A Short History of a Long Hatred

Posted on June 13, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

It would never come into their [the masses] heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X

We have only to keep repeating our themes that the United States and Israel are fascists, Imperial-Zionist countries bankrolled by rich Jews – Yuri Andropov

The Big Lie about Israel and her conflict with the Palestinians is that it is between Israel and the Palestinians.

That is the smallest part of it.

The truth is that the establishment of a Jewish state never sat well with either the post-Christian West or the Islamic world. Muslims are much more straightforward about it: the Land of Israel was once under Islamic rule, and therefore must return to it. Jewish sovereignty over the land and any of its inhabitants that are Muslim is an abomination to them. As Dr. Mordechai Kedar explains (see a longer talk by Dr. Kedar in Hebrew on this subject here), not only for Palestinians, but for all of the world’s almost two billion Muslims, the conflict is not “territorial, national, economic, civil, or legal;” it is religious. And therefore no compromise that leaves Jewish sovereignty in existence, even over the smallest part of the land between the river and the sea, will be acceptable to them.

The situation in the West is more complicated. With the decline of Christianity in Europe that marked the period following the 18th century Enlightenment, the religiously motivated antisemitism that had been responsible for the murder or expulsion of countless Jews in Christian countries throughout the centuries became less prevalent. But people seem to have a need to dislike Jews, and it was replaced by the racial version expounded by figures like Wilhelm Marr, which served as the justification for the Nazi Holocaust. After the war, the popular revulsion over the Nazi genocide of European Jews made “racial” antisemitism taboo, at least in public.

In 1948, Zionists succeeded in establishing a state in the Land of Israel, triggering a violent reaction from the Arab nations (local Arabs had long been hostile, correctly understanding the Zionists’ intention to establish a sovereign state). The Vatican took a parallel position, both because of its supersessionist theology that did not accept Zionist claims to represent the Biblical Israelites, and its opposition to Jewish sovereignty over Christian holy places (the Vatican finally recognized Israel in 1993, along with the PLO).

The Soviet Union, the ideological leader of the international Left, at first supported the creation of the state because of Israel’s initial embrace of socialist ideas and the Soviet desire to reduce British influence in the region. But Stalinist antisemitism (which peaked with the 1953 Doctors’ Plot), and Israel’s increasing alignment with the West brought about a rupture in relations, and even after Stalin’s death geopolitical considerations caused the Soviets to support Israel’s Arab enemies.

Around the time of the 1967 war, the Soviet KGB began a campaign of demonization and delegitimization against Israel. The objective was to hurt the US, which was seen as using Israel as an outpost to project power in the Middle East, and to inflame the Arab world, which would then turn to the USSR for weapons and other support against Israel. Like Korea and Vietnam, the Middle East became an arena for struggles between the great powers by proxy.

The KGB pushed various themes in its campaign, which was aimed at Western intellectuals, leftists, and academics, as well as the Third World. The Arabs in the Land of Israel had heretofore seen themselves primarily as members of diverse tribes, and most of them had relatively recently arrived as migrants from all over the region.  But they were presented as a unified, ancient, indigenous people that was struggling for freedom and self-determination against a massively powerful colonialist oppressor. The KGB – after all, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an invention of a previous Russian security agency – also seasoned its political message with hints of ancient Jewish depravity.

The Soviets supplied the PLO, the putative champion of the “Palestinians,” with money and weapons, and backed Yasser Arafat’s terror campaign against the Jewish state – which spilled over into the West, as the PLO hijacked dozens of airplanes and ships as well as murdering Israelis in various European countries. The UN, with its permanently Soviet-dominated majority, passed numerous anti-Israel resolutions and became a continuous source of propaganda. The 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution was one of the KGB’s notable successes.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the campaign against Israel lost its best patron, but it continued to be financed by the Gulf States, Iran, the UN (with funds provided by Western democracies, especially the US), and the international Left (e.g., the Soros-connected funds). A very significant part of it was the co-option of the important human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which have become prolific sources of anti-Israel propaganda. They effectively “launder” misinformation originating with terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah by publishing it as if it were obtained by independent research by a neutral organization.

In 2001, immediately before 9/11, the UN and various NGOs organized a World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa, in which Israel was excoriated as a “racist apartheid state” and accused of “war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.” These charges have been added to the original collection of allegations of colonialism and imperialism. It should be noted that the accusations are often couched in a form that recalls historic anti-Jewish prejudices; so, for example, the IDF is falsely accused of deliberately targeting Palestinian children in a reprise of the medieval blood libel.

Academic institutions in the West, especially in the US, have been the recipient of large gifts from Arab countries for decades, which have paid for research, endowed faculty, and established departments of Middle East Studies, all of which have reflected the biases of their funders. When this is combined with student organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, students are deluged with the anti-Israel message. And this message is that Israel is a racist, apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state that uses Nazi-like tactics to oppress the native Palestinian people, whose territory they have stolen and are occupying.

Every word of the above message is commonly believed, and every word of it is a lie. But the ground has been so carefully prepared, and the anti-Jewish undertones so evocative, that it has become part of the conventional wisdom. Its purpose is to promote policies in the West that will weaken the Jewish state, geostrategically, politically, economically, socially, and militarily. Although it pretends to be about human rights for Palestinians, it is in reality part of a long-term effort to make Israel disappear. Its current popularity is a hard-fought victory for the enemies of Israel and of the Jewish people.

Nevertheless, it still surprised me when some 500-odd journalists signed a document like “An open letter on US media coverage of Palestine,” which – incredibly to those of us who have been criticizing American media for decades over its anti-Israel bias – accuses it of “journalistic malpractice” for obscuring “Israel’s military occupation and its system of apartheid,” “sanitiz[ing] Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians,” and ignoring her policy of “ethnic supremacy.”

Journalists, of all people, should know better than to accept manufactured facts or popular slogans. After all, their job is (in their own words) to “get the story right.” They should be able to sniff out attempts to manipulate them. They should know how to avoid jumping on bandwagons, and not to allow themselves to become cogs in somebody’s propaganda machine. And they should understand how wrong it is to decree what other journalists should write.

Like Ed Hutcheson (Humphrey Bogart) in “Deadline USA” journalists should be individualists, following the truth wherever it leads. Sometimes it takes courage, especially when the penalty for ideological deviation is cancellation and loss of one’s job.

Ed Hutcheson only had to worry about armed gangsters. He didn’t have Twitter mobs waiting for him to slip up. But I know what he would have told those 500 smug, cowardly totalitarians to do with their open letter.

Posted in Islam, Jew Hatred, Media | 4 Comments

The New Government Will Soon be Tested

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Unless something very unexpected happens, Israel will finally get a government this coming Sunday.

I’m conflicted. I voted for Naftali Bennett and I’m happy that he will be Prime Minister, albeit in rotation with Yair Lapid, of whom I am less fond. But many elements of the agreements that the eight parties that will be in the government have signed with each other are troubling. Although they have not been officially made public, a TV news program released what it said were the details.

One of the provisions is said to be that any PM who serves eight years will have to take a four year hiatus before running again; and during this period he can’t even run for the Knesset. I am in favor of limiting the term of the PM, but it can’t be done in a retroactive way – that makes it a “personal” law aimed at one specific individual. And we know who that is.

Another provision is that if the government falls as a result of a vote of no confidence, Naftali Bennett will not be permitted to be a minister in the succeeding government. Apparently this aims to prevent the scenario in which Netanyahu persuades some members of one of the ruling parties to vote against the government, bringing it down, and then Bennett jumps to join him in a right-wing government.

These provisions require changes to the Basic Laws that serve Israel for a constitution. One of the “interesting” things about Israel’s system is that they can be changed by a simple majority of the members present in the Knesset. It’s almost as if the Democrats in the US could amend the Constitution so that nobody whose initials were D. T. could run for President.

And of course I am irritated by the fact that the government will have 28 expensive ministers and 6 Deputy Ministers, far more than are needed to run the country.

I’m very bothered by Mansour Abbas (not related to Mahmoud Abbas of the PA). The so-called “change government” – “change” meaning “without Netanyahu” – couldn’t get 61 mandates without support from one or more of the Arab parties. Mansour Abbas represents Ra’am, an Arab Islamist party that shares the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood (as does Hamas). His coalition demands have been mostly pragmatic – that is, he wants money for Arab communities. That in itself is not bad, but part of the deal is that he will receive half a billion shekels (about $154 million) that he can direct to “special projects.” That’s called a slush fund, and will be used to build a patronage empire to make him the most powerful Arab politician in the country.

He also received promises that laws against illegal building in the Negev will be frozen, and fines levied on such construction will be canceled. In recent years, Bedouin tribes have been increasingly squatting on land that belongs to the state or to private Jewish owners. There has also been a sharp increase in agricultural theft (of crops and equipment) and other crimes – especially the theft of weapons from IDF Bases – committed by Bedouins. Reducing enforcement will encourage more violations, which some say rise to the level of challenging Israel’s sovereignty in the Negev.

This government will be the first one in Israel’s history that does not include a single explicitly religious party – except Ra’am! Historian Efraim Karsh, in a recent talk, noted that neither Jordan nor Egypt allows representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, which wishes to overthrow their states, in their governments. Why should Israel?

Many promises have been made to the left-wing parties that are part of the coalition. One of them requires a special note: there will be a “Department of Jewish Renewal” within the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, whose function will be to aid the Reform Movement in Israel. The likely Diaspora Affairs Minister will be Gilad Kariv, who is a Reform rabbi.

Now, I don’t have a theological objection to non-Orthodox Judaism. My problem is political: the Reform Movement in Israel is controlled and subsidized by the movement in the US, which doesn’t hide its desire to remake Israel in the image of a leftist America. Israel is not well-served by an organization that pushes the fantastic and dangerous idea of a two-state agreement with the PLO, or that appears to believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like the American civil rights movement. It’s also a waste of resources – the Reform movement has never gained traction in Israel, and is unlikely to do so even with government help.

There is a lot of very heated rhetoric coming from the Right – that Bennett and Lapid are traitors who have sold out the country because of their overweening ambition. That is clearly not the case. I do think they have the best interests of the state in mind. It should be noted that Bennett in particular has burned his bridges. If this government does not succeed, he is dead in politics.

At the same time, I don’t trust Mansour Abbas, the extreme-left Meretz party, or the only slightly less extreme Labor party. There are already rumors that representatives of the left-leaning parties have been in contact with American officials about resuming the “peace process.” It’s impossible to forget the way Shimon Peres and his associates blindsided Yitzhak Rabin with the Oslo process.

If you look at the ideologies of the various parties that ran in the recent election, it is clear that the great majority of Israelis prefer a right-wing government. If it were not for the question of Netanyahu, we would have a solid right-wing coalition of 70 to 80 mandates. Instead, we are getting a “unity” government that includes Meretz and Ra’am!

Israel is facing some serious tests now: last month, Arab gangs in cities with mixed Jewish/Arab populations, incited by Hamas supporters on social media, went on a rampage that can only be called a pogrom, burning synagogues, cars, Jewish businesses, and Jewish homes, and beating (and even murdering) Jews. This accompanied the Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities.

While news outlets tend to describe these events as “Jewish-Arab clashes” the Jewish part consisted mostly of attempts at self-defense where the police were unable to respond, and a comparatively small number of violent incidents perpetrated by Jews against Arabs. There are a huge number of illegal weapons in the hands of Israeli Arabs, including criminals, terrorists, and even ordinary citizens. Will the government have the courage and persistence to collect them?

The Biden Administration is pressuring Israel to limit the right of Jews to live in eastern Jerusalem. Will the government have the spine to resist the pressure?

Hamas is demanding the release of more than 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned for terrorism in Israel in return for two captive civilians and the bodies of two soldiers killed in a Gaza operation in 2014. Will the government give in and release those with blood on their hands, as it did in the exchange for Gilad Shalit?

We’ll know soon enough.

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli Politics | 4 Comments

Special: Doing the Math About Gazan Casualties

Posted on June 8, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

“They were only children,” wept the New York Times, in its heartrending appeal for sympathy for Gazans, supposedly under “indiscriminate and disproportionate” bombardment by the IDF.

Is it true that Israel negligently murdered children (or anyone) in its response to rocket attacks from Gaza? Let’s look at the numbers, following the intrepid Nevet Basker.

Some 4,350 rockets were launched by Hamas and other terrorist factions in Gaza at cities and towns in Israel. Of these, about 1,400 were intercepted by Iron Dome. 680 of them fell short, and landed in Gaza.

Iron Dome only intercepts rockets that have a chance of hitting populated areas, and it had a 90% success rate in downing those. 1,400 is 90% of 1555, so that means that some 155 of Hamas’ rockets landed in populated areas of Israel.

These 155 rockets, which are designed to spray shrapnel over a wide area to kill and injure people, caused 12 fatalities in Israel.

Now keep in mind that Israel has bomb shelters for civilians (in Gaza, only soldiers and bombs have shelters) and an elaborate fine-grained warning system. Keep in mind that military targets in Gaza, including rocket launchers, are deliberately located in civilian areas.

How many Gazans were killed or maimed by those 680 rockets that fell short? Even if we ignore the better protection enjoyed by Israelis, proportionately we should expect about 52 deaths in Gaza from their own rockets. I’m going to reduce that number to 30, because, despite what anti-Israel people like to say, Gaza is not “the most densely populated place on earth,” and there are empty places for rockets to land).

According to Hamas, there were a total of 256 Gazans killed. The IDF estimates that it killed 225 fighters. Let’s give Hamas the benefit of the doubt and accept its number. And just to be even more generous, let’s say the IDF exaggerated a bit and only 200 of the dead were Hamas fighters.

That leaves 56 civilian casualties. At the very least 30 of them were killed by the “friendly” fire of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, leaving 26 that can be attributed to the IDF’s bombing of military targets.

So here is a 10-day air campaign in a dense urban environment – which I remind you was undertaken in self-defense, after Israel was attacked, in which there were only 26 civilian casualties as a result.

This is a record that no other military force in history, even the most advanced Western armies, can match.

“Indiscriminate and disproportionate?” I think not.

Posted in War | Comments Off on Special: Doing the Math About Gazan Casualties

Are the American People Smarter than they Look?

Posted on June 6, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

My father believed in social progress. He was a traditional Jewish liberal, maybe a bit on the left side despite having become a successful businessman. He was born on the lower East Side of Manhattan, lived through the crash and the depression, often worked at more than one job at a time, served his country in the navy during WWII, and ultimately moved to the suburbs, where he finally was able to take a day off now and then to play golf.

I recall asking him about the cold war. It will get better, he said. Russia will become more capitalistic and the US will move more in the direction of socialism. Soon there won’t be a problem. His heroes were Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, and he passionately hated Joseph R. McCarthy and Richard Nixon. When I came home for Thanksgiving, a college freshman in 1960 (he would have liked to go to college himself, but had to go to work), I proudly told him that I had learned in my Introduction to Philosophy class that moral propositions are empirically unverifiable, and therefore neither true nor false. That’s silly, he said. Isn’t it indisputably true that racial discrimination is morally wrong? I wondered why that hadn’t occurred to me in class.

He thought Marx was right that religion was the opium of the people. He acquiesced to a Reform bar mitzvah for me, perhaps because his father-in-law wanted it, but he never had a good word for Judaism or any religion. He was particularly annoyed by people who talked about an afterlife. When you’re dead, he said, you’re dead. He expected that religion, along with racial discrimination and antisemitism, would disappear as good education became more available to everyone, thanks to economic progress enabled by advancing technology.

At the same time, the gap between rich and poor, both among individuals and nations, would be narrowed by that same technology. National differences and animosities would fade as well. Conflicts would be solved by negotiation, not war, because people would learn that war is disadvantageous to everyone.

When my wife and I moved to Israel with our kids in 1979 he was supportive, although he didn’t think much of the manifestations of religious belief that were evident here. He himself wouldn’t live here, he said, because (at the time) there was only one golf course of only nine holes. But despite his leftward leanings he did not think that the Palestinians were an oppressed people, or that there was a sensible analogy between them and black Americans, or that Israel was a colonialist power. He understood that when someone was trying to kill you, it was necessary to defend yourself.

He died in 1987, at the age of only 73, a terrible loss to my mother and the rest of the family. Shortly thereafter, it became clear that he had been mistaken about the inevitability of social progress. Despite the advance of technology, the gap between rich and poor, individually and among nations, widened rather than becoming smaller. Shortly after his death the Soviet Union collapsed – how I wished that I could have had his opinion about that event! – but it did not usher in an era of peace and cooperation. Although there was no World War Three between the superpowers, vicious and bloody little wars continued to break out all over the world, and the international institutions that my father thought would deter them failed to do so. In 2001, the American homeland was attacked for the first time since Pearl Harbor, by a resurgent, fanatic, Islam, which had not, after all, begun to lose its potency.

Racial tensions within the US, which my father had observed from close up – his business was in residential real estate – that were supposed to fade away did not do so. Despite the real progress that occurred in the 1960s, the dismantling of Jim Crow in the South and the passage of laws guaranteeing fair access to housing, education, and employment for minorities throughout the country, black citizens were often worse off than before. The public educational systems in the country fell apart, especially but not only in the large cities. Higher education became astronomically expensive at the same time as its quality declined sharply and its politicization increased dramatically. The ratio of administrators to faculty shot up, while most undergraduate teaching was done by academic “temps.” Whole departments of ethnic and gender studies that were purely political came into existence.

More recently, an anti-American movement has arisen. Supposedly it is a movement for racial justice, but in fact it is a radical revolutionary movement whose objective is to replace the ideal of equal rights, opportunity, and justice for all with a system of race-based identity politics. This movement denies the importance of free expression, silences dissent – sometimes by physical violence, enforces racial criteria in granting permission to speak, has replaced fact with narrative as the criterion of truth, and intends to exchange an admittedly flawed system (but one that is improving) with one that is explicitly racist.*

It is a step backward, away from racial justice, not toward it.

Like many revolutionary movements, this one has found it possible to stir up emotions useful to motivate behavior by using the oldest trick in the book: blame everything on the Jews. This source of antisemitism has combined with the obsessive, extreme, irrational hatred of Israel (misoziony) that has become de rigueur in the academic Left, and has taken over university campuses with the help of organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and so on, to produce a perfect storm of antisemitic expression, everything from academic articles on “settler colonialism” to street violence against anyone wearing a kipa.

That would be bad enough in itself, but the “racial justice” movement has co-opted much of the formerly conservative world of big corporations. The result has been the normalization of previously unacceptable antisemitic expression. In an incident emblematic of this, a Google executive described as its “chief of diversity strategy” was reassigned to a less-public position in the company, after the exposure of a blog post he wrote in 2007, in which he noted that,

If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself.

“Self defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering [of] others …

It’s hard to avoid asking oneself what Google would have done to an employee who publicly accused virtually any other ethnic group of “an insatiable appetite for war and killing!” I guarantee it would be more severe than a reassignment.

The recent explosion of Jew-hatred and misoziony in America, which has encompassed street thugs, pro-Palestinian demonstrators, college students, and now corporate executives, is unprecedented. My father, who once described calling on his older brother to protect him from Jew-hating bullies on the streets of New York, would be profoundly shocked by the sheer number of incidents, as well as the fact that many of the perpetrators are particularly well-educated, unlike the bullies of the 1920s. Perhaps his faith in education as a solution to bigotry would be shaken, along with his beliefs in the inexorable march of social progress, and the generally positive effects of improved technology.

The American people, he once said to me (after JFK’s victory over Nixon), are not as dumb as they look. I hope not, because they are not looking very smart lately.

________________________
* I am aware that according to the post-colonial definition of “racism” that is in vogue today, it is impossible for those defined as “oppressed” to be racist. But I see racism simply as attitudes or behavior that negatively discriminate on the basis of ethnicity. Anyone can be a racist.

Posted in American Jews, American society, Jew Hatred | 3 Comments

Almost a Government

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Tonight (Wednesday) at midnight is the deadline for Yair Lapid to tell Israel’s president that he has formed a government. Negotiations between the eight parties – including Ra’am, an Arab Islamist party – that will be part of the almost wall-to-wall coalition are still taking place as I write this, so everything I say is subject to change. The coalition, if it comes to be, will be led by Naftali Bennett and Lapid, who will each be Prime Minister for two years, starting with Bennett.

So who will not be in the coalition? The single largest party, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud, of course, two Haredi parties that have cast their lot with him, and Betzalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. If this coalition comes about as planned, it will be the first time in the history of Israel that there hasn’t been at least one explicitly religious (Jewish) party in the government, and one of the few times without a Haredi party. There will, however, be a fundamentalist Muslim party! And Mansour Abbas’ Ra’am party has already demanded that the government make no commitment in its platform to reforms favoring the LGBT community.

At first the idea was that Ra’am would not be a member of the coalition, but would vote for it from outside, so that it would have the 61 mandates necessary to come into existence. But at some point it was decided that it would be part of the coalition, although without any ministerial portfolios. This too would be a first in Israel’s history.

The idea of an Arab party as part of the government is not in itself a radical one. Arabs are 20% of Israel’s population, and have legitimate concerns, in particular about the allocation of resources to Arab towns and cities. But until now no coalition has included them – and no Arab party has wanted to be included – because of a fundamental disagreement between all the Arab parties and most of the Jewish ones over the question of whether Israel should be in some sense a “Jewish state.” Positions of the Arab parties range from the view that Israel should be a “state of all its citizens” to explicit Palestinian or pan-Arab nationalism. Yes, you read that right.

Indeed, if the conditions in Israel’s Basic Law for the Knesset were strictly applied, no Arab party could sit in the Knesset. The law excludes any party or person whose “goals or actions … expressly or by implication, include … negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” But Israel’s Supreme Court has always interpreted the requirement very liberally, at least when applied to the Arab members of the Knesset. On several occasions the Court has overruled the decision of the Central Elections Committee of the Knesset to bar an Arab candidate from running, as occurred in 2013 and 2015 to the Balad Party’s candidate, Haneen Zoabi.

Ra’am is ideologically aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, (!) the parent organization of Hamas, but Mansour Abbas insists that his goals as a member of the government are only to influence practical issues affecting the Arab community, like the out-of-control crime rate in Arab towns and investment in infrastructure.

Coming immediately after a short but painful war with Hamas, and more importantly, after anti-Jewish riots by Arab citizens of Israel in which synagogues and Jewish homes were burned, the decision to include an Arab party in the government was met by many with shock and anger. Indeed, after the news of the riots broke, I concluded that even the idea of forming a government with outside support from an Arab party was dead.

But apparently the driving forces of the unity coalition, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, believe that the need to form a government and avoid a fifth election in a bit more than two years is paramount.

Despite the large number of parties that run in Israeli elections and the fact that no party has ever gotten a majority by itself, there is usually a clear-cut contest between right-wing and left-wing blocs. Whichever bloc wins the most mandates then forms a coalition with other bloc members. But in the last few elections the split has been between pro- and anti-Netanyahu parties. The pro-Netanyahu parties could not obtain the required 61 mandates; but the anti-Netanyahu forces encompass such a wide ideological range that it has been impossible for them to form a coalition of 61 either. And that is why we have had four elections in two years.

And that is also why we have a situation in which, despite the fact that a solid majority of Israelis vote for right-wing parties – some 70 or 80 mandates worth – we can’t get a right-wing government. And why it appears that we are going to get a coalition that includes on the one hand the far-left Meretz party, the Arab Islamist Ra’am, the Labor Party, what’s left of Benny Gantz’ Kahol-Lavan, and Yair Lapid’s center-left Yesh Atid; and on the other, Avigdor Lieberman’s anti-Arab Israel Beiteinu party, as well as Gideon Sa’ar’s Tikvah Hadasha and Naftali Bennett’s Yamina, both solidly on the right of Netanyahu.

There is a great deal of anger at Naftali Bennett from right-wingers, both those that voted for Netanyahu and blame Bennett for Netanyahu’s failure to get 61 mandates, and those who voted for Bennett but think he is at best a fraud and at worst a traitor for choosing to give his seven mandates to the anti-Netanyahu side. The Shabak (internal security service) thinks that the threats against Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, also on the Yamina list, are serious enough to merit a 24-7 bodyguard.

Bennett has justified breaking his earlier commitments to not sit in a government with Lapid or to even depend on support from an Islamist party by insisting that there was no way that a government led by Netanyahu could get the needed 61. The alternative, he said, is a fifth election, which would be a disaster for the country. Netanyahu has said that if Bennett had fully committed to joining him rather than remaining on the fence, there could have been a right-wing government. I personally believe that Bennett is right: he did explore every possibility to squeeze out a few more mandates for a right-wing coalition before going to Lapid.

I also think Bennett is right about the consequences of a fifth election, which would entail several months of a paralyzed caretaker government, followed by yet another period of chaos as the parties try again to form a coalition. And there is no guarantee that the results would be more decisive than they were the last four times. The country is facing some very serious security issues today – the unrest among Israeli Arabs (which was incited by Hamas), the unfinished business with Hamas itself, the Iranian nuclear program, and – affecting all of the above – the pro-Iranian and pro-Palestinian polices of the Biden Administration. There is also a major unknown, which is the policy of China in a Middle East where American influence is waning. And of course there is the economic fallout of the Covid epidemic, and the continued need for vigilance against mutations of the virus. I could go on, and on.

We need a government and we need one now. It will definitely not be the one anyone hoped for, either on the Right or the Left, but the present instability is unacceptable. There is a good chance that the differences between the partners in the coalition are too great, and it will splinter, resulting in another election anyway. But if it does work, even for a year or two, it could be a path back to political stability.

Update [3 Jun 2021 12:06 IDT]

A few minutes before the deadline, Yair Lapid went to the President with a coalition in hand! Now we will see if it holds up for the two weeks until the official swearing in.

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

Four Days in May

Posted on May 30, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

This story has everything: the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of Western academia, the obsessive need of Palestinians and their supporters to make everything about them, and the emptiness of their insistence that they are not antisemitic, only “critical of Israel.”

On 26 May 2021, the Chancellor and Provost of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, released a statement* by email condemning recent antisemitic violence, called “Speaking Out Against Acts of Antisemitism.”

Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world …

If you have been adversely impacted by anti-Semitic or any other discriminatory incidents in our community, please do not hesitate to reach out to our counseling and other support services on campus. Our behavioral health team stands ready to support you through these challenging times …

We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel.”

On 27 May, the infuriated Rutgers Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) replied in a long post on their Instagram account (here significantly shortened):

… The Chancellor and Provost’s statement exclusively addressing antisemitism comes during a time when Israel’s occupation of Palestine [sic] is finally receiving widespread criticism, and despite mentioning the “deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region,” conveniently ignores the extent to which Palestinians have been brutalized by Israel’s occupation and bombing of Gaza.

… the fact that [the statement] comes at such a critical time involving global protests and critiques against Israel’s occupation of Palestine [sic] is a decision that cannot be separated from widespread attempts to conflate antizionism [sic] with antisemitism and derail Palestinian voices and activism. …

Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway proceed to refer to “increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East.” By choosing to center the crossfire between Israeli Occupation Forces [sic] and Hamas, rather than Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine [sic], the Chancellor and Provost minimize the impact of settler-colonialism on Palestinians and attempt to portray the violence as an equal conflict, which we know it not to be in the slightest. …

Most importantly, the Chancellor and Provost notably neglected to use the words “Palestine” or “Palestinian” in their statement, instead opting to use phrases such as “the Middle East” and “the Gaza region.” This refusal to acknowledge and affirm the existence of Palestine [sic], and thus the Palestinian faculty and students at Rutgers University, reveals the administration’s inability to stand in genuine solidarity with the Palestinian members of its University, a community that is grieving the death of over 200 Palestinians including many women and children. It isolates them and shows that Rutgers does not stand with or support them in their struggle for freedom and liberation, and contributes to the racist efforts of zionists [sic] to erase Palestinian identity and existence. …

We therefore demand an apology from Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway for dismissing the voices and visibility of Palestinians and allies, as well as demand an acknowledgement and explanation of why they did so. We demand that the Rutgers administration call out and expose any and all ties to Israeli apartheid and commit to action that reflects a global call to uplift the humanity of Palestinians, to recognize their violent displacement by the state of Israel, and acknowledge the gross mass murders occurrings [sic] at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces, adjacent to the American police violence condemned by the University.

On 28 May, the Chancellor and Provost sent a second email,* titled “Apology.”

Rutgers University–New Brunswick is a community that is enriched by our vibrant diversity.

However, our diversity must be supported by equity, inclusion, antiracism, and the condemnation of all forms of bigotry and hatred, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

As we grow in our personal and institutional understanding, we will take the lesson learned here to heart, and pledge our commitment to doing better. We will work to regain your trust, and make sure that our communications going forward are much more sensitive and balanced.

It is absolutely stunning that university officials found it necessary to apologize for condemning antisemitism! But of course the apology was inadequate to calm the fury of SJP, who had demanded far more, and on the same day they produced an even longer  Instagram diatribe, from which I will quote just one piece:

… Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway had no urgent or context-based prerogative to address antisemitism. Condemnation of the unjust murders conducted by a Zionist institution does not equate to condemnation or attack upon Judaism or Jews; to explicitly cite the Jewish community in need of support in context to global criticisms of the Zionist occupation of Palestine [sic] is to conflate antizionism [sic] with antisemitism and derail Palestinian voices and activism.

In other words, SJP holds that the antisemitism university officials have condemned is actually just anti-Zionism, which SJP sees as totally justified! SJP admits that anti-Zionism is essential to Palestinian identity, and therefore to condemn it is to “erase” Palestinian identity. I agree with them: the only uniquely “Palestinian” part of Palestinian culture is its opposition to Jewish sovereignty. But it is becoming more and more clear that the anti-Zionism of Palestinians and their supporters is viciously antisemitic.

At this point, well-deserved criticism for their craven apology rained down on the poor Chancellor and Provost. And so, on 29 May, Rutgers found it necessary to release a third statement, this one by the President of the University, to un-apologize, and to make it clear that like the US Congress, they oppose every imaginable form of bigotry (and therefore criticize no one).

Rutgers deplores hatred and bigotry in all forms. We have not, nor would we ever, apologize for standing against anti-Semitism.

Neither hatred nor bigotry has a place at Rutgers, nor should they have a place anywhere in the world. At Rutgers we believe that anti-Semitism, anti-Hinduism, Islamophobia and all forms of racism, intolerance and xenophobia are unacceptable wherever and whenever they occur.

An Orwellian note: with each iteration of its position, Rutgers replaced the previous one on their website. All the links in the media that pointed to the original statement, the apology, and the un-apology now redirect to the same place, the un-apology. The others have been dropped into the memory hole.

Some 140 members of the Rutgers faculty joined SJP in opposing Israel’s right to self-defense. You can read their letter here. These are the folks that would teach your children if they go to Rutgers.

I can’t imagine that I would want my children to study in a North American or European university today. Far better for them to learn a trade; they will come out with smaller debts and without antisemitic baggage.

_________________________________
* I would have liked to provide “official” links to the complete, original emails, but as I wrote, they no longer can be found. The quotes provided are taken from several news accounts that included the content of the emails.

Posted in Academia, Jew Hatred | 2 Comments

Wardrobe Malfunction!

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Recently, Jews in the West who thought themselves safe have found themselves facing the same form of antisemitism that is common in the Arab and wider Muslim world, much of it imported along with immigrants from the Middle East. In the US, Canada, Continental Europe, and Britain, Muslim Jew-hatred become cross-fertilized with the native brand, bringing along the extreme violence that characterized it at home. Ironically, traditional Islamic antisemitism itself became more radical with the injection of vicious eliminationism from Nazi Germany, starting before the war, continuing through the employment of Amin al-Husseini as propagandist for Hitler, and concluding with the arrival in Arab countries of fleeing Nazi war criminals afterwards. Now it is coming back to the post-Christian West.

Red lines are being crossed at a nauseating pace as the violence that was first directed at Jews in European countries where there was massive Muslim immigration moves westward. What American would have expected, even one year ago, that a gang of pogromists would invade a restaurant, ask who among the patrons were Jewish, and beat them? That is something that happened in Berlin in 1938 or Baghdad in 1941; but it ought to be unthinkable in Los Angeles today. And yet it happened.

For some time it has become dangerous for Orthodox Jews to walk the streets in their own neighborhoods in New York City. The perpetrators of this violence are young black and Hispanic males. The targets are often women and elderly people. All over the West, Jewish institutions, synagogues, schools, even graveyards, are targets for vandalism. Such attacks were rare in the US until recently, but they have become commonplace now. And interestingly, the vandalism often includes graffiti of slogans like “free Palestine.”

When anti-Israel demonstrators in London called for “Jewish blood” and the rape of Jewish women (in earshot of police, who did nothing), it somewhat diminished the strength of the arguments that “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism.” Anyone who honestly believes that today didn’t get the message.

It’s often said that every time there is a flare-up of Israel’s long war to survive in the region, it is reflected in worldwide antisemitic violence. That supposedly explains the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews (and the theft of their property) by virtually every Arab country after 1948. This action was against the national interests of these countries, since Jews were among the educational, financial, medical, and technical elites (their loss was our gain, since most of the expelled Jews came to Israel). But anti-Jewish beliefs have always been irrational, extreme, and obsessive.

For the Jew-hater, everything  bad, personal and political, can be explained with reference to the Jews. Facts and logical reasoning are irrelevant; indeed, the more unbelievable antisemitic beliefs may appear, the more this confirms their truth in the mind of the believer. Unsurprisingly, anti-Israelism, or misoziony, follows the same pattern: irrational, extreme, obsessive.

And this leads me to believe that the chain of causality is reversed in the traditional historical account. It makes more sense to see both the violent (but unsuccessful) attempt to dislodge the Jews from Palestine and the more successful effort of the Arab nations to rid themselves of their own Jews as stemming from the same kind of antisemitic impulse.

One of the interesting things about Jew-hatred is that it is a powerful motivator, especially of violent actions. In the past there was nothing shameful about it, so it could be used openly. Hitler and company found it a useful tool to focus public anger and create support for his party, which promised a solution. But in the case of Hitler himself, like the Arab nations after 1948, antisemitism became the motive rather than the tool, and his obsession may have lost Germany the war. After the war, the sheer horror of the Holocaust caused it to be discredited. So the KGB clothed the Jew-hating Palestinian movement with the up-to-date ideas of national liberation, anti-colonialism, and socialism. But the costume slipped from time to time, as when the Entebbe hijackers separated the Jews (Jews, not Israelis!) from the rest of the hostages. Something is exposed that should have been hidden; I call it a “wardrobe malfunction” like those that bedevil female celebrities.

More recently, Jew-hatred has adopted an even more up-to-date uniform as a movement for racial justice. And what success it has had! Colleges and universities in the West turn out dedicated pro-Palestinian activists by the tens of thousands every year. Organizations in support of racial minorities like Black Lives Matter routinely include the Palestinian Arabs as one of the oppressed groups they want to liberate. And the Palestinian cause is pursued obsessively, irrationally, and often with extremism.

That gives us a clue, especially when we consider that it’s rare to hear even the most fanatical “anti-racists” mention the fact that there is race-based slavery in some parts of the world. Not “microaggressions,” actual slavery. But of course we know what is behind their enthusiasm. These modern proponents of human rights (for some humans), the ones in the universities, the ones on the European Commission and in the New York Times, may say, or even believe, that they are motivated to be righteously angry at Israel because of her alleged denial of Palestinian rights, but we know where the emotional drive comes from. And like Hitler and the Arab nations, their obsession eats them up, and sometimes there is a wardrobe malfunction, like those folks in London promoting the rape of Jewish women. Because of Palestine, of course.

This is upsetting to some. Michelle Goldberg published a piece in the NY Times which was originally titled “Attacks on Jews Over Israel Are a Gift to the Right,” but after numerous observers noted its implication that violent attacks on Jews were bad primarily because of the political fallout, the NYT changed its headline to “The Crisis of Antisemitic Violence.” Max Blumenthal went all-out and argued that the explosion of antisemitism was “manufactured … to turn the media’s gaze away from dead children in Gaza” (no link, google it if you really want to swim in his sewer). Wardrobe malfunctions.

Unfortunately, while the IDF was moderately successful in its Gaza campaign (although it was cut short by a command from Washington), Israel has been decisively beaten in its information campaign.

The war was started by Hamas with heavy barrages of deadly rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities, from civilian areas, a double war crime. Some 4,350 rockets were launched by Hamas, of which 600-700 of them fell on their own people in Gaza. Israel’s response was very carefully targeted, using various techniques to warn civilians in areas where there were military targets. Final casualty figures are not available, but as of now the number of deaths in Gaza is reported as about 250. The IDF estimates that about half of these are civilians. Considering the number of shortfalls, it is likely that most of them were killed by Hamas’ own rockets. The IDF’s performance in destroying Hamas’ military infrastructure while sparing civilians is unmatched in the annals of urban warfare.

And yet, media opinion in the West continues to overwhelmingly blame Israel for the war, as well as to accuse her of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, deliberately targeting civilians, and more. PM Netanyahu, a centrist who many Israelis believe to be too soft on terrorism, is called a “hardline right-wing extremist,” who has presided over “massive settlement expansion” although the area occupied by Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria has barely changed since the 1990s.

There is a reason for this, and it’s not just Israeli ineptness at hasbara. It is a consequence of the blossoming of the seeds of Jew-hatred that can lie dormant for years, waiting for the right stimulus to wake them up.

If you think I’m wrong, just pay attention. Sooner or later there will be a wardrobe malfunction.

Posted in Information war, Jew Hatred, Media, War | 4 Comments

Sovereign or Satellite?

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

“Israel has the right to defend herself,” said Joe Biden to cheers from the Jewish state. But not too strongly or for too long, apparently. When the pressure from the left wing of his party began to get uncomfortable, he issued an ultimatum. And when America says “jump,” Israel jumps.

One of the greatest mistakes Israel has made in the 73 years since its declaration of independence was to sign on as a satellite of the United States, in return for military aid. The aid has been corrosive: it gives the US too much leverage over our policies, distorts our military procurement decisions, corrupts our decision-makers, cripples our own defense industries, and damages our sovereignty. We don’t need it and we would be better off without it.

While many Americans support Israel, there are those, including some in the US Congress, Senate, and administration, who would prefer that she disappear. Even among those who support Israel, knowledge of the facts about our situation is rare. American media, with few exceptions, is at best strongly biased toward a policy of Israeli concessions that most Israelis oppose. Some of the media’s misconceptions are  risible, like their repetition that Benjamin Netanyahu is a “hardline right-winger.” Many Israelis would respond to this, “if only!”

Israel and its conflict with the Palestinian Arabs has become a highly partisan issue, with American politicians spouting nonsense in order to activate their political bases. Anti-Israel propaganda has become a large-scale industry in the US, with numerous organizations springing up, financed by our state enemies and non-state actors like the groups associated with George Soros, probably the single most prolific funder of anti-Israel initiatives.

In addition to all this, the US is currently going through a convulsive social upheaval centering on the subject of race. The mix of violence and incoherent ideologies, along with what is probably a deliberate attempt to destabilize the country, has also given rise in some segments of society (as political and economic instability always does) to antisemitism and its constant companion, misoziony, the irrational, extreme, and obsessive hatred of the Jewish state. There has been a deliberate effort by some to tie domestic racial issues like the relations between the police and black Americans to Israel. Despite the absurdity of this proposition, it has garnered a great deal of support.

Henry Kissinger once said that Israel does not have a foreign policy, only a domestic one. This is becoming true of America as well. All politics, as Daniel Moynihan said, is local. In more and more ideological localities, they don’t like us, and that has an effect on national policy.

Do we, as Israelis, want to tie our survival to the USA? Or any other great power, like China for example? I don’t think so.

But what is the alternative? Israel is a very small country with a small population in an increasingly hostile world. It is located in a very strategic spot, both physically and in the conceptual geography of much of the human race. Without allies, she would be at the mercy of much larger and stronger nations. Today she is facing a direct threat from Iran, a country with a population almost ten times greater.

The Trump Administration, whatever else can be said about it, was solidly pro-Israel. Its actions regarding Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, as well as its sharp reduction of financial support for UNRWA and the Palestinian Authority, strengthened Israel with respect to her internal and neighboring enemies. The Abraham Accords it brokered provided – for the first time – a true light at the end of the tunnel for the Israeli-Arab conflict, in a way that the cold peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan did not.

I was very optimistic at that time that Trump’s policy marked the beginning of progress away from international isolation, as well as – for the first time – an end to the artificial support for the poisonous and destructive Palestinian movement. Israel, I thought, could develop into a leader of a strong non-aligned movement, including Arab countries and possibly India, that could deter Iranian aggression. I thought that maybe the irredentist PLO and Hamas could be pushed out, and some form of Palestinian autonomy established that would both provide a better life for the Palestinians and end the plague of terrorism that has accompanied our nation since her beginnings.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration, feeling the need to reject all things Trump, rejected his pro-Israel policy. It went back to the failed and dangerous initiative of the Obama Administration to appease Iran, a policy that guarantees a new regional war in the Middle East – one that will make the recent fracas in Gaza look like a schoolyard squabble. In addition, it is impossible for me to understand how Iran, where “death to America” is a popular slogan, will be a better ally to the US than the nascent Abraham Accords community promised to be.

Biden is a good guy. He said that Israel had the right to defend herself, and said that “until the region, says unequivocally, they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state, there will be no peace.” He is not personally confrontational to Israel or her leaders, as Obama was. But one has to look past what politicians say at what they do. His administration is moving ahead to restart the Iran deal and resume funding the PA and UNWRA. And his ultimatum over Gaza, no matter how polite, was still an ultimatum.

I hope it will be possible for Israel to make the necessary changes to reduce its dependence on the US. It won’t be easy.

In the meantime, this week we are facing a test of our sovereignty and independence. That is the conflict over the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood. Israel’s courts have decided, after a legal struggle that continued for decades, that four Arab families who have never paid rent to the Jewish owners of the property, must be evicted from it. If the evictions are not carried out, it will establish that Israeli law does not apply in Israel when it doesn’t suit the Arabs and their international supporters.

PM Netanyahu will have a chance to prove that he is the leader of a truly sovereign and independent state in the next few days. Let’s see if he can do it.

Posted in US-Israel Relations, War | 7 Comments