How They Did It

Posted on July 8, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Between 1967 and 2021, the enemies of the Jewish state and the Jewish people created in effect an army of anti-Israel operatives in key positions in Western societies, including Israel herself. These operatives are often opinion leaders who influence the behavior of their countries.

Here is how they did it.

The Arab nations failed to defeat Israel in major military conflicts in 1948, 1967, and 1973. At that point, they turned to cognitive warfare, the manipulation of information, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings, in order to weaken their enemy and deny it support from third parties. Thus there were two primary targets: the population of the State of Israel, and the Western nations that might become sources of financial, logistical, diplomatic, or other forms of help for the Jewish state.

The objective of cognitive warfare is to divide, disrupt, and isolate the enemy so that it be finished off more easily by military means. Terrorism is an important part of cognitive warfare, because frightened people are prone to Stockholm syndrome. But this discussion will be limited to the non-kinetic aspects of cognitive warfare.

The cognitive war began around 1967, initiated by the Soviet KGB as a propaganda campaign. The terrorists of the PLO – whose actual ideology was close to that of Nazi Germany – were presented as a national liberation movement, which found approval in the leftist student and antiwar movements that were part of the larger Soviet cognitive assault on the West.

By 1973, the challenges facing the cognitive warriors of the Arab world and their advisors were great. The Jews of Israel had lost the overconfidence of the post-1967 era. The USA had (finally) resupplied Israel with the weapons needed to reverse the advance of her enemies and – although she was prevented from achieving a crushing victory – she had clearly established her military superiority. But the militarily weak Arabs strengthened their cognitive warfare capabilities to include more than mere propaganda. They launched operations to fundamentally change important features of the social landscape of the West.

Cognitive attacks were aimed at the following Western targets:

International institutions; the UN and its agencies (easy targets because of the built-in Soviet/Third World majority).

Major early victories included several anti-Israel UN Security Council resolutions during the Carter Administration (the US abstained), and of course the “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1975. Although the resolution was ultimately revoked, the “UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” it created and the annual observance of “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” remain. The UN Human Rights Council has a unique permanent agenda item to discuss Israel’s “human rights abuses” at every session. UN reports on health, the status of women, the environment, and other subjects often wrongly single out Israel as a violator.

International NGOs have been persuaded, by infiltration and financial grants from Arab and left-wing sources, to join the campaign. “Human rights” groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have been particularly useful in accusing the IDF of war crimes. Recently HRW produced a tendentious report calling Israel an apartheid state.

Institutions of higher education (easily bought with oil money).

Starting almost immediately after 1973, Arab states began to make major donations to leading universities, establishing departments of Middle East Studies (where “Middle East” does not include Israel), endowing chairs and fellowships, and so on. This has continued to the present day. Other quasi-academic institutions, such as influential think tanks like the Qatar-supported Brookings Institution, have also benefited.

This is an extremely far-sighted and effective strategy, because influence trickles down to other faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Ultimately these students graduate and take their places in education, business, government, and even law enforcement and the military.

Even in Israel, leftist academics produce a constant flow of pseudo-academic material that can be used as support for NGO and think tank documents that call for anti-Israel policies. Israeli NGOs, supported by the international Left and Arab/Iranian/Turkish sources, provide information for use in lawfare against Israel and the IDF, as well as propaganda.

Student and labor movements, liberal churches (easy targets because of left-wing connections).

Since 2004, resolutions supporting the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement against Israel have been debated and often passed by student governments, labor unions, and liberal churches. While there has so far been little effect on Israel’s economy, the debates provide a forum for disseminating false accusations against Israel.

Student organizations have been established on campuses that promote anti-Israel ideas and intimidate anyone who supports Israel. The recent widespread acceptance of postmodern “woke” ideas including intersectionality, critical race theory, and third-worldism has made it possible to connect Palestinism to diverse causes, even some that are clearly inconsistent with it, such as LGBT rights.

These organizations are supported and nurtured by faculty, departments, and administrators that were put in place by Arab (and more recently) Iranian oil revenues, as well as traditionally left-leaning academics.

Corporate interests (easy targets because of their dependence on Arab oil).

Immediately after the 1973 war, the Arab oil boycott caused a spike in prices and supply shortages. Oil companies in the US, who have great influence in politics, began to take public political stances, calling for what they referred to as a “more even-handed” policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict (in other words, calling for the government to stop supporting Israel). They funded propaganda outlets that followed the Arab line.

More recently, large corporations – particularly the very influential and powerful tech companies – have begun to adopt “woke” policies, out of a combination of fear of popular boycotts and the absorption of woke ideas from the academic world that provides their personnel. Infiltration of anti-Israel activists and attitudes into the tech companies that increasingly determine popular culture is especially worrisome.

Social media.

Recently someone noted that pro-Palestinian personality Bella Hadid has 21 million Instagram followers, significantly more than the total number of Jews in the world. Social media provides a huge amount of leverage for cognitive warfare, since it reaches literally billions of people throughout the world. Clever manipulation of social platforms can have a massive effect at very low cost. As usual, Russia is leading the world in developing this cognitive warfare technique, using bots and human-operated social media farms. But Iran and other enemies of Israel aren’t far behind.

Minorities (whose grievances could be blamed on Jews and Israel).

As early as the 1930s, Soviet propagandists realized that racial discrimination in the US could be used to sell communism to disaffected minorities. It has also been possible to sell them Jew-hatred, and the closely related hatred for the Jewish state. The racial mass psychosis that has gripped the US lately presents a wonderful opportunity to attach anti-Israel messages to “anti-racist” activities via the principle of intersectionality. Combined with the historically high level of antisemitism in the black community, it’s been possible for Israel’s enemies to spread preposterous lies, such as that “Israel trains American police to be racist” effectively.

Antisemitic politicians.

Politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, Ilhan Omar, and others are effective propagandists. It’s difficult to defend against them, because opposition can be discounted as politics, and because they have large bases of support (e.g., among Muslim populations) of which the politicians in their own parties are afraid.

For whatever reason, Israel’s successive governments have either been unable to fully internalize the danger posed by cognitive warfare, or have failed to come up with an effective strategy for fighting it. But with each military conflict that Israel is involved in, the cognitive attacks become more and more intense. They have already affected the IDF’s ability to fight.

The solution is to employ a proactive, not reactive strategy; to attack rather than defend. But what would such a strategy look like?

That’s the subject of my next post.

Posted in Academia, Information war, Jew Hatred, The UN, Wokeness | 2 Comments

Ha’aretz is an Enemy of the Jewish People

Posted on July 4, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Ha’aretz is more than just a left-leaning newspaper.

It is an enemy of the state, and in fact, an enemy of the Jewish people, whose future depends on the state.

Today, when Israel and Jews are under attack throughout the world, when international organizations have been turned into lie factories targeting Israel, when the Jewish State is accused of the very crimes – terrorism, murder, apartheid, genocide – that her enemies are either guilty of or aspire to, an Israeli newspaper, owned and operated by Jews, is a primary propaganda organ of those enemies.

Every day, the paper – which publishes both a Hebrew print edition that few Israelis read, and an English internet edition that is read around the world by decision-makers in governments and businesses – pumps out its vileness. Every day its writers present a slanted version of events in which Israel and Israelis are oppressors, occupiers, murderers, racists, thieves, and liars.

By virtue of its Israeli origin, this Stürmer gains credibility. Perhaps you don’t believe everything you read on Aljazeera’s website, but this is an Israeli newspaper; indeed, it’s been called the NY Times of Israel, the paper of record.

Today there is a typical example. In an editorial, they excoriate the Yamam, the Israel Police counterterrorism unit, accusing it of committing a “cold-blooded execution” of a man named Ahmed Abdu. They call it “Israel’s own death squad,” equating it with the ones operated by South American dictators.

Their accusation is based on a security camera video: it shows someone in a car getting shot. That is all it shows. But let me quote the Ha’aretz editorial:

The footage and neighbors’ testimonies leave no room for doubt: Ahmad Abdu, 25, of the Amari refugee camp returned from a night out with friends. They dropped him off at his car. He entered the vehicle and started it, then a SWAT team emerged in a civilian car, blocking his way. Three Yamam police officers got out and shot at Abdu point-blank as he sat in his car. They then dragged him out, apparently to make sure he was dead, left him on the road and quickly left the scene.

The response by Border Police spokesman Tamir Faro to the incident is no less shocking and outrageous: He ignored the evidence in front of him and sufficed with the claim that the shooting was done “according to the rules of engagement.” In other words, the execution of an unarmed man in his car, while he’s not endangering or threatening a soul, in a deserted street doesn’t breach Yamam’s rules of engagement. Are we to deduce from this that this special unit is licensed to kill?

I can tell you exactly what it is possible to deduce from Tamir Faro’s statement, because I am personally acquainted with officers who serve in the Yamam, which is possibly the most competent police unit of its kind in the world, and their rules of engagement have been explained to me. I deduce that Abdu was not an unarmed man, because had he been unarmed, he would not have been shot.

It is true that the Yamam was charged to do targeted killings during the Second Intifada. They have not had such an assignment since then, and in any event, Ahmad Abdu was not important enough to be the subject of one. Recently the Yamam has arrested some perpetrators of high-profile murders, like the killer of Esther Horgan, and (unfortunately, in my opinion) they were taken into custody unharmed. Abdu was wanted for questioning regarding a non-fatal shooting at a demonstration.

The explanation of why he was shot is found in the rules of engagement, which permit the officers to shoot if the suspect reaches for a weapon, points it at them, or opens fire on them. And this is undoubtedly what happened.

What is the “evidence” that Tamir Faro supposedly ignored? Is it in the video in which Abdu is not even visible until after he is shot? Is it in the statements of family members interviewed by Ha’aretz? The answer is that Ha’aretz has no evidence. Only those who were on the scene know whether Abdu was armed.

These are not rookie policemen who might have panicked. They are professionals who arrest dangerous terrorists night after night, and show great restraint, even when they are arresting someone who they know is drenched in Jewish blood. Why would they suddenly decide to “execute” a small-time terrorist?

The editorial is based on an article over the weekend by Gideon Levy, a specialist in blackening the name of Israel, the IDF, and the Israel Police. It was based on information provided by B’Tselem, an extreme left-wing Israeli NGO dedicated to documenting “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation.” For this purpose, it receives more than US $3 million a year from the EU, various European governments, the Ford Foundation, the New Israel Fund, the UN, and more.

Amos Schocken, the publisher of Ha’aretz is Israel’s modern day version of Julius Streicher, who incited anti-Jewish hate in the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Streicher was hanged for his crimes, but Schocken and his hatchet man Levy are careful to stay within legal boundaries, so they will probably not even be punished with a lawsuit.

Posted in Media, Terrorism | 4 Comments

Identity and Reality

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

This morning I picked up a book from my philosophy student days, “Identity and Reality,” by Emile Meyerson. It’s a book about the metaphysical foundations of science, but the title inspired me.

Everyone has an identity in the sense of their answer to the question “what are you?” Almost everyone has a need to find, adopt, or construct an answer.  Often it’s a list of things: a mother, a Jew, a football fan, a plumber, and so on. Recently “gender identity” has been added.

There is no national identity with a longer pedigree than that of the Jewish people. For millennia Jews have had a unique language and religion, and a tradition that connects them to the Land of Israel, which (according to that tradition) was given to them by Hashem. Religious Jews explicitly remind themselves of this three times a day.

This makes “Jewish” a very desirable identity. As Jimmy Durante said (about something else), “everybody wants to get into the act,” despite the anti-Jewish attitudes that Jews have to deal with. Jewish identity is so sought-after, that one of the popular themes of antisemites is to claim that they are the “real Jews” and we are Khazars or just fakers. If a Jew chooses to live in the Land of Israel, they have additional prejudices against them. Recently a European “anti-fascist” said that as an Israeli Jew, I was “stealing the very air I breathe.”

But still, the Jewish identity is attractive because – here is the connection to the book I picked up – it is solidly grounded in reality. Lots of people hate Jews and even want to kill them, but no identity is better documented. Indeed, one of the most important parts of the cognitive warfare that is being waged against the Jewish people by its enemies is the effort to break down that identity; in particular, to disconnect us from the Land of Israel. So, for example, Palestinian Arabs go out of their way to destroy archaeological evidence of ancient Jewish provenance in the land, as they have done at the Temple Mount and numerous other sites.

Mahmoud Abbas has always insisted that “Jewish” refers only to a religion, not to a people, because a people can have ties to a particular land, and if there were a Jewish people, this would be their land. This is why he objected so strongly to the condition that he recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, although he claims to recognize Israel’s existence. This is why the PLO has never agreed to the formulation “two states for two peoples,” although it claims to support a “two state solution.”

Tribal identities are important to Arabs, but attempts to forge a pan-Arab identity among Arabic speakers haven’t been particularly successful, because, for example, North Africans, Egyptians, and Syrians have little in common. A great deal of energy is put into the attempt to establish that there is a historical “Palestinian” identity, but the people who identify as “Palestinians” today have diverse origins, with many of them relatively recent (after 1830) migrants to the area. There is very little that is specifically Palestinian in their culture (as opposed to tribal, Arab, or Muslim), other than elements that developed in opposition to Israel. They didn’t even self-identify as “Palestinian” until the 1960s. That is not to say that there cannot be a “Palestinian people” – give them another 3000 years, and if they still remember the Nakba, they may become as well-established as the Jewish people.

The Palestinian argument is that we, the Jews, appeared from Europe in the 20th century and “colonized” a long-established indigenous “Palestinian people,” ultimately taking their land by force, driving most of them out of their homes and not allowing them to return. The Jews, according to this story, are not even a people, just a bunch of Europeans whose made-up religious myth connects them to what is actually the Palestinians’ homeland (I am not sure how they account for the more than 50% of Israelis who previously lived in various Arab countries).

Like all “Europeans,” the story continues, the Jews are white racists who exploit black and brown indigenous peoples like the Palestinians. Justice therefore requires that the Jews should give up control of the land to its “rightful owners,” the millions of descendants of the Arab refugees of 1948.

The Palestinian story is wildly wrong on several points. First, there were several ancient Jewish commonwealths in the Land of Israel, and some Jews always were present during the millennia in which the land was under the control of various outside powers. Doubtless some of today’s Palestinians are also descended from ancient residents of the land, but the great bulk of Palestinian families arrived much later. So the claim that Arabs are “more indigenous” than Jews is false. Arab families with names like “al Musri” (Egyptian) or “al Haurani” (Syrian) and numerous others testify to their origins.

Second, when the Zionists arrived and began developing what would become the Jewish state, it was not in the possession of the Palestinian Arabs – there was never a sovereign Palestinian entity in the land – but was a colony of the Ottoman Empire. Most private land belonged to absentee owners. Shortly thereafter the British Mandate was established, and the Arabs, led by Amin al-Husseini, who later cast his lot with Hitler, violently tried to prevent the advent of Jewish sovereignty. When the British were forced out, the Jews defeated the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab nations that invaded (who were interested in grabbing territory and kicking the Jews out, not in setting up a Palestinian state). The Jews did not “colonize” Palestine – they decolonized it, by ejecting the British.

Third, by the time the British left and the Arab nations invaded, the Palestinian Arabs had been fighting with the Jews for several months (with the connivance of the British, who preferred that the land come under Arab control). Much of the Arab elite fled early in order to avoid the conflict (some went to summer homes in Lebanon). The poorer Arabs fled for various reasons, including fear induced by propaganda about Jewish atrocities – which was not difficult for them to believe, since their own leaders planned to do the same to the Jews if they got the upper hand. Some Arabs were expelled (Lod or Lydda) because their towns or villages fought on the side of the Arab armies. Some 500-700 thousand Arabs left for various reasons, but there was no overall plan to expel them. In some cases (Haifa) Jewish authorities asked non-belligerent Arabs to stay.

After the war, only a few were allowed to return. The new state simply could not take the risk of allowing hostile Arabs to return and reignite the war. This was a classic ethnic conflict over land, and the usual result of these is either that the weaker side becomes refugees, or the winner massacres the losers. The leaders of the Arab nations did not hide their intention to massacre the Jews if they won. The 800,000 Jews kicked out of Arab countries at about the same time suffered a similar fate to the Palestinian Arabs.

Fourth, and finally, the whole “racism” theme is nonsense. Only a minority of Israelis ever lived in Europe. They range in color from black Ethiopians to white Europeans with red hair and freckles. Most are various shades of brown, as are Palestinians, who also include the descendants of black slaves and – if you remember her – Ahed Tamimi, who earned the nickname “Shirley Temper” for kicking and hitting Israeli soldiers, with her pale skin and blonde hair. The conflict is best described as national and religious, not racial.

But unlike other similar conflicts, the losers managed to persuade the world of the justice of their cause, with the help of the Soviet KGB, the Arab oil weapon, the liberal application of terrorism, and the exploitation of the always-present antisemitism of the west. Which is why my European anti-fascist acquaintance thinks I’m an oxygen bandit.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli or Jewish History, The Jewish people | 1 Comment

Zionism and Democracy

Posted on June 27, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Gideon Levy, the hateful Ha’aretz writer who reaches new depths of loathing for the state that protects and nurtures him with every column he writes, has gotten something right this week. But he is wrong about the implications of his discovery.

Last week, I wrote about the State of Israel’s reason for being: the Zionist principle that “a sovereign state in the Land of Israel is a necessity to protect and preserve the Jewish people – and that their preservation is an objective worth attaining.” Such a state, of, by, and for the Jewish people, is what the founders meant by a Jewish state.

This Wednesday there will be a vote to extend (or not) a law that prevents Arabs from the territories or enemy countries from obtaining Israeli residence by marrying an Israeli Arab citizen. The official justification for this law is the large number of children from such families that committed terrorist acts. But that’s only a small part of it: the truth is that without a Jewish majority, we can’t have a Jewish state. Control of non-Jewish immigration is essential to maintain it. And don’t think the Arabs don’t understand that.

The founders also wanted the state to be democratic, and for all its citizens to have equal rights. What Gideon Levy has correctly noted is that sometimes these objectives conflict with one another:

There is no such thing as Jewish and democratic, because on Wednesday the Knesset will have to decide between the two. Those who prefer a Jewish state will vote to extend the discriminatory and infuriating amendment that marks a clear gap between the rights of a Jewish citizen and the rights of an Arab citizen, with outright Jewish supremacy in the legal code. Those who prefer a democratic state will of course vote against the law.

But our real state, unlike the one in Levy’s imagination, is neither fully Jewish nor fully democratic. That’s because some 21% of our population is not Jewish. In this particular case, the Jewish ones can invite their relatives to join them, and the non-Jews can’t. That’s not fair, but it’s necessary. And it is not self-contradictory, as Levy suggests.

Levy demands perfect democracy (more precisely, perfect equality of rights), and insists that any deviation is “intolerable nationalism.” That is nonsense. There is no state in the world that is a perfect democracy, and most are far less democratic than Israel. He should consider that the other side can also demand perfection, that is, a state that has no non-Jewish citizens. That is also an alternative.

Last month Israel was attacked by Hamas in Gaza, on the pretext that Israeli police violated the sanctity of a mosque on the Temple Mount (where Arabs were stockpiling fireworks and rocks to throw down on Jews at the Kotel and at police) and because some Arabs were being evicted from homes in Jerusalem for non-payment of rent. In response, Hamas launched 4,350 rockets at Israeli towns and cities. At the same time, incited primarily by Hamas, some Arab citizens of Israel began an insurrection in cities with mixed populations, which not only included fighting with the authorities, but also the beating and murder of random Jews, and the burning of Jewish homes, vehicles, and businesses.

In other words, some of Israel’s Arab citizens became a fifth column, fighting on the side of the enemy on the home front.

The solution to this problem doesn’t involve more “democracy” in the form of rights for Arab citizens to bring in more Arabs. Indeed, it’s easy to argue that the best solution to the problem, even the only one, is the opposite – for as much of the Arab population as possible to emigrate to other Arab countries or the West.

It is unlikely that our government will choose that alternative. What it will do, and probably what the majority of Israelis would prefer, is to continue trying to walk a compromise path that makes it possible for the state to keep its Jewish character and majority, while impinging as little as possible on the rights of minorities. Even many Israeli Arabs will accept this, albeit without applause.

Why isn’t this real-world solution obvious to Gideon Levy?

He claims that he rejects Zionism because it conflicts with democracy. That is not true, because he supports a far less democratic “one-state solution,” an unstable fantasy that would become a totalitarian Muslim state. As is obvious from his countless columns vilifying the state and especially its defenders, his real reason for opposing Zionism is that he does not believe that the Jewish people, as a people, are worth preserving. The explanation for this lies in the realm of aberrant psychology, not logic.

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli Politics, Media, Zionism | 1 Comment

What is the State of Israel for?

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

It’s not a silly question. There are serious disagreements about the answer. But there is only one answer that justifies the sacrifices that have been made to re-establish the Jewish state in its historical homeland, and those that will be required in the future to keep it.

That answer is given by Zionism, which holds that a sovereign state in the Land of Israel is a necessity to protect and preserve the Jewish people – and that their preservation is an objective worth attaining.

The Zionist view implies certain things about the nature of the state, things that logically follow from its function as a refuge for persecuted Jews, a source of strength for the Jewish people, and a place where it is possible to live a fully Jewish life, according to whatever combination of religious and cultural elements are important to the individual.

It is a place where the Hebrew language is dominant, the majority religion is Judaism, the holidays are the traditional Jewish ones (religious and national), and most of the population are Jews. It is (or should be) a place where antisemitism is not tolerated, indeed, where it is unthinkable. Because there are forces that work against these principles, it can’t be expected that they will appear by themselves. They must be woven into the legal fabric of the state and they must be affirmed by its leaders. The Law of Return and the Nation State Law are not accidental; they are essential.

The Zionist state can share some characteristics of a liberal, secular, democratic state such as the USA aspires to be (although recently this conception has come under attack from the anti-rational Left in America), but it cannot be such a state. It will unavoidably need to distinguish between Jews, for whom the state exists, and non-Jewish citizens, in very specific ways that relate to the character of the state – e.g., the language and symbols of the state, the official holidays, etc. – and to the maintenance of its Jewish majority.

Israel is special. It is the only Jewish state, the only one with that specific purpose. It is not a smaller version of the USA. Its socialist founders, despite their emphasis on democratic principles and guaranteeing rights to all citizens, nevertheless were Zionists and proclaimed that they were declaring a Jewish state. Those weren’t just words.

The state may try to provide every possible civil right and protection against discrimination to its minorities, but when there are conflicts between liberal-democratic ideals and Zionist principles, Zionism must prevail. Otherwise the state will ultimately lose its function as a Jewish state. It will lose its ability to protect and preserve the Jewish people as a people, against persecution and assimilation.

Zionism is unpopular throughout the world. The majority of those who have thought about it do not approve of Zionism for one reason or another. Either they don’t see the importance of there being a Jewish people, they actively dislike them, or they think that the cost to others of the existence of the Jewish state is not justified (I suspect that most of those in this group also fit in the second).

Ever since the founding of the state, there have been Jews who are uncomfortable with Zionism. They correctly note that Zionism can conflict with liberal democratic principles, and for this reason they bitterly oppose it and want to “dezionize” Israel. Sometimes they have even made common cause with enemies of the state.

This issue has come up now in the dispute over the “family unification law” which since 2002 has made it difficult for residents of the Palestinian Authority who marry Israeli citizens to move to Israel in order to live with their spouses. I won’t get into the interesting politics of it now, with Bennet’s coalition trying to extend the existing law despite opposition from some of its Arab members, while Bibi’s opposition tries to embarrass them by proposing an even stronger Basic Law on the subject of immigration in general (something that I favor, although not as a tactic to overthrow the coalition). I mention it to note how the opponents of the law, like the publisher of Ha’aretz Amos Schocken and his antisemitic writer Gideon Levy, scream “racism, apartheid, Jewish supremacism!”

This law has nothing to do with “race,” which is essentially meaningless where Arabs and Jews are concerned. It is not “apartheid” which means enforced separation of racial groups, which would not apply to Israel even if Arabs and Jews were different racially. And it certainly doesn’t imply that Jews are superior to Arabs or believe that they ought to dominate them. Although the original purpose of the law was to reduce terrorism (a disproportionate number of terrorists were the product of “unified” families), it is not embarrassing to admit that it helps maintain Israel’s Jewish majority. It is a Zionist law that is unfair to non-Jews. So be it.

Post-Zionists Schocken and Levy also oppose the Law of Return (or would like to see it apply equally to Palestinian Arabs) as well as the Nation-State Law. They also oppose efforts to repatriate the tens of thousands of African migrants that entered the country via the Egyptian border, before an effective fence was built. These things are “undemocratic.” Perhaps, but they are necessary.

The post-Zionist vision is remarkably empty. The right-wing Jabotinsky and the left-wing Ben Gurion had very different ideas of what the Jewish state should be like. Schocken and Levy do not think there should be a Jewish state. In their monumental stupidity and arrogance, they wish for a soulless techno-state built on “equality” and “democracy” for peoples that would have nothing in common except geographic proximity, and a great deal of resentment for each other.

Imagine an Israel without its Zionist purpose (and very quickly, without its Jewish majority). How long would it survive? Why would anyone want to fight for it? Would Jews and Arabs make common cause in support of a liberal, democratic state? It’s hard to imagine. We saw last month what happened in mixed cities like Lod and Acco, where there are about half as many Arabs as Jews.

Most likely, Jews with money and foreign passports would flee. After the initial bloodbath, the ones who were left would face a descent into the tenuous, contingent existence that characterized the Middle Eastern diaspora for more than a millennium. Of course, it’s doubtful that the “lucky” ones in Europe, America, Australia, and other places would fare much better.

Just as a Jewish state is essential to the survival of the Jewish people, Zionism is essential to the survival of the Jewish state.

Posted in Post-Zionism, The Jewish people, Zionism | 8 Comments

Special: Experts Say New Nuclear Agreement Worse than the Old One

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

What is pushing the Biden Administration to give up the store to the murderous mullahs?

Israeli officials recently received an urgent warning:

It’s signed by three worried citizens: Maj. Gen. (res.) Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, a former director of Military Intelligence; Gideon Frank, a former head of the Atomic Energy Commission; and Ariel Levite, one of Israel’s leading nuclear experts. The document’s authors were invited to present it at several meetings with the heads of the relevant organizations. …

According to Ze’evi-Farkash, Frank and Levite, the emerging agreement is worse than its predecessor, which was signed in 2015. It reflects the collapse of the Netanyahu policy that encouraged Trump to withdraw from the original deal.

The pressure of the economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration didn’t break the Iranians, and in the past two years they started to violate the agreement (without withdrawing from it) and progress toward a nuclear bomb.

The three experts write: “Reliable, extremely worrisome information has reached us about the status of the negotiations between the powers and Iran. The negotiations stand at a very advanced stage. It emerges that in their eagerness to remove the issue from the agenda, the Americans are now willing to suffice with a ‘reduced’ arrangement in which most of the sanctions that the Trump administration has imposed on Iran since 2018 will be lifted. In exchange, Iran will retreat from only some of the steps it has taken since 2019 to advance its nuclear project.”

The three warn that the United States is now willing to make do with only partial restrictions on the advanced enrichment capability (five times as fast as its predecessor) that Iran has been exercising in recent years, and to forgo some of the supervision clauses over the Iranians’ research and development efforts. They say Washington is also willing to show flexibility on the study of the history of the nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which requires access to facilities and full explanations to the agency’s inspectors.

According to the three experts, “The United States intends to rebuff criticism of the reduced agreement with the promise that all these additional issues and others will be dealt with in a future improved, long-term agreement. However, Iran is steadfast in its opposition to negotiate such an accord, and in any event the prospect that it will be achieved in the foreseeable future appears very poor.”

I doubt that Israel’s input will have any effect on the American negotiation team, which is led by the longtime opponent of the Jewish state, Robert Malley.

The article continues:

Ze’evi-Farkash, Frank and Levite warn that a diminished agreement will have serious implications for Israel. “Iran will step forward legitimately as a nuclear-threshold state possessing know-how, experience, advanced centrifuges and a production infrastructure of enriched uranium that will enable it to achieve confidently, within just months of deciding, fissionable material for a first weapon and for a number of weapons shortly thereafter.”

They maintain that the 2015 agreement saw to “a warning time of about a year for Iran to arrive at sufficient fissionable material to manufacture one nuclear bomb. According to the emerging agreement, and in the absence of supervisory and enforcement arrangements on the activity of the weapons group, Iran will be able to advance secretly and shorten significantly the time required to obtain a nuclear arsenal.”

“The warning time for a renewal of an Iranian effort to achieve the weapon will be abbreviated and will, accordingly, limit the available options for thwarting it. Iran will retain an extensive underground enrichment infrastructure, which it has actually extended recently, that will hamper activity to thwart it.”

“A return to the contours of the previous agreement will also obligate the United States to go back to refraining from intervening against the Iranian nuclear program, and this could have implications for Israel’s freedom of action. A reduced arrangement, in which most of the sanctions on Iran will be lifted, will expand the resources available to that country for taking action in spheres disturbing to us and also create a feeling of immunity.” [my emphasis]

In other words, Iran will be able to get the bomb with very little lead time for Israel to act, and the US will be obligated to prevent Israel from acting against Iran. In addition, the agreement will make funds available for Iran’s regional terrorist proxies that threaten Israel and the Sunni Arab states.

I cannot bend my mind enough to see how this is in America’s interest. It certainly amplifies an existential threat against Israel, and will leave her no options other than military ones.

Posted in Iran, War | 5 Comments

Biden Brings Back Baker-Hamilton-Rhodes

Posted on June 20, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

News item:

The Biden administration is pulling eight Patriot missile defence batteries from countries in the Middle East, including Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

US officials told the Journal that in addition to the Patriot batteries, the Pentagon is removing another anti-missile system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) system, from Saudi Arabia, and jet fighter squadrons that were assigned to the region are being reduced.

The reported withdrawal is a major realignment of Washington’s military footprint in the Middle East and comes as the country aims to focus its efforts and attention towards Russia and China.

In addition to the removal of the equipment is the redeployment of hundreds of American troops operating and supporting the missile defence systems.

At the same time, the administration is continuing with its push to finalize a return to the Iranian nuclear deal. The US has indicated a willingness to remove sanctions placed on Iran in return for a return to the pre-Trump status quo, after which it wants “follow-on” talks about issues not covered in the original deal, like ballistic missile development and support for terrorism.

As always, I am astonished by the American propensity to give up its leverage up front. The previous agreement was worse than worthless. In addition to having holes big enough to drive a massive missile transporter through, it completely legitimizes Iran as a nuclear weapons state by 2030 even if they don’t cheat (which they do). Once sanctions are gone, Iran will have no incentive to make actual concessions.

It’s been suggested that the removal of the missile defense systems from countries under threat from Iran is an effort to sweeten the deal for the Iranians. Certainly the suggestion that it will help “focus … towards Russia and China” is not persuasive, since Russia is allied with Iran in the region, and since China also favors a lifting of sanctions and a return to the deal as soon as possible. Apparently, the threatened “change of focus” doesn’t scare them.

I’m not sure what the US would do with those antimissile systems and troops that would deter China anyway. China is happily conquering the world incrementally by cyber, economic, diplomatic, and possibly biological means. I don’t think Biden is planning to go to war over Taiwan or Hong Kong.

The only way to understand this is that the US has decided that its relationship with Iran is more important than protecting the Arab states from Iranian aggression. A relaxation of sanctions will immediately pump up the Iranian proxy that has been battering Saudi Arabia. Needless to say, this will also be bad for Israel, which is contending with Iran-funded proxies as well.

It is very hard to see how switching its traditional support for the Arab states to Iran is in the long-term American interest, because the Iranian regime has made no secret of its desire to humiliate and even destroy the US. I suspect that American planners believe that the apparent religious motivation of the regime is a sham intended to cover the “true” geopolitical reasons for the conflict and to obtain popular support. The Americans seem to believe that Iranian enmity will dissolve if the US allows them to achieve their regional aims. I am not so sure. It would not be the first time that Westerners have failed to understand the power of Islamic ideology as motivation for action.

The Israeli Chief of Staff, Aviv Kochavi, is on his way to the US to discuss various matters, including Iran. Former PM Netanyahu and PM Bennett agree on their opposition to the deal, but Bennett appears to be willing to talk about the possibility of improving it, while Bibi was not. In any case, I strongly doubt that there is anything that Kochavi can say that will influence the American strategy of appeasing Iran, to which Biden is no less committed than Obama was. Kochavi might be able to extract a promise to provide Israel with additional weapons.

The American strategy was first enunciated in 2006 in the Iraq Study Report. Its main authors were James L. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, and future Obama advisor Ben Rhodes was a contributor. At that time, Iran and Syria were supporting Iraqi insurgents that were taking a heavy toll in American casualties in Iraq. The report advocated making Syria (then still a country) and Iran happy by taking the Golan Heights from Israel, and forcing the establishment of a “unified” Palestinian state in Judea/Samaria and Gaza, among other things. Precisely how weakening the main countervailing power and US ally in the region would reduce aggression from Iran and Syria was not clear (and still isn’t).

Luckily the Bush Administration did not follow the recommendations in the report – at least, not effectively – but it apparently formed the basis for the Obama Administration’s policy toward Iran and Israel. By that time, it was clear that getting Israel to give the Golan Heights to mass murderer Bashar al-Assad wouldn’t fly, but it was still possible to both appease Iran and put the screws on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. Although Obama did force Israel to freeze settlement construction and release hundreds of Arab terrorists, he did not succeed in creating a Palestinian state.

Donald Trump took the opposite approach, strengthening Israel and weakening Iran with economic pressure and covert action. Although his opponents like to say that his strategy “failed,” I believe it simply had to be given more time to work. When Biden took over, the Iranian regime was hanging over a cliff by its fingertips. But rather than pushing it off, he threw it a lifeline, and the coterie of anti-Israel officials he had appointed went to work trying to reactivate the Baker-Hamilton-Rhodes policy of appeasement.

America no longer depends on oil from the Gulf, something that I had long wished for. But rather than enabling a pro-Israel policy as I’d hoped, it seems to have allowed the US to abandon Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, leaving them to the tender mercies of Iran. This in turn has made it possible for Israel to establish normal relations with some of her former Arab enemies. Had the Trump policy been continued, I think we would have seen the development of a strong Israeli-Arab bloc with the power to deter Iranian aggression. Continued “extreme pressure” on Iran might have dried up Iranian support for terrorist proxy militias like Hezbollah and the Houthis. It might even have made it possible for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the very unpopular regime of the ayatollahs. Keeping Trump’s policy toward the Palestinians might have led to the elimination of UNRWA and the rise of a realistic Palestinian Arab leadership that did not believe in the chimerical fantasy of “return.”

But none of that happened. Trump was defeated and today’s Democratic Party, having internalized the views of its left wing – which today border on antisemitism (and sometimes cross over) – threw out the only productive approach to the Middle East that has been tried since Truman’s presidency, and went back to one based on fantasy at best – and Jew-hatred at worst.

Posted in American politics, Iran, Middle East politics, US-Israel Relations | 2 Comments

Keeping the Jewish State

Posted on June 17, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

For the first time in its history, Israel’s government includes an Arab party.

Arabs have sat in the Knesset since Israel’s founding, both as members of primarily Jewish parties and as representatives of various Arab parties. From time to time Arab MKs have kept a government in office by supporting it from outside the coalition, as happened in 1993 when the Oslo Declaration of Principles was approved. But no Arab party has ever been member of the governing coalition until now.

Some people think this is wonderful. The Arabs are 20% of our population, so why shouldn’t they have a commensurate role in government? Mansour Abbas is a pragmatist who just wants the best for his constituents, they say. Others think it is a disaster. The Arab parties are all anti-Zionist and in some cases disloyal. What will happen when there is an operation against Hamas? Mansour Abbas represents an Islamist party that is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent of Hamas!

My view is that I honestly have no idea how this will work out, even assuming that the new government lasts more than a few weeks. But one thing is absolutely clear: putting an Arab party in the coalition brings the question of the relationship of the Jewish state to its Muslim Arab citizens front and center in a way that it heretofore hasn’t been.

Indeed, it’s one of those elephants in the room that we have been carefully ignoring for years. But since the formation of the new government that elephant has been tromping around and bumping into things. It can’t be ignored any longer.

Although the law requires that any candidate for the Knesset not “negate” the Jewish and democratic character of the state, the Supreme Court has required a very high standard of proof in order to disqualify an Arab candidate, and has several times overturned the decision of the Knesset’s Elections Committee to do so (the law also bans “incitement to racism,” and this has been invoked several times against Jewish candidates, including of course Meir Kahane’s Kach party).

This is in keeping with the extremely weak interpretation of “Jewish state” that was propounded by the influential former President of the Court, Aharon Barak, in whose opinion a “Jewish” state is little more than one whose values are “universal values common to members of democratic society, which grew from Jewish tradition and history.” The absurdity of this view is evident (it makes the US, for example, a Jewish state), but it is popular among those, Arabs and Jews alike, who are made uncomfortable by either Judaism or Jewish nationalism.

In 2006, a group of Israeli Arab intellectuals (I use this term although some prefer “Palestinian citizens of Israel”), under the auspices of the Arab heads of local authorities, produced a document called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel” in which they declare themselves “the indigenous peoples, the residents of the States of Israel, and an integral part of the Palestinian People and the Arab and Muslim and human Nation,” and call for Israel to relinquish its Jewish character and become a binational state. It accuses the “Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe” of settler-colonial oppression of the indigenous “Palestinian People.” It calls for equal representation of Jews and Arabs in the government, and the recognition of the Arabs as an “indigenous cultural national group” with international protection. “[A]ll forms of ethnic superiority, be that executive, structural, legal or symbolic” must be removed. There is a great deal more, including the placing of all “Islamic holy sites” (which naturally include all the Jewish ones) in Arab hands.

If anything “negates” the Jewish character of the state, this does. And yet, several of the participants in the development of that document, including Ayman Oudeh, the head of the Joint List of Israeli Arab parties in the Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, and Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, currently serve in the Knesset.

One of the reasons that the Nation-State Law was passed was in response to this. It states that “the actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and even specifies the flag, the national anthem, and the symbol of the state. The Basic Law (part of what serves Israel for a constitution), which was passed by a majority of Knesset members, is nevertheless controversial. The Jewish Left subjects itself to cognitive dissonance, insisting that it still believes in Zionism while wanting a “state of its citizens” (see the self-contradictory Meretz platform here) and opposing the Nation-State Law.

Jewish Israelis need to face this issue head-on and stop pretending that it does not exist. Our state – our state –  was created explicitly as a Jewish state because the founders were Zionists who believed that Jewish survival depended upon the existence of a sovereign state of the Jewish people. The evidence of the past 73 years of Israel’s existence, especially the burgeoning of Jew-hatred in the 21st century, has only strengthened my belief that they were entirely correct.

Some think that all that’s necessary for Israel to be a Jewish state is that it have a Jewish majority and a Law of Return for Jews. This ignores the real connection that most Israeli Jews have to the ancient homeland of their people, without which there is no reason for a Jewish majority, and no justification for a Law of Return. Possibly “religious” people find this easier to grasp, but it’s not necessary to be observant to see yourself as part of a historic people, a people with a land, a language, a religion, and a culture.

If the Jews of Israel give up the idea of the connection of the people to the land, if they decide to emphasize democracy at the expense of Jewishness, if they stop believing that there is great value in having their capital in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv, if they give up their control of Jewish holy places (because, in the words of Moshe Dayan, “who needs all that Vatican?”), they will soon find that there is no longer a Jewish majority in the Land of Israel, and indeed that the Jewish people are again wanderers in foreign lands.

The Muslim Arabs understand this quite well, and the imperatives of their religion drive them to struggle relentlessly to get control back over the entire Land of Israel, which they consider a Muslim waqf, land that permanently and irrevocably must be under Muslim control. This is why they struggle to conquer not only the physical land and temporal assets in the hands of the Jews, but to obtain symbolic and spiritual control. This is why Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are often the focus of their violence. This is why they will never give up.

Mansour Abbas may be a pragmatist in the short term, but he is also an Islamist, which implies the longest of terms. If the Jews are to prevail in the struggle for this land, they too need to understand the limits of pragmatism. They need to learn how to draw lines and stick to them, to understand the importance of symbolism, everywhere in the country, from the Galilee to the Negev. But especially now, they need to wrest control of the Temple Mount and the Old City back from the Arabs, who have systematically undercut Jewish sovereignty there since June of 1967.

We have the power and the resources to do this. Do we also have the spiritual strength, the perseverance, and the ability to sacrifice that will be required?

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli Politics, Israeli Society | 6 Comments