Reflections on Tribal and National Loyalty

Posted on August 26, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Recently I saw a Facebook post by Ryan Bellerose. Ryan is an Indian of the Metis tribe who lives in Canada, an activist for indigenous (aboriginal) peoples – all of them, including the Jewish people.

He wrote:

I side with my people before everything else. I can count on one hand where I sided with a non indian over an indian (the indian had to be really really wrong) but I would never side against my people on anything of real importance and I will never stand with anyone who stands against my core beliefs. why is this so difficult for people to understand?

Family. Clan. Tribe. Nation. Country. in that order, no exceptions, that’s how loyalty should be. family first last and always. nuff said.

Most people today agree about loyalty to their family. The other stuff, it depends. When I was in school in the 1950s, we learned about Stephen Decatur Jr., the American naval officer and hero of the wars against the Barbary Pirates, who was reported to have said “Our country!  … may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.” This was presented as an admirable example of patriotism. Later, in the late 1960s, it became for many an example of chauvinism or jingoism, something not at all admirable (and after the turn of the millennium, Barry Rubin reported that it seemed as though education in the US was aimed to develop precisely the opposite position, that America was always wrong).

Since 1945, tribalism and nationalism have officially fallen out of favor. The World Wars of the 20th century were blamed on nationalism, and the UN and EU were founded to keep a lid on it. Countless international institutions in those frameworks were created in order to erase or blur national differences and boundaries. Those who express sentiments like those of Bellerose, Decatur, and me, were considered throwbacks, pitied for their atavistic inability to grasp the equal value of all humanity, to understand that everyone has the same human rights. Zionism, which is nothing more or less than Jewish nationalism, got a bad rap.

Although the one-worldism of this period didn’t appeal to me, at least it was consistent. Every human had the same rights.

But then something else happened in the ideological space: post-colonialism appeared. Thanks to writers like Franz Fanon and Edward Said (and the KGB’s psychological warfare machine), it began to be popular to think that although in theory everyone should have the same rights, that entity known collectively as “the West” or “Whites” had for centuries systematically abused and exploited “the Third World” or “People of Color;” and now, in the name of human rights and fairness, it became necessary to compensate the formerly colonized peoples.

This compensation takes multiple forms, from actual monetary reparations to the descendants of slaves, to excusing violence on the part of “colonized” peoples. Because Palestinian Arabs are supposedly “occupied” by Israeli “settler-colonialists,” they are permitted – they will even argue (wrongly) that they are allowed by international law – to employ terrorism against them. When a 17-year old Jewish girl is killed by a remote-controlled bomb, as happened Friday, the PLO will not condemn the act, and Hamas will celebrate it. It is, they say, their right.

Indeed, the acceptance by the international community of systematic war crimes committed by “oppressed third world” movements like Hezbollah, Hamas, and other similar militias is, or should be, a scandal.

In the post-colonial model, tribalism and nationalism are still anathema, except for the formerly or currently “colonized,” particularly the Palestinian Arabs, whose own nationalism – not to mention misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, and extreme propensity for violence – are all excused as the legacy of the colonial past.

In its milder form, post-colonialism informs the political correctness that plagues American campuses. “People of color” have victimhood rights that “whites” do not, including the right to impose segregation, to decide what topics can be discussed and who can have opinions about them, and so forth. Violation of these “rights” constitute “racism,” which is punished severely by ostracism and often loss of employment.

The difference between the idealistic postwar emphasis on human rights and the postcolonial era, which dates more or less to the 1970s, is striking. The language, which often refers to human rights, is similar, but in practice the exercise of these rights is limited to favored groups.

The contrast between the two periods is illustrated by the 1947 UN decision to partition the Palestine Mandate in a way intended to be fair to both its Jewish and Arab residents, versus the later, biased decisions of the UN, of which the 1975 General Assembly Resolution 3379 declaring Zionism to be a form of racism was a prime example.

Today postcolonialism is firmly ensconced in international institutions in the academic world, and in the media. The contradiction between the emphasis on human rights – for some groups – and the denial of self-determination for the Jewish people (who are never included among those who are considered victims of colonialism) is especially evident in Europe. Zionism, despite the UN’s repeal of Resolution 3379, is still considered “racist” by many, even though they don’t bat an eyelash at Palestinian nationalism – which includes the explicit intention to ethnically cleanse a Palestinian state of Jews.

But there does not need to be a contradiction between human rights and the older conception of nationalism. Prioritizing family, clan, tribe, nation, and country, as Ryan Bellerose does, does not necessarily imply denying rights to others. You can believe, as is stated in Israel’s declaration of independence and her recently passed Nation State Law, that the State of Israel is a Jewish state – that is, a state of, by and for the Jewish people – without denying the civil rights of non-Jews that live in it. This is what it means to be a Zionist.

Those of us who feel this way also understand the concept of national or tribal honor, and its importance. We understand that perhaps Israel had a reason to refuse to permit her enemies Tlaib and Omar to enter the country over and above the calculation of whether it would be better or worse PR than letting them in: national self-respect.

President Trump’s remark about Jewish loyalty might have been unfair to all of the Democratic Party. It might have represented the kind of poor boundaries sometimes attributed to Trump. But it certainly wasn’t antisemitic. And it wouldn’t hurt for American Jews to engage in more than a little introspection on the subject.

Posted in American Jews, The UN, Zionism | 1 Comment

No, it wasn’t Antisemitic

Posted on August 22, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Donald Trump said:

Five years ago, the concept of even talking about this – even three years ago – of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people – I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. … Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they’re defending these two people [Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar] over the State of Israel? … I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.

The CNN article linked above goes on to quote Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and several other minor public Jews as saying that Trump is invoking the antisemitic “dual loyalty trope.”

The “dual loyalty trope” is far more than the idea that Jews care about Israel, see American and Israeli interests as aligned, and want US policy to be supportive of Israel. It implies that Jews would be willing to work against American interests in order to help Israel, to stab America in the back – as Hitler accused German Jews of doing to Germany –  for their own purposes.

This is a pernicious doctrine, but there is no evidence that this is what he meant. Indeed, if the Jews were more loyal to Israel than the US, they would be more likely to vote against the party of Tlaib and Omar, Israel’s enemies, than for it.

Halie Soifer, executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, went farther:

If this is about Israel, then Trump is repeating a dual loyalty claim, which is a form of anti-Semitism. If this is about Jews being ‘loyal’ to him, then Trump needs a reality check. We live in a democracy, and Jewish support for the Republican Party has been halved in the past four years.

I think these responses are not just deliberate misunderstandings intended to attack Trump. I think that these people are really unable to understand his rather obvious intention, which is that Jews who support the Democratic Party are disloyal to the Jewish people. Not to America, not to Trump, but to the Jewish people.

So let me correctly translate his statement, with which you can agree or disagree: “the Democratic Party has tolerated, even embraced, the antisemitic and misozionist* Tlaib and Omar, and Jews who still support it are either ill-informed or disloyal to their own people.”

One could argue that this is not true, that the Democratic Party can be saved from going down the road traveled by Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, that there are elements in the party that are strongly opposed to their positions, that most House Democrats opposed Omar’s pro-BDS resolution and indeed passed one condemning BDS by a large margin, and so on. I don’t intend to discuss this here. My point is that an interpretation of Trump’s words as antisemitic is simply nonsensical.

There is a reason for the inability of these people to get the point. It is that at bottom they do not feel a part of a “Jewish people.” And they also don’t understand or don’t care that the conditions that enabled the Jewish people to survive in the diaspora no longer hold. Today, the survival of the Jewish people as a unique people in history depends on the survival of the Jewish state.

To those Jews whose worldview was inspired by the 19th century reformers who believed that they could protect their communities from antisemitism and integrate them with non-Jewish society by insisting that Jews were not a people, but only a group sharing a common religion – Germans or Americans of the Jewish Persuasion so to speak – Trump’s remark was unintelligible.

Interestingly, even the Republican Jewish Coalition seems to have missed the point. It tweeted, “President Trump is right, it shows a great deal of disloyalty to oneself to defend a party that protects/emboldens people that hate you for your religion.” That’s wrong. The disloyalty Trump is referring to is not to “oneself,” but to one’s people. And they don’t hate us for our religion: they hate those of us who support a Jewish sovereign state in a place that they believe belongs only to Muslims. They see the Jewish people as a rival, even an enemy of theirs.

The PLO knows there is a real Jewish people and that it has a deep historical connection to Eretz Yisrael. They deny it because they would like the world to accept their false narrative, but they know that the Jewish people are the aboriginal inhabitants – the oldest extant indigenous people – of Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish ancestral homeland. Many American Jews do not know or care.

Trump himself probably thinks the responses were just attempts to attack him, and maybe that is a part of it. Trump, like Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic, seems to believe that “justice resides in helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies,” and doesn’t understand people who invert this idea, like the progressive Jews who subscribe to “Tikkunism.”

Because this post mentions Trump, I will get a lot of angry mail. But before you sit down at your keyboard to type all the adjectives that are so beloved of those who believe that Trump is the Devil, please understand that as usual, this post is not primarily about him. It is about the importance for Jews, even in the diaspora, to understand that they are a unique people, with a homeland that is theirs alone.

Trump is comfortable with nationalism, which American liberals have long since rejected, and it makes sense to him that members of a people would naturally want to stick up for their ancestral homeland, even while preferring to live somewhere else.

It makes sense to me too.

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*Misoziony is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is  antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.

Posted in American Jews, American politics, Jew Hatred, The Jewish people | 1 Comment

“You don’t have a right to exist. May we come in?”

Posted on August 18, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit. – Donald Trump

If you kill your enemies, they win – not said by Justin Trudeau, but could have been

Sometimes you have a non-issue that everyone wants to be an issue. That is what the controversy about the non-visit (at least as of now) by anti-Israel US congresspersons Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to Israel (which they call “Palestine”) is.

This was a cognitive warfare operation against us that was guaranteed to be successful. Israel had to make the decision to either refuse admission to them on the grounds that they are BDS supporters, or to make an exception because they are members of Congress. Either way, we lose.

The operation was designed by Tlaib and Omar not only to harm Israel, but to achieve several domestic political goals: drawing attention to themselves, raising the profile of the “Palestine issue” in the coming election campaign, embarrassing the more moderate elements in their party, and of course slapping at the president.

PM Benjamin Netanyahu – he made the decision himself – had to consider the possible damage from banning them, in which case Israel would be accused of acting “undemocratically,” of weakness (“can’t face criticism”), of “insulting the US Congress,” of “having something to hide,” and needless to say, of “racism” in “singling out” these two Muslim women. All of these accusations and more have been made.

But allowing them in would have given them a stage for acts of political theater, even possibly the creation of international incidents.

Netanyahu examined the various scenarios, considering intelligence information about the plans of the two and of Palestinian groups here. He also had to take into account President Trump’s public opposition to the visit, and whatever private threats or promises Trump may have made. Netanyahu decided that the best of two poor options was to keep them out.

It was not an easy or obvious decision, and anyone not fully informed of all the facts would have been foolish to second-guess it. The pair planned a visit to the town of Nabi Saleh, a place that hosted weekly marches from 2009-2016 to protest against (and try to tear down) the security fence. These marches usually included violent clashes with local residents, extremist left-wing Israeli supporters, and foreign activists on one side, and IDF soldiers under heavily restrictive rules of engagement on the other. This is where young Ahed Tamimi famously slapped and kicked a soldier (video). One can only imagine the theatrical events that may have been scripted to occur.

Since the whole business was designed to create negative feelings toward Israel, you would expect that American Jewish organizations that are supposedly pro-Israel would try to deprive it of oxygen. You would think they would limit themselves to saying as little as possible about it.

But no. Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) accused Netanyahu of “sacrificing Israel’s commitment to democracy and openness.” J Street called the decision “dangerous, unacceptable and wrong,” and said that it was “motivated purely by politics and ideology — not by the interests of the State of Israel,” as if they have ever supported those interests, and demanded that it “be reversed immediately.” Even AIPAC thinks the two should be able to “visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand,” despite the fact that they did have such an opportunity with other freshman congresspersons, which they turned down, preferring an official visit to “Palestine.”

And these are organizations that are allegedly friendly (although in the case of J Street, the allegation is weak indeed). Our enemies, on the other hand, opened up with everything they had. Peter Beinart published an article awash with exaggerations and outright lies, accusing Israel of “hiding the reality of the occupation,” as if somehow a visit by a pair of Muslim misozionists* would reveal the “truth” that nobody has been able to see until now.

Omar herself accused Israel of “implementing Trump’s Muslim ban,” which is a breathtaking statement since there is no ban on Muslims entering the US, and countless Muslims fly in and out of Israel every day.

And then there are those who simply don’t have a clue. Gloria Steinem, the former Playboy bunny and feminist icon, accused Netanyahu in a tweet (in which she misspells “Israel”) of denying them “free speech.”

I have a few observations. For one thing, democracy has nothing to do with it. Democracy is a method of national decision-making, and nobody has the right to vote in Israel except Israeli citizens: not American Reform Jews, not J Street, and not Beinart. Anyway, this decision was not made by referendum, but if it had been, probably a majority of Israelis would have approved it.

There is also a precedent: in 2012, the US refused to grant a visa to Michael Ben Ari, an extreme right wing member of Israel’s Knesset. I don’t think J Street or the URJ complained.

Despite what the critics say, Netanyahu’s decision doesn’t seem to have been ideological – although I think it should have been – but rather a simple balancing of the likely consequences of the options available.

My regular readers know that I have strong opinions about the value of an aggressively Zionist ideology, and the need for Israel to assert herself in the public sphere. I don’t know if the concept of national honor entered into Netanyahu’s calculations of how to respond to the proposed visit, but if it didn’t, it should have. Israel’s self-respect demands that we don’t allow people like Tlaib and Omar to use us as a doormat. And her self-interest tells us to minimize their opportunities for political theater against us.

The argument, so popular with liberals, that it demonstrates strength when you give in to enemies and give them what they want, seems to inform most of the arguments against keeping Tlaib and Omar out. I admit that I have never understood that. Weakness is not strength, except in the Orwellian Newspeak of our critics. Trump seems to have got that right.

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*Misoziony is the extreme and irrational hatred of the Jewish state. It is  antisemitism raised up one level of abstraction, although almost all misozionists are antisemites as well.

Posted in American Jews, American politics, Information war, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, US-Israel Relations | 5 Comments

The Arrogance and Ignorance of Tikkunist Jews

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Tikkunists protest Trump’s immigration policies in New York City, August 11, 2019

You want to know what’s wrong with progressive American Jews? Here it is:

NEW YORK — Jews across the United States took to the streets on Sunday, marking Tisha B’Av (the Jewish day of mourning) with protests against the Trump administration‘s treatment of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers.   In New York City, during the fast day commemorating the destruction of the two Jewish temples in Jerusalem, over 500 Jews joined the “Close the Camps” demonstrations, holding signs reading “Never Again.”  Participants first gathered at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan for learning, prayer and activities. Some made signs, others participated in a songwriting workshop or text studies of letters from refugees. …

“This is personal for the Jewish community,” Rabbi [Yael] Rapport told Haaretz, holding back tears. “Public outcry, especially in our modern age, can really change attitudes, and change policy. This is a deeply Jewish thing to do.”

Before you jump all over me for being an evil, fascist, deplorable Trump-lover, I wish to announce that I, as an Israeli citizen who has not set foot in the USA for five years, do not have an opinion about Trump’s treatment of immigrants. It isn’t my issue. It is up to the Americans who live there to decide how to protect their borders (or not, if they choose) – just like Americans do not have the right to tell us how to defend our border with Gaza.

Although I might argue with the participants in these demonstrations about whether their religious practice is actually Judaism (I call it “Tikkunism”), I believe that they have a right to their religious beliefs. Although I think that Tisha b’Av has nothing to do with immigration policy, I think that they have a right to believe whatever they want to.

What they do not have a right to do, what I find infuriating, what exemplifies their arrogance and lack of respect for personal boundaries, is to insist (“this is personal for the Jewish community … this is a deeply Jewish thing to do”) that they speak in the name of all Jews and Judaism.

Of course they do not speak for “the Jewish community!” Who gave them that right? There is no reason they should not demonstrate – as progressives, as Democrats, as concerned Americans. But not as Jews.

There is also their misuse of the Holocaust metaphor. Seriously, is temporarily detaining illegal border crossers and asylum seekers anything like shooting and gassing millions of people because they are Jews? Are they ignorant enough to think so? As the saying goes, “if everything is the Holocaust, then nothing is the Holocaust.”

It’s not as though they don’t understand what it is to transgress personal boundaries. “Not in my Name” is a popular slogan for left-wing Jews calling for Israel to withdraw from Judea/Samaria or to remove the partial blockade of Gaza. It bothers them when the government of Israel acts as if in the name of the Jewish people. But they seem to have no problem with themselves speaking in the names of others. Why?

This isn’t an accident. It is in part a strategy to draw attention to their campaign with their outrageous claims, but also it is a Tikkunist religious ritual intended to produce a psychological feeling of satisfaction, similar to the satisfaction traditionally religious people obtain from prayer or other rituals. And by imputing religious motives to their political activity, and implying that all Jews must share the obligation to act similarly, they validate their Tikkunism as a legitimate form of Judaism.

But Tikkunism is a radical departure from traditional Judaism. Reform Judaism deemphasized the “ritual” commandments like observance of kashrut and Shabbat, while emphasizing the “social” commandments like concern for strangers, widows, and orphans, and the political vision of the Prophets. Tikkunism goes even farther and redefines the social commandments and in terms of progressive politics. For example, the “stranger” (ger) in the Torah, who in traditional Judaism is a convert to Judaism or a non-Jew living in the Land of Israel and obeying the Noachide commandments (ger toshav), becomes any outsider – even a Palestinian terrorist or an illegal immigrant. The injunctions of the Prophets are also interpreted in the most extreme left-wing way possible.

In the past decade or so, the leadership of the Reform Movement, its membership eroding, has consciously chosen to adopt Tikkunism as a way of generating excitement and commitment from its members. In today’s politically charged America, it may be a good strategy; but it takes the movement even farther from traditional Judaism.

And the Tikkunist ritual of self-justification is insensitive, insulting, and offensive to those who do practice Judaism.

Posted in American Jews, American politics | 1 Comment

Tisha b’Av, in Judea

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal
Dvir Sorek, z"l

Dvir Sorek, z”l (courtesy of the family)

Fireworks

Fireworks set off by Palestinian Arabs in nearby village of Silwad in an attempt to disrupt the funeral of Dvir Sorek, z”l ( screen capture, courtesy of Israel Hatzolah)

Today Jews are observing the fast of the 9th of Av, commemorating the destruction of the Jewish Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE. They are abstaining from food, sex, or anything pleasant that might distract them from contemplation of the horrific death, destruction, and dispersal that occurred millennia ago, and indeed also of more recent events. By coincidence, today is the beginning of the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha, which is celebrated by the mass slaughter of animals.

Israeli Jews are also contemplating the vicious murder of Dvir Sorek, an 18-year old yeshiva student and IDF soldier on Wednesday night. Sorek was set upon by two Palestinian Arab terrorists as he walked the 200 meters from a bus stop to his yeshiva in the Judean community of Migdal Oz, and stabbed many times. He was in civilian clothes and did not have a weapon.

Another young Jew brutally murdered for the “crime” of being a Jew – in Judea.

In case anyone might believe that such acts are applauded only by “a few extremists,” I’ll note that Palestinian Arabs gave out candy to celebrate the murder, set off fireworks (video) to try to disrupt Dvir Sorek’s funeral, and rioted to interfere with the arrest of the suspects in his murder.

Two suspects were arrested by Israeli security forces, as well as several others that assisted them. The headline of today’s paper read “the account is settled.”

Like hell it is.

The two murderers are headed for a cushy stay in an Israeli prison, whose humanitarian standards are matched only in Scandinavian countries. They will be in a special section for security prisoners, where they may have cellular phones smuggled in for their use (perhaps by members of the Knesset) and semen smuggled out to impregnate their wives. They will be paid handsomely by the Palestinian Authority, and their families taken care of. If their homes are demolished, the PA will pay for new ones. If they are very lucky, they will be released early as ransom for kidnapped Jews, like Ahlam Tamimi, the woman who planned the Sbarro Pizza bombing and drove the suicide bomber to the site in 2001. She received a sentence of 16 consecutive life sentences plus 15 years, but was released after only 10 years as part of the deal for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit.

I’ve called for a death penalty for terrorist murderers (and so have numerous Israeli politicians), but it is unlikely that it will be enacted; and if it were enacted, it would be unlikely that executions would be carried out. There are multiple reasons, but the main one is that every time a prisoner were about to be executed, there would be riots in the streets, resolutions at the UN, protests at our embassies, and so forth. The IDF and Shabak (General Security Service) oppose it. It is not going to happen.

There is a problem here, and it won’t be solved by passing a law. It is a problem of European diaspora-trained consciousness trying to survive in a Middle East to which it is ill-adapted.

Western – that is, European – morality has developed in such a way that “settling accounts” is not considered a good reason for acting. The European view is that such behavior is atavistic, as is tribal or ethnic loyalty. European morality venerates humanity and denigrates tribalism. European morality thinks that honor is subjective and unimportant. But to Middle Eastern sensibilities, nothing is more important.

By behaving like Europeans in the Middle East, Israelis place themselves at a severe disadvantage. The Arabs see the Jews as their enemies. An enemy is a member of a group that wants to kill you, and that you should kill first if you can do so. Since 1945, Europeans have stopped believing in enemies; today there are only communication problems.

About half of Israel’s Jewish population has roots in the Arab/Muslim diaspora. In general, they understand the Middle East much better than those whose ancestors lived in Germany or Poland. So in March of 2016, when IDF soldier Elor Azaria encountered a wounded terrorist who had just stabbed and tried to kill his friend, he did the natural and appropriate thing for the Middle East, which was to shoot the terrorist and kill him.

This act placed the country as a whole in a quandary. First of all, Azaria was a soldier, and what he did was a violation of the rules of engagement, a standing order. Second, some Israelis thought that it was morally wrong to kill a wounded terrorist, while others thought that it was praiseworthy. The military and legal establishment mostly fell into the former group, while the majority of Israeli Jews belonged to the latter one; and many of them were not ashamed to express themselves in demonstrations on behalf of Azaria.

What happened was quite interesting. Azaria argued that he believed that the terrorist might have an explosive vest and was a danger to his life and to others. The court’s verdict showed that he did not succeed in convincing the judges, and I don’t think most Israelis believed him either. But nevertheless, Azaria was convicted of manslaughter and not murder, and given a relatively light sentence which was later further reduced – probably because of the force of public opinion.

The Israeli Left, which despises both the Arabs that it pretends to care about, and the Mizrachi Jews that it does not, was outraged. But anyone who understands the schizophrenic nature of Israel’s relationship to the Middle East in which it exists knows what happened and why.

This will not be comfortable for those who think that Israel should be a “villa in the jungle” (a metaphor attributed to Ehud Barak) in the Arab Middle East. But the Jewish people are a Middle Eastern people, whose ancient ethos is much closer to that of today’s Arabs than to that of the post-Christian Europeans. Just read the Torah if you want to know what we used to be like.

I am not suggesting that we go back to committing genocide (as biblical peoples had to do to survive). But I do think that it is absolutely necessary for our honor and for our deterrence that we truly settle accounts with the murderers of Dvir Sorek. They should not have survived arrest.

And I’ll go further and add that we also have an account with the “Palestinian people.” They – as a society – have become comfortable with the idea that we will not avenge their murderous acts, and that they have a perfect right to burn our land, to shoot at us, and to murder or rape any Jew that they manage to catch undefended. We should respond to these acts in a disproportionate and terrifying way.

European morality says that collective punishment is wrong. But in the Middle East, collective guilt demands collective punishment.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Society, The Jewish people | 3 Comments

Are there “Arab Jews?”

Posted on August 8, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

I’m not a terminology freak. Sometimes you have to use words or phrases whose connotations are ideologically impure, so that people will understand you. But I draw the line at “West Bank,” “Israel-Palestine,” and “Arab Jew.”

I don’t think I need to remind my readers that there was no “West Bank” before the illegal Jordanian invasion and annexation of Judea and Samaria. With the exception of those 19 years between 1948 and its liberation in 1967, the area was always Judea and Samaria. There is no reason for anyone to call it anything else; but unfortunately the media, even most of the Israeli media, can’t seem to stop.

“Israel-Palestine,” of course, implies that there is a place called “Palestine,” and that it is as legitimate as the place called “Israel.” In reality, there is a State of Israel, there is an area that Israel seems to have ceded to Hamas, and there is the autonomous but non-sovereign Palestinian Authority. Hamas has never declared Gaza a state, because it insists that all the land between the river and the sea is “Palestine.” The PA has declared a state which encompasses all of the land Israel conquered in 1967, but does not effectively control it, so it isn’t really a state. Israel is a state; “Palestine” is a word.

But I think the one that bothers me the most is the last, “Arab Jew.” It is used to refer to Mizrahim, Jews whose last exilic homes were in Arab countries. It suggests – see, for example, this 2003 essay by Ella Shohat – that Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries were culturally more connected to their Arab neighbors than to an abstract historical Jewish people on the one hand, or to the Ashkenazi Jews that discriminated against them so harshly (and stupidly) in Israel on the other. Indeed, she sees a deliberate, even malign, attempt by Zionism to “dismember” their Arab culture and inject a false historical consciousness of being part of a Jewish nation, as part of creating the “new Jew” that was supposed to be superior in every respect to the despicable Palestinian Arabs – and also to the Arab Jews.

Except in the matter of religion, she suggests, Mizrahi Jews are Arabs, Arabs who were cruelly robbed of their true culture so they could be used as soldiers in Israel’s wars and workers in her fields and industries. Rather than “a return home,” Shohat calls their aliyah (she would disdain this word) “a new form of exile.” In this, she agrees with Mahmoud Abbas, who – in order to deny our connection to the land – has always insisted that Jewishness is simply a religion, not a nationality (Abbas, of course, believes that “Palestinians” are a nation, despite their disparate origins and lack of historical connection to “Palestine”).

This fits in with the Arab and extreme leftist understanding of Israel as an Arab territory colonized by “European” Ashkenazi Jews. All this is part of the loaded meaning of the term “Arab Jew.”

Some pro-Palestinian writers even suggest that Mizrahi Jews actually have a common interest with Palestinian Arabs, their “brown” brothers, to overthrow the hegemony of “white” Ashkenazi settler-colonialists.

But there are plenty of testimonies from Jews that came to Israel from Arab countries showing that they did see themselves as fulfilling the biblical promise of ingathering of the exiles; this wasn’t just a Zionist myth to manipulate them. Most Israelis of Mizrahi origin do see themselves as part of the great Jewish people, the people whose history and provenance in Eretz Yisrael is becoming better illuminated from day to day by archaeological and historical evidence. While they recall ill-treatment by earlier arrivals, that is a far cry from pining for their “stolen” “Arab culture.” Indeed, from a political perspective, they are more nationalistic than the descendants of Ashkenazi “pioneers.”

It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that neither Shohat nor the early Zionist social engineers understood what was happening in Eretz Yisrael, when Ashkenazi Jews from pre-revolutionary Russia and Poland, Holocaust survivors, Jews from the disparate cultures of North Africa, Iraq, Yemen, India, Ethiopia, the Soviet Union, and numerous other diasporic populations, were thrown together to experience a historical process impossible to control by any social engineering. Unlike the idea that Mizrachim could be forced to assimilate to a dominant Ashkenazi culture, what actually happened was quite different. A new culture, but with ancient roots, came into being.

Ella Shohat is proud of her Iraqi heritage. But except for having spoken Arabic, her ancestors, who came from a highly developed and relatively modern culture, had little in common with the parents of my son’s wife, who immigrated to Israel from North Africa, and even less with the Yemenite Jews who had never seen indoor plumbing until they were brought here “with wings, as Eagles.” Or the Ethiopians, who came from an even more primitive culture. For that matter, how similar are the cultural origins of Ashkenazis from the former Soviet Union to the academic and media leftists of North Tel Aviv?

According to Shmuel Rosner and the Jewish People Policy Institute, the belief system of most Jewish Israelis is a mixture of Israeli nationalism and Jewish religion which is not found anywhere else but Israel. Israel is experiencing a natural process of developing her own unique culture, a process that those who consciously wanted to create a New Jew had no power to control. It’s a modern culture, although grounded religiously and linguistically in antiquity. My son’s children don’t speak either the Arabic of their mother’s ancestors or the Yiddish of their father’s. They do speak a language that is similar enough to that of the Torah that they can read and mostly understand it.

This isn’t assimilation into a dominant culture, but the creation of a new one – or better, the creation of a modern form of a very ancient one. And it is happening by the reunification of the fragments of the once unified but then scattered Jewish people.

The idea that Mizrahim are “Arab Jews” is wrong. It is also insulting, suggesting that they lost sight of their ancient heritage during their time in exile, and assimilated to the surrounding culture. And it is pernicious, implying that Jewishness is only a religion, and not also a nationality – not membership in the Jewish nation which traces itself back to ancient times in Eretz Yisrael.

***

So yes, I will use the word “Palestinians,” although I’ll add the caveat that no Arab Palestinians existed before the mid-1960s. But I will never refer to Judea and Samaria as anything else, nor will I say “Israel-Palestine” or “occupied territories” or “pre-67 borders.” And I will never, ever, say “Arab Jews.”

Posted in Information war, Israeli Society, Zionism | 2 Comments

We’ve Always Been Here: The Historical Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel

Posted on August 4, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

I often talk about the Jewish people’s historical right to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, in addition to our legal and moral rights. What do I mean by that? First we need to understand the concept of a distinct “people.”

Mahmoud Abbas has said numerous times that the Jews are not a people; being Jewish is only a religion. He could not be more wrong: the Jewish people are the paradigm case of a people. In other words, if you want to know what a “people” is, look at the Jews.

More analytically, a “people” is a collection of individuals who have certain characteristics in common. Not every individual in the group will have all of them, but the more of them that they have, the more likely it is that they will be considered a member of that people. They are:

  1. A common geographical origin and a connection to their aboriginal home.
  2. A shared genetic heritage.
  3. A unique ancestral language.
  4. A unique religion.
  5. A shared culture.
  6. A shared historical experience.
  7. Self-identification as members of a people.

The Jewish people originated in Eretz Yisrael. They generally married within the group, so DNA tests today display a high degree of genetic similarity. They maintained a familiarity with their ancient Hebrew language, even when they spoke other languages as a result of their dispersal. Their religion, Judaism, has changed to some extent over the centuries, but their holy book, the Torah, has remained essentially the same for several thousand years. Their dispersal created Jewish subcultures, but all of them retained some connections to their original culture, even as they drew apart. The historical experience of Jews in the diaspora was remarkably similar, whether they were in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East – they were outsiders, sometimes persecuted or expelled, sometimes living peacefully, but always marked as different and almost always as second-class citizens. Finally, all of them everywhere strongly felt themselves to be members of the Jewish people, tied to Eretz Yisrael, to which they prayed to return.

Individuals can enter or leave a people, usually by marrying in or out and adopting the religion, language, and culture of their partner. Peoples change over time. Sometimes a people is so diluted that that it is extinguished, absorbed by the peoples around it. Such is the case with many cultures of antiquity. Where are our once deadly enemies, the Philistines, today? (No, the Palestinian Arabs are not descended from them). But the Jewish people maintained its genetic distinctness, its religion, its language, and much of its culture in diaspora for millennia.

With the establishment of the State of Israel in Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish people were able to restore their ancestral language to everyday use, to reunite the diverse Jewish subcultures that developed in the long period of diaspora, and to redevelop a non-diasporic culture: a culture of a people living in their own land.

A population is said to be indigenous to the place that it originated. Members of the oldest extant group indigenous to a particular place are called the aboriginal inhabitants of the place. The Jewish people are the oldest extant people indigenous to Eretz Yisrael, and as a matter of fact the last indigenous independent political entity in Judea was the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty of c. 110 BCE. From then on, Eretz Yisrael was ruled by a succession of non-native conquerors, beginning with the Romans. In the seventh century, the land was conquered by Arab Muslims from Arabia; later, it fell to Crusaders, Mongols, and various others. In 1517, it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, who held it for 400 years. Finally, it passed into the hands of the British after WWI. The native Jewish population waxed and waned, but was always present while others came and went. There was never a “Palestinian” regime. In 1948 the last colonizer – the British Empire – was expelled, and a Jewish state reestablished.

This is remarkable, even incredible. In almost every other case, aboriginal peoples have been unable to reestablish sovereignty in their native lands – certainly not in the Americas, Australia or New Zealand. When the British left, there was a struggle for sovereignty between the Jews, who had developed the framework of a state during the period of the Mandate, and the Arabs within and outside of the land. The surrounding Arab nations wanted to divide the area up between them, and the majority of Palestinian Arabs supported them in this. Despite what some people think, Palestinian nationalism – as opposed to broader Arab nationalism – was not a significant force at this point.

The Jews beat back the Arabs, and established a sovereign state. They did not “take the country from the Palestinian Arabs,” who never had it. They simply became sovereign in place of the foreign powers that had controlled the land since 110 BCE.

The Palestinian Arabs, who had mostly supported the Arab states in their attempt to take over the land (and incidentally, to massacre its Jewish inhabitants), paid the price for being on the losing side of a war. Some of them left before the war and planned to return, some of them fled out of fear that the Jews would do to them what they would have done to the Jews, and some of them were expelled by the Jewish fighters. The numbers are disputed, but some 500,000 – 700,000 Arabs left their homes in the land that would become the State of Israel, and were not allowed to return. A tragedy for them, but magnified 100 times by the Arab states who refused to absorb the refugees. At roughly the same time, some 800,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab and other Muslim countries. Most of these went to Israel, whose Jewish population today is about one-half from the European diaspora, and one half from the African and Middle Eastern ones.

The Palestinian Arabs claim that they are the aboriginal inhabitants of the land and that the Jews are Europeans who invaded and colonized “Palestinian land.” But there was never a Palestinian political entity, and the Palestinian Arabs themselves are of relatively recent provenance in the land. Very few of them have ancestors that arrived before about 1830, and most go back only as far as the early 20th century. Indeed, the definition of “Palestinian refugee” adopted by the UN requires only that a person lived in the Palestine Mandate from June of 1946 to May 1948, and lost his home and work due to the war.

Palestinian Arabs do not have a uniquely Palestinian language or religion. Although there were stirrings of Palestinian Arab nationalism as early as 1920 (mostly among Christian Arabs), most Palestinian Arabs identified most strongly with their clans, and less so as belonging to “Southern Syria.” It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that they began to self-identify as “Palestinians.” Insofar as they can be called a people, it is a people that dates to the 1960s, and whose unique “Palestinian” culture is composed entirely of its opposition to Jewish sovereignty and the State of Israel.

The Palestinian claim that they are an ancient people rooted in this land is simply false. Stripped of its narrative flourishes, it devolves into nothing more than the fact that there were more Arabs than Jews between the Jordan and the Mediterranean immediately prior to 1948.

Jews have been here in some number since biblical times. The Jewish claim to be the aboriginal inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael is supported by a huge body of historical evidence – not surprising, given the importance of the contribution of the Jewish people to Western civilization over the millennia – as well as archaeological evidence that is strengthened by new discoveries almost daily.

This is the basis of the historical claim of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael. It is also part of the argument for the legal rights of the Jewish people, both as the beneficiary of the Mandate and as the natural heirs of the decolonization process. But that’s another long story.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Middle East politics | Comments Off on We’ve Always Been Here: The Historical Right of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel

How and Why we are Losing the Cognitive War

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

The long war against Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel has been going on since before the founding of the state. The identity of our enemies varies depending on their ability to fight at any given time and other factors, but – with one important exception that I will discuss later – they are drawn from the Arab and Muslim nations in our region. Our most dangerous enemy in the past may have been Egypt; today it is Iran, and possibly tomorrow it will be Egypt again. But thanks to Islamic doctrine, it will never end.

The struggle for our independence includes physical, or kinetic, warfare, which has taken the form of pogroms, large-scale regional wars, intifadas, and various manifestations of terrorism. But there are also diplomatic, legal, covert, and psychological or cognitive battles going on at the same time.

The best way to picture our position in the cognitive struggle is that of a nation besieged. Our objective is to relieve the pressure so that we can continue with our normal lives. We are not interested in conquering and holding “enemy territory,” but we do want to destroy our enemies’ stock of cognitive weapons and crush their will to fight. Note that although the objective is to defend ourselves, our strategies to do that may call for aggressive offensive tactics. In the cognitive theater of war, our Muslim enemies are joined by some of the post-Christian nations of Western Europe, who are often even more bitterly hostile than the Muslims.

All our enemies have two kinds of objectives: to target us directly in order to create confusion, dissent, and defeatism at home, and to target the rest of the world in order to make it less likely that our allies will support us in time of kinetic war. That can mean making it more difficult for us to obtain supplies and weapons, or to use air space or land bases. It can mean preparing the ground so that other nations will vote against us in the UN Security Council, or so that public opinion in democratic countries will favor our enemies. It can mean damaging us economically by persuading nations, companies, and individuals to avoid doing business with our firms.

The cognitive attacks that target the nations of the world are intended to delegitimize Israel, to present her as a usurper that has no moral or legal right to exist; or to demonize her, to suggest that her behavior is so despicable, so evil, that she has forfeited her right to be treated like a normal nation of normal people, and deserves to be destroyed.

An example of delegitimization is the narrative that describes the birth of the state as the colonization – by “white” European Jews supported by the great powers – of indigenous “Palestinian” people of color, rather than the return of the Jewish people to its aboriginal land against the racist opposition of the entire Arab world to that return.

Demonization includes traditional military atrocity stories, especially the accusation that the IDF deliberately targets children – the reverse of the actual situation – claims of “apartheid,” and even, for less sophisticated audiences, the retelling of traditional anti-Jewish blood libels.

Cognitive warfare supports and functions in tandem with ordinary kinetic warfare and terrorism (which is both kinetic and cognitive). We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the ultimate goal of our enemies is to destroy our state, and kill or disperse the Jewish people. When an Iranian mullah leads a chant of “death to Israel,” he means death to Israel (America, too). When a European government sends money to the Israeli NGO B’Tselem, they are paying for the demonization of Israel in international forums, interference with IDF security activities, and lawfare against the Israeli government and IDF in Israeli and foreign courts. And when an Israeli newspaper columnist with Jewish parents writes an article in which he accuses Israeli Air Force pilots of murder, he too is pulling the trigger of a cognitive weapon aimed at our hearts. If his checks aren’t signed in Teheran, they should be. In all cases, the final objective is the same.

Israel responds to these attacks in a purely defensive way, to try to parry their thrusts. No, we say (after months of research), we did not shoot young Mohammed al-Durah in 2000; either he was shot by Hamas terrorists or he was not shot at all. No, our treatment of our Arab citizens and Arabs living under the Palestinian Authority is nothing at all like apartheid. No, we didn’t cut down those olive trees; Arab farmers pruned them.

As I wrote in my series about fighting BDS (here and here), the reactive approach has two serious defects: first, by restating the accusations, it gives them renewed currency and makes even absurd accusations acceptable subjects of discussion. Second, the mechanism of researching and responding to exaggerated or made-up claims can easily be overwhelmed by their sheer volume (just like Iron Dome can!)

A better strategy would be to go on the offensive and take the war to the enemy. The Palestinian narrative is flimsy and easily refuted. There is a continual flow of academic papers about the “settler-colonial” paradigm attributed to Israel, but where are the papers about the Arab migrations into the land of Israel in the 19th and 20th centuries? Where are the pro-Zionist academic conferences and grants given to scholars who present our side of the story, which has the advantage of being true?

And not only do we rarely attack the Arab historical narrative – indeed, many Israelis are in the forefront of those who promulgate it – we don’t sufficiently stress the moral depravity and culpability of Palestinian leaders, past and present. Imagine if we could obtain wide distribution of the story that Mahmoud Abbas raised the funds for the Munich Olympics massacre of 1972.

There is a reason that the pro-Israel point of view has such a tough time in academia and in free, Western media. And that is that while Israel has been busy fighting wars and defending herself against terrorism, our enemies have been using their petrodollars to subvert Western universities and media. Did you know that in addition to the millions it spends on lobbying American lawmakers, Hamas-supporting Qatar has given literally billions of dollars to universities and other academic projects (like the Brookings Institution) in the US? They specialize in universities like Georgetown and Northwestern, where there are schools for foreign service officers and journalists, but haven’t stinted on their gifts to Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and numerous others. And of course, Saudi Arabia has been doing the same for years, even subsidizing public-school textbooks in the US and Europe! Qatar also operates one of the most influential media outlets in the world (especially the Arabic-speaking world), Al-Jazeera.

Israel doesn’t have the billions of petrodollars that Qatar does, but with her technical abilities, she could do a great deal more. Unfortunately, perhaps because of inappropriate feelings of guilt over having won the wars of 1948 and 1967, fear of angering the Palestinian Authority or even Arab Israelis, and the pervasive influence of the Left in our media and academia, Israel is transfixed by the blows she has received on the cognitive battlefield, and is unable to take the initiative.

What will it take to win the cognitive struggle? Probably a wholesale change in our national consciousness. I’m not optimistic.

Posted in Information war, War | 3 Comments