rather than conviction.

The contradiction is striking: Yoffie seems to care a great deal about the prospects for democracy for the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, but not at all about the real democratic process which he admits may give Naftali Bennett an important role in the next government!

And this is my problem with him, and with much of the liberal American Jewish establishment.

They cannot have it both ways. If they are for democracy, then they must be for allowing Israelis to choose their own government, even if it isn’t to their liking, or to the liking of the US administration that they support.

It should be as clear by now to American Jews as it is to Israelis that the two-state paradigm was a mistake. Israelis paid dearly in lives as a result, in part, of American pressure to ‘test’ the Palestinian commitment to peace. Now, 21 years after the handshake on the White House lawn, the ‘test’ is over and the PLO has received a grade of F.

Unfortunately American Jews have been fed a stream of misinformation by leaders like Yoffie, who seem unable to grasp this.

Luckily for us, they will not get to vote in our election.

Posted in American Jews, Israeli Politics | 4 Comments

We can’t satisfy Europe

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal
The EU Parliament votes yesterday that it “supports in principle recognition of Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution, and believes these should go hand in hand with the development of peace talks, which should be advanced.”

The EU Parliament votes yesterday that it “supports in principle recognition of Palestinian statehood and the two-state solution, and believes these should go hand in hand with the development of peace talks, which should be advanced.”

I admit it. I read Ha’aretz (but I don’t pay for it). How else would I know what Israel’s extreme Left is thinking? So I am used to reading that time is running out, we’d better “end the occupation” before the Europeans decide to make us a “pariah nation” and Obama forgets to veto something in the Security Council.

For example, here’s Barak Ravid today:

Netanyahu doesn’t understand Europe. His approach to the diplomatic crisis with France, Britain, Germany and others is simplistic. He believes the moves in Europe are motivated by European leaders’ eagerness to obtain the votes of the growing Muslim minority by advancing a pro-Palestinian agenda. In addition, he feels Europe’s attitude toward Israel is based on deep-seated anti-Semitic sentiments.

I had hoped Ravid would continue and explain what he thinks does motivate European anti-Zionism if not the things he mentions, but he didn’t. I suppose if asked he would talk about how “The Occupation” is immoral and building across the Green Line ‘frustrates’ the Europeans and the Obama Administration because it supposedly creates facts on the ground which prejudge the outcome of negotiations.

But assuming that the architects of colonialism and perpetrators of the Holocaust* have suddenly acquired a moral sensibility is a stretch.

The Arabs of Judea and Samaria are better off economically and more secure physically than those in neighboring countries. Objectively their biggest problem is the criminal and corrupt Palestinian Authority (PA). Surely someone motivated by moral concerns would be more interested in ending the depravity and horrific violence of Da’esh (ISIS) and Assad than in satisfying the desire of the Palestinian Arabs for statehood.

This would be the case even if the PLO’s demands were not transparently designed to create a platform to replace Israel with an Arab state, and if it weren’t 100% clear that an IDF withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would bring a base for terrorism (probably under Hamas control) within a couple of miles of Israel’s population centers and airport. This isn’t rocket science (pun intended). Do you think they don’t understand this?

It’s also obvious that the Europeans don’t care about facts on the ground unless it is Israel that is creating them. The EU funnels money to the PA which is used for (illegal) Arab building in Area C, the part of the territories under full Israeli control according to the Oslo agreements, while every time Israel plans to build a few apartments in Jerusalem, they go ballistic. Why is Arab construction acceptable, indeed encouraged? Doesn’t it prejudge negotiations as well?

They pretend to be concerned about international law, which they (incorrectly) insist Israel violated by building settlements. But somehow they are letting precisely the same issue slide by in Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Western Sahara, and Cyprus. How inconsistent!

The EU also doesn’t seem to have a problem with terrorism, as long as it isn’t directed at them. You would think that the response to the repeated acts of aggression by Hamas against Israel which have provoked three major confrontations (2008-9, 2012 and 2014) would be to isolate Hamas and try to force it from power. Instead, they want to pump money into Gaza, which will strengthen Hamas’ hold and help it prepare for the next confrontation. They have even removed it from the EU’s list of terrorist organizations to facilitate this.

This is not the behavior of people driven by moral considerations. As Caroline Glick told the Danish Ambassador (video), it is evidence that Europe is in the grip of a pathological obsession with Israel. An obsession to crush the life out of a state that they are sorry they permitted to come into being in the first place.

There are lots of reasons for the obsession, including the repugnance felt by internationalists for a nation-state that belongs to a people, the Stockholm-syndrome fear of antagonizing the practitioners of terrorism, an attempt to assuage their own feelings of guilt for their colonialist past and the Holocaust, the Muslim votes, and — yes — “deep-seated anti-Semitic sentiments.”

Israel will not withdraw from Judea and Samaria, even if Tzipi Livni or Isaac Herzog were to become Prime Minister, because even they understand that it would be suicidal in today’s world. I venture to guess that the members of the European Parliament get this.

Which proves that they don’t care, that withdrawal isn’t the immediate goal. What Europe really wants is to weaken Israel, to damage its economy, security and ability to defend itself, so that at some point it will disappear. And so what is happening now is probably a step on the road to the ‘pariah’ status that Ravid is so worried about.

We can’t satisfy the PLO and this is now apparently true of the EU as well. So be it. It may be difficult, but Israel will survive.

I wonder if a non-Muslim Europe will?

—————————————————
* The idea that only Germans were guilty is a comfortable myth; large elements of the population of the continent were happy to cooperate with the Nazis in their project, and Britain and the US knowingly denied sanctuary to hundreds of thousands of Jews trying to flee.

Posted in Europe and Israel | Comments Off on We can’t satisfy Europe

Do we want a female Putin for PM?

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal
Tzipi Livni (r) breaks up during a remarkably rude and vulgar performance on Israeli TV show "Matzav Ha'uma." She has just used an Arabic expression meaning "your mother's genitals"

Tzipi Livni (r) breaks up during a remarkably rude and vulgar performance on Israeli TV show “Matzav Ha’uma.” She has just used an Arabic expression meaning “your mother’s genitals”

You probably know that Tzipi Livni, whose own party was expected to fail to get the minimum amount of votes to enter the Knesset, somehow managed to convince the Labor Party leader, Isaac Herzog, to form a partnership in which, if elected, they would take turns being Prime Minister. In one fell swoop she has transformed almost certain defeat into a shot at the top spot in the nation.

Although Netanyahu’s Likud and various right-of-center parties are expected to form the coalition, there is a possibility that several of the medium-sized parties could swing to the Left and join with Labor. In Israel, whatever group of parties that can get together 61 mandates can form a government even if the single party that got the most votes is not among them.

So if a labor-led coalition comes about, a person who (in American terms) would not be elected dog catcher by the voters could become Prime Minister. This is ironic, since one of Livni’s most oft-repeated complaints about her opponents is that they are anti-democratic.

In an appearance on the satirical TV program “Matzav Ha’uma” (State of the Nation) last night, Livni demonstrated how totally unsuited she is to any public position.

She began by joking that two prime ministers with “potential” were better than one “impotent” one. Then she said that she and Herzog would “take out the garbage” together, implying that Netanyahu was the garbage. She referred to him as a “zero,” to applause and cheers from the audience. But those remarks were just a warmup.

Here’s the background: Livni was one of the ministers whose firing by Netanyahu precipitated the present crisis (Netanyahu accused her and Yair Lapid of planning a “putsch,” leaving the government and joining with opposition forces to create a new coalition without elections). Another contentious issue was the “Jewish state” law, which she decided to oppose, even though the cabinet had voted in favor of it.

One of the program hosts made a remark about the Jewish state law and the Arabic language — an early version of the bill declared that only Hebrew would be the official language of the state. Then the dialogue went like this:

HOST: …so I thought, how would it be possible to get past the moment of the firings, without…
LIVNI: … without being able to say [Arabic expression meaning “your mother’s genitals”]

Yes, she said this on television. The audience loved it. If you understand Hebrew, the program is here and Livni comes on at about 11:48 into it. Of course Vladimir Putin can get pretty insulting and vulgar too — but do we want a female Putin for PM?

I’m sure Livni’s supporters will say that maybe she was just extra enthusiastic after her success in bamboozling Herzog. On the other side, Likud minister Yisrael Katz wondered half-seriously if she were on drugs.

But it’s not as if her performance in government has been so great that her inappropriate rudeness and vulgarity can be overlooked. As Foreign Minister in the execrable Olmert government, she oversaw the negotiations at the end of the Second Lebanon War that culminated in the toothless UNSC resolution 1701 that allowed Hizballah to rearm. Today it has as many as three times the number of missiles it had before the war in 2006.

Livni initially ran for the Knesset as a Likud member, and then jumped to Sharon’s Kadima party where she strongly supported the ill-fated withdrawal from Gaza. Next she dumped Kadima and formed her own party, Hatnua which joined Netanyahu’s coalition on the condition that she be Justice Minister. She admits (in a less funny moment of the TV interview) that she has done her best in that position to sabotage the legislative efforts of the more right-leaning members of the ruling party.

Livni presided over the fruitless negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the present government, and favors a “peace” agreement with the PA, despite the fact that a withdrawal from the territories would be a strategic disaster. She is one of the favorite Israeli politicians of the Obama Administration and of New York Times op-ed writers, and we can expect that they will do what they can to help her and Herzog defeat Netanyahu in the March elections.

Her cynicism and desire to obtain power no matter what is remarkable, even for an Israeli politician. And her arrogance and narcissism come through loud and clear in the TV interview. That program — the hosts, the audience, and most of all Livni — represent what is to me an ugly side of Israel. The cynical, dishonest and defeatist side.

So here’s an antidote: Naftali Bennett. This is a long video (in English), but if you don’t know Bennett it’s worth your time.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

The ideological disaster of Oslo

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal
Yasser Arafat waves the second Oslo agreement as Shimon Peres looks on

Yasser Arafat waves the second Oslo agreement as Shimon Peres looks on

A lot of you liked yesterday’s post, probably because you have had more than enough of the dangerous nonsense that has become the conventional wisdom about Israel in the West. Western politicians and journalists have adopted the Arab narrative, which portrays Israel as the cause of its conflicts and its creation as a kind of original sin. Needless to say, the only acceptable ‘cure’ is to slice up and emasculate Israel so that it can more easily be gobbled up.

It’s easy to say that they are bribed and blackmailed by our enemies, afraid of or pandering to their Muslim populations, or indoctrinated by left-wing academics. All of these things are true, but there is another reason that so many in Europe and the US have adopted an ahistorical, counterfactual and immoral story as gospel.

To a great extent Israel is responsible for subverting its own narrative, and I think we can point to a specific event that marked a turning point.

On September 13, 1993, PM Rabin signed the “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements” along with Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton, the so-called ‘Oslo I‘ agreement. I have argued that this was the single greatest mistake — rising to the level of criminal negligence —  ever made by any Israeli government.

From a strategic point of view, it elevated the moribund PLO from an irrelevant terrorist organization to a pseudo-government, with territory, an army, and the legitimacy to receive what turned out to be a massive subsidy (including weapons and training for its army) from the West. It enabled the exiled gunmen of the PLO who were sitting isolated in Tunis to move into the heart of the land of Israel, where they could, and did, strike at its Jewish residents.

The Oslo accord led directly to numerous terror attacks, culminating in the Second Intifada, during which more than a thousand Israeli Jews were murdered by Palestinian Arab terrorists. The wave of bloody murder happening right now can be blamed on the ‘educational system’ and incitement begun by Arafat and continued by his successor, Mahmoud Abbas.

Someone recently said to me “true, but we had to try.” I disagree: I called it ‘criminal negligence’ because by 1993 we knew precisely who and what Yasser Arafat and the PLO were. If ever there was a case of what lawyers call the “should have known standard,” this was it.

(Let me just note that I don’t place all, or even most, of the blame on Rabin. He was both blindsided by the ‘architects of Oslo’, Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres, and pressured by Clinton. But this is another post).

What is also important and often ignored is the psychological and ideological damage done by Oslo. It comprised no less than the adoption of the false Arab narrative by Israel.

The preamble to the agreement reads as follows:

The Government of the State of Israel and the P.L.O. team (in the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the Middle East Peace Conference) (the “Palestinian Delegation”), representing the Palestinian people, agree that it is time to put an end to decades of confrontation and conflict, recognize their mutual legitimate and political rights, and strive to live in peaceful coexistence and mutual dignity and security and achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process…

In other words, there is a “Palestinian people” whose representative is the PLO and they have “legitimate and political rights.” They are a people who have been denied their rights (by Israel), and they deserve redress.

Note that this doesn’t just mean that Arabs have human rights, which is true but trivial. It doesn’t mean that Arabs living under Israeli rule should have civil rights, which is more significant, but still reasonable. It means that the ‘Palestinians’, as a people, have political rights in the land of Israel.

In one swoop, we have given up the principles of the Mandate, which held the land in trust for the national home of the Jewish people and no other. We have accepted the self-definition of the Palestinian Arabs as a people with a claim on the land, which needs to be resolved in a ‘just’ manner. They are no longer Arabs (many of whom were recent immigrants from Syria or Egypt) who happened to live in the area in 1948, but a distinct people with a right to self-determination equal to ours.

Of course their self-determination has been defined (by them) as being incompatible with ours, and therefore the argument is made that the creation of Israel was an unjust act.

The academic post-colonialists go further and define the Palestinians as a colonized people, which implies that they get to kill us in pursuit of their ‘legitimate rights’ and we don’t get to defend ourselves.

And since 1993 we have gone along with most of this! Even our Likud government holds that there should be a “two-state solution,” albeit with various caveats intended to keep it from destroying Israel.

All, however, is not lost. The PLO has violated the Oslo accords in multiple ways, including by terrorism, incitement, failure to educate for peace, and — in a fundamental way — by unilaterally seeking recognition from the UN without making an agreement with Israel. In this way they expect to get everything they want without giving anything in return.

This makes it possible for Israel to declare that the Oslo agreements are null and void. But at the same time, it should issue a declaration of principles which contradicts the ideological misconceptions of Oslo. It should re-enunciate the principles embodied in the Mandate, and make clear that we do not recognize a ‘Palestinian’ nationality with a right of self-determination in the land of Israel.

This doesn’t mean that Israel should annex all of Judea and Samaria. It doesn’t preclude ceding some land to Jordan, for example, or creating autonomous Arab regions.

But it does mean that Israel is not obligated to allow the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian terror state on its eastern border.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Information war, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 1 Comment

To whom it may concern

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal

jerusalem_city

To whom it may concern in Europe and the US:

We are tired of hearing that withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will bring peace. We know and you know that it would bring another Gaza. So stop saying it.

We are tired of hearing that land beyond the Green Line is ‘Palestinian land’. The Green Line is simply an armistice line that has no political significance. You know this too.

We are tired of hearing about the “Palestinian people.” They are no different from the Arabs of Syria or Egypt, from which most of their ancestors migrated in the last 150 years or so. There is no Palestinian language or religion, and until very recently they considered themselves simply ‘Arabs’. Their culture is almost entirely defined by their opposition to the Jewish state.

We are tired of hearing that “the Palestinians deserve a state.” We are indigenous here, not they, and their behavior entitles them more to a trial at The Hague than to a state. And they certainly don’t deserve our state, which is the only state they want.

We are tired of hearing about ‘The Occupation’. As Naftali Bennett said the other day, you can’t be an occupier in your own land.

We are tired of hearing that “settlements are illegal under international law.” They aren’t.

We are tired of hearing that “settlement construction is an obstacle to peace.” Arab rejectionism and terrorism is the reason there isn’t peace. By the way, we are pro-peace. We are just not pro-suicide.

We are tired of hearing about the 5 million (or whatever ridiculous number there are alleged to be) ‘Palestinian refugees’ or the ‘Palestinian diaspora’. There were about 700,000 Arabs that left their homes in 1948, mostly of their own volition, more or less at the same time as the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries. We resettled ours — resettle yours.

We are tired of hearing anything from anyone associated with the UN. The UN is a parasitic and criminal enterprise dominated by our mortal enemies.

We are tired of stupid post-colonialist rhetoric. We aren’t ‘colonists’ and Arabs don’t have the right to murder us in the name of ‘resistance’. Talking this way reveals you as moral imbeciles.

You can’t recognize a state that has no borders, no single government, and no economy.

We know we can’t depend on any kind of security guarantee from anyone except the IDF. So stop being insulted because we don’t trust you. And don’t ask us to give up any nuclear weapons we might or might not have.

We know that the left-wing parties in Israel are bankrupt of ideas. We aren’t going to vote for them, no matter how much you would like us to. So don’t bother trying to influence our election.

Don’t believe what you read in Ha’aretz.

Jerusalem, undivided, is the capital of the state of Israel. Get used to it, because you can’t change it.

Sincerely,

Ordinary Israelis

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Europe and Israel, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, The UN, US-Israel Relations | 4 Comments

When Jew-hatred comes to America

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Victor Rosenthal

At the end of the 19th century, Theodore Herzl and Max Nordau realized that Jews had no future in Europe. They understood that enlightenment and emancipation hadn’t put an end to Jew-hatred, and progressive politics wouldn’t either. Europe, they saw, gave the Jewish people two options: total assimilation or death (and later history showed that even assimilation wouldn’t save them).

The catastrophe that actually befell the Jews of Europe was more severe than Herzl had imagined in his worst nightmares. The Jewish state that he inspired ultimately came to be, as he accurately predicted, but unfortunately it happened too late to save most of the European Jews.

You can blame the British or the Arabs, and they certainly did their best to hold it back, but the main reason the state was not declared until 1948 was that so many Jews were unsure, diffident, afraid of provoking more Jew-hatred, or of the opinion that “something could be worked out” with the gentile world. For example, the influential British Jew Edwin Samuel Montagu, opposed the Balfour Declaration and was responsible for weakening its language.

American Jews have had an ambiguous relationship with Zionism. The Reform Movement was anti-Zionist from its beginnings until the 1930s (and even today their position — although they claim to be “pro-Israel” — is, in my opinion, not constructive). But liberal American Jews since 1945 are convinced that their position is secure and that they don’t need the protection of a foreign country that seems, well, foreign, to them and that is at odds with their popular president.

Now it appears that the Jews of Europe (this time there are fewer of them) are in trouble again.  I don’t think we can entirely blame the Muslims, either. Just as Hitler would not have been able to carry out his program without the cooperation of large segments of the non-Nazi European population, so today European Jew-hatred is not confined to Muslim immigrants, although they may be responsible for its most violent manifestations.

We can divide Jew-hatred into two kinds: that of the mob, which is violent and infused with crudely false beliefs, and that of the elites, which is more sophisticated and better hidden. While they would never explicitly encourage the mob, the elites see its anti-Jewish behavior as a result of Jewish actions and (especially today) the actions and policies of the Jewish nation-state. They believe that they can understand Arab and Muslim violence against Jews because, after all, everyone knows that Israel is viciously oppressing the “powerless, indigenous Palestinian people.” So mob behavior tends to be tolerated, or at least not effectively suppressed.

It’s important to note that official statistics about “anti-Semitism” — such as ADL surveys — are biased against Jew-hatred that expresses itself primarily as hatred of the Jewish state. Young people especially are very sensitized to avoid expressions of traditional prejudice against individual Jews, and will not respond to poll questions designed to elicit such attitudes. Studies of attitudes toward Israel, on the other hand, show increasing degrees of irrational hatred.

However, the fact that Jew-hatred is expressed primarily as Israel-hatred does not imply that antipathy to individual Jews doesn’t exist. It is simply that the verbal expression — or even self-awareness — of these feelings has become taboo. So although it is often said that traditional Jew-hatred has mutated into Israel-hatred, “the new antisemitism,” I think it’s more correct to say that we express the same ugly impulses differently.

A 2009 study confirms the hidden nature of much anti-Jewish feeling, due to the social opprobrium associated with admitting bias. It showed as well that Jew-hatred and opposition to Israel are closely related, with an increase in one causing an increase in the other. Although clearly it is possible to be opposed to Israel without hating Jews, the extreme and irrational nature of the Israel-hatred prevalent on the American Left implies that this is unlikely to be the case.

Many diseases have incubation periods during which a pathogen reproduces inside particular organs without causing noticeable symptoms, and then suddenly bursts out as a systemic infection with tragic consequences for the patient. In America today, the virus of Jew-hatred is incubating in the universities, where a cadre of activists — including many teachers — employ powerful opinion molding techniques, especially including academic, social and physical intimidation, to indoctrinate students with a worldview in which Israel and Zionists play the role of the devil.

In American universities today, the mob rules, with the direct support of the academic elites. Administrators often behave with striking cowardice, even while their cherished ideals of free inquiry, open debate and respect for others are trampled.

A leader of the anti-Israel campaign is “Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP),” founded at Berkeley in 2001, coinciding with the beginning of the Second Intifada. According to Wikipedia, there were more than 80 chapters by 2010. Activism against Israel existed before that, but SJP has combined a Middle-Eastern disdain for truth and democratic norms with Berkeley-style confrontational politics. Along with the almost universal anti-Israel slant in the center-left media, it’s been remarkably effective at creating a generation of young people who vehemently oppose the continued existence of a Jewish state. These students will soon become the opinion-leaders, politicians, bureaucrats and executives of America.

Somewhat arbitrarily, I take 2001 as the start of the incubation period of the Jew-hatred virus. And I think that in the last few years, we’ve seen the beginning of the breakout phase. One indication is the way anti-Jewish and anti-Israel themes appear in almost every protest movement or demonstration, like the ‘Occupy’ movement and now even the protests against alleged police racism that began in Ferguson, Missouri.

Does this suggest that the position of American Jews will become more precarious in the near future, like that of European Jews? I think the answer is yes — especially if the social and economic decline that characterizes the US in recent decades continues, and violent expressions of Jew-hatred become more common, as they have in Europe. This means that American Jews, like the Europeans of the 1890s and today, will soon find themselves considering possible solutions to the “Jewish Question.”

Some will certainly take the tack of assimilation. This seems to be the direction that will appeal to liberal Jews. But will they be prepared to totally discard all vestiges of Jewish identity? And even if they do, will it protect them against discrimination (or worse)?

Will some of them move in the direction of an increased Zionism, either to actually consider aliyah or simply to align themselves with the Jewish state? Or will they, like Lord Montagu, become even more anti-Zionist in the (mistaken) opinion that this will make them immune to the depredations of the Jew-haters?

Tune in again in 5-10 years to find out.

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