The Post-American Age and Israel

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

The American debacle in Afghanistan is bad for America, and bad for Europe. The jihadists of the Middle East have received a huge gift of military equipment. They may even receive “humanitarian aid” from the US, in return for releasing some of the Americans still in Afghanistan. The Americans may call it aid, but everyone knows it is ransom for the release of hostages.

Psychologically, this is a massive boost to Islamic militants everywhere. Their belief that Allah is on their side has been confirmed. While I am probably too old to see them marching into the Vatican, unless present trends are reversed, my children probably will. Maybe they will find our Menorah, the one that Titus looted from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

America’s defeat is also bad for Israel, and not just because of the American-made arms that the Taliban is selling to Iran and to every swaggering group of savages who believe they have a divine mandate to loot and rape. Even before the disaster in Afghanistan, the forces of jihad here have been feeling the wind of history at their backs, and have become drunk with their power to make demands and have them met by a government which is always willing to choose, as Churchill said, dishonor over war – and which, like Britain under Chamberlain, got war anyway.

So when six murderous terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Fatah organizations escaped from an Israeli prison on Monday, their parent organizations threatened violence. Hamas, apparently feeling left out, also made threats of escalation and launched incendiary balloons across the border. The tension has been growing for the past few weeks, as Hamas makes demands for loosening of restrictions on the entry of building materials and financial aid from Qatar, and Israel tries vainly to satisfy them with concessions.

Recently, Israel agreed to “loan” the Palestinian Authority about $150 million, in order to “strengthen the PA against Hamas.” This is a strange “loan:” the source of the money is about $186 million of funds that were collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, for Palestinian taxes on imports that pass through Israeli ports. Israel, however, withheld the money from the PA because of an Israeli law that forbids transferring money as long as it is used to pay stipends to imprisoned terrorists or the families of “martyrs.” The Palestinians have refused to stop paying their heroes, so the transfer is called a “loan” in order to bypass the law. Wrap your head around that.

I know, it’s complicated. There is the PIJ, there is Hamas, and there is the Fatah-dominated PLO which in effect constitutes the PA. But here’s a rule to make it simpler: they are all waging jihad (even Fatah, which is officially secular), they are all deploying terrorists against us, and they are all dedicated to the idea that if they kill enough Jews the rest of us will pick up and go back to Poland, or wherever they believe we come from.

The new government is not quite as dysfunctional as the preceding one, but because of the inclusion of left-wing parties and even an Arab Islamist party – that’s right, a party whose ideology is that Israel should be ruled according to the principles of Islamic sharia is part of Israel’s governing coalition – it seems to be unable to deal with the escalating chutzpah of its Palestinian enemies.

The Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is someone with a solid right-wing ideology, at least he has always expressed himself as such, but I believe that he is not able to call the shots in a government whose majority is center-left and left. Incidentally, and I know I will get a lot of objections to this, I think he is a courageous person who has sacrificed his political career – I doubt that his party will even get into the Knesset in the next election – to extricate the country from an endless series of elections and caretaker governments. The present situation is not good, but it was worse before. For this, I am grateful to him.

But now is not the time for concessions. America is leaving the Middle East, starting with Obama’s tacit decision to allow Iran to get nuclear weapons (as long as the breakout happens after his presidency), continuing through his inaction when Bashar al-Assad crossed his “red line” by using chemical weapons, and now being concluded by the empty suit in the White House. It should be clear to every American ally in the region, especially Israel, that it is impossible to count on support from America. Of course Israel doesn’t need American troops to fight for it, or even military advisors. But political developments in America make it uncertain if it will continue to support Israel diplomatically, with military aid, or even by selling her weapons for cash.

I don’t want to be even more negative than I have to be, but there is a fundamental cultural instability in America that seems to be becoming more intense with time. I suspect that Americans will soon be concerned more with their own personal security, even their physical safety, than anything else. Maybe it looks worse from here than it is, but I visualize it as an engine revved far beyond its redline, and holding there. At any moment it will fly apart.

We are living at a major historical inflection point, with America withdrawing her influence everywhere. Unfortunately the beneficiaries of this are Iran and the Islamists of all stripes, as well as the totalitarian Chinese Communist party, nuclear-armed Pakistan and North Korea, and others.

The end of the Roman Empire was followed by the Dark Ages, which aren’t called that for nothing. It’s going to be hard for everyone.

Posted in American politics, Terrorism, The Future, US-Israel Relations | 5 Comments

Running from Afghanistan

Posted on September 5, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

America has suffered a defeat of military and psychic proportions that have yet to be measured.

I once thought that future historians would be likely to use 9/11 as the date that marked the end of the American era, the one that started with the end of the Second World War and represented the flowering of one of the greatest national colossi in history, the nation and time that gave us (for good or ill) atomic energy, men on the moon, and the most incredible consumer culture ever seen.

But now I think that the date they will use will be 31 August 2021, the day a senile man who was never more than an empty suit sustained by narcissism at his best (and today he is definitely not at his best), placed America’s tail between her legs and told her to run.

It’s hard to list all of the diplomatic consequences of the failure (but see this analysis by military historian Victor Davis Hanson).

After 9/11, the jihadists pretended to have won a great victory, but they were actually scared to death. America’s military machine was the most powerful in the world, and President Bush promised to hunt down the perpetrators, warning that he would “…make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” They had yanked on the tail of a dragon that was now turning its smoking head in their direction.

Or so they thought. In the immediate aftermath, while “Ground Zero,” the site of the World Trade Center was still smoking, American and British special forces chased Osama bin Laden into the caves at Tora Bora. But Bush’s people made a serious tactical error: rather than risk the casualties that they feared would ensue from a direct assault by allied operators, they depended on local Afghan allies for the pursuit, and on Pakistan to seal its border. Bin Laden escaped; he would live almost another ten years until Navy Seals caught up with him in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

While the US was able to remove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, it was never able to defeat them. The war dragged on to become the longest war in American history, five months longer than the Vietnam war. In the meantime, the US  invaded Iraq for no clear reason, and after defeating the supposedly fearsome Iraqi army in short order, managed to lose 4,500 men (32,000 were wounded, many seriously) over almost 9 years of insurgency. The number of Iraqi civilians killed was enormous; estimates vary from about 110,000 upward. The cost of the war and the occupation that followed has been estimated as close to $2 trillion! It didn’t bankrupt the nation, but it hollowed it out, burdening it with new debt, a large chunk of which is held by China.

The ultimate result of the war in Iraq was an Iranian foothold there by way of Shia militias that it controls. Biden plans a final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq as well, and at that point it will become  a full-fledged Iranian satellite. From Israel’s point of view, Iranian control of Iraq will tighten the ring of rockets and drones surrounding her – including high-precision missiles that can hit critical points in Israel, such as airfields, military bases, strategic roads, electrical generating plants, refineries, and so on. This is a critical danger, no less so than a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Iranian regime.

I suspect American analysts are coming out of the numbness brought about by the sudden collapse in Afghanistan, and realize the danger their nation is in. They must realize that at some point the various terrorist groups will begin to absorb and master at least some of the sophisticated weapons and equipment that is at their disposal. It will take a bit longer for them to learn to fly the aircraft than it did for them to put on American uniforms – it was telling that this was the first thing they did, a primitive way to absorb the power of their defeated adversaries – but they won’t have any trouble driving the vehicles and using the hundreds of thousands of assault rifles that are now in their possession. Many of these weapons will find their way to terrorist groups that are probably making plans at this very moment to attack the American homeland in order to demonstrate the superiority of Islam to the decadent Crusaders. Thousands of terrorists were imprisoned at Bagram who are now free, in case there is a shortage of personnel. And I doubt that Europe or Israel will be spared either.

It’s too late to stop them. The Taliban and their ilk are not afraid of the Americans any more. They believe that they are on a roll, a historic comeback for the forces of Islam after their defeat at the gates of Vienna – on 11 September (!) 1683.

What compounds this disaster is that today America is internally divided, politically and culturally. Its intelligentsia are suffering from the collective insanity of postmodernism, obsessed by issues around race and gender; and now, like Covid-19, this virus has escaped from the academic laboratory and is infecting the rest of the educational system, the media, the business community, and even the military. Now is not the best time to deal with terrorism. But America will have to.

Posted in American politics, American society, War | 3 Comments

Fight, damn it!

Posted on September 2, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Losses are part of war. There’s no escaping it. The tragedy is immense. A person has precisely one chance at life, to love, to have children, to learn, to have a profession, to do all the things that a person aspires to do, and to have it all taken away when it has barely begun is catastrophic.

Whenever a life is lost, especially a young life, families and friends grieve painfully. In Israel, which has been at war without a break since her establishment in 1948, there is a phenomenon of national grief, which I haven’t seen elsewhere. Funerals of soldiers, police, and terror victims are sometimes attended by thousands of people, many of whom did not know the deceased. The media devote much time and space to each case. Memorial day in Israel is full of ceremonies, all across the country, to remember and honor the fallen.

Jewish Israelis (with some exceptions) understand that they have an obligation to pay a price for the existence of the state, and that part of that price is that some of our children will lose their lives. Nothing demonstrates more conclusively how important the state is to the Jewish people.

So you can imagine the anger when a young life ends because somebody in authority was incompetent or lazy. War is war and soldiers die, but one of the things a good military organization does is analyze its defeats and failures, learn lessons from them, and make changes so that future outcomes will be better. When a preventable casualty occurs, it is because someone failed to do their job.

There are micro- and macro-failures. For example, if a soldier dies because his weapon wasn’t properly maintained, that is a micro-failure. If many lives are lost because an enemy that could be defeated is allowed to continue to re-arm, over and over, and the result is an unnecessary war, that is a macro-failure. They are both the result of someone not doing their job.

The tragic death of Border Police 1st Sgt. Barel Hadaria Shmueli, z”l, traumatized the entire nation, because it was unnecessary, a combination of micro- and macro-failures. Shmueli, a sniper, was placed at a slit in a wall that forms part of the border between Israel and Gaza. The slit was improperly located (too low) and inadequately surveilled by cameras on the Gaza side. The location was known to be dangerous. Sniper weapons are carefully adjusted to fit the individual, and for some reason he was not using his personal weapon. It jammed several times at critical moments. There is a buffer zone along the border that is supposed to be clear of Arab “demonstrators” (i.e., Hamas fighters and human shields), and somehow a number of them were allowed to enter it and come up against the wall, where they could not be seen by the defenders. They attempted to grab Shmueli’s weapon from outside, and in the struggle one of them placed a pistol up to the slit and fired; the bullet struck Shmueli’s head (information from a Hebrew article in Israel Hayom, 1 September).

These are some of the micro-failures, which the IDF promises to deal with. There is also an ongoing macro-failure.

Consider the overall situation. The “demonstrations” orchestrated by Hamas and other terrorist factions in Gaza are not demonstrations; they are attempted human wave attacks against Israel’s border. IDF Soldiers and Border Police defend it; they try to use non-lethal weapons to control the crowds, as well as “less-than lethal” live fire from .22 caliber Ruger rifles, and more deadly weapons if necessary to prevent a breach of the border. Such a breach could result in a disastrous terrorist attack against the numerous small communities in the area.

Hamas and its allied factions, who are supported and financed by Israel’s enemies in Iran, Turkey, and Qatar, are constantly working on ways to attack us. They dig tunnels, release incendiary balloons, stage “demonstrations” to penetrate our border, produce and launch rockets, try to land terrorists on the beaches north of Gaza, shoot antitank missiles at vehicles on our roads, teach their kindergarteners to hate us (so this will go on forever), and more. They are creative and proactive.

On the other hand, the IDF – which has the power to scrape the entire 365 km2 of Gaza into the sea – does not even hunt down the few dozen top leaders of Hamas and other factions and kill them. When rockets are fired at random into Israel’s cities in the hope of creating mass casualties, we prefer to intercept the rockets, and only shoot back when absolutely necessary, and with great care to kill as few people as possible. When incendiary balloons burn hundreds of acres of cultivated lands and nature preserves, the Air Force bombs empty enemy installations. And when a young soldier is killed protecting the border, the IDF prefers to improve procedures and shore up the border – that is, to deal only with the micro-failures.

It’s almost as if we are afraid to fight back, because then we might make them mad. We are satisfied to merely push them away. God forbid that we should hurt somebody.

But it’s far, far worse than just that. Yesterday, the day Sgt. Barel Shmueli was buried, Israel allowed “dozens of truckloads” of building materials into Gaza for the first time since the last mini-war. Today the government announced further loosening of restrictions. If I weren’t too embarrassed by the idea, I might say we are paying them for “protection.” Nice border you have there, we wouldn’t want it to experience a violent “demonstration.”

I have heard the argument that if we did respond more aggressively, then our soldiers and leaders would have to face charges in the International Criminal Court. Perhaps – but what came first? Maybe we have trained the world to think that attacks on Jews are the normal order of things, and Jewish self-defense is the true crime. Somehow the Russians and the Iranians don’t seem to worry about the ICC. Why do we?

Sgt. Shmueli gave his life fighting for the State of Israel. Why doesn’t the State of Israel want to fight for herself?

Posted in War | 6 Comments

Just Another Terrorist

Posted on August 29, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

I remember well the day in early June of 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was murdered. I was a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching several courses while supposedly working on a dissertation that I never wrote. I awoke in the morning to the news that he had been shot in California, shortly after the primary victory that instantly established him as, in his unintentionally ironic words, “a viable candidate” for the presidency.

I went to my classes in the morning. The students were stunned. I said, stupidly, that I thought he would pull through. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started teaching my logic class. Some of the students left, and nobody, including me, paid attention to the material.

Counterfactual speculation in history has a deservedly bad reputation. It’s hard to predict how things would have been different if Kennedy had lived to run, and – quite likely – to be elected President. Would he have withdrawn the US from Vietnam more quickly, or, alternatively, presided over a military victory? Would he have improved race relations in the country? Would he have been quicker than Richard Nixon to help Israel in 1973? He was a great supporter of Israel, and indeed that was the motive of the man convicted of murdering him, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan.

Sirhan is a Christian Arab who was born in Jerusalem. In 1948, his family moved from the western to the eastern part, “for fear of what life would be like under Jewish rule.” In 1956, when he was 12, they moved to the US. Immediately after the murder, he claimed that he had done it because of Kennedy’s pro-Israel sympathies:

Sirhan told his captors that he had made the decision to kill Kennedy only three weeks earlier. On the radio, he had heard a speech delivered by the candidate during a visit to a synagogue, in which Kennedy promised to arm Israel with dozens of warplanes, calling it the lesson he’d learned from the Six-Day War a year earlier …

Sirhan explained that the date of the assassination was not accidental, that he had chosen it because it was the first anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War.

Later he reinforced his earlier statement:

“To me he [Kennedy] was my hero, he was my champion,” Sirhan told British journalist David Frost during an interview at the state prison in Soledad, California, in 1989, one of only two television interviews he has given over the years. “He was the protector of the downtrodden and the disadvantaged, and I felt that I was one [of those]. And to have him say that he was going to send 50 Phantom jets to Israel to deliver nothing but death and destruction on my countrymen, that seemed as though it were a betrayal, and it was sad for me to accept and it was hard for me to accept.”

At the time, Sirhan was identified in the American media as a “Jordanian.” A pastor that knew his mother called him a “Jordanian nationalist” and that was how he was described by the LA Times. Today he is more likely to be identified as a “Palestinian,” driven to do what he did by the horrors of the nakba and “the occupation” (only one year old at the time), but I suspect the earlier conception is closer to the truth. Either way, it is irrelevant. He is just another violent Arab terrorist. Unfortunately we know the type well. A nobody who wants to become somebody by an act of outrage that will give him a place as a hero of his people.

Sirhan was convicted and was sentenced to death. But in 1972, California’s Supreme Court declared the death penalty “cruel and unusual punishment” and all death row prisoners including Sirhan were re-sentenced to life imprisonment. Capital punishment was re-instituted a few months later by a constitutional amendment, but death sentences were not re-imposed.

Interestingly, there are somewhat credible arguments that can be made for the presence of a second shooter, and even that the fatal bullet came from that shooter’s gun and not Sirhan’s. Kennedy certainly had enemies other than Jordanian/Palestinian nationalists, having led a take-no-prisoners war against organized crime in the early 60s. But legally and morally it doesn’t matter: Sirhan deliberately and with premeditation opened fire on Kennedy and is guilty of murder regardless of whose bullet killed him.

This week, the California parole board voted to recommend his release, on the condition that he join an alcohol abuse program and get therapy. The parole board has up to 120 days to review the decision, and then the governor, Gavin Newsom, will have to approve it. Since Sirhan never obtained US citizenship, he could be deported to Jordan (where he would join Ahlam Tamimi as a terrorist celebrity). Would the Palestinian Authority pay him the usual stipend for imprisoned terrorists? Given his long prison term, the retroactive payment would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Robert F. Kennedy was intensely anti-communist – he served as an assistant counsel to the McCarthy committee in 1953 – and outspokenly pro-Israel, characteristics that would not endear him to today’s American Left. On the other hand, he was very popular in the black community during the 1960s because of his actions on behalf of racial justice as Attorney General and advisor to his brother, President John F. Kennedy. He was loved by liberal students, who believed that he would quickly end the Vietnam war.

Kennedy, in fact, was precisely the opposite of today’s left, with its self-imposed ideological straitjacket. Tough and pragmatic, but also (perhaps a bit later on) compassionate toward those he saw as disadvantaged. It’s tragic that he was assassinated before he had realized his potential as a leader. The contrast between his greatness and the smallness of his despicable murderer is palpable.

Which makes me wonder: how will the American Left relate to Sirhan’s release, if it occurs. Will Rashida Tlaib praise him as a hero of the Palestinian Cause? How will BLM relate to the murderer of the man who probably did more to end Jim Crow in the South than any other white man?

For my part, I hope the parole board or the governor will come to their senses and keep him locked up, until he rots.

Posted in American politics, American society | 2 Comments

Bennett Should Have Stayed Home

Posted on August 26, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Israel’s PM, Naftali Bennett, is already in the US and will be meeting with US President Biden on Thursday.

There are some who think that Bennett should have stayed home. While it is unlikely that the administration can be convinced to turn aside from its path of appeasement toward Iran, it is expected to pressure Bennett on several other issues, like construction in Judea/Samaria, the re-opening of the American consulate in eastern Jerusalem, and who knows what else.

The issue of the consulate is particularly painful. Before Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it served as the de facto US Embassy to the “State of Palestine.” A country locates its embassy in the capital of the state that it serves, and the significance of an embassy to Palestine located in Jerusalem, is that Jerusalem is the Palestinian capital. Trump – or his Ambassador to Israel, David M. Friedman – realized this and closed the consulate, transferring its functions to the new US Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. Reopening the consulate and resuming its function as a mission to the Palestinians, in effect walks back Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and at the very least supports the division of Jerusalem into Israeli and Palestinian sovereignties.

The Biden Administration also considers any Israeli construction east of the Green Line as undesirable, because it prejudices the possibility of obtaining a “two-state solution,” that is, an Israeli withdrawal from territories it gained control of in 1967. Somehow there is less excitement when Arabs illegally build in Area C, where Israel has full civil control, according to the Oslo Accords, which still have the force of international law. Biden has already restarted aid to the Palestinians that Trump cut off due to policies such as anti-Jewish indoctrination in Gazan and Palestinian Authority schools, and payments to convicted terrorists or the families of “martyrs.”

After the realism of the Trump Administration, it feels like swimming underwater to hear the familiar platitudes about “two-states, living side by side in peace” coming from Biden’s officials. Today there are only two kinds of people who support an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria: those who are entirely disconnected from reality, as it has unfolded in the past century (and particularly in the past three decades), and those who want Israel to be replaced by an Arab state, and see the reversal of 1967 as a step on the way. Biden himself, to the extent that he thinks about anything at all, is in the former category; but many administration officials fall into the latter one.

Biden and the Democrats are in big trouble now, because the debacle in Afghanistan has made it impossible to maintain the fiction of a competent government and chief executive. Even some of the formerly sycophantic media are beginning to sound discordant notes. The fact that the mighty US was (and apparently still is) unable to even rescue its citizens – not to mention the thousands of Afghans who had worked for it and whom are already being targeted by the Taliban – sends a signal of weakness and even cowardice, which Biden only made worse by unconvincingly blaming Trump and the Afghan army.

China has already made propaganda hay out of the situation, warning Taiwanese that American support can’t be depended upon. And Islamic terrorists of all stripes have been cheering loudly.

Biden’s people will be looking for a foreign-policy achievement to help make Americans and others forget the humiliation, especially one that will send a message of strength and control. How better to get one than to bully Israel, which – unlike the Taliban – is unlikely to shoot back?

In an interview this week with the NY Times, PM Bennett made it clear that his top priority is to get the US to work together with Israel and its Sunni allies to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. He also insisted that he would defend construction policies in Judea/Samaria (although he has already preemptively cut building plans to avoid irritating Biden) and that he is not interested in any new Palestinian peace initiatives.

Perhaps Bennett thinks that if he throws Biden a news-cycle lifeline, Biden will be grateful enough to give him something in return. Bennett is very unpopular these days in Israel – the Right thinks he has sold out to the Left, and the Left dislikes him for his right-wing ideology. Some crumbs from Biden’s table might be politically useful to him.

So I’m sure Bennett will return brimming with accomplishment over some encouraging words about Iran that he will have received; but the possibility that there will be any substantive change in US policy is negligible, given the cast of characters in the American administration. If, as I suspect, the administration is strongly influenced by the circle around former president Obama, that is even more reason to think that Israeli concerns will not affect American Iran policy.

The phrase for “negotiations” in Hebrew is literally translatable as “give and take.” But when one side holds all the cards, there is mostly give and very little take. Anything that Bennett does get from the meeting, even if it is only insubstantial promises, he will pay for, probably in concessions regarding the Palestinians.

There are plenty of crises in Israel right now – for example, hospitals are claiming to be out of money and refusing to take more Corona patients – that could serve as legitimate reasons to stay home. Bennett should have picked one of them and not gone to America.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, American politics, Iran, Israeli Politics, US-Israel Relations | 5 Comments

A Very Slender Reed

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

“The President – whoever he is – has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job.” – Harry S. Truman

The sound that you hear is the crumbling of a great nation. A precipitous fall, not the slow fade out of the Roman Empire, or the much faster dissolution of the British one, but something more akin to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Or the fall of the two towers on 9/11, when the descent began in earnest.

“Precipitous” certainly describes the American retreat from Afghanistan, which was carried out in the middle of the night and without even ensuring the safe exit of all American citizens there, not to mention the thousands of Afghans that had worked with them as interpreters, drivers, mechanics, and so on, who will certainly face vicious retaliation by the Taliban who now control the country. Tens of thousands of weapons, thousands of vehicles, and several hundred aircraft have also fallen into Taliban hands.

I write often about the Israel’s cognitive war with her enemies, which I believe is as important to the ultimate outcome of her struggle to exist as her periodic kinetic battles, but clearly America too is under attack in this realm. The information warriors of Teheran, Beijing, and Moscow – as well as al Qaeda and Hezbollah – have already made use of the catastrophe. I expect that the incidence of terrorist attacks against Americans and even America herself will rise sharply in the near future, encouraged by what they are being told (I think correctly) is an indication of the suicidal weakness of her leadership. And what will those who depend on the US, in Taipei, Seoul, Amman, Tokyo, and – yes – Jerusalem  think?

President Biden has blamed his predecessor, but regardless of any commitment made by Trump, the manner of the withdrawal was up to this administration. They screwed up beyond belief, and Biden – personally – bears responsibility. President Truman famously had a sign on his desk stating “The Buck Stops Here.” Biden, regrettably, is an empty shell, propped up by unknown elements who are making critical decisions but taking no responsibility for them. Today, there is no place for the buck to stop. The full dimensions of the catastrophe of the election of a man who suffers from dementia (and who was never more than a mediocrity before) to the highest office in the land are still not known, but this fiasco is a harbinger of worse to come.

I’m not an expert on the military aspects of the US involvement in Afghanistan. But if I had to say when things began to go wrong, I would point to the battle at Tora Bora in December of 2001, when excessive dependence on Afghani and Pakistani “allies” allowed Osama bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. The dash into Afghanistan to capture bin Laden was the right thing to do, and the miscalculation of what was necessary to do it was tragic. Soon after, the processes that would lead to the disaster that is unfolding now became apparent. The unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003 was massively expensive and increased America’s foreign debt dangerously. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed and 32,000 wounded, many seriously (the numbers of Iraqi casualties are in dispute, but far greater). The war also greatly increased the influence of the Iranian and Syrian regimes in the region.

At the same time, the psychological and spiritual decline of the US was accelerated by the wars and the financial panic of 2008. While President Bush’s heart was in the right place, his administration displayed a lack of competence in dealing with both foreign and domestic affairs. President Obama was also incompetent, but in addition held the view, now popular on the Left, that America was fundamentally defective in the way it treated its minorities and in its actions in the world (Newt Gingrich called him “the first anti-American president”), and needed to be radically changed.

Since the 1970s, when the real income of the American middle and working classes stagnated, the economic situation of the majority of Americans has become progressively worse. The disappearance of so many jobs in manufacturing, mining, and other blue-collar professions, has been painful. In Tony Horwitz’ book “Spying on the South,” the author asks a resident of a depressed East Texas town “what do people do here?” The answer: “oxy and meth.” The 2008 financial panic struck them badly, with many families losing their homes to foreclosure while the financial sector received bailouts.

Obama’s “they cling to guns and religion” comment was salt in their wounds, as was his encouragement of the spread of pathological political correctness from the academy into everyday life. In a surprising, even revolutionary move, in 2016 the Americans whom Obama disparaged elected Donald Trump.

Former President Trump is admittedly a flawed individual. It’s impossible to defend his personal behavior and his dishonesty. But unlike Obama, he had a good sense of who America’s friends and enemies were, and he went ahead helping the former and hurting the latter. Like the 1977 election of Menachem Begin here in Israel, Trump’s victory stunned those who felt themselves entitled to rule. With the media and the increasingly powerful tech companies who control social media, they orchestrated a massive campaign to portray Trump as a racist, a would-be fascist dictator, and a danger to American democracy. Information about corruption close to Democratic candidate Biden was brutally suppressed on social media, while anti-Trump hyperbole reached stratospheric height.

Of course, Trump was defeated, whether the election was stolen (as he insists) or not. But the man that became president was at best an empty suit, and at worst a puppet. And after the disaster of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, everyone knows it, from America’s allies all over the world to her enemies.

There is a lesson for Israel here, too, if we are ready to learn it. It is nothing new; I’ve been saying it for years: America is a very slender reed to lean on. Our survival depends on our own strength.

Posted in American politics, American society, War | 7 Comments

Shiva

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

I am sitting shiva for my daughter Aviva, who has died of Covid. She had a very difficult and unhappy life despite being brilliant and talented; indeed, to a great extent because of that.

I will return to writing next week.

Posted in Uncategorized | 18 Comments

Antisemitism and the Jewish State

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Jews have always been in the minority in their temporary diasporic homes, and so they have usually been at the mercy of antisemites. If at a given time and place they are not actively persecuted, the possibility of persecution always remains, as European and even American Jews are rediscovering today. The commandment to keep one’s suitcase packed is no less apt today than in previous centuries.

Despite the heartwarming (but illusory) feeling of a worldwide solidarity of good people engendered by Yair Lapid’s recent remarks that antisemitism is just a particular form of a much more general collection of religious, ethnic, racial (etc.) hatreds that all those of good will should decry, the pervasiveness of antisemitism over the millennia and its shape-shifting nature show that it is indeed sui generis, unique. And we learned from the Holocaust that the Jewish people ultimately must stand alone against it.

Early Zionists like Moses Hess, Leo Pinsker, A. D. Gordon, and of course Theodor Herzl thought that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty would remove much of the basis for antisemitism, by ending the parasitic economic life of diaspora Jews and restoring to them their self-respect as productive beings. The world had forgotten that the Jews had a homeland and saw them only as a people who belonged nowhere, and who were permanently aliens no matter how long they lived in a particular place. Of course the Jews themselves never forgot, but that only added to their foreign and exotic nature in the eyes of their hosts.

Gordon thought that through the labor involved in the creation of a self-sufficient state, the Jewish people could be fundamentally changed. With the removal of the restrictions of the diaspora, Jews could now engage in truly productive work, especially agriculture, which would create a “new Jew,” a strong, self-reliant one, different from the cringing targets of diasporic pogroms. A Jew that for once knew how to defend himself! The socialist kibbutz movements that actualized Gordon’s program did in fact create such a Jew (although the loss of Jewish tradition and spiritual motivation that followed did not serve the state well. But that’s another story). Once the Jews became an “ordinary” people, with an ordinary homeland containing Jewish police and Jewish prostitutes, it was expected that antisemitism would die out.

Today Israel has plenty of both police and prostitutes. But antisemitism did not die with the reestablishment of a sovereign Jewish state. It simply mutated, and today its virulent “Delta Variant” is the extreme, irrational, obsessive hatred of the Jewish state that I’ve called misoziony. Hand in hand with traditional religious, racial, and political antisemitism, misoziony became a useful tool for Islamic dictatorships and other anti-Western forces. In particular, the Soviet Union invested a great deal of ingenuity employing it as a tool to develop an anti-American (and of course anti-Israel) bloc in the UN. Today, various forms of antisemitism permeate the world.

Imagine that it were possible to assemble Bogdan Chmielnicki, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Louis Farrakhan, Ismail Haniyeh, Jeremy Corbyn, Rashida Tlaib, Lara Friedman, and Gideon Levy in one room. Antisemites all, albeit of greater or lesser import. They would agree about very little except the vileness of the Jewish people. Their followers and their ideas are everywhere; the initial impetus by the KGB in the 1960s and 70s set fire to the latent Jew-hatred whose overt manifestation today is so shocking to those who don’t know the history of the Jewish people.

Most initiatives to “fight antisemitism” rely on some form of educational enterprise. These are doomed to fail, especially “Holocaust education,” which is intended to make people behave better toward Jews by making them feel sorry for them. Psychologically, this has the opposite effect, causing subjects to distance themselves from Jews. Antisemites respond that the Holocaust is either a Jewish lie, or if it did happen, it was because Jewish behavior precipitated it, and they are encouraged by Hitler’s partial success and want to finish the job. They add that Jews are like Nazis. Misozionists insist absurdly that their “criticism of Israel” is different from antisemitism rather than a mutant form of it. They too add that Israelis are like Nazis.

Misozionists will also say that the existence of the state is the whole problem. If Israel didn’t exist, there would be no conflict, no terrorism, no hatred. I point to the entire history of the Jewish people prior to 1948 as a counterexample.

One thing that has been learned is that Jews cannot end antisemitism by improving themselves, either by involvement in “social justice” activities to help other oppressed groups (many of whose members don’t like Jews much anyway), or by becoming “new Jews” who drive tractors and milk cows rather than lending money.

Bari Weiss wrote a book called “How to fight Antisemitism.” I liked the book, but the title is a poor one. The enemy is not “antisemitism;” it is antisemites. There is only one way to “fight antisemitism” and that is to instill enough respect for – and fear of – Jewish power in antisemites to deter them from their anti-Jewish activities. The ideology can die out on its own (or not, we don’t care). The real enemy is not an abstract ideology, but concrete and specific: we and they know who they are.

And that is why a Jewish state, even though the fact of its existence does not itself prevent antisemitism, is invaluable in ending it. A stateless people is a powerless one, and the use of power is the best remedy for Jew-hatred. The Jewish state has bombed nuclear reactors in enemy countries, and Israel’s covert services have arrested or killed terrorists all over the world. Jewish police protect Jews in Israel from terrorism, and Jewish diplomacy, backed by military and economic power, can defend them in the diaspora. Ultimately, persecuted Jews can go to the Jewish state; indeed, Israel has preemptively rescued Jewish populations in danger in places like Ethiopia and Yemen.

If there is a problem, it is that too many Israelis have forgotten Jewish history and even the history of their state. They think that now we are a “normal” people in a “normal” state, and so we can relax and live normal lives. We aren’t and we can’t. Our state has a unique responsibility: to protect and nurture our people in a hostile world.

Posted in Jew Hatred, The Diaspora, Zionism | 4 Comments