The Iran Policy Shipwreck

Posted on February 4, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

The other day YouTube decided that I wanted to see a compendium of large ships crashing into each other or into docks, cranes, and other installations. What impressed me was the unavoidability of the crashes: the ships moved ponderously, inexorably, toward their fates as tiny humans scuttled around on the decks, horns blowing with great urgency (I imagine the ship’s captains shouting “Full astern!”), but all for nothing when the almost irresistible force of the ship meets the almost immovable object of its nemesis in a crescendo of crushing, grinding, and snapping.

Whew. And this reminded me of the situation with Iran. The Iranians have ramped up their production of enriched uranium and activated advanced centrifuges in their Natanz facility, and they are threatening to kick out IAEA inspectors on 26 February. They are telling US officials that if they want to reenter the (worthless) deal, they’d better hurry and start removing sanctions while there is still time. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for his part, is demanding that the Iranians first “return to compliance,” although what that would mean in practice considering the progress they have made is unclear.

What is becoming clear is that the Biden Administration is dead set on a course of returning to the deal, although Blinken, at least, wants to renegotiate it. On the other hand Robert Malley, President Biden’s choice for Special Envoy to Iran, wants to jump back in to the deal as it was when President Trump took the US out of it. Malley’s think tank published a position paper a few days ago, which contained this:

The Biden administration should pursue U.S. re-entry into the 2015 nuclear deal, starting by revoking the 2018 order ending U.S. JCPOA participation and initiating a process of fully reversing Trump-era sanctions while Iran brings its nuclear program back into full compliance. As further confidence-building measures, Washington could support Iran’s International Monetary Fund loan request as a sign of good-will in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, and perhaps engage Tehran in discussions on a prisoner swap.

Do you hear the horns blowing and the captains shouting yet?

Persia was among the earliest known places where the game of chess was played, and the Iranians have proven to be very good negotiators. A strategy that calls for American concessions up front (“confidence building”) will fail, as it did under Obama. Only a tough strategy that demands action by Iran as an alternative to more pressure (“an offer that they can’t refuse”) will succeed. The Trump Administration left the US in a strong bargaining position toward Iran, with very painful sanctions in force. The US should insist on concrete, verifiable steps by Iran before removing any sanctions, and should threaten to take even stronger action if Iran does not comply.

Biden’s administration is replete with former Obama Administration officials (conservative blogger Jeff Dunetz calls it “the reBama Administration”), including Malley, who incidentally is also very out front about his pro-Palestinian sympathies. From the standpoint of American or Israeli interests, Malley is a wretched choice. He is far more pro-Iranian than even Blinken, Jake Sullivan, or Wendy Sherman, all former Obama-era Iran hands retreaded by Biden.

One wonders why Biden picked a team that is unlikely to produce better results than it did under Obama, and may even do considerably worse. Maybe Blinken vs. Malley is a good-cop bad-cop routine. But who knows if Biden was responsible for those choices, or if they were made for him?

Fortunately I am not Prime Minister of Israel, but if I were I would not expect better performance from a reBama Iran team than from the original one. And I think this could have been known for some time. Biden announced his intention to reenter the deal in September of 2020. From then on, it became clear that any military action by Israel – even special operations short of war – would be construed by the new administration as a slap in the face.

This could be the reason that Biden announced so early that he would be re-entering the deal: so that the “slap in the face” argument could be used against any last-minute Israeli action before Biden took office, or even before the election. And it was indeed deployed (by Obama surrogates Ben Rhodes and John Brennan) to criticize Israel’s assassination of the head of Iran’s nuclear program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on 27 November.

Rhodes and Brennan said that Israel’s act was “aimed at undermining diplomacy” between the US and Iran, and that seemed ridiculous. How could anyone see it as anything but an attempt to slow Iran’s progress to the bomb? But in fact they were sending a message: after Biden becomes president, we’ll remember anything you do now, and you’ll be sorry.

I missed this. On 1 October, I wrote that I had expected that if Biden won the election, Israel would act against the Iranian nuclear facilities in the last weeks of the Trump Administration. I was wrong. Apparently our government got the message that the Americans would not forgive Israel if she eliminated the need for an Iran deal before Biden could sign one.

The weeks passed, Iran ramped up their processes, and Israel did nothing. Now that Biden is in the White House, it is even less likely that Israel will act, despite the recent sabre-rattling of our Chief of Staff.

Israel is in the position of a helpless observer on the deck of a small vessel who can only watch as a huge cruise ship or supertanker plows into it – which is just where the people pulling Biden’s strings want us.

Posted in Iran, US-Israel Relations | 3 Comments

It’s Not Paranoia

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Jewish paranoia. The phrase is ridiculous.

Paranoia suggests delusion. But they have been hating, expelling, and murdering Jews for being Jews since there were Jews. Until 1965, the Catholic Church taught that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Anti-Jewish violence was common in both the Christian and Muslim worlds during the Middle Ages (although the Christians were generally worse). Martin Luther wanted to “set fire to their synagogues and schools,” making him an inspiration for German Jew-hatred. Marx, the child of Christianized Jews, saw them as exemplars of everything that was evil about capitalism. Jews in the pre-WWI Russian Empire from which my grandparents escaped were the target of countless pogroms (pogrom is a Russian word derived from a verb that can be translated as “to wreak havoc”). Jews joined the Revolution in the hopes that the new world they believed they were creating would finally be free of the oldest hatred, but it turned out after a few years that a zhid would always be a zhid.

Jews were the enemies of Christ, Christianity, Mohammed, and the working class. They were vicious exploitative capitalists and dangerous Bolshevik revolutionaries. Not allowed to own land or work at trades, they demonstrated their avarice by becoming moneylenders.

The Germans seem to have invented the racial form of Jew-hatred in the latter half of the 19th century, when the likes of Wilhelm Marr explained that the economic, sexual, and other depravity of Jews was not simply a matter of religion or occupation but something inherent in their genes. They didn’t know about DNA yet, but the new ideas of Darwin explained how even Jews that had assimilated and converted to Christianity could be as malevolent as ever. The Nazis later made good use of this idea.

After the war, even the Germans were abashed, although unrepentant Nazis fled to Egypt and Syria to help them develop chemical weapons, because once you start gassing Jews it’s hard to stop. Anyway, antisemitism took a breather in the West, although those Nazis continued teaching the Arabs in the Middle East things they hadn’t known about hating Jews before. The Palestinian Arabs didn’t benefit from German scientists as far as we know, but they had their own Nazi, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and wartime Arabic-language broadcaster from Berlin.

In 1967, the KGB wanted to amass influence in the Arab and Muslim world and stick it to the West, so they heated up the Israeli-Arab conflict. As part of their campaign against Israel, they created the myth of the Palestinian Arabs as a national liberation movement, just like the Viet Cong. The third world and Western virtue-signallers loved it. Later they promoted the idea that Zionism was racism, and got the UN to pass a resolution saying so in 1975. In 2001, the Durban Conference against racism focused almost entirely on the Jewish state. By then, although it still wasn’t cool in the West to admit that you thought Jews were creatures of the Devil, it became acceptable, even admirable, to “criticize Israel” in the extreme, irrational, and obsessive manner formerly reserved for Jews. The so-called “new antisemitism” came into being, in which Israel, the Jew Among Nations, took on the role of the Jewish people.

Israel was accused of every possible crime, especially those crimes that had been perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews. By definition, Israel could do no right. If Israel was tolerant of homosexuals, then mentioning that fact was forbidden, because it was a trick (“pinkwashing”) to hide the genocide we perpetrated against the Palestinians (the fact that the population of Palestinians had more than tripled since 1970 was ignored).

After a while, people started saying, “if the Jewish state is so unutterably evil, maybe it’s because it’s full of evil Jews,” and old-fashioned Jew-hatred, began to trickle back into public discourse. One neat twist was black antisemitism, which was part of the ideology of the original Nation of Islam (NOI) that started in the US in the 1930s. During the 1960s the mainstream civil rights movement worked closely with Jews and Jewish groups, but the Black Power movement rejected Jewish help, with important personalities like Stokely Carmichael (later called Kwame Ture) turning toward the international Left, especially including the PLO. The NOI’s new leader, Louis Farrakhan, who has been consistently and viciously antisemitic for decades, is a hero for many in the black movement today.

Today the landscape of Jew-hatred in the US includes many on the Left who argue that the connection to Israel automatically taints Jews, unless they are prepared to repudiate the Jewish state and buy into the ideology of Palestinism – which implies the death or dispersal of Israel’s Jews. The ideology of Critical Race Theory that has swept American campuses, and which is more and more permeating the educational system, sees Jews as “white”; that is, as privileged oppressors whose privilege should be eliminated and whose excessive wealth should be distributed to the People of Color they oppress.

At the same time the extreme Right maintains conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the world’s economy and politics, claiming that the Rothschild family and George Soros – who, while of Jewish extraction, is probably the greatest individual non-state enemy of Israel – control everything, including the weather. The existence of social media bubbles has given life to large groups of people who believe more and more fantastic theories, and many of these theories place Jews at the center of conspiracies. This is the source of some of the most violent Jew-hatred, like that which moved Robert Bowers to enter a synagogue in Pittsburgh and murder nine harmless and mostly old Jews (the oldest was 97).

In Europe, while there are still some Nazis running around, most if not all recent murderous antisemitic incidents are the work of young Muslim immigrants who have absorbed the new hybrid of traditional Muslim Quranic Jew-hatred, Nazi conspiracy theories, rage at the “oppression” of Palestinians, and fury at the existence of a sovereign Jewish state on “Muslim land.” Nice combination. In France, the virulence of this condition is shown by the propensity of these young men to murder women and children.

In the UK the flap over Corbyn’s Labour Party, which didn’t end with his resounding loss in the election, continues to expose a combination of so-called “genteel” British antisemitism and more modern left-wing stuff centering on Israel (but clearly being about Jews). And of course there are young Muslims in Britain too.

Herzl and Jabotinsky believed that a Jewish state was absolutely necessary for the survival of the Jewish people, because they would never be granted a place in the non-Jewish world. Jabotinsky saw clearly the explosion of anti-Jewish violence in the future and warned against it. When the Holocaust happened, many people believed that Zionism had now been vindicated by history; and indeed, a Jewish state arose shortly afterwards.

But as we’ve seen, the taboo against Jew-hatred that followed the war only lasted a couple of generations, and it is creeping back in right, left, and religious guises. And the international institutions that were created after the war in order to ensure that the horrors of that period should never be repeated have proven to be weak, and many of them have ironically been turned directly against the very Jewish state that Herzl and Jabotinsky dreamed of but never saw.

It was not unreasonable to think that Jew-hatred would disappear after the war, just as it was not unreasonable to think that the Enlightenment would solve the Jewish problem in 19th century Europe. In both cases it was not to be. One of Herzl’s dreams was that the Jewish state would someday be a “normal” state, like France. This will not happen. Israel will always be the exception, it will always have enemies, it will always attract attention, much of it malign.

No, we aren’t paranoid. The conflict is real. That’s fine. It just makes us stronger.

Posted in Jew Hatred, Zionism | 1 Comment

How Israel Could Get a Stable Government

Posted on January 28, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

The challenges facing the state today are enormous. Although the vaccination project has been a success, the more-contagious mutations are spreading among groups that haven’t been vaccinated, and there are worries that new strains for which the vaccines aren’t as effective may develop. The health-care system is past peak capacity now. The economic impact on some segments of the population has been exceedingly painful already, and the costs for the vaccines and lost productivity will ultimately be felt throughout the economy.

At the same time, the IDF is asking for more money, in part to prepare for the possibility that it will be necessary to neutralize the Iranian nuclear capability by military means. That also would involve conflict with Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria and possibly Iraq, as well as involvement from Hamas. There still is no 2021 budget, and since the Knesset has been dissolved in preparation for the fourth election in two years, there is no possibility of passing one until there is a new government. The election is scheduled for 23 March, and then there is the interminable process of forming a coalition after that – assuming that a coalition can be formed.

The “unity” government that has just fallen apart was very expensive, since it was put together by bribing various politicians to join it with ministerial portfolios; since there weren’t enough to go around, a bunch of new ministries were created, for a total of 35. In addition, it was ineffectual: since the main partners were PM Binyamin Netanyahu’s bloc and a bloc made up of anti-Netanyahu politicians (with no other ideology besides a desire to depose him), they were permanently at each other’s throats.

In recent years Netanyahu has become obsessed with protecting himself from the corruption indictments against him. As a result, he has been unable to stand up to the Haredi parties that hold up his coalition. Their constituents seem to believe that they are Rabbi Akiva and the government which is trying to enforce the rules to contain the epidemic is the Roman Empire. Their acting as an autonomous group within the state has always been a problem, but with the advent of Covid it has become much more serious. Recently they have engaged in violent riots against the police.

Bibi has always insisted on managing everything himself. Ministers often find that their authority is very limited, limited to precisely what Bibi wants them to do. Their individual initiatives are stymied, something very frustrating to people like Naftali Bennett, who have ideas and energy but are kept on a tight leash. Bibi is tremendously competent and able to do many things at once, but this sometimes results in particular areas being neglected. And lately this problem, too, has become more serious.

Everything the government has done to control the epidemic except for the vaccination program has been poorly planned, poorly timed, and poorly executed. I judge that this is because the PM wants to control everything, but lacks the power – and perhaps also the focus – to exert that control.

Finally, the temporary vacation from American pressure that Israel enjoyed under the Trump Administration has come to an end. Biden’s promise to return to the Iran deal means that sanctions on Iran will be removed and (almost certainly) limitations will be placed on Israel’s freedom to act against Iranian bases in Syria and the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah. Israeli officials believe this makes conflict with Iran much more likely.

In the Palestinian arena, too, Biden and his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, have reiterated their belief in the necessity of a sovereign Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. They have said that they will restart payments to UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency that exists to nurture the growth of a population of stateless refugee descendants – now more than 5 million – that is a hothouse of terrorism, and which the Palestinians and their supporters demand be allowed to live in Israel. Biden also intends to reopen the PLO mission in Washington.

The administration hasn’t done much that affects Israel yet, and I would like to be optimistic about the future. But some of his appointments are troubling. For example, his new Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the NSC, is former Obama Administration staffer Maher Bitar, a Palestinian activist who worked for UNRWA and supports BDS. Bitar will “coordinate intelligence between the White House and the intelligence community, receiving material from intelligence agencies, informing the intelligence community of White House policy, and deciding who gets access to secret information.”

All this requires a government that can pay attention to multiple issues at the same time, a coalition that can work together, and a PM that is not on trial for corruption.

How can we get one? The last three elections have been almost deadlocked. Twice no governing coalition could be formed, and the last election produced the Frankensteinian “unity” government that was almost worse than no government at all (I have discussed the technical issues in our electoral system here).

Based on recent polls, if we leave out the non-Zionist Arab parties, who will neither be invited into a coalition nor wish to be, and the Haredi parties, then neither the right- nor the left-wing blocs will be able to form a government. The Right, which has a majority of the Jewish vote, is split between pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions. With the Haredi parties, Netanyahu is very close to 61 seats – precisely the situation we were in the last time. But if he succeeds, the government will be weak, dependent on the Haredim, and will continue to be a one-man show. The Left has no chance, even with the support of the Arab parties from outside the coalition. Of course there are all kinds of imaginative solutions involving partners that would normally not be together that I haven’t mentioned. But they are unlikely.

I would like to see a fundamental restructuring of our system, but that is not going to happen under a caretaker government in the next two months. But there is one thing that could radically change the picture, and it is something that should happen in any event:

Binyamin Netanyahu should voluntarily step down as head of the Likud. This could unify the Right, and enable a solid majority right-wing coalition – without the Haredi parties, whose ability to bring down the government at will has made it possible for the Haredim to act like a state within a state.

This does not solve all of our problems. It doesn’t fix the imbalance of power between the legal establishment and the elected Knesset, for example. But it does at least make it possible to have a reasonably lean government with a unified ideological perspective that will be able to act on the problems at hand.

Since I’m dreaming, there is one other thing I would like: as part of the deal, all charges against Netanyahu – some of which are legitimate, and some fraudulent – should be dropped, in view of his service to the state.

There are only a few weeks to go before the election. Can our politicians, starting with Bibi, put aside their plans for personal glory and their thoughts of revenge, and agree to do the right thing for the Jewish state? I’m hoping they can.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 1 Comment

Is it a Still a “Free Country?”

Posted on January 24, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

I didn’t want to write about the USA anymore. People keep telling me that I don’t know anything about events there, that it’s a different country than when I lived there, and that I don’t get how Donald Trump almost engineered a fascist coup of my former home. I am told that I am blinded by the good things he did for Israel, and that he didn’t really mean them anyway, because everything he does (by definition!) is done for selfish political reasons.

But maybe my not being personally involved (although it’s hard for anyone on the planet to be entirely uninvolved in what happens in 800-pound gorilla America) makes it possible for me to see some things more clearly. And what I see is that in the last few years the combination of changes in the media, the educational system, and popular culture, as well as the explosion of social media have given rise to some really dangerous trends, in the direction of less freedom of expression.

Trump is blamed by many for damaging democracy. But I think far more damage has been and is being done by the reaction to Donald Trump. Trump and his movement are being used as an excuse to push the country down a path toward less free expression and less free thought. A path toward a totally different kind of country than the one I grew up in, the one in which every kid’s response to being told to shut up was to say “it’s a free country.” Is it still a “free country?”

What prompted me to write about this was this recent announcement by Press Secretary Jen Psaki of a federal initiative to fight “domestic violent extremism”:

The January 6th assault on the Capitol and the tragic deaths and destruction that occurred underscored what we have long known: The rise of domestic violent extremism is a serious and growing national security threat.

The Biden administration will confront this threat with the necessary resources and resolve. We are committed to developing policies and strategies based on facts, on objective and rigorous analysis, and on a respect for constitutionally protected free speech and political activities.

Our initial work on DVE will broadly fall into three areas. The first is a tasking from President Biden sent to the ODNI today requesting a comprehensive threat assessment, coordinated with the FBI and DHS, on domestic violent extremism. This assessment will draw on the analysis from across the government and, as appropriate, nongovernmental organizations. …

The second will be the building of an NSC capability to focus on countering domestic violent extremism. As a part of this, the NSC will undertake a policy review effort to determine how the government can share information better about this threat, support efforts to prevent radicalization, disrupt violent extremist networks, and more. …

The third will be coordinating relevant parts of the federal government to enhance and accelerate efforts to address DVE. This considered, an NSC-convened process will focus on addressing evolving threats, radicalization, the role of social media, opportunities to improve information sharing, operational responses, and more.

The first red flag is the use of the Capitol incident as a justification for this project. Most of the participants in the Trump rally at the Ellipse in Washington believed that the election had not been fair, and that Trump should have become the President-Elect, not Biden. Some of these demonstrators moved to the Capitol, where a small number of them (“several hundred”) invaded the building, fought with Capitol police, committed acts of vandalism, and even murdered one police officer. A woman was fatally shot by police, and several others died in unclear circumstances. Not all those that entered the building committed vandalism or violent crimes. Some behaved like tourists.

This was not an insurrection or a coup attempt. Given that some of the people in the crowd had (legal) weapons, it could have turned into a shootout with police. But it didn’t. Because it was the US Capitol, the incident had great emotional resonance. But objectively it was not a big deal. There was only a relatively small number of “violent extremists” involved. And if normal security precautions had been taken – why they were not is a rather interesting question, given that the FBI and other agencies had prior intelligence that something was planned – nothing at all would have happened. Most of those involved have by now been identified and arrested.

The administration is citing this event as the justification for a federal crackdown on “domestic violent extremism” which even has an official abbreviation already, DVE. There has certainly been a lot of DVE in the US over the past year, but most of it took place in the context of anti-police demonstrations, looting, mass vandalism, and violent takeovers of multiple city blocks. One might hope that the administration also had these events in mind, but the fact is that Psaki studiously did not mention them. She only mentioned the Capitol break-in.

In the past decade there have been numerous other incidents that could be called DVE, some of them very serious mass-casualty events, like the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and the 2015 San Bernardino jihadist attack, but she didn’t mention these either, although it would have made sense.

Indeed, an elaborate multi-agency initiative such as this would normally be justified on as wide a basis as possible – unless its announcement is part of a campaign to impugn a particular ideology that is held to be responsible for the Capitol break-in.

Trump was blamed for inflaming the crowd, and was impeached in record time and with almost no concern for procedure. Now he is about to be tried in the (newly Democrat-controlled) Senate, after he has left office, in a possibly unconstitutional and unnecessary proceeding.

There is only one possible way to understand these things, and that is that the new administration is mounting an aggressive campaign to discredit Trump’s movement, as well as to destroy it, by prosecuting outspoken Trumpists for inciting or conspiring to commit DVE.

Another red flag is Psaki’s mention of federal cooperation with “nongovernmental organizations” in assessing the threat. Such organizations might include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a corrupt organization that is notoriously blind to Islamic or left-wing hate groups, and the ADL, which, while more respectable than the SPLC, has in recent years become quite close to the Democratic Party and also has difficulty perceiving hate from the Left. This suggests that the threat will be (surprise!) found to be primarily right-wing extremism or white nationalism. It is very unlikely that groups like BLM, Students for Justice in Palestine, or Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam will be found to be dangerous extremists.

A third red flag is the discussion of “information sharing” between agencies, which suggests that dossiers will be compiled on “extremists” and “extremist groups” and made available to other agencies. Left-leaning non-governmental groups will help in this. “Extremists” will then become targets either for prosecution, blacklisting, or the various forms of harassment with which anyone who has studied repressive governments is familiar.

Finally there is the mention of social media. Will government intervene in social media? How can that be consistent with the stated intention to “respect constitutionally protected free speech and political activities?” If they are not planning to censor expression, what exactly are they planning to do with respect to social media?

Every day we see different groups making lists, and saying that those who worked in Trump’s administration or campaigns, or even supported him, must be “held accountable.” Sometimes it means that people lose their jobs or their businesses are boycotted. Or perhaps nothing they write can be published.

In an era where many have started to turn against free speech – just try to speak freely if you are a university professor or student and see what happens – the government needs to defend the constitutional guarantee of free expression even more strongly.

Instead, it looks like the new administration is gearing up to use its law enforcement and intelligence agencies to stamp out the political opposition.

Posted in American politics, American society | 4 Comments

What President Biden Will Mean for Israel

Posted on January 21, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

As I write this, preparations are underway for the swearing-in ceremony of a new President of the US. Nobody truly knows what this will mean for us in Israel. Caroline Glick, who can be depended on to see the dark side – often, unfortunately, correctly – finds Biden’s appointments of numerous former Obama officials, some of whom are demonstrably anti-Israel, to be evidence that the new administration will return to the almost maliciously anti-Israel policies of the Obama Administration.

On the other hand, as Bret Stephens notes (in a masterful piece that I hope will be required reading for Biden and his people), the situation has drastically changed since Obama pursued his diplomatic assault on Israel. Everything is different (except perhaps the Palestinians). Israel, Iran, the Arab nations, and the situation in the USA have all undergone significant changes. The damage to American interests from continuing Obama’s policy today would be even greater than in 2008-2016.

But not all politics is rational, as history amply demonstrates. Bad regimes sometimes follow policies dictated primarily by the misapprehensions, prejudices or even obsessions of their leadership rather than the interests of their nations. The Obama Administration was one of those.

Indeed, its interpretations of the intentions of the Palestinians and the Iranian regime – which could be determined simply by paying attention to their words – were so far from reality that I often found myself asking, “stupid or evil?” Did American officials really think that the Palestinians would be satisfied with a peaceful state alongside Israel if only the right concessions were forced out of us? Did they really believe that the agreement with the Iranians would prevent them from getting nuclear weapons, or even significantly slow them down?

There was also an ideological element, a clear affinity of Obama himself to the Muslim opponents of Israel that was demonstrated by the speech he delivered in Cairo shortly after his inauguration. There was his comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans, one of the worst possible analogies. And there was his antipathy for our Prime Minister, which he famously shared in an off-mike chat with the French president. Taking all this into account, one can be excused for thinking that one of the deliberate objectives of Obama’s policies was to weaken and hurt Israel.

While these personal characteristics of Barack Obama do not apply to Joe Biden, he does seem to believe in the traditional (and wrong) principles of American Middle East policy, such as the primacy of creating a sovereign Palestinian state in bringing normal relations to the region. He agrees with Obama that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria are “illegitimate and an obstacle to peace,” a position that the State Department reversed under Trump.

American policy toward the Palestinians, going back to the Clinton Administration, has always been to provide ample financial aid to them and get Israel to make concessions up front, both territorial and practical (like freeing jailed terrorists). And Obama’s Iran policy was heavily front-loaded with financial benefits to Iran. One would think that professional diplomats would understand why this strategy failed over and over. Both the Palestinians and the Iranians have objectives that they cannot be paid to give up. Giving them presents only made them ask for more, and in both cases they used the money to pay for terrorism.

The non-professionals of the Trump Administration did understand this. They reversed course and applied economic pressure to both the Palestinians and the Iranian regime, in order to create leverage for negotiations. Unfortunately, the policy hasn’t been in place long enough to tell if it will work, but the desire to be “not-Trump” may cause the new Administration to end sanctions on Iran and re-fund the PA and UNRWA – making failure a certainty. Biden has already promised to restore Trump-suspended payments to UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency, thus continuing the decades-long growth of a hostile population of heavily indoctrinated, stateless welfare clients.

We can also expect a resumption of objections from the US against Jewish construction in Judea/Samaria and Eastern Jerusalem, joining the chorus from Europe. It wouldn’t surprise me if another unannounced but near-total freeze on construction will soon go into effect.

In more encouraging news, recent comments by Anthony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, indicate that he doesn’t intend to reactivate the Iran deal immediately. Nevertheless, we should watch for any loosening of the Trump-applied sanctions on Iran as an indication of the likely direction the administration will take.

Israel has been engaged in a “war between the wars,” against Iranian installations in Syria. The Trump Administration did not interfere. I expect that attacks against these targets will be less frequent under the new administration. A warning sign will be if they stop entirely.

I had hoped that Israel would utilize the last weeks of Trump’s term to destroy the Iranian nuclear installations, perhaps even with American help; but apparently our PM and the IDF believe that their lower-level activities are effective enough that such an ambitious project wasn’t needed. We might regret this later; I will be very surprised if it happens under Biden.

All of the above is based on the assumption that the “moderates” in Biden’s administration, including Biden himself, will be in control. And here is where the real scary stuff begins.

Biden is 78 years old, older than any other American president at the time of his inauguration (Trump was 70 and Ronald Reagan was not quite 78 at the end of his second term). He certainly does not appear to me, admittedly a non-professional, to be at the top of his game … or worse. Even if he remains as president for a full term, it’s hard to imagine that he will be calling the shots. His vice president, Kamala Harris, is an unknown quantity in the area of foreign affairs. And there are strong forces that will be trying to exert their influence on the administration – unfriendly ones.

One is the left wing of the Democratic party, which supported Bernie Sanders for the presidency, and which is strongly anti-Israel. The other is the Obama organization.

When Barack Obama left the White House, he did not retire from politics and retreat to his home state, like so many other ex-presidents. Rather, he bought a home in walking distance to the White House, and transformed his highly effective campaign fund-raising organization into a social action group, with both domestic and foreign policy goals. It’s hard to believe that he will not try to exert influence over the new administration.

I believe that Israel will be able to work with an administration that is somewhat less friendly than that of Trump, as long as it is honestly interested in regional peace. Israel will present the evidence – which is overwhelming – that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons; indeed, is developing them now. Together with its new allies in the Arab world, it will argue that continued maximum economic and diplomatic pressure is the most effective way to stop Iran, short of war.

I believe also that Israel will be able to convince such an administration that the real reason for the lack of progress with the Palestinians is their refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state with any borders. We will explain that the development of Israel’s relations with other Arab states means that Palestinian sovereignty can be delayed indefinitely, until the Palestinians are prepared to accept the legitimacy of the nation state of the Jewish people.

But if the American administration undergoes a sharp turn toward the left, either as a result of a takeover by the left wing of the Democratic Party or from the influence of the Obama organization, we could see a return of Obama-era pressure for concessions, restrictions on our actions, and appeasement of Iran.

We’ve made a great deal of progress in the past four years. It would be a shame if it were reversed.

We’ll find out in the next few months.

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

The Machine

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

During most of the 20th century, news was delivered primarily by professional reporters, via newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV. Although various media had biases, these biases were generally known and could be taken into account. There was a sharp distinction between what would be put on the news and opinion pages. Major media had correspondents in various places who would usually report events that they had physically covered. Although there were abuses and cover-ups (for example, FDR’s wheelchair), most news reports were relatively trustworthy. Americans laughed at the slanted stories found in the Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia (Russians did, too).

The advent of the internet, and particularly social media, threw a massive monkey wrench into the system. First, it sliced out the financial heart of local media, and seriously hurt the national outlets as well, by taking over the functions of the classified sections. No longer do people search for apartments, jobs, or second-hand items in the newspaper, where a listing might take a couple of days to appear. Websites like Craigslist provide instant advertising, mostly for free. Print advertising in general took a massive hit.

The financial blow put local media out of business, and forced most of the regional and national media to divest from their correspondents in numerous locations. It was necessary for them to depend on wire services, which meant that many outlets had precisely the same stories. Investigative reporting, which requires long (expensive) hours of legwork, has also almost disappeared.

At the same time the politicization of the universities that began in the late 1960s, the creation of ethnic and gender studies departments and the weakening of traditional academic standards, brought forth a new generation of journalists and editors, many of whom were activists. The sharp distinction between the news and opinion pages blurred.

The major media, which drew its staff from universities, mostly leaned left. To counter this, the Right turned to independent news sources like talk radio as well as “new media” like blogs, podcasts, email newsletters, and so on. These outlets developed their own clientele, which was limited to a narrow ideological segment of the public. Soon media – both traditional and new media – separated itself into bubbles. A person could hear just one side of the story and consider himself well-informed. People living in different bubbles could barely communicate, because they didn’t even have the basic facts in common.

As if this weren’t enough, social media ballooned into a massive enterprise. In the second quarter of 2020, Facebook had 1.7 billion monthly active users. No single media outlet has ever approached even a fraction of that number. And it is controlled – or rather, guided, because it primarily controls itself – by a small group of managers and engineers whose goals are to maximize interaction, collect information, and target advertising. The algorithms used by these systems encouraged the partitioning of users into bubbles even more than before. All the major social media platforms are interconnected, even those that are competitors, sharing information about every aspect of the lives of those billions of humans that are its targets.

These platforms have become part of almost everyone’s life, in part because of their carefully and deliberately designed addictive nature. Many people spend far more time on them than in interaction with flesh-and-blood  humans, and get most or all of their news about the outside world from them. And they have become essential to political life as well. Every candidate for any office must have a presence on multiple platforms. Newspaper reports about candidates and officeholders are often made up of quoted tweets or Facebook posts. Probably the primary contact between a politician and his electorate today is mediated by social media in one way or another.

Because social media are mostly unfiltered they contain a great deal of misinformation (false statements) and disinformation (deliberately false statements), put there by people inside and outside of a country for political (or psychological warfare) purposes. And this fact gave rise to a demand to police them. Somehow, it’s argued, there must be a process to purge the bad stuff and remove the bad actors.

This is the point at which the danger to free expression and democratic politics becomes manifest. After addicting the whole society – indeed, much of the world – to a device, a machine, that is almost the only source of communication and information for an enormous number of people, after destroying the traditional media, the engineers of the social media platforms are being asked to become arbiters of truth.

The idea of centralized control of the content of what have become the main arteries of human communication is beyond frightening. But that is what is being asked for. And that is what is being done. The fact that several left-leaning tech companies (Google, Apple, and Amazon) could get together and throttle a right-leaning one (Parler) – and I am making no judgment about the politics here, just the exercise of power – is shocking. The fact that tech companies could de-platform the President of the United States – is even more so, regardless of what one thinks about this president.

This happened quickly, within less than 20 years, the span of one generation. Because public speech today is so dependent on these social media platforms, their owners and engineers have the power to shut down people and ideas that they don’t like. Suppression of speech by governments is bad enough, but this is worse: there is some accountability for democratic governments, but there is absolutely none for these machines.

The power in their hands is almost absolute. Who in government or traditional media would dare to go against them? If current trends continue, they will have more power than governments. They may already have, whether they know it or not.

I suspect that they do know and have already started to exercise it.

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

But What About the Palestinians?

Posted on January 14, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

This morning I received a robo-call from the Rehovot city government to tell me that, as a senior citizen, if I had trouble getting an appointment for my Coronavirus vaccination, they would help me, and here is how to contact them. I remembered that some months ago I got a call from a human social worker employed by the city, who wanted to know how I was, how we were getting our food (this was during our first full lockdown), did we have local family to help us out, and so on.

I’ve had my differences with the city from time to time, but I am really impressed by this. They are using our tax money (Israelis pay local taxes based on the size of their homes and other factors) to provide services to the citizens! I realized how little I’ve come to expect from government, so this seemed like a big deal to me. But it’s still remarkable that they have programs in place to help those of us who are no longer “productive citizens” in an economic sense.

And then there is the vaccination program itself. The State of Israel paid a premium price for vaccines, and set up a system to distribute them. The logistics are complicated because the Pfizer vaccine, the first to arrive here, must be kept at -70 degrees C (-94 F) and then used within several hours of being warmed. As of Tuesday, 1,700,000 Israelis had received their first vaccination, including my wife and me.

We went to the designated location, where the four HMOs that all Israelis belong to had set up stations to give vaccinations; waited only a few minutes in an open area, and received our shots (for those who speak British, “jabs”). Information was immediately entered into the nationwide computer networks of the HMOs, and our appointments for the second dose set. This was much more efficient than anything I have ever experienced in any bureaucratic setting either here or in the US, even in the IDF.

Of course Bibi is taking credit for the whole thing, as our next expensive, unnecessary election approaches. But in truth he does deserve credit for making the deals with the pharmaceutical corporations that got us large quantities of vaccine early, even while the HMOs put together the system which is expected to vaccinate the entire population by the end of March.

So this morning I have a feeling that this country cares about me, and about the rest of its citizens. The institutions like the national and local governments and the HMOs are doing their jobs, at least in this connection. The government has not done so well in managing the lockdowns, especially the last, partial one, which seems to have hurt small businesses badly while doing little to slow the spread of the virus. There are plenty of other things to criticize, but still, I am proud of my country.

But the response of the world media to Israel’s relative success in fighting the epidemic has been more hostile than anything I recall since the last time Israel was forced to defend herself against deadly rocket attacks from Gaza. “What about the Palestinians,” they screamed. Why aren’t we vaccinating them, too? “It’s because Israel is an apartheid state!”

The accusation is everywhere, in mainstream and social media, from the human rights organizations, and even from Jewish groups like J Street.

And it’s nonsense. First, Arab and Jewish Israelis, as well as Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are treated precisely the same. Second, the PA and Hamas are responsible under international law for vaccinating their citizens. The PA has said they have ordered vaccines from several manufacturers and are awaiting their arrival. Israel has promised to give surplus vaccine to the PA after our campaign is over. Israel’s public broadcaster KAN reports that Israel already gave the Palestinian Authority some 100 doses of the vaccine for “hardship cases” (probably the big shots in the PA). And the blogger Elder of Ziyon has debunked some of the accusations against Israel made by “human rights” NGOs here and here.

One of Israel’s greatest national concerns is the question of how it can become a better state, one that better performs the basic function of a state, to protect its citizens against man-made and natural dangers, and to provide economic and cultural opportunities for them. This is the purpose of our health care system, the IDF, and our Knesset, judicial system, central bank, and so forth. Although there is a certain amount of corruption it is incidental to the functioning of the overall state.

The vaccination project has been a positive force in our lives, illustrating that we need not always be passive and accept the blows that fall on us. And it shows that our big institutions (the HMOs are independent organizations, but closely controlled by the Health Ministry) can work smoothly when they have to.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are entirely different. Although they have government ministries, a health-care system, and many other services, they do not exist to protect their people and enable them to fulfill their economic and cultural potential. They have two functions alone: to enrich those Palestinians who are “connected,” and to fight the war against Israel with which they are obsessed. Corruption is essential, not incidental. Funds that don’t go into the pockets of the rulers go to prepare for war or to pay the soldiers. Palestinians know this and hate their rulers, but there is little they can do because the dictatorships under which they live don’t hesitate to use force against them. And in many cases, they are also slaves to their obsessive hatred of Israel.

Palestinian governments continue to encourage, pay for, and perpetrate terrorism against Israel, while “ordinary Palestinians” throw rocks at cars containing Jews, a pastime that has caused several deaths and countless serious injuries. A few weeks ago, an “ordinary Palestinian” viciously beat an innocent woman to death. Right now the concern in Ramallah is not how to vaccinate millions of Palestinians, but rather how to ensure that terrorists will continue to get paid despite Israeli restrictions on Palestinian banks.

Israel struggles to be better. Palestinians struggle to be worse. And yet, which side do the media, the Jewish Left, and the human rights industry take?

***

Sheldon Adelson died on Tuesday. He was one of Israel’s greatest supporters. He loved this country, and contributed massive amounts of his own money to make it better and to help improve its relationship with the diaspora, including hundreds of millions of dollars to Birthright, which has probably done more to counteract the hate campaign against Israel in the universities than all other PR initiatives put together. He also gave large sums to AIPAC, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Yad Vashem, and the Israeli-American Council. He and his Israeli-born wife, Miri, were the major donors to a new medical school at Ariel University. He donated several Magen David Adom ambulances and mobile ICU vehicles, including some that were armored to protect them against terrorist attacks. He started the free newspaper Israel Hayom (Israel Today), which is today the paper with the largest circulation in the country, shattering the almost total monopoly on news media in Israel held by the Left. His influence on Donald Trump was partly responsible for Trump’s pro-Israel policies.

Miri Adelson will certainly continue his philanthropy, but the Jewish people and the State of Israel have lost a friend who won’t easily be replaced. BDE.

Posted in Information war, Israeli Society, Media | 1 Comment

Donald Trump and Me

Posted on January 9, 2021 by Victor Rosenthal

Before I begin to write about the events of this past week, I feel the need to say a few words about myself and my own political consciousness.

I’m a former American who has lived in Israel a total of 15 years, first on a kibbutz in the 1980s and now in a small city, Rehovot. I first made aliyah with my wife and three children in 1979. In 1988, I dragged them back to the USA because I wanted to follow my father’s example and start a business, something I didn’t think I would succeed at in Israel’s tough environment. We stayed until 2014, and finally sold our business and returned to Israel.

It wasn’t until I arrived here that I realized that I had been in galut, physical and spiritual, for 26 years. Zionism and Israel had been important to me since I was in high school, but I didn’t realize how much of my identity was bound to this country and these people.

I am telling you all this because I want you to understand that my point of view is that of an Israeli, not an American. I haven’t set foot in the USA for more than six years. On the one hand, this allows me to be a somewhat more objective observer of events there. On the other, well, I’m here and you’re there.

Donald Trump was hands down the most pro-Israel president of the US since Truman, in both words and deeds. The Obama years, which I experienced both from the US and from Israel, were a nightmare, as I watched the leader of the country of my birth and the most powerful man in the world, deliberately act on behalf of our enemies, advocating policies that if carried out would result in the end of Israel. I watched him try to humiliate our Prime Minister, and even deploy antisemitic themes in his campaign to make a deal with our greatest enemy – and a bitter enemy of his own country as well – Iran.

The deal he succeeded to force through over the objections of the US Congress provided funds that the Iranian regime used to finance Hezbollah in Lebanon and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq and Syria, which have perhaps 130,000 short- and long-range missiles aimed at Israel at this very moment. The deal neutralized the UN’s enforcement, such as it was, of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and guaranteed that with the passage of time Iran could legally develop and deploy nuclear weapons. And this despite countless promises by Iranian leaders that they would bring about the destruction of our Jewish state!

I watched with horror as the US, for the first time since the Carter Administration, allowed – indeed, arguably spearheaded – a resolution in the UN Security Council that denied Jewish rights to our holiest places.

And then President Trump came along, ended the pernicious deal with Iran and re-imposed sanctions. He reaffirmed Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem and the Golan, which other presidents, even the relatively friendly Clinton and Bush, had failed to do. He rejected the idea that Israel had to bear the full burden of a peace agreement with the Palestinians, and stopped coddling them while they paid terrorists to murder Israelis. His administration helped bring about the normalization of relations with several Arab countries, something which was both a breakthrough toward the integration of the Jewish state with its neighbors as well as a deterrent alliance against Iranian expansionism. He turned the anti-Israeli policy of Obama around by 180 degrees.

So of course I appreciate Donald Trump. And I saw how badly he and his supporters were treated by the majority of the US media, which had given up maintaining even a pretense of objectivity when he was elected. I saw how they falsely called Trump a white supremacist and an antisemite. I saw how they lied about and twisted his words, presented everything he did in the worst possible light, accused him of treason, made fun of him, called him incompetent and even crazy. I saw how they incited hatred against him.

I also saw how the various manifestations of left-wing extremism, including the BLM organization and the campus cultural warriors, tried to push racial divisiveness, cancel culture, gender-craziness, wokespeak, and even Islamization onto Americans, many of whom find the whole package beyond abhorrent. I saw the violence and destructiveness of the riots and looting associated with BLM demonstrations, and the coercive behavior of BLM supporters. I saw how the Left denigrated the traditional American ideals of meritocracy, equality of opportunity, and free expression, in favor of identity politics. And I very definitely saw that the Left took anti-Israel positions even more extreme than those of Obama’s administration.

Trump opposed all this.

I wasn’t blind to Trump’s narcissism, his dishonesty, or his vindictiveness. But the Democratic Party today is more and more influenced by those who stand for the program of the extreme Left, and I saw – and still see – those ideas as far more dangerous for America and for Israel than Trump’s personal deficiencies.

On Wednesday, 6 January, pro-Trump demonstrators broke into the Capitol, in an attempt to stop the Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden. I don’t need to describe the events, except to say that the emotional impact on Americans and others – I can testify to that here in Israel – was enormous. Although the incident was objectively no more violent than some of this summer’s BLM activities, the symbolic significance of it can’t be minimized. It represented a violent attempt to interfere with the orderly transfer of power after a presidential election. As far as I know, this had never happened before in US history.

In the weeks between the election and 6 January, and in the rally before the break-in and his video tweet several hours later, Trump emphasized his belief that the election had been stolen. The implication was clear: they broke the law, he was the true heir apparent, and if it takes extra-constitutional actions to reverse this injustice, they are fully justified. And on 6 January, some of his supporters acted, though it should have been clear to them that they had no chance of success. Indeed their actions destroyed any credibility remaining to Trump and his movement.

There is a theory that the whole thing was a setup and the ones who invaded the Capitol were Antifa provocateurs. Why, it’s asked, would Trump incite actions that would be so damaging to himself? There may indeed have been a few provocateurs among those that entered the building, and I certainly didn’t hear Trump order anyone to attack the Capitol. But there is no doubt that his words were highly inflammatory. And he may not have considered carefully enough the consequences of inflaming a mob.

Trump’s actions and utterances since the election have come from that part of his personality that is the least attractive, and in a national leader, the most dangerous. Despite his positive accomplishments – and there are more of them than just his Middle East policies – I must condemn him for his behavior after the election. What was done to Trump by the Democratic media was unfair, even vicious. But his response was to throw a bomb at the US Constitution.

This breaks my heart, because – from a purely ideological standpoint – Trump represents American values far more than his opponents on the left. Ironically, he stands for the values of Martin Luther King Jr. far more than does BLM, which only wants to change the color of the oppressors.

Was the election fair? I have no idea, and in my opinion the truth in this matter has been so obscured by disinformation from both sides and from psychological warfare waged against the US by her enemies, that it is impossible to say. But there is a point at which Trump ought to have realized that whether he lost fairly or unfairly, he lost. And for the sake of the Constitution, his reputation, and those of his party and his country, he should have stepped aside, perhaps to fight again another day.

The consequences of this incident will be serious and long-lasting. The events of 6 January have discredited the Republican party and removed it as an obstacle in the way of the Left. Freedom of expression has also suffered, as the tech industry has begun to intervene more deeply into social media content. If the extreme Left gets control of the Biden Administration, it will be a horror show, and there will be no one to put the brakes on it.

This episode is over for now. They are cleaning up the Capitol. Next, someone needs to clean up the wreckage of the Republican party and create one that will proudly represent the traditional values that once did “make America great.” I’ll be cheering from here.

Posted in American politics, American society | 11 Comments