What’s Not in the Normalization Agreements

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

The most interesting thing about the normalization agreements that Israel signed with the UAE and Bahrain is not what is in the written agreements, which are sparse on detail. It is not even the speculation about the unpublicized understandings about such things as F-35s and for how long the extension of Israeli law over parts of Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley will be delayed. It is, rather, one specific item that is not in them: there is no explicit mention of a “two-state solution” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Indeed, the agreements don’t mention borders, Jerusalem, settlements, or refugees, which always appear in such texts. One commentator even said that it seems that these Arabs are “less pro-Palestinian than the Europeans,” who always mention these things in their pronouncements about the conflict.

Here is all the UAE agreement says about the Palestinians:

Recalling the reception held on January 28, 2020, at which President Trump presented his Vision for Peace, and committing to continuing their efforts to achieve a just, comprehensive, realistic and enduring solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;

Recalling the Treaties of Peace between the State of Israel and the Arab Republic of Egypt and between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and committed to working together to realize a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that meets the legitimate needs and aspirations of both peoples, and to advance comprehensive Middle East peace, stability and prosperity;

The agreement with Bahrain is even more vague, leaving out the reference to other treaties. So no wonder the PLO reaction was to declare a “day of rage,” while Hamas attacked the Israeli cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon with rockets during the signing ceremony!

Why is this important? We need to keep in mind the Palestinian interpretation of “two-state solution,” a temporary condition in which a sovereign “Palestine” from which all Jews have been expelled exists next door to an “Israel” which must agree to absorb millions of Arab “refugees.” Unification as an Arab-majority state would soon follow.

Although some left-wing Israelis have endorsed a two-state solution, they generally accept the “two states for two peoples” paradigm, which leaves room for a Jewish state. But no Palestinian leader has ever countenanced such a thing, even arguing that there is no such thing as a Jewish people, and so no Jewish right of self-determination.

This systematic ambiguity has led some to say that the conflict is easy to settle; it’s only necessary to work out the details of a two-state deal that both sides would accept. But of course the sticking point comes down to whether there will be a Jewish state or not. That isn’t a detail, and it’s not something that can be compromised.

Although Israelis have come to understand this, Americans have almost always seemed to miss it. The Clinton and Obama administrations beat their heads against the wall trying to reconcile the directly contradictory positions. Left-leaning organizations like J Street and the Reform Movement continue to call for a two-state solution, not understanding – or maybe understanding but not caring – that the Palestinian version of two states implies that neither state will be Jewish.

The breakthrough represented by Trump’s “Deal of the Century” (DOC) was to stop trying to find a way to meet Palestinian demands without endangering Israel, an impossible task. Rather, the DOC includes a plan to allow the maximum amount of Palestinian autonomy consistent with Israeli security. Naturally, the Palestinian leadership, which has been promising to kick out the Jews and lead its people back to “their homes” in Israel for generations, finds this unacceptable.

Until now, the Palestinians have enjoyed seamless support from the entire Arab and Muslim world. They believed that all they needed to do was stand pat, and the world would force the Jews into making concessions, until the Jewish state was so weakened that it would fall apart – or could be destroyed by an attack by its Arab neighbors, or in a proxy war waged by Iran via Hezbollah.

But now at least two – and possibly a few more – Arab states have recognized several important facts: 1) Israel is too strong to be forced to make significant concessions, 2) they find themselves on Israel’s side in the regional conflict with Iran, which wants to gobble them up, and 3) the benefits of normalization with Israel outweigh whatever they would get from Israel’s enemies for continuing to support Palestinian demands.

It might even be the case that they realize that the Palestinian people themselves have been ill-served by their leaders, who have exploited them since 1948 as an excuse to funnel huge amounts of money from Western donors into their pockets.

In any case, these agreements put the PLO on notice that it can no longer expect blanket support for its intransigent policies. Indeed, last week the Arab league rejected a Palestinian resolution to condemn the UAE-Israel deal.

One of my greatest concerns about the coming American election is that a Democratic victory could bring back some of the people and policies of the Obama Administration concerning the Middle East. Joe Biden has already promised to try to re-activate the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran that in fact protects the Iranian nuclear weapons project rather than stopping it. It’s likely that he would also want to resuscitate the Obama/Kerry two-state plan. Of course a Trump victory would prevent these things; but failing that, the next best thing would be a united Israel-Arab front against Iran – and for a truly just solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Middle East politics | 2 Comments

A Just Society – or Changing the Color of the Oppressors?

Posted on September 13, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

There is no greater offense to human rights, short of murder, than slavery. It’s hard to imagine a more viciously evil enterprise than the slave trade to the Americas. The treatment of those Africans who survived the crossing to the New World was mostly inhuman, and – in the US – the treatment of their descendants after emancipation and the short period of Reconstruction was a stain on the moral history of the nation. It wasn’t until fully 100 years after the Civil War that oppressive, discriminatory laws were removed from the books. Along with legal segregation, blacks were victims of pervasive extralegal violence, including lynching, for trivial “offenses.” Such violence was rarely punished.

American society, black and white, has still not recovered from the trauma brought about by the evil treatment of black people. By objective measures, the economic and social conditions of black communities are worse than the national average. Racist attitudes – by which I mean the propensity to treat black people as morally or intellectually inferior – still persist.

Black communities themselves have been damaged, often by policies that were intended to improve their condition, like welfare rules that encouraged fatherless family units. Family dissolution, poverty, and the weakening of black churches and other institutions opened the doors to drugs, crime, and incarceration. The reduction in upward social mobility that has characterized American society as a result of globalization and automation of low-level jobs has made it harder for those in the lower economic strata to escape. These same problems press on low-income whites as well as blacks, but they are a less distinct group and so their troubles are less visible.

The question facing the nation is what to do about it. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement he represented proposed three major steps: first, remove all vestiges of legal and institutional bias; second, ensure that blacks had high-quality education; and third, ensure that they had the ability to obtain political power by voting and being elected to office.

This program was in general adopted, but has proven difficult to implement fully. The educational system in the US has struggled to function, almost regardless of the amount of money it receives, especially in the inner cities where the black communities are the worst off. Laws to prevent discrimination in employment are ineffective when there simply aren’t enough good jobs. There are 53 black congresspersons (12.2%), about 1% fewer than the percentage of blacks in the overall population, and 10 senators (10%). There are also numerous black mayors and other local officials. Probably that is necessary but not sufficient.

Recently some very high-profile and emotionally affecting cases of blacks killed by police officers followed by mass demonstrations and riots have created a tsunami of anger and demands collected together under the banner “Black Lives Matter.” Although police killings of innocent people are always tragic, the question of whether blacks are disproportionally killed by police, when factors like disparities in contact with police between populations are taken into account, is not easy to answer. Having said that, anecdotal evidence indicates that humiliating, frightening, and sometimes painful contact with police is a common experience for black men.

In any event, the issue has galvanized American society toward racial issues in general. The program of Dr. King has been replaced with more radical proposals for the remaking of society. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is a coalition of organizations that present such radical demands. One of the major ones is for reparations to be paid to black Americans to compensate them for “past and continuing harms.” Demands include a guaranteed income, free education and health care, mandated school curricula to “critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery,” and so forth. There are also numerous other demands, which generally follow a socialist line.

The idea that only radical changes in society will suffice comes from so-called “Critical Race Theory” (CRT). This postmodern/postcolonial ideological framework, which finds expression in the fields of law, education, and public policy, sees race as “a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of [color].” Whites, in other words, have built racism into the society that they control; and so even if individuals do not harbor ill will toward blacks, whites benefit and blacks are harmed by their interactions. According to CRT, all “whites” have “white privilege” from which they benefit, at the expense of non-whites. CRT rejects the idea of meritocracy, because it sees “merit” as racially relative. So, for example, white teachers automatically prefer white students, because their idea of a good student is one that behaves in characteristically white ways and whose work represents white values.

The CRT worldview holds that because they can’t avoid exercising their white privilege, all whites are inherently racists. A corollary, expressed in the popular book “White Fragility,” is that an accusation of white racism is irrefutable: when a white person objects to being called a racist, that is prima facie evidence of their racism – an argument of very dubious logical quality. In the social paroxysm of guilt that surrounds the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations, the author of the book has been paid large sums by major corporations and governmental entities to do “diversity training,” which teaches whites to understand and accept their inescapable racism, and to behave as inoffensively as possible to people of color.

These manifestations of postmodern philosophy have been nurtured in ethnic and gender studies classes in the best universities, and have now burst into everyday life. Like most postmodern ideas they are fundamentally unsound, and if implemented would not eliminate racial conflict, but lead to a more unjust society. Let’s compare some of the ideas of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with those of CRT:

MLK Jr. CRT
Racism is racial prejudice or hatred. Racism is a way of exercising power and gaining advantage based on race.
There should be equality of opportunity for all, regardless of race. Equality of opportunity is impossible in a racist society, so it’s necessary to favor POC over whites.
Racism in society comes from racist individuals who can be educated (or at least restrained). Racism is built into the society, because whites naturally created it to favor their own race.
People can stop being racists. Whites are inherently racist.
We can build a better society by making laws to guarantee rights and by educating people to respect one another. It’s not possible to fix society except by fundamentally restructuring the power relationships in it.
Whites and blacks can learn to understand each other. Whites can never understand blacks because they have not had the same history of oppression.
Violence is counterproductive. Violence is necessary.

If we agree with CRT, then the only way to eliminate racism is to restructure the power relationships in our society. Although they suggest that this would build a just society, their belief that justice is culturally or racially relative – that is, whoever has the power makes the rules – implies that they would have a hard time recognizing one. Indeed, the real implication of their view is that there can be no objectively just society, since they believe that any society is naturally biased to benefit the group with the most power. And what they are demanding is power. The inescapable conclusion is that if the CRT revolution were to succeed, it would do no more than change the color of the oppressors.

The liberalism of Martin Luther King Jr., on the other hand, and the system created by the US Constitution and its amendments, does provide a framework to establish a society that can be just for all its inhabitants, even if the history of the nation has not always lived up to its ideals. But – at least until recently – there has been progress in that direction. Those of us who remember the Civil Rights Movement and the changes it brought about, know that it is possible to take real steps toward a just society without wrecking it.

Posted in American society | 3 Comments

Another Soft Enemy

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

Not long ago I wrote about one of Israel’s “soft enemies,” who choose to fight the Jewish state with money rather than bullets and explosives: the European Union. Indeed, the European Union has just demonstrated its hostility by threatening to torpedo (see also here) the bids of Serbia and Kosovo to join the EU if they persist in their intention to open embassies in Jerusalem.

Now, when the formerly impenetrable anti-Israel solidarity of Arab and Muslim nations has finally begun to crumble, our soft enemies seem to be pursuing the war against Jewish self-determination even more aggressively.  Today I want to discuss yet another one, this time one that weaponizes American dollars: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefeller fortune began with John D. Rockefeller, certainly the richest American in history, and indeed one of the most wealthy humans ever. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870, and before he died in 1937 (at the age of 98), he donated enormous sums for various charitable purposes, in the areas of education, health, scientific research, and causes connected to his Baptist faith. He established various foundations during his lifetime to facilitate the disbursement of his wealth. Very much a free-market conservative, he nevertheless took seriously his personal commitment to those less fortunate than himself and his family. He had four daughters and a son, J. D. Rockefeller Jr. “Junior” continued his father’s philanthropy, including founding the Rockefeller Museum in eastern Jerusalem (the site of a 1967 battle, now operated by the Israel Antiquities Authority).

John D. Rockefeller Jr. had a daughter and five sons. One was Nelson, who had a long career in public service, serving as Governor of New York from 1959-73, and Vice President under Gerald Ford from 1974-77. Nelson was socially liberal and considered a moderate on economic issues; he was the paradigmatic “moderate Republican.” Another was David, who was Chairman and CEO of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1969-81, and was a director of the influential Council on Foreign Relations from 1959.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) was started by “Junior’s” five sons in 1940, who were its first trustees. It received large endowments from J. D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1951, and David Rockefeller, who gave it $225 million in 2006.

Note that there is also a Rockefeller Foundation (started by J. D. the patriarch in 1913), and a Rockefeller Family Fund (started by younger family members in 1967). They are not the subject of this article.

The RBF gradually moved politically leftward as time went by, especially after Stephen Heintz became its president and CEO in 2001. Ironically, it divested from investments in fossil fuels – the original source of Rockefeller money – in 2014.

It has strongly advocated for and funded advocates of the JCPOA – the nuclear deal with Iran – and criticized US President Trump for exiting from it. Armin Rosen notes that “Between 2012 and 2015, RBF gave $4.4 million to the Ploughshares Fund,” which then “led the public campaign in favor of the [Obama] administration’s Iran diplomacy. Ploughshares … gave National Public Radio $100,000 toward its coverage of the Iran nuclear issue.”

In 2011, RBF began its “Peacebuilding” program, and it started to make grants related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today it supports various organizations and programs whose goal is to eliminate the Jewish state. It funds the group “Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP),” which supports boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) of Israel, and which was called one of the top 10 anti-Israel groups in America by the ADL. It has made grants to IfNotNow, the BDS-supporting student organization. It supports the American Friends Service Committee, which also promotes BDS, and numerous other BDS-supporting groups, including the umbrella organization for BDS in the US, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). The USCPR is deeply involved in the successful campaign to get the “mainline” Protestant churches like the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Church of Christ to adopt BDS. USCPR also pushes the absurdly false but popular idea that the movement to destroy Israel is analogous to the American civil rights movement.

At this link is a partial list of grants made by RBF to groups that are to a greater or lesser extent involved in activities to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state, in “lawfare” against it, or even which have connections to anti-Israel terrorist organizations. One of the largest recipients of RBF money is J Street, the phony “pro-Israel” lobbying organization which has consistently taken positions opposed to Israeli interests. Other recipients include Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that wants to “dezionize” the state, Breaking the Silence, which defames IDF soldiers, and Adalah, a group that works to radicalize Arab citizens of Israel and incite them against the state. There are dozens of other groups, each of which has its own particular angle to attack Israel.

It’s unlikely that David Rockefeller, also a moderate Republican, would have approved of the uses to which his bequest was put. His Chase Manhattan Bank was the agent for Israel Bonds in the US, making it a target of the Arab boycott. And unlike another tycoon, Henry Ford, there is no evidence that the founder of the dynasty, John D. Rockefeller was antisemitic.

One of the notable images used by Jew-haters from 19th-century Europe, through the Nazi period, and including today’s European and Middle-Eastern antisemites is the hook-nosed Jewish spider sitting in the center of his web, pulling strings that stretch his malign power throughout the world. But in reality, the opposite is true: there are a number of anti-Israel puppet masters, pulling the strings – and streaming money – into the literally thousands of loci of misozionist hate around the world. Money that originates in the European Union, the RBF, the Ford Foundation*, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and its satellites, flows into the numerous anti-Israel NGOs, student organizations, propaganda organs, Middle East Studies programs, and so forth.

Think about it. It’s truly marvelous. Has there ever been another enterprise like this in history? All this, aimed and concentrated against one tiny country, my country!
_________________

* The Ford Foundation funded many of the same organizations as the RBF until 2013, when it was convinced to stop supporting anti-state NGOs in Israel. It still provides funds for international groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam, etc. that are strongly biased against Israel.

Posted in Jew Hatred | 2 Comments

Social Media and Radical Freedom of Speech

Posted on September 6, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

The Internet and its functionalities, like email and the World Wide Web, were created by academic researchers. Although the military paid for a lot of it, there was little attention paid to security and none at all to control of content. The academics built an extremely democratic structure. Anybody could create a web site and put anything they wanted on it. You didn’t need to be a public figure, or to persuade a publisher to spend money promulgating your ideas, or to own a TV station. If you had someone’s email address, no matter who it was and who you were, you could send them a message (you might not get an answer, but still). Radical freedom of speech was not only theoretical, it was real.

This appealed to me powerfully. Back in the US, I regularly wrote letters to the editor of my local paper, and sometimes they published them and sometimes not. They didn’t have to tell me why. Sometimes they even edited the ones they did print. During one of Israel’s wars I was interviewed by a TV station as someone who had family here. A half-hour interview was edited into a 15 or 30 second sound bite about my concern for my kids. The whole interview consisted of me trying to explain Israel’s right of self-defense while the reporter tried to get me to express fear or anger, the contents of a good sound bite. I tried to produce a radio program for the local public radio station (don’t laugh). They were not interested. They also had a deal where you could get several short spots broadcast in return for a modest contribution. My spots, which mentioned the number of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorism (this was during the Second Intifada), were not acceptable; they wouldn’t take my money.

Once I even got my wife in trouble when I wrote an article for the Hadassah bulletin, of which she was the editor. The chapter president told her in no uncertain terms that this would never happen again. Apparently the woman’s tolerance didn’t extend to opposition to the “two-state solution.”

I hate it when someone tells me to shut up. So I loved the internet, which allowed me to write whatever I wanted in my blog. Nobody could shut me up. Getting people to read it was another story, but I loved the feeling that anyone in the world could hear what I had to say. All they had to do was click.

In 2004, Facebook was founded and in the next few years social media took off. Facebook soon outpaced Myspace and other competitors. Reddit appeared in 2005, Twitter in 2006. Numerous others followed. Social media got an almost incomprehensible number of people online (Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users), making it the most powerful tool for the manipulation of human consciousness ever invented.

But social media has diverged from the ideal of total information democracy. Commercial enterprises exist by selling something, and in this case it’s ads and personal information. In order to do this, they have developed secret algorithms that determine who communicates with whom and who sees what content. Still, the megaphone that  it gives to users – private individuals, businesses, political groups, and governments – is incredibly powerful.

Naturally, there has been a reaction. Some of the content is evil; false information, incitement to murder, hate, and harassment are rife. Of course there is no agreement on which content that is. There is a public clamor to “do something” about the misuse of social media. But the scale of the enterprise is far too large to allow for human moderation of content without destroying spontaneity. In any event, even after-the-fact moderation has proven to be unhelpful with the extremely controversial issues that are discussed. A statement like “’transgender women’ are not women” or a reference to “Islamic terrorism” will be reported as hate speech, and may or may not be allowed. The idea of “community standards” is relative to the community that is making the decisions.

An even worse expedient is the use of artificial intelligence to vet content before publication. Such algorithms are not intelligent enough to distinguish between discussion of hateful ideas and their expression – in logical terms, the distinction between mention and use – not to mention satire.

I use an emailing service to send my blog to subscribers. Recently I tried to distribute a relatively mild one and found it blocked by a program the service had activated (stupidly called “Omnivore,” which of course means that it eats everything). Maybe Omnivore didn’t like that I had referred to “Islamic antisemitism” and “Nazi Jew-hatred,” but it didn’t tell me, and it ate my emails. Rather than wait for a human to get around to evaluating my appeal, I switched to another service (which has its own problems).

Facebook has recently implemented “fact check” posts, which present what they feel are unbiased responses to controversial statements. This is probably the least damaging way to respond to objections against specific content, but it isn’t an answer for hate speech, incitement, or harassment.

Probably the best approach would be to force users of social media to make their identities public, to make them take responsibility for their own speech. It certainly won’t work to appoint more human or robot commissars. Freedom of speech isn’t the problem. Anonymity is. Facebook posts calling for fires in crowded theaters should have the same penalties as live speech or ink-printed threats. What’s hard about that?

One of the interesting aspects of social media is how it has facilitated the spread of conspiracy theories. Sometimes there are conspiracies: JFK was not murdered by a lone wacko and Epstein didn’t kill himself. But some theories are almost certainly false: we know who was responsible for 9/11, and like Luca Brasi, he “sleeps with the fishes.” Other theories are outlandish and inconsistent enough that they can only be called crazy, like the assertions that the Moon landings were fake (please don’t write to me if you believe this). And this article about “Pizzagate” – despite its tendentious attempt to attribute guilt to the Trump campaign – is fascinating. Nothing has helped the spread of these theories more than the internet, and in particular, social media.

Because social media is so powerful, it has become a weapon of psychological warfare, wielded by operatives associated with nations, armies, spy agencies, political parties, and organizations of every kind. A combination of human agents and bot networks can be used to insert disruptive content into social media and nurture its growth and spread. It’s an easy, safe, and relatively cheap way to attack an adversary, whether a political opponent or a country. I’m convinced that one or more foreign actors has been using these methods to increase extremism (of both the Right and the Left) in America, as well as to create anger, dissention, and, ultimately, instability that can be exploited. And that isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory.

All of this has made the ideal of radical freedom of speech less attainable (but radical speech ubiquitous). Both the use of the internet for malign purposes as well as the strategies adopted to prevent that have made it a less free and less democratic place.

But it is still almost the only way that a “nobody” with something to say can succeed in getting their point of view before the public. And in these days when the phenomenon of “canceling” opinions that don’t agree with the prevailing ideology seems to be peaking, it is essential to protect the channels of free expression.

Posted in Information war, Media | 1 Comment

Normalization Could Create a Real “New Middle East”

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

The main thing you need to know about the normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is that Iran, Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, and other enemies of the Jewish state oppose it.

Opponents of the deal like to call it a “betrayal of the Palestinians.” It isn’t: rather, it’s a betrayal of the PLO and Hamas, organizations which are the worst thing to happen to Palestinian Arabs since the Nazi Mufti Amin al-Husseini.

Countries don’t have feelings and don’t form friendships. They have interests and form alliances in support of them. The PLO was created in 1964 by Nasser’s regime in order to promote Egyptian objectives, which were to conquer and annex as much as possible of the new state of Israel; later it came under the influence of the KGB, which employed it on behalf of Soviet interests in the region.

Neither Egypt, which forced Palestinian refugees into camps in 1948 (and to this day does not grant full Egyptian citizenship to Palestinians living in Egypt), nor the other Arab states and the Soviet Union, viewed Palestinian Arabs as anything other than a weapon to use against Israel, and the PLO, their creature, reflected this.

In 1982, the PLO was defeated by Israel and Maronite Christian forces in the First Lebanon War. But instead of being treated like the war criminals they were, the leadership of the PLO was allowed to flee under UN auspices to Tunisia. One would have thought that the PLO, removed from close contact with Palestinian Arabs, would lose influence and die out. But in 1987 there was a popular Palestinian uprising in the territories, the First Intifada, and PLO-connected groups managed to coopt and control it, brutally suppressing anti-PLO Palestinians as “collaborators.” The PLO made itself the de facto representative of the Palestinians in the territories.

And now Israel made one of her greatest mistakes since 1948, the Oslo Accords. Oslo created a “temporary” Palestinian Authority (PA) to govern the territories until a final status agreement could be made, which of course never happened. But the PA, in essence the PLO, still controls the parts of Judea and Samaria where most Palestinians live. In Gaza, the PLO was overthrown by a violent coup by Hamas in 2005.

Both the PA and Hamas function as dictatorships (the PA is supposed to be democratic, but hasn’t held an election since 2005). Both are supported by large amounts of foreign money via UNRWA and other sources. They are both massively corrupt; “connected” Palestinians live like kings, while most of the population lacks basic needs. Both maintain their maximalist demands against Israel, which have kept the conflict simmering with intermittent boiling over into large-scale violence – the Second Intifada and multiple Gaza conflicts. And both have created educational and media systems that teach their youth to hate Jews and Israelis enough that even children have become capable of murdering Jews at random in the streets.

The PLO and Hamas depend on the conflict as an excuse for their dictatorial control, and for much of their foreign money. It’s their reason for being. So there can be no “normalization” of relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews on their watch. The conflict must go on. And this has been bolstered by almost universal Arab and Muslim solidarity – until today.

The peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan called for some degree of normalization, but these aspects have not been realized. The peace has been “cold” from the beginning. This isn’t an accident. Indeed the growth of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel expression in Egypt and Jordan – which sometimes bursts out in murderous incidents – ensures that there will not be normalization in the near future. Like the PLO, the leadership of these countries has been prepared to compromise to some extent to achieve the practical benefits of non-belligerence; but they have not rejected the destruction of Jewish sovereignty as an ultimate objective.

The negotiations with the UAE, on the other hand, at least at this point, seem to express a wholly different spirit, one in which actual normalization and not just non-belligerence seems to be the goal. Nothing could infuriate the Palestinian leadership more, since their unhappy subjects will see, for the first time, that the option of unending hostility is not the only choice. If other Arab nations join in as expected, it will be even more persuasive.

Naturally, the Iranian and Turkish regimes (correctly) see these developments as the creation of an economic and military alliance that opposes their geopolitical ambitions. But what about Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and similar Western leftist groups? How can we understand their opposition to what is, after all, a movement in the direction of reducing conflict, perhaps a movement that will ultimately lead to the long-desired end of the Israeli-Arab conflict?

It’s simple. They say they are concerned for the welfare of the Palestinian people, but that is not true, and never has been true. The welfare of the Palestinians would best be served by the replacement of the PLO and Hamas by less corrupt leaders that would favor normalization and closer cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis. There is no doubt that if instead of paying terrorists to murder Jews, Palestinian leaders worked together with Israelis to develop economic alternatives to the international dole, the lives of ordinary Palestinians would be greatly improved. I am sure that many Palestinians already think so, but are afraid to publicly say it in the face of PLO and Hamas repression.

IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace – and countless other such organizations – have as their objective the elimination of the Jewish state, not the welfare of Palestinians. For that reason, they support BDS, the PLO and Hamas. They are supported financially by anti-Israel sources (see here and here) like the massive Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Their opposition to normalization exposes them for what they are.

One doesn’t want to be too optimistic at this early stage. It can be noted that there will probably be a backlash from religiously conservative elements against Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the region. It can be argued that the apparent rapprochement between Israel and some Sunni Arab states is nothing more than a temporary alliance against Iran. But I don’t think so. I think there is beginning to be an understanding, at least on the part of some Arabs, that the continued demonization of Israel does not serve their long-term interests. And the possibilities for the future are breathtaking.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Middle East politics | Comments Off on Normalization Could Create a Real “New Middle East”

Thoughts at Zero Dark Thirty

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

It’s very, very early, when a person should be asleep, lest melancholy thoughts intrude on the familiar, but totally irrational, optimism that keeps one functioning in the face of the absolute certainty that every human life will sooner or later come to its end.

In these days of The Corona, as Israelis like to refer to it, there are plenty of ends to go around. The other day, the rabbis of the Talmud were speculating about nature of the World to Come. Like myself, I imagine they were of an age that makes it impossible to ignore the end of the road that stands before them. And then they went back to the seemingly interminable discussion about courtyards and wells, and bringing water to animals (or bringing the animals to water) on Shabbat.

I have a daughter, a child of the 1960s, who has a chronic disease that makes her life bitter and painful. She thinks about ending her life. It is selfish of me, but I don’t want her to leave. It would tear my heart.  She has arguments; I don’t want to hear them. I’m irrational too, in the face of the ultimate irrationality.

Nobody wants to outlive their children. In Israel the death of a young person is treated like a national tragedy, whether it’s the result of accident, disease, or terrorism. Last week, a young (39) rabbi, Shai Ohayon, was murdered by an Arab terrorist, stabbed to death in the street, the first such murder in a year. Only a few hundred people attended his funeral due to Coronavirus restrictions; normally such a funeral draws thousands.

The terrorist was taken alive, which means that he will probably be imprisoned for no more than 20 years in a quite comfortable prison (much nicer than American prisons) along with other Palestinian terrorists, and the Palestinian Authority will pay a very generous salary to his family. An illegal outpost that was set up in Shai Ohayon’s name was forcibly evacuated by police, and Arabs celebrated as they burned what was left. More irrationality.

Everyone finds (or doesn’t find) a way to confront the brute, empirical fact that human life, your own life, is bounded, and the irrationality of human actions in the face of that. Some individuals feel the presence of Hashem. They are the luckiest ones. Hashem is a mystery to me, but I am comforted by the fact that I am part of a people, and it will continue without me. And I have nine grandchildren, all of whom are part of my people.

Our enemies want to extinguish our people. It’s that simple. All the geopolitical stuff is peripheral. That’s why there were pogroms and a Holocaust, that’s why the Palestinian Arabs stab us, why the Iranian regime wants a nuclear bomb, and why sophisticated Europeans and American academics think that the creation of a Jewish state was a mistake. That is even why the clever Jewish kids of “If Not Now” act as they do.

Superman was Jewish. His creators were Jewish, so he was Jewish. Like my grandchildren. If I were Superman I would gather up those young American Jews of If Not Now and fly them back in time (Superman can do this, by flying at greater than light speed) and show them the history of the Jewish people in front of their eyes, show them how shallow their presumption of caring for the oppressed of the world is. I would show them things that would make them understand what a people is and why it’s important to care for your people.

There are a lot of things I would do if I were Superman. I’m not, none of us are, and we just have to do what we can.

Posted in Terrorism, The Jewish people | 2 Comments

Israel’s PM and Government Should Resign Today

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

I’m not looking forward to writing this, or to reading the responses that I will surely get from various quarters. But here it is.

The Breslov Hasidim venerate Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), a kabbalist, scholar, and founder of a movement that stresses joy and the personal closeness of a Jew to Hashem. Israelis are familiar with the Breslov trucks that drive around playing loud, rousing music, sometimes stopping for the passengers to get out and dance in the street with passers-by. Some see their approach as a welcome infusion of life and spirituality into what can be a dry and forbidding faith; others see their attitude toward Rabbi Nachman as avoda zara (worship of something or someone other than Hashem).

The Breslov Hasidim have developed a tradition in recent decades of visiting Uman (in Ukraine) where he died and where his grave is located, on Rosh Hashana. This pilgrimage has included tens of thousands of Israelis and others over the years. While for most of the pilgrims the goal of the trip is increased spirituality, there is also an element that treats it like the American college students’ Spring break, lubricated by alcohol and spiced up by prostitution.

The advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has (maybe) put a damper on the phenomenon. Israel’s numbers of serious cases and daily deaths from Corona are about as high as they have ever been, and its total number of cases per million population is 19th in the world (out of 213). Ukraine is also suffering an increasing number of new cases, although it ranks only 87th in cases per million. Last month, Ukraine decided to bar Israelis from the pilgrimage after the EU placed Israel on its “red list” of countries unsafe to visit.

Since then, pressure has been applied to authorities in Israel and Ukraine, both for and against the event. As one can imagine, tens of thousands of visitors mean a huge amount of income for the relatively small town of Uman. On the other hand, the danger of spreading Covid-19 at this kind of happening, where there will be large crowds and little social distancing, is very great. As Prof. Roni Gamzu, the Corona coordinator of Israel’s Health Ministry, recently pointed out, travelers to Uman will have to be placed in quarantine when they return home. A few thousand could be placed in hotels, but there is no way to quarantine and keep track of tens of thousands. Gamzu wants the government to forbid Israelis from flying to Uman. He also communicated his feelings to Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In response, former Health Minister and present Housing and Construction Minister Ya’akov Litzman, himself a member of a (different) Hasidic sect, was infuriated and called for Gamzu’s resignation. The most recent development has the Ukranian President announcing that the pilgrimage would be “significantly restrict[ed]” although no precise details were given. Zelensky said that he was responding to a request made by PM Binyamin Netanyahu, but the PM’s office denied that he had made such a request, and said only that travelers should follow health instructions (proving yet again that at least in the case of Bibi, physical courage in youth doesn’t necessarily translate into moral courage in maturity).

I don’t know what will come out of this for Gamzu, who recently implied that he would resign if “not given the tools to bring down morbidity.” Gamzu, who has been properly trying to balance the medical demands of the epidemic with the need to protect the economy, has been stymied at almost every turn by politicians.

Why is an advanced, small country like Israel doing so poorly in managing the epidemic? There are several reasons. One is the fact that government decisions are being made on the basis of political interests, and not from medical or economic considerations. The pilgrimage to Uman is only one example. Another is that the Haredi and Arab sectors, where the virus has spread the most, institutionally resist authority, and ignore the rules. And finally, last but definitely not least, is the lack of leadership from the one person that should pull everything together, the Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu is more concerned with keeping the support of Litzman’s Haredi faction to keep him in power and out of jail, than with the threat of a major outbreak of the virus and concomitant economic disaster. Netanyahu has systematically kept his rival Naftali Bennett on the political margins. Bennett is one of the few politicians who has demonstrated real creativity in dealing with the present crisis, but he was forced out of the Likud by Bibi, reportedly because Mrs. Netanyahu dislikes him.

Recently the government managed to avoid falling and precipitating yet another election when it negotiated an internal compromise to delay voting on a budget. This is the best thing this pitiful government is capable of accomplishing: saving itself by not doing something essential.

Thanks to the irresponsibility of our politicians, people are dying of the virus. And the ones who don’t die are out of work.

After three elections in one year, Israelis have no appetite (or half a billion shekels) for another one. But the people have had it. We are sick of the endless crises of their own making, while the country misses opportunities like the application of sovereignty to the Jordan Valley, while the southern part of the country absorbs blow after blow from Hamas (yesterday their incendiary balloons started 30 fires), and while the number of seriously ill increase daily as the politicians dither.

Recently the entire government of Lebanon resigned, after an ongoing economic meltdown was followed by a massive explosion that destroyed a large chunk of their capital. I don’t envy the Lebanese their economy or their explosion, but our government should follow their example.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 3 Comments

Anti-Zionism isn’t Antisemitism – but it Doesn’t Matter

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Victor Rosenthal

There has rarely been a more pointless dispute than the one over whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. The answer is easy, and it has two parts: a) no, they are not the same, and b) it doesn’t matter.

What is anti-Zionism? The denial of the proposition that the Jewish people ought to have a state in their historic homeland, Eretz Yisrael. Right away, there is a problem: there has been a Jewish state since 1948, and its right to be there is guaranteed by international law. So it doesn’t make sense to argue this point today.

But that isn’t what they mean, they say. They maintain that what they are doing is criticism of Israel. They argue that Israel violates the human rights of Palestinian Arabs (even accusing her of genocide and apartheid), and provide remedies which usually imply the replacement of the state of the Jewish people by a state of its citizens, a “dezionized” entity of some kind, or simply an Arab state. But there’s no Jew-hatred involved, they insist.

Now as a matter of fact, very often the same people who “criticize Israel” in this way also believe that Jews control the world economy and media, profit from wars and plagues, and bleed little non-Jewish children to make matzot. In logical terms, the two classes are coextensive. But the “responsible” critics of Israel distance themselves from these people. Their position is entirely political. They hold no animus for individual Jews. Some of their best friends are Jews.

Let’s look closely at their “criticism,” and their proposed solutions. Both are very special. Natan Sharansky noted three characteristics of anti-Israel discourse, which he called the “three D’s”: Demonization, Delegitimization, and Double standard.

The demonization of Israel and the IDF needs no elaboration. Israel’s actions in self-defense are presented as aggression, atrocities are invented, false themes – the IDF “targets” children – are promoted, and no context is provided (e.g., news stories headlined “Israel strikes Gaza” to describe retaliation aimed at empty buildings following a Hamas rocket barrage against Israeli towns). There is the whole phenomenon of “Pallywood,” the comparisons to Nazi Germany, and over all the attribution of the most malign motives imaginable for every Israeli action.

Delegitimization is all-pervasive as well. Israel is excluded from UN bodies, sporting competitions, and artistic festivals. Israel is removed from maps, and its capital is not recognized. It is often argued falsely that the land of Israel was “stolen” from the Palestinian Arabs and that therefore the entire enterprise should be abolished.

Double standards, too, stand out. The behavior of the UN, which constantly issues resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations while ignoring actual violators is well-known. Numerous cases of territory taken by force that are entirely unjustifiable (northern Cyprus, Crimea, Tibet) are ignored, while’s Israel’s legitimate possession of Judea and Samaria is a cause célèbre for the UN, the EU, and the international Left. Israel’s military actions are subject to a far higher standard of scrutiny than those of any other nation, including the most developed Western countries.

Sharansky argues that these characteristics mark discourse as antisemitic. Certainly it is often suffused with antisemitic themes, like the accusation that the IDF targets children. But the object of hatred is not the individual Jew, or even the Jewish people: it is the Jewish state. And this makes it something different than antisemitism or Jew-hatred, even though the “critic of Israel” often is an antisemite.

The discourse in question is irrational and extreme, just like Jew-hatred, or anti-black racism, or any of the countless forms of bigotry that divide people and lead to violence. Because it is closely tied to Jew-hatred, gains strength from it, and is contagious in a similar way, it can be conflated with it. But it is logically distinct.

I’ve given it a name. I call it misoziony (mis-OZ-yoni), defined as the extreme and irrational hatred of Israel. Sharansky’s criteria are useful, but they characterize misoziony, not antisemitism.

This is not a distinction without a difference. Jeremy Corbyn, Lara Freedman, Simone Zimmerman, Peter Beinart, and countless others will argue until the cows come home that they are not antisemites. Perhaps some of them have a case, and perhaps not, but it is much harder for them to establish that they are not misozionists.

Misoziony is not somehow less reprehensible than antisemitism. It is just as irrational, just as bigoted, just as hateful, and just as likely to bring about violence. It’s possible to look at misoziony as a mutated form of antisemitism, a meme that was more adapted to survive in the climate that followed the shock of the Holocaust. Classical antisemitism was paused in the West after the war, because responsible elements in Western society would not permit its public expression. Misoziony, masquerading as “criticism of Israel” had an easier time. Today, both Jew-hatred and misoziony flourish around the world, each giving strength and encouragement to the other.

The Western Left is prepared to denounce all forms of bigotry, including some that had never been heard of until recently. To some extent it is becoming ambivalent about antisemitism, because so many of its clients are antisemites; but in its more sophisticated circles, antisemitism is still taboo (although they only can see the antisemitism of the right). But it embraces misoziony with gusto.

Antisemitism, Jew-hatred, gave rise to pogroms wherever Jews were found from time immemorial, including the biggest pogrom of all, the Holocaust. Misoziony has so far failed in its grand ambition, because its target, the State of Israel, possesses the military power to prevent it. But just because it hasn’t (yet) proven its malignity in blood doesn’t mean that it is morally acceptable, any more than any other bigotry.

Posted in Jew Hatred | Comments Off on Anti-Zionism isn’t Antisemitism – but it Doesn’t Matter