Unlearning the Lessons of the Diaspora

Posted on July 28, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

If you won’t eliminate the Diaspora – the Diaspora will eliminate you. – Ze’ev Jabotinsky, 1936

For Jewish individuals and communities, life in the Diaspora can be fraught. They must be vigilant for attacks from all sides. Even today, in a free and tolerant country like the US, there are Jew-haters under every rock: extremist Muslim Imams, obsessed neo-Nazis, black admirers of Louis Farrakhan, even anti-Jewish Catholic cults. Violent attacks on Jews are on the rise on the European continent, in Britain, and in the Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. Some of the anti-Jewish prejudice stems from the worldwide campaign against the Jewish state, exemplified by the BDS movement. The rise of identity politics in the West also tends to amplify anti-Jewish phenomena. Despite attempts at education since the Holocaust, belief in antisemitic stereotypes is widespread throughout the world.

Nevertheless, the situation of Diaspora Jews has been much worse in the past. From the time of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple until founding of the State of Israel, the welfare of Jewish communities in both the Christian and Muslim worlds was almost always dependent on the attitudes of the particular ruler, and could become intolerable overnight. Even in the best of times, Jews were treated as second-class citizens, often taxed heavily and restricted in where they could live, how they could earn their living, whether they could obtain higher education, whether they could own land, and so forth. Sometimes the local citizens would take it into their minds to attack Jews, beating, raping, and murdering them, and of course stealing their property. Often the authorities would cast a blind eye to such outbreaks, or even encourage them for political reasons.

Naturally, Jews developed strategies for survival in such hostile environments. Some of them are assimilation, hiding, appeasement, suffering in silence, and collaboration. Assimilation can protect an individual, although since its mass adoption leads to the extinction of the community, it is in a larger sense self-defeating. And as is well-known, it’s ineffective when the basis of Jew-hatred is “racial,” as it was for the Nazis. Hiding is hard to pull off, and can become indistinguishable from assimilation. Appeasement – paying the jizya or ransoming captives – is giving into blackmail, which leads to greater and greater demands, which ultimately become unbearable. Collaboration with the antisemitic enemy may work for a few individuals for a time, but in addition to its immorality, it only accelerates the destruction of the community.

After millennia of diasporic compromise and the need to rely on others for our defense, it became possible for the Jewish people to contemplate – and even actualize – the return to their historical homeland and establishment of a Jewish state, which would put an end to the need to choose between these distasteful options. The existence of the state also makes true Jewish self-defense possible. There is a meme that was popular a few years ago, a picture of IAF aircraft with the caption ”Jews: not so easy to f— with any more.” And that is, or at least ought to be, true.

But unfortunately, the aforementioned diasporic millennia accustomed the Jewish people to ways of behaving that may have helped them survive in that unnatural and unhealthy environment, but which actually work against their survival in a world in which there is a sovereign Jewish state. These attitudes are found both in the diaspora and in Israel herself.

In the Diaspora today, there are Jews whose diasporic adaptations only affect them and their communities, such as the assimilators. These are usually acting as individuals, but it can also be argued that the Reform Movement in America, by accepting – almost encouraging – intermarriage, and at the same time transforming traditional Judaism into a politically-oriented “Tikkunism,” is actually bringing about mass assimilation in fact if not in name. More serious are the collaborators, whose actions affect the entire Jewish people. They are Jews whose identification with the enemies of the Jewish people take the form of extreme anti-Zionism, or Misoziony. This would include Jewish supporters of the BDS movement, Jewish members of organizations like “A Jewish Voice for Peace” or “If Not Now,” and so on. Just as dangerous or more is the phony “pro-Israel” group J Street (see also here). While pretending to responsibly support dovish solutions to Israel’s regional conflict, J Street received funds from Arab, Iranian, and extreme left-wing sources, and consistently acts against Israel’s interests.

In Israel, we find the collective guilt complex toward the Palestinian Arabs, which makes some Israelis feel the need to compensate them for the nakba, the mass exodus of several hundred thousand Arabs from what would become the Jewish state before and during the war that accompanied its birth. There is also a tendency to appeasement, as is exemplified by various schemes to stop terrorism emanating from the Gaza Strip by helping Hamas build facilities like a port that would improve the economy, or by allowing aid money from Qatar to flow into it.

There is also the policy that a certain amount of terrorism – a few stabbings in Jerusalem, a few rocks thrown through car windshields (which have caused death on several occasions) on the roads, a few thousand acres of farmland, nature preserve, and forest burned – is an acceptable level. Better that than war, think the decision-makers. Meanwhile, the terrorists grow bolder and the incidents more frequent. But we wouldn’t want to make them angry, would we? Is it diaspora thinking or battered woman syndrome?

Today’s newspaper has a headline story about a program being pushed by Yisrael Katz, the supposedly “right-wing” Foreign Minister who has just taken over the position from PM Netanyahu, to encourage governments to move their embassies to Jerusalem. A wonderful idea, but the article notes that there is a budget of 50 million shekels (about $14 million) in aid for countries who do so. So we will bribe them to recognize our capital!

There are also the activities of the extreme Israeli Left, who are actively assisting Israel’s enemies in their efforts to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state. Even the important Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz has several writers that contribute to this campaign on a daily basis. Nobody is saying that we shouldn’t have a free press, but Gideon Levy, for example, long ago crossed the line from social/political criticism to foaming-at-the-mouth loathing for the homeland that gave his parents refuge from the Nazis in 1939. This is a sign of a psychological disorder, and it’s a disorder that is common enough to be considered a social pathology.

Assimilation, appeasement, collaboration, and acquiescence to humiliation or even to terrorism. They are all social pathologies of the Jewish people, in the diaspora and even in the Jewish state, that are vestigial remnants of diasporic survival strategies.

It’s time for us to overcome them. In a world containing a thriving, powerful, Jewish state, they are as useful to the Jewish people as an inflamed appendix is to the human organism.

Posted in Jew Hatred, Zionism | 2 Comments

Ending the Humiliation

Posted on July 25, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

When the muhtasib or his agent comes to collect the jizya, he should stand the dhimmi in front of him, slap him on the side of the neck and say: “Pay the jizya, unbeliever.” The  dhimmi will take his hand out of his pocket holding the jizya and present it to him with humility and submission. – al-Shayzari, The Book of the Islamic Market Inspector, quoted in Lindsey, Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World, p. 121

The Jews Race typically had eight contestants, or sometimes 12, according to Cassiano. They would be required to run naked through the streets, covered only by a loincloth. On their forehead would be painted the letters SPQR, the abbreviation for the Latin Senatus Populusque Romanus, the official name of the city government, both ancient and modern.  Since Carnival is in February, it was cold, often wet, and frequently muddy. To make the race more arduous for the runners – and more entertaining for the public – the contestants would also often be required to gorge themselves before taking off, with the result being that sometimes they would vomit, or even collapse, during the race. The spectators were also permitted to throw rotten oranges and mud at the runners. – David B. Green, “1668: Pope puts a stop to Rome’s sadistic ‘Jews Race’.”

Examples of Jewish humiliation in the diaspora abound. In the Middle Ages in some parts of Europe, Jews were required to wear special pointed hats or badges, supposedly in order to “reduce the likelihood of sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jews.” Later, in the 18th and 19th century, many countries limited where Jews could live, what professions they could practice, whether they could study at universities, own land, serve in the military, and so on. There were supposed justifications for some of these restrictions, such as protecting the opportunities available to “native” Europeans, but the effect was to always send the message that the Jews were morally inferior beings that deserved punishment. The Nazis publically humiliated Jews even before they began to systematically murder them. Photographs of Jews being paraded through the streets in a state of undress, being forced to clean gutters on their knees, and so on are common.

The antisemitism of the Christian world can perhaps be traced to the refusal of the Jew to accept the “good news” that the Mashiach had arrived. Among Muslims, it was their stubborn refusal to accept  Mohammed’s prophecy. Jews in 19th century  Morocco were forced to live in ghettos, and were required to go barefoot or wear shoes made of straw when walking outside of them. Muslim children threw stones at Jews as a matter of course. Like Europe, the treatment of Jews in the Muslim world was dependent on the whim of the ruler, sometimes being quite harsh and sometimes less so. But the inferior position of the Jews, based on Koranic principles, was no less evident than in the Christian world. And that often expressed itself in acts of humiliation.

I grew up in the US, where the kind of murderous Jew-hatred my grandparents experienced in the Russian Empire was mostly just a story. But when I did encounter antisemitism, it was always in essence the expression of the non-Jew’s need to demonstrate to the Jew, to bystanders, and to himself, the inferior social status of the Jew. In my grandparents’ day, Jews had no choice but to accept humiliation, because it was the price of avoiding far worse punishment – murder or rape could follow if the Jew resisted being put in his or her place.

Centuries of diaspora life habituated the Jewish people to humiliation. The founders of the state of Israel realized this, and the “New Jew” that they wished to create in Eretz Yisrael was a person who would no longer accept it. And in a Jewish state, a Jew wouldn’t have to choose between shame or death.

Of course there were times that it seemed that way, like when Ben Gurion decided to accept German reparations in order to finance the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Holocaust, and in fact, refugees from the Arab world as well. Menachem Begin chose honor over practicality, and vehemently opposed the deal (to be fair, perhaps in addition to honor he preferred not to see all that money flowing into government and Histadrut-owned enterprises).

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been so easy to breed the tolerance for humiliation out of the Jewish people, even in a Jewish state. When someone treats us unjustly, we often prefer to just take it rather than to stand up for ourselves. This attitude continues to surface in relations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, as well as our old nemeses in Europe.

The most important issue toward the Palestinians is the question of sovereignty in Jerusalem and over the Temple Mount and other sites. They understand very well that Jerusalem is the spiritual center of the country, and they keep pushing to make the Mount a no-go zone for Jews. “Who needs that Vatican?” said Moshe Dayan, but he failed to see that it is important not just as a religious symbol, but as proof that the roots of the Jewish people are here in the land of Israel, in our capital. Over time, we’ve allowed fear of “disturbances” and foreign pressure to force us to give up, little by little, the practical control of the Mount and eastern Jerusalem that we won at great cost in 1967. Our collapse over the installation of metal detectors may have been the low point.

But lately there have been some bright spots, like the demolition of illegally-built structures in the southeastern part of the city, and the excavation of the City of David despite Palestinian objections. I hope that these are demonstrations of a new seriousness and not just pre-election posturing.

Things are as bad or worse in our relationship with the European Union. It and its members, particularly Germany (!) have been trampling on our sovereignty by funding illegal Palestinian construction in Area C, the part of Judea/Samaria that is supposed to be under full Israeli control – including matters of zoning and construction. They support left-wing “Israeli” NGOs which intervene in our politics, try to embarrass the IDF in the territories, and harass the government and IDF with frivolous “lawfare.” We have taken only the mildest steps to rein them in.

Until President Trump came along, the US Department of State maintained the absurd fiction that no part of Jerusalem belonged to Israel, despite the fact that it had been the seat of our government since the founding of the state. No other country has been denied the right to determine its own capital, and if Trump had done nothing else for Israel (and he’s done a great deal), he would be remembered for ending the long humiliation that was foisted on us from the very beginning of the state.

The Arabs and Europeans are not forcing us to clean streets on our knees like the Nazis, but by ignoring our sovereignty over the land, especially in our capital, they are reaffirming their belief – both the Muslim and Christian versions – that Jews do not have the same rights as others. Like the demeaning jizya  payment and associated slap, their actions both punish us in a practical sense and humiliate us. But we are out of the diaspora and back in our home, where we do not have to accept humiliation. Both Ben Gurion and Begin understood that. I wonder about today’s leaders.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Zionism | 1 Comment

Fighting BDS, Part II

Posted on July 23, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it. – Jonathan Swift

Summary of Part I:

The Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement is not intended as an economic weapon against Israel, and has not succeeded as such. It does not seek to attain its stated objectives of forcing Israel to withdraw from the territories, grant rights to Arab citizens, or accept the “return” of Arab refugees. Rather, it is a cognitive weapon to facilitate the demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state, which it does by providing opportunities for the promulgation of various “big lies” about Israel and its conflicts.

Such remedies as anti-boycott laws are unnecessary (there is little danger of economic damage from BDS). Worse, they play directly into the hands of Israel’s enemies. Every controversy about BDS, every resolution that is debated on a university campus or church board, in a union hall or the US Congress, provides a platform for the same false accusations of apartheid, racism, war crimes, and even genocide, as well as a reprise of the false historical and political Palestinian narrative.

The demonization and delegitimization of Israel present a real physical danger, because they affect the target populations, both the “street” in Western countries and their decision-makers. The effect is to increase tolerance of terrorism against Israel, to reduce support (such as the supply of arms) during wartime, to justify forcing dangerous “solutions” to the conflict, to prevent Israel from obtaining decisive victory in armed conflicts, and so on.

How should Israel and her supporters respond?

A cognitive attack demands a cognitive response. As we’ve seen, legal or legislative attempts to stop boycotts actually help BDS achieve its goal by providing loci for the promulgation of anti-Israel memes. Traditionally, Israeli “hasbara” in response to BDS has taken the form of denying its accusations. We insist that we are not an apartheid state, note that Arab citizens have full civil rights, and try to disprove particular accusations of mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs and war crimes.

But by repeating the accusations in order to deny them, we give them additional currency, and make formerly unthinkable concepts at least debatable. For example, anyone who knows anything about South African apartheid or Nazi genocide knows that there is absolutely no similarity between them and Israeli treatment of Palestinian Arabs. But if the lie is constantly repeated, it becomes a question to be taken seriously, with pros and cons. This is similar to the way Holocaust deniers claim that the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is an “open historical question.”

There is also the constant flow of what can be called “nuisance libels.” The most well-known and consequential of these is the alleged killing of the boy Mohammed al-Durah by the IDF in 2000, but it is just one of hundreds or thousands of accusations of murder, mayhem, or mistreatment that are alleged against Israel on a continual basis. It is trivially easy to make an accusation with the flimsiest of proof, but refutation requires time and effort. As Swift said, falsehood flies and truth limps. And of course the controversy itself is the objective, as former US President Lyndon Johnson well understood.

Our sporadic, reactive, and generally less-than-serious approach to the cognitive war that we are in (whether we know it or not) has so far proven ineffective. But why shouldn’t our cognitive war fighting follow the same principles that inform Israel’s doctrine of traditional, “kinetic” warfare? In other words, why shouldn’t we take the offensive and bring the war to the enemy’s own territory? Let’s see what this might mean in terms of cognitive warfare.

The first thing we need to do is to directly attack the framing of the conflict as “Israeli-Palestinian.” The true description, to which we must continually return and use as a logical starting point for our cognitive attacks, is that of the war against Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East that has been going on since before the founding of our state. Our enemies in this war have primarily been the Arab nations, now (perhaps temporarily) replaced to some extent by Iran, with the “soft” assistance of the major European powers. The Palestinian Arabs are the smallest part of the alliance arrayed against us, but are used as an excuse for hostile action and as pawns in the long war.

The next target is the false historical narrative that paints the Palestinian Arabs as indigenous occupants of the land, and the Jews as “European” interlopers. We should deploy historical research and archaeological evidence to establish (and broadcast!) that the Jewish people are the oldest indigenous inhabitants of the land of Israel, the ones possessing aboriginal rights, and that the Palestinian Arabs are mostly newcomers to the land from multiple places of origin in the region. We should explain that the “Palestinian people” do not have a unique language or religion to imply peoplehood, have only self-identified as a unique people since after the creation of the Jewish state, and that the specifically “Palestinian” part of their Arab culture consists entirely of their struggle against the Jewish presence in the land.

Finally, the BDS movement tries to present the Palestinian Arabs as sympathetic and victims. We should remind the world that Palestinian heroes are terrorists who murdered Jews, usually civilians and especially children. We should note that Palestinian terrorists popularized airline hijacking and suicide bombing, the two techniques that were used in the most deadly single terrorist attack in history, 9/11. We should explain that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are corrupt, kleptocratic, and dictatorial regimes that terrorize their own people while stealing international aid and making war on Israel.

We should emphasize that the father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, incited anti-Jewish pogroms in Mandate Palestine, collaborated with the Nazis, met with Hitler himself, broadcast Nazi propaganda in Arabic from Berlin, lobbied to extend the Holocaust to Palestine, recruited Bosnian Muslims to serve in the SS, had a role in precipitating the notorious farhud pogrom in Iraq, and more.

We should ensure that they don’t forget Yasser Arafat, master of international terror, the man Malcolm Hoenlein called “the largest mass murderer of Jews since Hitler,” who died with several billion dollars of international aid money in bank accounts and property. We also shouldn’t forget Arafat’s educational system, carried on by his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, which incites children to stab Jews in the street, and then pays their parents when they are killed or arrested.

That’s not all. It’s not even the beginning, because we haven’t mentioned the war crimes of Hamas, which guards itself with human shields while it fires rockets at the Israeli civilian population.

BDS is all about delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. But where is the legitimacy in the claims of the Palestinian Arabs, who are at best descendants of colonialist invaders from Arabia, and at worst the children of 19th and 20th century migrants? And we don’t need to make up stories in order to demonize the Palestinian Arabs – they are as close to demonic as the Nazis they admire, if less competent!

None of this material is new. Ask any pro-Israel blogger. But we can do better. The BDS movement has been running a professional, well-funded, worldwide campaign for more than a decade. They are consistent, on message, and found on every campus and countless churches, labor unions, and professional organizations.

We have the resources, both the money and the brains. We can do this too – and we have the advantage that we will be telling the truth.

Posted in Information war, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Terrorism | 4 Comments

Fighting BDS, Part I

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

The Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel has not been an effective economic weapon. It has had few victories and numerous defeats. I think that’s probably because market forces are stronger than ideological ones, at least among the populations that make decisions with economic impact. But I don’t think it’s intended to do economic damage.

Some people think that BDS is a nonviolent way to pressure an intransigent Israeli government to stop “oppressing the Palestinians.” That this is not the case is clear from the conditions that the BDS movement has set for the removal of its boycott. They are

  1. Withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967 and removal of the security barrier.
  2. Giving “full equality” to Arab citizens of Israel.
  3. Recognizing a right of return for the descendants of Arab refugees.

The first is inconsistent with Israel’s survival from a security standpoint, and the last is inconsistent with it from a demographic one. The second condition is interesting, since Arab citizens already have full civil rights; so the demand is for national rights, which would mean that Israel (or whatever it would be called) would no longer be a Jewish state, but a state of all its citizens.

Accepting these conditions would result in the replacement of the Jewish state by an Arab-majority state. Practically speaking, this could not occur non-violently. It would certainly result in civil war and, if the Arabs were successful, expulsion and/or genocide for Israel’s Jews.

Israel will never agree to these demands. It would literally be national suicide, and everyone, Jews and Arabs, knows that. But the demands of BDS are not intended to be acceptable. They are intended to make it possible for the BDS movement to continue for as long as its leaders wish it to.

If BDS does not damage Israel’s economy – and Israel’s success since the initiation of the movement in the early 2000s shows that it doesn’t – and if its demands are so extreme that they will never be met, then what is its true objective?

The answer is that it is a tool for delegitimizing and demonizing Israel. It is a way to start ideological fires around the world, to create controversies that will enable its advocates to call Israel an apartheid state, to say that Israel is like pre-Mandela South Africa, to accuse Israel of all manner of crimes against humanity, including genocide, and to equate it with Nazi Germany.

These accusations are ridiculous, but as former US President Lyndon Johnson once explained, they want to hear us deny them.

Several states in the US have expanded laws initially passed to protect Israel from the Arab boycott that began in 1948 on the basis that the boycott constituted unfair discrimination, to apply to BDS. A federal law to this effect was also proposed in the US Senate in 2017, but hasn’t been voted on. Such laws essentially say that government agencies are not allowed to do business with organizations that refuse to trade with Israel for political reasons. Opponents of such measures say that they are unconstitutional limitations on speech; proponents say that they don’t prohibit speech or expression, only specific actions.

I am not going to discuss the legal arguments, which are ably handled here by Eugene Kontorovich. My opinion is that since BDS is a tool of cognitive warfare, it should be met with cognitive countermeasures. While an anti-boycott law might be an effective and practical tool against economic warfare – as in the case of the original Arab boycott of Israel – it will have little effect on BDS, which as we’ve seen, is not intended to do economic damage.

Indeed, since the constitutional arguments are not well-understood by the public, attempts to pass anti-boycott laws simply provide yet another opportunity for BDS-niks to generate public discussion into which they can insert false accusations of apartheid, oppression, racism, war crimes, and so on. It gives them an opportunity to make false analogies between the “plight” of the Palestinians – actually the point of the spear of the Muslim majorities in the region – and the situation of minorities in the US. Worst of all, it permits them to argue that a powerful Jewish conspiracy is trying to use the law to “silence” the courageous voices of those on the side of the oppressed Palestinian minority-of-color, who supposedly only want their human rights.

The debate that is created by anti-boycott laws and resolutions thus plays directly into the hands of Israel’s enemies. Every time there is a publicized struggle in a university, church, or labor union over BDS, they achieve their goal, whether the resolution passes or not. Just now, the extremely smart, dangerous, and despicable Ilhan Omar has introduced a resolution in the US Congress which would support the “right to boycott” as a free-speech issue. There is a great deal of opposition and at least now it seems that it is unlikely to pass (and even if it did, it would have no legal weight). But Omar has already attained her objective, as should be clear from her words in support of the resolution:

Americans of conscience have a proud history of participating in boycotts to advocate for human rights abroad including … boycotting Nazi Germany from March 1933 to October 1941 in response to the dehumanization of the Jewish people in the lead-up to the Holocaust…

Of course she does not explicitly say that Israel is like Nazi Germany, and in fact the pro-boycott resolution doesn’t even mention Israel. But cognitive warfare is all about subtly, almost subliminally, introducing the connections you want to make. The targeted brain does the rest.

Omar likes win-win propositions, like the controversies surrounding her borderline antisemitic remarks (“it’s all about the Benjamins,” etc.) and the dueling resolutions pro and con BDS. She is keeping the pot boiling by announcing a trip to Israel along with fellow anti-Israel Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Israel recently passed a law that gives the Foreign Ministry the authority to ban BDS supporters from entering the country, and if she were banned, she would doubtless claim it as evidence of Israel’s racism and intent to silence critics. Our government (reportedly the decision was made by the PM himself) decided that it would be less damaging to let her in and accept the inevitable exaggerated reports of ill-treatment of Palestinian Arabs that will ensue.

The demonization and delegitimization of Israel that is the objective of BDS has a purpose; our enemies aren’t doing it just to make themselves feel good. It is done in order to prepare the target population – both the “street” in democratic countries and important decision-makers – to stand by and not oppose, to even agree with, very violent actions against Israel and her people. Terrorism against Israel is tolerated during “peacetime” and weapons are embargoed in time of war, disadvantageous diplomatic “solutions” are forced on us, and we are never allowed to achieve decisive victory over our enemies – all because the cognitive groundwork has been laid beforehand, by the operatives of the BDS movement and politicians like Ilhan Omar.

The BDS movement was created by psychological warfare experts, the successors to the ones who gave us the PLO in the 1960s as the “national liberation movement of the Palestinian people,” and cast Israel in the role of the “European colonialists” who were oppressing them. Until now, we seem to have relied on ad-hoc defensive measures that, like the attempts to find legal remedies in the US, only play into the hands of our enemies.

Israel’s doctrine for traditional warfare calls for us to always be on the offensive and to take the war into enemy territory. Shouldn’t we fight the cognitive war in the same way? We’ll discuss that in part II.

Posted in American politics, Information war, Jew Hatred | 3 Comments

Realism, not Sadism

Posted on July 18, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Odeh Bisharat is an Arab novelist, political writer and activist, who is also – quite painfully for him – a citizen of the Jewish state of Israel. He recently published an op-ed in that flagship of Jewish shame, Ha’aretz, in which he describes the display at Arab schools of the flag of the state of Israel, the very Jewish magen david, as “an act of sadism:”

After all, the national flag … is related to the Arabs’ tragedies from 1948 to the present. It provokes considerable sadness, bitterness and even revulsion. It was under this flag that most of the Arab villages were captured in 1948, and later their residents were expelled under this flag, and in the shadow of this flag all those villages were destroyed. …

The Arabs don’t object to the flag because of what it symbolizes for the Jews — a state and independence — but because of what it symbolizes for the Arabs: expulsion and destruction.

I understand. After all, Jews were forced to stand in view of all kinds of flags, from the Roman standards that symbolized the destruction of our holy Temple and expulsion from our homeland of Judea, to the Christian cross of persecution, and even the twisted cross of Nazi Germany.

But painful or not, there is an important lesson conveyed by the flag of the state of Israel to its Arab residents, a lesson that Bisharat rejects with his “sadness, bitterness and even revulsion.” That lesson, which the editors of Ha’aretz also would prefer not to learn, is that the Jews won their War of Independence in 1948, a war that was forced upon them by the refusal of the Arab residents of the land and their Arab neighbors to accept any Jewish state, no matter how small.

It was a vicious war, in which the Arab armies eliminated any trace of Jewish presence in the areas they controlled, expelling or murdering the people and destroying synagogues and even cemeteries. The Arab nakba was nothing compared to the “war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades,” in the words of the Arab League’s Abdel Rahman Azzam, that would have occurred had the Arabs won.

But note: they didn’t win. A Jewish state was created, one which does not insist on ethnic purity within its borders; and Odeh Bisharat lives and works in it, received a university education in it, can vote and hold political office in it, and is not punished – indeed, he is paid – for vilely speaking out against it as he does.

Nevertheless, he should be aware that the Jews didn’t go through the trials of blood required to create their state to turn it into a “state of its citizens” or a binational state. It is and will be a Jewish state with a Jewish flag, other Jewish symbols, a right of return for Jews only, and even a Nation-State Law that asserts those propositions.

Bisharat does not like to be reminded – it is a “sadistic” torture – of the fact that a Jewish state was established on land that he believes should belong to Arabs. I am sure that if it were pointed out to him that there are 21 explicitly Arab states in the world and only this one Jewish state, he would say that there is only one Palestine, and that it should belong to the “Palestinian people.”

Excuse me, but this is rubbish. “Palestinians” didn’t even self-identify as such until the mid-1960s, when the KGB suggested that this would be a good strategy. Palestinian Arabs are mostly descended from 19th and 20th century migrants from various countries in the Arab world, and their culture reflects that. Unlike the Jewish people, they do not have a unique language, religion, or place of origin. What is specifically “Palestinian” about their culture is its ultra-violent hatred and rejection of Jewish sovereignty; as well as airline hijacking, suicide bombing, and stabbing random Jews in the street. What else is “Palestinian?”

Odeh Bisharat does not have a deed to this land. If the Arabs of Palestine had any claim to justice, it was blown away by the hundredth exploding bus or pizza restaurant. His “revulsion” is misdirected: it should be aimed at the real architects of the nakba, the Arab states that tried to wipe out the Jews and then put the Arab refugees of 1948 in camps instead of resettling them, as Israel did for the Jews fleeing Arab countries. It should be aimed at Haj Amin al-Husseini, who incited pogroms against Jews and then went to Germany to work with Hitler to create a Middle Eastern edition of the Holocaust. It should be aimed at Yasser Arafat, who made himself fabulously wealthy by stealing aid intended for Palestinian Arabs, while masterminding international terrorism and creating an educational system that has been successfully breeding murderers since 1993.

Arab citizens of Israel need to think regularly about these things. They would rather not. It’s more comfortable to see themselves as victims or resistance fighters. But if they want to live here, to enjoy the benefits of a relatively uncorrupt and highly developed modern society, they will have to understand that here they will always be Arabs living in a Jewish state. If displaying the flag on every school, Arab or Jewish, will help make that clear to everyone, it’s worth Bisharat’s discomfort.

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Israeli or Jewish History | 2 Comments

An Ally, not a Satellite

Posted on July 13, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Despite the fact that my daughter once had one of those T-shirts with a picture of an F-16 and the words “Don’t worry, America, Israel is behind you,” a mutual defense pact with the US is a terrible idea.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a great friend of Israel, recently proposed it, and there are rumors that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering it (right before our election, of course).

Don’t do it, Bibi.

With all due appreciation for my former country, which I still love and care about, increasing Israel’s dependence on the US is not in Israel’s interest.

Treaties are pieces of paper; countries act in ways that advance their perceived national interests regardless of what’s on the paper. In 1956, President Eisenhower promised (or appeared to promise) that the US would defend the right of passage through the Strait of Tiran, which was critical for Israel’s import of oil (in those days, we bought it from Iran!) But by 1967, President Johnson, embroiled in Vietnam, felt that he could not afford the risk that keeping Ike’s promise would involve the US in another conflict. When Egypt expelled UN troops and closed the straits to Israeli shipping, Israel was on her own.

In 2004, President Bush wrote a letter to PM Ariel Sharon encouraging him to continue with his plan to “disengage” (read: withdraw) from Gaza and northern Samaria. It included the statement that “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations [sic] centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” This was understood by Israeli officials, and confirmed by Elliott Abrams, a member of Bush’s National Security Council involved in the negotiations, to imply that construction in the large existing settlement blocs such as Betar Illit could continue. Sharon went ahead with the withdrawal. But in 2009, Obama’s new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reneged on Bush’s promise, saying “there were no informal or oral enforceable agreements” about construction in any settlements. “These settlements must stop,” said Obama.

So much for Bush’s letter – and so much for American credibility.

Even if there were no worries about whether a future administration would live up to commitments made by a prior one, there is the question of how fast the US could come to Israel’s aid. Israel is a tiny country, with little strategic depth. Our response to an attack must be as close to immediate as possible, or it could be too late – as was almost the case in 1973. And although our politicians would deny it, the existence of a treaty would lead to complacency and the erosion of our own deterrent power. We not only ought to defend ourselves, we must.

One of the false accusations made against Israel by its opponents in the US is that “American boys have died for Israel,” in Lebanon or Iraq. A mutual defense treaty would be read as a commitment for Americans to become casualties in service of Israel, something that Israel doesn’t need or want.

I’ve argued that we would be best served by phasing out American military aid almost entirely, for multiple reasons. Israel can afford it: her state budget in 2019 is $116 billion, of which $17.5 billion goes for defense. The 10-year Memorandum of Understanding on aid negotiated with the Obama Administration calls for it to be spent entirely in the US. This weakens our own military industry. Even boots, which used to be made in Israel, are imported from America. And if we had a thriving military industry, sales of weapons to other countries might offset some of the loss in American aid.

Aid also distorts our purchase decisions. If the Americans are offering something for “free,” why build our own or buy something else that might be better?

Further, the existing aid arrangement gives the US too much leverage over Israeli policy. Perhaps we are happy with the Trump Administration’s recent actions on Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, UNRWA, and so on, but have we forgotten how the Obama Administration cut off the supply of Hellfire missiles during the 2014 war with Hamas in Gaza?

In 2012, PM Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Ehud Barak wanted to preemptively attack Iranian nuclear facilities, but were prevented from doing so by massive American pressure, including leaks about Israeli intentions. Perhaps Obama would have stopped Israel in any event, but the leverage of military aid on Israeli defense officials made it easier. I can’t prove it, but couldn’t then Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi – who strongly opposed bombing Iran – have been influenced by the folks that provided almost a quarter of his budget?

Trump will not be president forever, and some of his opponents today make Obama and Kerry look like Zionists. Shouldn’t we prepare for the worst case, rather than the best?

There are some things that we do want from the US. Continued diplomatic support in international forums, continued security and intelligence cooperation (which often greatly benefits the US), and continued sharing of defense technology, as we had with Iron Dome and other systems. We want to be treated as an ally, not as a target of diplomatic warfare and espionage, as we are by many European governments – and as we were for the Obama Administration.

We would like to be able to buy the weapons that we need with our own money, and would like to see the policy of helping us maintain a qualitative edge over our enemies continue. We would appreciate non-interference in our internal affairs, and also in our economic relations with other nations. These things would cost the US nothing – indeed, they would pay dividends – and save $3.8 billion in annual military aid.

One of the lessons the Jewish people learned from the Holocaust was that we could not rely on the non-Jewish world to come to our aid in times of danger. Today as antisemitism is growing throughout the world, even in the US, and when our regional enemies are putting strategies into place that they believe will be our undoing, it is more important than ever that we stay as strong – and as independent – as possible.

Posted in American politics, Israeli Politics, US-Israel Relations, War | 1 Comment

The nakba that is Ha’aretz

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

One   who   becomes   compassionate   instead of   cruel,   will   ultimately   become   cruel   instead   of   compassionate…
Midrash Kohelet Rabba (a discussion of this is here)

The lead editorial in Ha’aretz today is headlined “The Nakba isn’t Going Away,” and it touts a longer article by investigative journalist Hagar Shezaf published last week, about how Defense Ministry personnel have collected and sealed documents that describe the alleged expulsion and other ill-treatment of Arabs at the time of Israel’s War of Independence and afterwards.

The editorial accuses Israel of “expulsion, looting, murder and rape” in 1948. There is no doubt that some of these things did occur, although it is also true that we were far kinder to the Arabs than they would have been to us if they had won. I don’t object to the publication of such facts, although Ha’aretz has a tendency to exaggerate the extent and cruelty of our deeds and to accept the narrative of our enemies uncritically. What I do violently object to is their attribution of moral guilt and demand for some kind of accounting for it toward the Palestinians.

The editorial concludes:

Israel at age 71 is strong enough to address the moral failings of its past. The Nakba won’t go away. It’s still there in the landscape, in the rows of pear cactus of the abandoned villages, in the many arched houses of Jaffa and Haifa, and in the memory of the Palestinian community in Israel, and in the territories and across the border.

Instead of censoring and concealing things, the history of Israel’s establishment and the Palestinian society that was uprooted should be studied and taught. Commemoration signs should be put up at the sites of destroyed villages, and the moral dilemmas that have accompanied Israel since 1948 should be faced. Such recognition won’t resolve the conflict, but it will place dialogue between Jews and Palestinians in Israel on a foundation of truth instead of lies, shame and concealment.

No, this is absolutely not what “should” happen. Israel was born in war, a war that was forced on it by Arabs who couldn’t abide Jewish sovereignty, and who planned – in the words of Abdul Rahman Azzam, Secretary-General of the Arab League – “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.” A pity, for the Ha’aretz editorial board, that we won the war and now have “moral failings” to address as a result. But we did, and there is no reason to be apologetic about it, or to get nostalgic over the losses of our enemies, who, incidentally, have not stopped murdering us whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Perhaps they wouldn’t be murdering us today if we had followed the same policy in 1967 that the Jordanians did when they conquered Judea/Samaria and part of Jerusalem in 1948. Every single Jew living in areas under their control was forced to leave at gunpoint. Some were murdered. Synagogues were destroyed, gravestones uprooted, and not a trace of the former Jewish inhabitants was allowed to remain. Did newspapers in Jordan call for a “dialogue” or agonize about their “moral failures?” To ask the question is to answer it.

War is ugly, especially when two peoples are fighting over a piece of ground. There were massacres and rapes on both sides (Benny Morris believes that he has evidence for at least a dozen rapes committed by Jewish forces, something that surprised both Morris and me). I think that he is correct when he says that “the entire [Jewish] leadership” understood that there would be no Jewish state as long as there wasn’t a large Jewish majority, and that it was absolutely necessary to encourage the Arabs to leave.

And that isn’t a moral problem. It was them or us, quite simply; and our claim on the land was stronger than theirs and we had fewer alternatives. Would Israel have survived its first 19 years if significantly fewer Arabs had fled in 1948? I doubt it. And if the Arabs had won the war, Azzam’s threat would surely have been carried out.

This is a fact of human life. It has always been so. Population transfers have occurred after almost every major war. Indeed, we were not cruel enough. I think that in the long run, there would have been fewer victims on both sides and more security in the region as a whole if Israel had expelled the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Eastern Jerusalem in 1967.

Just a note about “investigative journalist” Shazef. She works for Ha’aretz, but she is also paid by a European foundation, supported in part by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Flemish (Belgian) government, and other European sources, to write anti-Israel articles. But naturally she doesn’t let that cloud her journalistic judgment. Naturally.

What is the matter with Jews like the ones on the Ha’aretz editorial board? Why are they obsessed with bashing their country, the one that may have given their parents and grandparents a home when no other country would? Why do they find it so easy to understand the pain of the Palestinian Arabs, who themselves have brought so much pain into the world, but they can’t cut Israel a break? Why do they advocate national suicide for their own people out of concern for others? That isn’t morality, it’s stupidity.

We do not have to feel “shame” for 1948, and we have nothing to be ashamed of today, when the IDF shoots Arabs dead when they climb border fences. Gideon Levy, another Ha’aretz operative, eloquently mourns poor Abdallah Gheith, a teenager who “dreamed of praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” and was shot climbing the fence. According to Levy, his father took him and a cousin to the fence and dropped them off! I am sure that he just wanted to live his dream of praying at al-Aqsa, aren’t you? Levy calls the border policeman that shot him a “murderer.” I call him someone doing a dangerous job, protecting traitors like Levy and the rest of the Ha’aretz gang from young men like Gheith, who might stick a knife in their necks on the street.

Because “traitor” is not too strong a word. Israel’s War of Independence never ended; every few years it flares up, but between times smolders in a deadly way. And the Ha’aretz newspaper, 60% owned by publisher Amos Schocken, who controls its editorial policy, is a brigade in service of Israel’s enemies. Although its Hebrew edition is the by far the least popular of Israel’s major newspapers, its English edition and website in English are widely read by government officials and businesspeople around the world. By presenting an almost uniformly critical view of Israel and Israelis in its opinion pages, and by slanting news reports to present Israel in the worst possible light, Ha’aretz contributes to the campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel that is part of the international effort to destroy it.

This constitutes treason. I understand that a free press is an important part of a free country, and that makes it difficult to shut down or prosecute a newspaper. But why do we need Ha’aretz when we have Aljazeera and Palestinian Authority newspapers?

I would like to understand what Schocken, Levy, and the others see when they stand in front of the mirror. After all, they are Israelis too. Does this cause them to feel the “shame” that they want all of us to feel? Or do they see themselves as courageous fighters for the “truth,” which is that Israelis are murderers and Arabs saintly victims?

It’s the latter, of course. They are not “self-hating” Jews, because they clearly love and value themselves. It’s just the Jewish people that they hate.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli or Jewish History, Media, War | 4 Comments

This isn’t Ferguson

Posted on July 7, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

It turned out that Ferguson wasn’t what they said it was either, but that’s another story.

Don’t Americanize it. A black Israeli of Ethiopian origin was shot dead by a policeman, and there were riots, roads were blocked, cars were overturned and even set on fire. That is where the resemblance stops. There is skin-color racism in Israel, but the dynamics are different. Everything is different.

What happened: All the details are not clear at this time, and won’t be until the official investigation report comes out. But the policeman’s story has leaked out, and it seems to hold up. There are many details that I’ve heard about that I am not including because they can’t be verified. But it seems that what took place was this:

An off-duty policeman in civilian clothes was in a park with his wife and children. He came across a fight in which three older youths were beating up a 13-year old in an attempt to steal his phone. He identified himself as a policeman and ordered them to stop. They turned on him, at which point the 13-year old escaped.

The men approached the policeman and threw stones at him; he was hit several times, including in the head. He drew his weapon and fired a warning shot into the ground. The bullet hit the ground and either the whole bullet or a fragment of it ricocheted upward and struck Salomon Tekah (19) in the chest, killing him. It has been reported that an internal police investigation has confirmed this, and therefore the policeman will not be charged with manslaughter. He may or may not be disciplined.

I interviewed a veteran of the police who is now a firearms instructor, and who teaches security personnel of various levels both how to shoot and when and how they are permitted to do so. He explained that the protocol for arresting a suspect requires that a warning shot be fired unless the officer feels that there is imminent danger to his life. In an open area, the shot may be fired into the air, but in a crowded urban environment it may, indeed must, be fired into the ground. The park was surrounded by apartment buildings, and would be such an environment. In any event, the policeman said that he believed that there was imminent danger to his life.

The instructor also said that police officers are afraid of finding themselves in similar situations, in which they are forced to defend themselves, and then punished for it.

Spokespersons for Tekah’s family and the Ethiopian community have called it murder. The policeman has received death threats, pictures of him and his family have been posted to social media with incitement to kill him, and he has been placed under house arrest with his family in an undisclosed location.

The extent and intensity of the demonstrations, in some cases riots, seems to have taken the country by surprise. It shouldn’t have. There have been numerous cases of conflict between police and Ethiopians, including several others in which people were killed. In 2015, after a young soldier, Damas Pakada, was beaten by police, apparently without provocation, there were massive demonstrations. The Prime Minister appointed a commission to make recommendations, and both he and the police Inspector General met with Pakada to apologize. The policeman who beat him was fired.

The commission made 53 recommendations for changes in education, media, and policing. Some were implemented and some not, but activists in the Ethiopian community say that relations with the police have not improved since then. Ethiopians are arrested to a degree out of proportion to their fraction of the population, and young people say that they are often hassled on the street by police when they are doing nothing illegal.

Expressions of racism are common in some segments of Israeli society. There are many Ethiopians and other dark-skinned Israelis who work as doctors, nurses, and so on. They report that some patients refuse to be treated by them, sometimes abusively. This evening’s TV news featured a woman doctor describing one mother screaming “I won’t let that koosheet [nigger] touch my daughter.” I’ve heard similar stories from my friend who is of Indian origin, and dark skinned.

Even though it seems that the recent shooting, while tragic, was not a case of deliberate malice – or even negligence – by the police officer, it has been the straw that broke the camel’s back with many younger Israelis of Ethiopian origin, most of them born here. They don’t understand why they should accept the continued humiliations from the police and others. They serve in the army (where they sometimes claim that they are discriminated against) and they are asked to die for their country. Some of them do.

Ethiopian Jews were not brought here in chains; they were rescued from persecution. There was no slavery, no Jim Crow, no lynching. A great deal has been written about the mistakes that were made in trying to help people from a subsistence economy integrate into our modern highly technical society. But the ones who are angrily demonstrating today were born here, speak perfect Hebrew, and are quite conversant with modern technology. They are a product of our educational system (in which they also claim to have experienced discrimination).

They are right about one thing: it is their country, no less than it is the country of the descendants of the European Zionists that landed here in 1880, or the Sephardim who greeted them when they got off the boats, or the Eastern Europeans who fled the Nazis, or the North Africans, Egyptians, and Iraqis that were forced out of the communities where they had lived, sometimes for centuries, or the Yemenites who were also rescued from a highly undeveloped culture, or the Russians who escaped the Soviet Union. No less.

This is a difficult problem, especially for the police, who daily have to make decisions that could end up like the one that ended the life of Salomon Tekah, and the career of the policeman, who after all only wanted to stop a robbery and assault of a child.

Progress is being made in many areas. Although still lower than other groups, the percentages of Ethiopian-Israelis graduating from high school and going to university are increasing, as is average family income. Arrests are decreasing, especially for “contact offenses” where a policeman initiates contact by asking someone for their identity card, etc. Perhaps integration is taking longer than it did for other groups, and not fast enough for those that are experiencing it, but it is happening.

But certain things are clear: the ill-treatment of people because of their race must stop, in every context. My wife says there should be a sign at the door of every hospital: “People of numerous colors, religions, and origins work here. If that’s a problem for you, get your healthcare somewhere else.”

I don’t think we need the American-style discussions of how our society is structurally racist that are appearing in the progressive media. We don’t need Americans to tell us that our problem is just like theirs, because it isn’t. We certainly don’t need left-wing NGOs telling Ethiopian-Israelis that Israel is not their country, and that they should join with our enemies to destroy it. We don’t need to widen the cracks in our society.

We do need to take the complaints of the Ethiopian-Israeli community seriously. At the same time, they should stop calling what happened last week “murder.” They need to understand that the police have a job to do, an essential job to maintain a secure society. The anger on both sides needs to be replaced by rational problem-solving.

And we need to get everybody to internalize this simple fact: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. All of them.

Posted in Israeli Society, The Jewish people | 6 Comments