When Will the Snake Finally Lose its Head?

Posted on July 4, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Nine out of 10 of the Democratic presidential contenders in the first debate raised their hands when asked if they would return to the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran that Donald Trump removed the US from in May.

At more or less the same time, there was an announcement of the creation of a new “think tank” called the Quincy Institute (after John Quincy Adams, who said that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”). The organization received pledges of half a million dollars each from George Soros on the left, and Charles Koch on the right. Apparently these politically diverse billionaires agree with Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council and one of the founders of the institute, that the Iranian revolutionary Islamic regime is not a monster that the US should destroy.

Another voice calling for a return to “engagement” with Iran as opposed to the policy of economic sanctions followed by the Trump administration is National Security Action (NSA), the foreign policy lobby of the former Obama Administration. NSA is co-chaired by Ben Rhodes, one of the architects of “engagement” (which in practice meant payoffs, appeasement, and a guaranteed path to nuclear weapons).

One of the pillars of the Rhodes policy, which was detailed in the 2006 Iraq Study Group proposal of which he was one of the authors (my 2006 analysis is here), is the trading of Israel’s security for concessions from Syria and Iran. At that time, Syria was facilitating the transit of insurgents and Iranian weapons, including advanced roadside bombs that were killing US soldiers, across its border with Iraq. The idea was that the US would force Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria (as well as create a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria), and in return, Syria would close its border with Iraq.

Although Israel’s worst (or second-worst) Prime Minister ever, Ehud Olmert, made an overture to Syria in 2007, almost certainly at US prompting. But Bashar al-Assad wasn’t interested, preferring his alliance with Iran.

The idea of trading Israel’s security for the friendship of Iran continued through the Obama Administration. The Iranians reacted cynically, taking what they could get while still chanting “death to America.” Obama’s Defense Department applied pressure to the Israeli defense establishment in 2012 to scuttle a plan to bomb the centers of Iranian nuclear development, at a time when the window of opportunity to seriously set back the program was significantly wider than it is today.

It’s unfortunate to see that the policy of appeasement, reversed by President Trump when he re-imposed sanctions on Iran, is still championed by the Democratic opposition. But I suppose that “opposition” means opposition to everything Trump does and says, regardless of its merit. And it fits with the anti-Israel wind blowing from the left in America, where the Iranian threat is seen as an Israeli problem, not an American one. Indeed, one sees a congruence of the isolationist right and anti-American left – as illustrated by the supporters of the Quincy Institute – who find it useful to blame Israel for dragging the US into conflicts that it could otherwise avoid.

I’m convinced that most of those who want the US to rejoin the JCPOA – at least those who have given it serious thought and have the background to understand the situation, which excludes most of the democratic candidates – understand that it will lead to Iran building nuclear weapons. This is because the agreement has a sunset date for its restrictions, and compliance with some of the most important of them, like the prohibition of research into military applications, is impossible to verify (the Iranians refuse to permit inspection of military sites). All the JCPOA really does is protect Iran while it finishes developing its weapons. But people think, “So what? Even Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and the US has a massive nuclear deterrent.”

This is a mistake. Unlike Pakistan, Iran is aggressively proceeding with a plan whose first stage is to eliminate American influence in the Middle East, seize control of approximately one-third of the world’s petrochemical resources, establish a Shiite caliphate across the region, and eliminate Israel. Iran already effectively controls Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and is on the verge of establishing a land bridge to the Mediterranean. If it is allowed to succeed, it will become a threat to the West unmatched since the Soviet Union.

Today, according to Michael Doran in the Wall St. Journal (paywalled article here), Iran’s in-your-face violation of JCPOA requirements as well as sabotage of tankers and pipelines, and its downing of a US military drone, are intended to pressure the Europeans (who are seriously affected by disruptions in the oil supply).  Iran wants them to lobby the US to re-establish waivers, removed by Trump, that allow Iranian-European cooperation on supposedly “peaceful” nuclear projects. Great.

The Iranian regime thinks it can survive economic sanctions, at least until the end of the Trump Administration. It controls the allocation of resources in Iran, and will brutally suppress popular attempts at regime change. It also believes that it can hold Israel hostage, as shown by its recent threat that Israel would live only half an hour after an American attack like the one that Trump ordered – and then recalled – after the drone incident. It believes that that ultimately the view that a nuclear-armed Iran is preferable to the alternatives will prevail in the US and Europe.

It might, in the US. It is not possible in Israel, where it is understood that a nuclear Iran will have the ability to destroy the country, either with nuclear weapons or with conventional ones under a nuclear umbrella. And there is absolutely no doubt that destroying Israel is one of Iran’s major objectives. The fact that Israel has a protected retaliatory capability gives us some comfort, but not enough to justify inaction.

It could happen that the sanctions will cause Iran to end its program (but this is unlikely). It could happen that the US will bomb the Iranian nuclear installations (even more unlikely). Or, I suppose a meteor could land on Tehran and wipe out the regime (the most unlikely). But, as long as something is possible short of war, Israel will wait – until the last moment, the moment before Iran builds its bombs. Once this point is reached, there will be no alternative. Netanyahu and Gantz are agreed on this, if on little else.

The Saudi king once said that the only way to end the conflicts in the Middle East was to cut off the head of the snake, meaning Iran. He was right. When time runs out, the snake will lose its head.

Posted in American politics, Iran, US-Israel Relations, War | 3 Comments

Take your Zionism Seriously

Posted on July 1, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

As my readers probably know, I don’t see a lot of difference between antisemitism and misoziony.* The difference is that the former focuses irrational hatred on the Jewish people as a group or as individuals, and the latter targets the state that is the concrete expression of their peoplehood.

Sometimes misoziony is called “the new antisemitism.” While Jew hatred never went away, it became unacceptable in polite discourse or institutional policy in Western countries shortly after WWII. But like the alien in the movie of the same name, it could not be constrained, and burst from the collective chest of Western society in the form of vicious and pathological hatred of Israel.

No, they don’t hate Jews, they insist. They are only “criticizing Israel” for allegedly denying the Palestinians their human rights. But they can’t explain why they only criticize Israel in a world where most humans do not have “human rights,” nor why their “criticism” morphs into incoherent hatred, often using memes that are familiar from historic antisemitism; nor why nothing less than the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state would be enough to satisfy them.

But now apparently the wheel has come full circle, and the ceaseless demonization of Israel is being turned around and used to justify the old-fashioned persecution of Jews, even Jews that do not live in Israel and have nothing to do with her besides being Jewish.

Last week a Jewish writer named Richard Zimler told the Guardian that two organizations in the UK that had previously hosted events with him promoting his books would not do so again because he was Jewish. Zimler has no direct connection to Israel, although his latest book is about events that happened in the Holy Land – some 2,000 years ago. His other books are set in Portugal and Poland.

Apparently the organizations, in Zimler’s words, “feared a backlash – protests by their members and others – if they extended an invitation to a Jewish writer.” He believes that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, plus the antisemitism of a significant part of the Labour Party are responsible for making Jewish writers like himself radioactive.

This is the sort of treatment that one associates with 1930s Germany, or the Arab world after 1948. But it is happening today, in the democratic UK. It is the way that a minority prepared to be sufficiently unpleasant, even violent, can coerce a neutral majority to cooperate in the persecution of a targeted group.

The situation in America is not exactly the same, but it is not entirely different, either. American Jews are caught between armed and murderous neo-Nazis, a “progressive” Left which is becoming progressively more anti-Jewish (especially on campuses), and a growing Muslim population which is seeded with Imams who preach violence against Jews.

During the 19th century, the insecurity of European Jews and the realization that the emancipation of Jews from various restrictions would not bring about their full acceptance into society or even protect them from pogroms, gave impetus to the Zionist movement. One premise of Zionism was that only in their own state would it be possible to provide security for the Jewish people (as well as enable their cultural and spiritual development). The truth of this is no longer debatable. It was clearly and horribly demonstrated before, during, and immediately after WWII.

Today, national and local authorities in the diaspora have not been especially effective in protecting Jews, although in most countries the governments are at least nominally opposed to antisemitism. That may change in the UK, if Jeremy Corbyn should come to power (although he will express formulaic opposition to antisemitism, his actions clearly belie his words).

No, of course I am not predicting a genocide. Not in Britain. But Jews could be marginalized, forced out of  important positions in culture and politics, punished economically. Many of them would find it in their best interests to leave. It’s happened over and over, throughout the world.

One hundred years ago, there were tens of thousands of Jews in Arab countries, millions in the former Russian Empire, flourishing Jewish populations in Germany, France, and England, and of course several million in the USA. Today there are practically zero in the Muslim world, and only vestigial populations in Russia and Eastern Europe. The few that are left in Germany keep a low profile due to antisemitism from Muslim migrants, and many French Jews have already fled for the same reason. The roughly 280,000 Jews of the UK have mostly held firm, but many are on the edge of their chairs as a result of the Corbyn phenomenon.

The number of Jews in the US has declined for the first time since 2000 (due to assimilation and low birthrate), both absolutely and as a percentage of the population, and the center of both Jewish population and culture has moved to Israel. Jews are still doing well in the US, but the writing is on the wall.

Zionism is a rational response to antisemitism and the best way to guarantee the survival of the Jewish people and their language, religion, and culture. Of course it is impossible for every Jew in the diaspora to pick up and go to Israel, for numerous reasons. But it is possible for every Jew to support the Jewish state, and also to prepare themselves – study Hebrew, and the history, geography, and politics of the state – for the possibility that one day they or their children will live in Israel.

There are many things a Jew living in the diaspora can do to fight antisemitism, like organizing for self-defense, that will make a difference to their situation. But there is only one way to secure the future of the Jewish people. Jabotinsky’s Betar youth groups in Eastern Europe took military training, but they also strove to get themselves and others to Eretz Yisrael.

Are you a Zionist? Then, like Betar, take your Zionism seriously.

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* Misoziony (pronounced mis-OZ-yuh-nee) is extreme and irrational hatred of Israel.

Posted in Jew Hatred, The Jewish people, Zionism | 3 Comments

Living in the Shadow of the Next War

Posted on June 27, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
William Tecumseh Sherman

The recent tension between the US and Iran is being watched very closely here in Israel, because it could well be the trigger for our next war.

I am convinced, to my very great sorrow, that this war is unavoidable. The 130,000 rockets and longer-range missiles under Iranian control in Lebanon will not be left to rust away, nor will those in Gaza. Our enemies – Iran and its proxies, as well as Hamas and the PLO – are not interested in peace.

Iran has spent billions and struggled for decades in its attempt to become a nuclear power, and to establish regional hegemony. We are not only a bone in the throat of their Islamic sensibility, we are physically in their way. They won’t give up without a fight, and they believe they can win.

US President Trump thinks he can break them with sanctions. But the Iranian regime doesn’t care what happens to its civilian population. If they are willing to shoot their people down in the streets (and they have demonstrated this), they will let them suffer. At some point they will be on the verge of going nuclear, and when that happens, someone will have to stop them. It is not a question of if there will be war. It is a question of when – and of precisely what will set it off. And once it starts, no matter who starts it, Israel will be in the thick of it.

It will almost certainly be a multi-front war. Iran has its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria. The Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and Judea/Samaria have demonstrated, over and over, that they do not want a state of their own. They want our state, without us. No amount of money will persuade them to become other than who they are. By themselves they do not have the strength to challenge us, but in the context of a general conflagration, they will take the opportunity to cause as much damage as possible.

Numerous experts have predicted that this will be a terrible war, for our soldiers, for our home front, and for our enemies. Indeed, the home front has been mostly spared since our War of Independence in 1948. This time, our enemies – understanding our lack of strategic depth and believing that they can break both our spirit and the support system of the IDF – will concentrate on bringing the war to us, with rockets and ground invasions.

Hezbollah has the ability to launch thousands of rockets per day, far more than can be intercepted by Iron Dome or our other antimissile systems. In 2006, when they had far fewer and less sophisticated rockets, they threw the northern part of the country into a panic. Degrading their launch capability will take time, and in the meantime rockets will be exploding into our homes. Those who have safe rooms or access to nearby shelters are lucky, but many Israelis – like my daughter – live in older buildings which do not have such facilities. Large-payload missiles may bring down whole buildings, in which case safe rooms will be little help. Missiles that can hit densely populated urban areas will create mass casualties.

We know that both Hamas and Hezbollah plan cross-border incursions to kill and kidnap Israelis, maybe even to capture smaller communities. IDF ground forces will be spread thin, and they will have to worry about terrorist “operations” by Arabs from Judea and Samaria as well.

The sheer inevitability of this war weighs on us. We know it will happen; we are expecting it from week to week. Although people here don’t talk about it often, it’s never far from their consciousness. We know that some of our friends and neighbors, maybe even ourselves, will not survive. Others will lose their homes and all their possessions. We know too that numerous young soldiers and some older reservists will not come home alive to their families.

There will be funerals, and horrendous wounds. As is often said, in Israel all the soldiers are everyone’s children. It will tear us apart. It will make us angry. It won’t however, cause us to flee the country, as our enemies hope.

Will we prevail? We’d better. Otherwise Israel, and ultimately the Jewish people, will disappear. Losing the war would be a disaster on the scale of the one in the year 70 CE, and I doubt that the conditions exist for our people to survive another two-millennium diaspora.

I think the outcome will depend primarily on one thing: leadership. In 2006, we could not defeat Hezbollah, because the team of Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz, Tzipi Livni, and Dan Halutz was incompetent from top to bottom. Do we have the leaders that we need today? Do we have a Churchill to stiffen the home front against a blitz, or officers who will take the initiative like Arik Sharon did when he crossed the Suez Canal in 1973? We’ll find out.

We have the desperation – and advantage – of having no place else to go. Our enemies cannot imagine how much firepower is available to the IDF, and if it is unleashed they will not be able to stand against us. In its recent operations, the IDF has gone out of its way to minimize enemy civilian casualties. This next war might begin that way, but at some point Hamas and Hezbollah’s use of civilian infrastructure as a shield will leave us no other option but to put that concern aside.

When relatively accurate rockets with large payloads start striking industrial targets and big cities, for example, the launchers in Lebanon will have to go – regardless of what they are built next to or inside of. It’s pretty certain that most of southern Lebanon will end up a slag heap, and parts of the Gaza strip will meet the same fate.

If thousands die in Israel, tens of thousands will lose their lives in Lebanon and Gaza, or anywhere else from which our enemies fight. If the Arabs of Judea and Samaria rise up, their communities, too, will be razed, and they’ll find themselves homeless, another nakba.

War, it’s well-known, is hell. This one will be, too. But we must ensure that it will be a bigger hell for our enemies than for us.

Sometimes it takes a war to change things that otherwise would be frozen forever. WWI changed the face of Europe and the Middle East, brought down the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Czarist empires, gave freedom to some peoples and a new kind of slavery to some others. WWII facilitated the destruction of Europe’s Jews, the creation and use of atomic weapons, and the establishment of a Soviet empire in Eastern Europe – but also ushered in the United Nations (not an unmixed blessing), the American civil rights movement, the end of the British Empire, and the creation of the State of Israel.

Maybe, in addition to a new regime in Iran, the next war will bring about the end of Hamas and the PLO, and even the creation of the long awaited Palestinian state – in Jordan, where it belongs.

Posted in Iran, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, War | 6 Comments

An Essential “Privilege”

Posted on June 23, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

Gideon Levy is an antisemitic misozionist* who is paid for his poison by an Israeli newspaper. He is a truly despicable human, but sometimes he’s useful as an exemplar of the extremist Israeli please-cut-my-throat Left.

Recently he wrote,

If Israel is a democracy, it’s a state of all its citizens. There is no democracy that isn’t a state of all its citizens. From America to Germany, all are states of all their citizens. If they weren’t, to whom would they belong? Only to their privileged citizens. There’s no such thing as a democracy that belongs only to the privileged of one nationality.  The state belongs to everyone. A regime that segregates and discriminates is called apartheid. There is no other name. … A state of all its citizens isn’t “the slogan of the enemy,” as the new foreign minister [Yisrael Katz] put it. It’s the heart and soul of democracy.

It’s a cold day in Hell when our dear Gideon doesn’t refer to Israel as an apartheid state, but usually he is referring to the fact that Palestinian Arabs living in Judea and Samaria cannot vote. This time he seems to be inspired by an even more fundamental fact, that Israel is defined – by its Declaration of Independence and now by its Nation-State Law – as a Jewish state. Since there are Arabs living here – even though these Arabs have the right to vote and hold office, as well as all the other usual civil rights – Israel cannot be a democracy.

The question wouldn’t even have come up if Israel had followed the example of every one of the Arab states, who expelled all of their Jews after 1948. But Ben-Gurion and the other founders thought a Jewish state could have Arab citizens. Perhaps that was a mistake, but unlike the Arabs, they weren’t racists.

What exactly is Levy’s “apartheid?” There aren’t Jewish and Arab beaches or drinking fountains (although there are Muslim-only water faucets on the Temple Mount), or laws against “race mixing” as there were in racist South Africa. There are separate school systems, but this is because the Arabs insist on it (there are also separate secular, national-religious, and Haredi school systems). As a result of affirmative action and other programs, the number of Arab students in Israeli universities has grown 78% in the last 7 years (under the “hardline” Likud government led by the “racist” Binyamin Netanyahu). In the fields of medicine and education, the number of Arab students is proportional to their representation in the overall population. Go to an Israeli hospital and you will probably be treated by Arab doctors or nurses. Go to the pharmacy and you will almost certainly deal with an Arab pharmacist.

So if they have civil rights and educational opportunities, what don’t they have?

In a word, ownership.

Zionism is Jewish nationalism, but it is more than that. It is based on the historical imperative that a Jewish state is essential to the self-defense of the Jewish people, and to their survival as a minority in a hostile world. This requires that certain rights be granted exclusively to the Jewish People, such as a right of return, and the right to determine the cultural character of the state, including national symbols, language, holidays, and so forth. This is precisely what is affirmed in Israel’s Nation-State law, which – I’m absolutely certain – Israel’s Supreme Court will challenge in the near future.

Does this make Jews “privileged citizens” in Levy’s words? Perhaps, but it is a necessary response to the “privileged” condition of the Jewish people for the last several millennia, which included demonization, persecution, expulsion, degradation, and industrial-scale murder. It is a necessary response, even in countries where Jews are well-treated, to the forces of assimilation. The elimination of this “privilege,” which in practice is essential to survival, is indeed the objective of our enemies, and “a state of its citizens” their slogan.

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* A person infected by an extreme, irrational hatred of the Jewish state (pronounced mis-OZ-yuh-nist). See also misoziony (mis-OZ-yuh-nee), the disease itself.

Posted in Israeli Arabs, The Jewish people, Zionism | 1 Comment

The Department of Anti-Israel Studies

Posted on June 20, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

I met Prof. Cary Nelson on Monday. Nelson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois, is former president of the American Association of University Professors, and the author of many books and articles on diverse subjects.

Nelson showed us his new book, Israel Denial: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, & the Faculty Campaign Against the Jewish State. I only looked at it for a few minutes, but Elder of Ziyon has a complete review here. I want to write a little about the academic world that makes such a book necessary.

It’s an attempt to push back against the remarkably ubiquitous participation of Western humanities and social-sciences university faculty in the process of demonization of Israel. It’s axiomatic that today’s college students are tomorrow’s political and business leaders, and the fact that most Western universities are monolithic anti-Israel environments today is not encouraging for the future.

The most important part of the book is a detailed refutation of claims made by Judith Butler, Steven Salaita, Saree Makdisi, and Jasbir Puar, against Israel. With the exception of Salaita, whose work is so substandard and his public invective so vulgar that he has been unable to find and keep an academic position, they hold highly prestigious jobs and have no difficulty publishing whatever they write in the best venues. Butler and Puar, in fact, are professorial rock stars, with numerous awards and accolades to their credit.

Nelson, who is old enough to have grown up in an era in which standards of scholarship were adhered to – facts were checked before being cited, articles were carefully vetted before being published, candidates for academic positions were evaluated on scholarly rather than political criteria, and there was an implied commitment to seek objective truth – found himself shocked by the total collapse of academic standards in the humanities and social sciences. This was particularly evident in connection with the Israeli-Muslim conflict.*

Jasbir Puar, for example, has recently published a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), in which she accuses Israel of deliberately and sadistically starving, maiming, and stunting the Palestinian population in order to achieve its “biopolitical goal” of breaking the bodies and spirit of the Palestinians to end their “resistance.” One reviewer called the book a modern “blood libel,” similar to the medieval accusations that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood to make matzot.

Puar gave a lecture at Vassar College in 2016 in which she claimed that Israel poisons Palestinians with lead, uranium and phosphorus, and that the IDF shoots Palestinians in order to harvest their organs – (something which, Nelson pointed out, is medically impossible). She threatened to sue anyone who released an audio recording of that speech.

Nelson explained that Puar’s factual assertions about stunting and starvation can be debunked quickly enough by a high school student armed only with access to Google. It’s possible to show that the nutrition of the Palestinian Arabs is among the best in the Arab world, and has greatly improved since 1967 (only to decrease somewhat in areas under Hamas control since 2007). Her claim that the IDF aims at the legs of rioters or terrorists is true – but only insofar as these are cases in which the alternative would be to shoot to kill. For most of her accusations, there is simply no evidence of any kind. Puar simply makes up the facts she needs, and then “explains” them with a vicious fantasy of Jews as Nazis.

Puar is published by the respected Duke University Press. Nelson wondered why their editors were unable to check any of her factual assertions. He wondered why her similarly defective papers passed the peer review required by scholarly journals, and why she has been granted honors, academic tenure, grants, fellowships, and other prestigious and remunerative perquisites despite her penchant for inventing facts and using them to support a superstructure of demonization of a nation and its people.

I do not wonder.

Some years ago, the late Barry Rubin told me about the collapse of any semblance of scholarly integrity in his field of Middle East Studies. He noted that when he was a student, he could expect his teachers, some of whom had political views diametrically opposed to his own, to evaluate his work on its merits. But then – due to endowments and donations from the Arab nations – the complexion of the departments changed, with candidates being selected primarily because of their political views. The brilliant Rubin, author of countless books and articles, had difficulty finding a university position.

This is now the case in many departments of humanities and social sciences, although not necessarily because of Arab money. It is particularly bad in departments of Women’s or Gender Studies (Jasbir Puar is a professor in such a department at Rutgers University), Ethnic Studies, and so on, but it is not limited to them. The explanation is threefold.

First, the postmodern understanding of the nature of reality that has become common outside of the hard sciences (where you might blow up the lab if you make up your own facts), allows the subordination of reality to narrative. Every identity group – especially oppressed minorities – sees the world differently, and no window on the world is more true than any other. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and one man’s truth is another’s lie. What is real is the narrative, and it is acceptable to create “facts” as long as they support it.

Second, the introduction of the (somewhat corrupted) concept of intersectionality, in which every member of an oppressed group must support the struggle of every other such group, seems to encourage every “victimized” person to speak out on behalf of other victims, regardless of their expertise. For example, Jasbir Puar, as a “queer” “woman of color,” apparently has the right to speak – even to write books – in support of the Palestinians, even if there is no reason to believe that she actually knows anything about them.

Third, and most important: while the postmodern destruction of the scholarly enterprise has affected other subjects of study, nothing else has been the focus of so much concentrated negative energy as the alleged ill-treatment of the Palestinians by Israel. No other stateless people has so many (or indeed, any) cheerleaders in Western academe as the Palestinian Arabs, and no state besides Israel – not even North Korea – has been so vilified by so many faculty members so much of the time. There is something very familiar about this. It’s always about the Jews, isn’t it?

For whatever reason, the viral memes of misoziony (extreme, irrational hatred of Israel, pronounced mis-OZ-yuh-nee) and bad old antisemitism have a solid foothold in Western universities, where ground zero is the identity studies departments.

Cary Nelson’s careful exposure of the lies upon which some of the more vicious attacks rest is a necessary corrective. But it’s only a starting point, and I’m not optimistic. One answer to Nelson’s question about why nobody at the Duke University Press fact-checked Jasbir Puar’s manuscript could be that where Israel and the Palestinians are concerned, the facts don’t matter. Why bother checking them when everyone knows that Israel is a sadistic oppressor of Palestinians, even if some of the details are wrong?

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* The usual expressions, “Arab-Israeli conflict” or “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” are too narrow and do not capture what I see as its true nature: the religion-based rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East by almost the entire Islamic world, including the Arabs but also the Islamist regimes in Turkey and Iran.

Posted in Academia, Jew Hatred | 1 Comment

Tikkunism Begets Misoziony

Posted on June 16, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ
אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם

To be a free nation in our land
The land of Zion and Jerusalem
Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel

This is not a book review. The book that I won’t review (because there are some books that even I, who read Mein Kampf through to the end, won’t read) is a collection of essays edited by Carolyn L. Karcher called Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation. Those whose transformations are described in the book include some of the best-known contemporary Jewish misozionists (extreme Israel-haters, pronounced mis-OZ-yuh-nists), like Rebecca Vilkomerson and Cecilie Surasky of “A Jewish Voice for Peace” (JVP), the communist Joel Beinin, JVP Rabbis Alissa Wise and Brant Rosen (see his nakba day prayer here), Ariel Gold of Code Pink, historian Hasia R. Diner, and 33 other Jews who hate the Jewish state.

If I’m not going to even read the book, why mention it? Because the author provides a perfect example of how some progressive Jews have combined a new religion – they insist that it is Judaism, but I think it is sufficiently different to deserve a new name, Tikkunism – with some historical distortions, in order to claim that Judaism and Zionism are incompatible.

Here is how Karcher presents the argument in a recent interview:

As I see it, ethical precepts lie at the heart of Judaism: pursue justice, love the stranger, love your neighbor and repair the world. Obviously, all of these ethical precepts are violated by Zionist policy toward Palestinians. And so, what happens when Judaism is married to (or hijacked by) Zionism is that the protection of the Jewish people, the physical survival of the Jewish people, takes precedence over the religion’s ethical teachings.

Karcher admits that she was brought up in a “completely secular [family],” but she is not wrong that Jews are told to “love the stranger [ger] for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:19), and to “pursue justice” (Deut. 16:20). These commandments mean more or less what the Tikkunists say they mean, although probably “ger” does not include people living outside of the land of Israel, or those who have demonstrated violent enmity to the people of Israel. We are not required to love Amalek or the Philistines or Hamas.

“Repairing the world” (tikkun olam), on the other hand, is not found anywhere in the Bible, and in traditional Judaism is associated with an arcane Kabbalistic concept that has nothing to do with social action. Modern liberal Judaism has taken the words and created a new meaning for them: working to create a more just society, where “just” is always defined in liberal or progressive terms. So, for example, it would be tikkun olam to participate in a demonstration to make it easier for people to vote, but it would not be tikkun olam to try to tighten safeguards against voter fraud.

Tikkunism is a faith that imbues the ethical commandments of the Torah and the admonitions of the prophets with a political slant, adds a wholly invented idea of tikkun olam, ignores the “ritual” commandments like Shabbat and kashrut, and – most important in this context – ignores the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel.

Karcher mentions “the heart of Judaism.” Most traditional Jews would say that is the Torah. The Torah is many things: it is the source of all the commandments, including the ones that the Tikkunists observe and the many that they don’t. But above all it is a narrative about a relationship, a triangular one between Hashem, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel. This relationship is even logically prior to the commandments, because they constitute the conditions for maintaining it. Every traditional Jew understands and feels this.* The Land of Israel is truly at the heart of Judaism, from which Karcher and the Tikkunists would remove it.

Tikkunists don’t feel a special connection to the Jewish people, either. They tend to see all humanity as one people, and to believe that improved communication would solve all political problems. They dislike most nationalism, and make no exception for Jewish nationalism (although for some reason they seem to approve of Palestinian nationalism). I am not sure that Tikkunism is as much a religion as a political movement, but I will give them that. I think, though, that calling it “Judaism” is a stretch too far, even though many of those who profess it are Jewish.

Karcher’s version of Tikkunism also seems to include the strange idea that a people should commit national suicide in defense of its Tikkunist “ethical precepts.” This idea isn’t found in traditional Judaism, where the preservation of life overrides all other commandments, except in a few very special circumstances. Yes, in my opinion, the physical survival of the Jewish people is more important than loving the Palestinians.

In any case, the historical analysis presented by Karcher is wrong. “Zionist policy” according to Karcher is “settler colonialism,” in which European Jewish colonialists, with the assistance of arch-colonialist Britain, dispossessed an “indigenous people” and took their land. The truth is that the actual aborigines of the land of Israel, the oldest indigenous culture who have been present here since biblical times, are the Jewish people. Rather than facilitating the dispossession of the Arabs, the British helped the Arabs try to dispossess the Jews. All this is supported by archaeological and historical evidence.

The claim of the Palestinian Arabs that their ancestors have lived here for thousands of years is false. Most are relatively recent immigrants to the land (19th and 20th centuries). There was no historic Palestinian polity for Jewish sovereignty to displace – the last indigenous polity in the land was the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty in the second century BCE. The flight of the Arab refugees from the new state of Israel was a direct result of the attempt of the Arab nations and the Palestinian Arabs to commit another genocide against the Jewish people. Their nakba was of their own doing. Today’s “plight of the Palestinians” is the fault of their leadership and the “friendly” leaders of the Arab states, not the Jews.

The State of Israel is far more than an expedient to ensure the “physical safety of the Jewish people,” as Karcher says, although it is that in part. It is the legitimate expression of Jewish self-determination in our historical homeland. It does not violate the ethical principles of Judaism; indeed, it represents the highest aspirations of traditional (not Tikkunist) Judaism, as expressed in the Torah.

Not all Tikkunists are misozionists. But Tikkunism enables Jewish misoziony. It makes it possible for Jews who claim to be motivated by religious considerations to treat Israel as “just another foreign country,” to support BDS, knowing that its objective is the destruction of the Jewish state, and even to identify with Palestinian groups that are engaged in terrorism against Israel.

One of the goals of the psychological warfare campaign that is being waged against Israel is to flood the media with accusations of vicious mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs, so as to demonize her and reduce external support for her when she is attacked. Without a connection to Israel, Tikkunists are especially susceptible to this, and find it natural to criticize Israel for her supposed moral failure, and claim a religious motivation for doing it.

Jewish misoziony is dangerous, because the Jewishness of the speakers grants them authority that a non-Jew would not have when speaking about the Israel-Islamic conflict. Organizations like “A Jewish Voice for Peace,” to which Karcher and several of her essayists belong, specialize in exploiting their members’ Jewishness as a weapon against the Jewish state. JVP supports BDS, a Palestinian “right to return,” has defended convicted terrorists, and in an arguably antisemitic campaign, has promoted the idea that Israel is to blame for American police officers shooting unarmed blacks.

Judaism doesn’t need to be “reclaimed” from Zionism, and certainly not by inventing an attenuated pseudo-Judaism. The natural condition of the Jewish people, the condition that Jews aspired to for thousands of years of painful, unnatural, diaspora, is to be a free people in in their own land – as is written in the national anthem of the Jewish state, Hatikvah.

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* Satmar Hasidim and other anti-Zionist Haredim don’t deny the relationship. They just think that a legitimate Jewish state in the Land of Israel could only be established by the still-to-come mashiach, or that the secular aspects of the state are sinful, etc.

Posted in The Jewish people, Zionism | 2 Comments

What it Would Take to Really Solve the Gaza Problem

Posted on June 13, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

A Hamas-related “military unit” called “Sons of al-Zawari” has been responsible for launching countless incendiary and explosive kites and balloons across the border into Israel for more than a year. Recently they even threatened to fill the condoms they use for balloons (apparently they are made of strong latex, so they are less likely to break prematurely) with a payload of some kind of poisonous or carcinogenic material.

Mohammed al-Zawari, in case you are interested, was a Tunisian engineer who developed drones for Hamas; he was assassinated in 2016, probably by the Mossad.

Although it is not so newsworthy outside of Israel, Arabs from Gaza continue to start fires and try to kill people in southern Israel with these devices. Israel responds in various ways, like reducing the size of the area in the Mediterranean in which Gazans are allowed to fish (really). They have also “attacked” the groups launching the devices with drones – but news reports never say that any of their members are killed, so I presume they fire low-yield weapons near, but not directly at, the terrorists.

The “disturbances” at the border fence wax and wane, but they never stop. Every once in a while someone is shot trying to harm Israeli soldiers on the other side, or planting explosives to create a breach in the fence that would allow a large number of terrorists to cross over and attack local civilians. Israel is building a massive barrier, both above and below the ground, to protect local communities against attacks via tunnels dug under the fence, and from shooting – in a recent case, a man was killed when his car was hit by an anti-tank rocket fired from Gaza. This barrier will cost billions, but will not stop the balloons or kites, nor will it prevent rocket attacks as we experienced this May. Recently, Israeli officials said that Hamas has already replenished its stock of rockets after the recent violence.

In a sense, Hamas is already engaged in chemical and biological warfare against Israel. The border demonstrations often involve burning tires, with the smoke darkening the skies over Israeli communities, some of which are only a few hundred meters from the fence. Even more seriously, for years, raw sewage from Gaza has been dumped in the sea and into streams that flow in southern Israel.  Garbage is dumped and burned near the border. The Hamas government has received much assistance from international donors to solve its pollution problems, including the World Bank financing a large treatment plant in northern Gaza, which, due to a lack of electricity and other problems,  never became operational.

Of course the population of Gaza suffers far more than that of Israel from the air and water pollution. But Hamas has always allocated available resources primarily to its war effort, following the First Principle of Palestinism,™ which is that it’s always preferable to hurt Jews than to help Arabs (although, to be fair, they have built luxurious residences for their leaders).

The Israeli government has come up with various reasons (perhaps ‘excuses’ is better) for why the mighty Jewish state can’t stop the torture of the residents of the southern part of the country: Israel does not want to occupy and become responsible for Gaza; there is a more serious threat from Hezbollah and Iran in the North; among the balloon launchers and fence busters are “children;” and, an attempt to overthrow Hamas would result in numerous civilian casualties in Gaza – something that the “international community” would not permit.

The “solution” from our “hardline, right-wing” government – just ask the NY Times how “hardline” it is – is to find technological answers to all the threats: we’ll shoot down the rockets with Iron Dome or similar systems, we’ll finish the expensive over- and underground barrier, and we’ll put out the fires started by the incendiary balloons before they get too big. Then, when the Gazans understand that we won’t allow them to hurt us, someone (preferably not us) will provide the cash to solve their economic and ecological problems, and we can live peacefully side by side.

This is a recipe for failure, and it is already failing. With every Iron Dome launch costing the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars, and with Hamas and Islamic Jihad improving both the number of rockets they can fire in a short period of time and their accuracy, the task of intercepting them all becomes more challenging and more expensive. During the last exchanges of fire in May, several rockets did get through and resulted in a number of deaths. The trend is against us: it is easier and cheaper for them to improve their offensive systems than for us to strengthen our defensive ones.

Although various high-tech solutions to the low-tech balloons have been proposed, they are still setting damaging fires on a daily basis. While attempts to bribe the Hamas regime have from time to time reduced the number of balloons launched or the number of demonstrators at the fence, extortion has a way of becoming more expensive and less effective as time goes by. And we have no solution to the ecological crisis that Hamas is creating for its own population and for our common neighborhood as long as Hamas remains in power.

One goal of Hamas is to cause Israeli residents of the area to abandon it. So far, because of economic incentives to live there, the high cost of housing in other places, and apparently a strong feeling of community, this has not happened. But don’t kid yourself – if there is a successful penetration of the border in which there are significant casualties among Israelis, or if there are extended periods during which people must stay in shelters, there may be a point at which many of them ask themselves whether the disadvantages of living there don’t outweigh the advantages.

What we are doing is a combination of holding the line and kicking the can down the road, to violently mix metaphors. These are by definition temporary solutions. What is a permanent solution?

We could win a war with Gaza, and probably suffer relatively few casualties of our own, as long as we actually apply the “principle of proportionality” in the Law of War as it is intended. If the enemy is using otherwise protected targets like mosques, hospitals, schools, and civilian structures for military purposes, then we are permitted to attack as long as the collateral damage is proportional to the military advantage of doing so. In other words, if Hamas has located its main command and control center in the basement of a hospital in Gaza City, then we can bomb it, if doing so is an important enough military objective – which it certainly would be. We are permitted to fight against child soldiers, and human shields that are injured or killed are the responsibility of Hamas.

Part of winning such a war would include targeted killings of the upper echelons of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leadership. They are war criminals, responsible for the deaths of numerous Israelis, and they maintain a dictatorial and oppressive regime over their own population. They are our deadly enemies and even if their military capabilities were destroyed, would manage an insurgency against us. Killing them would send a message to their successors that they are personally responsible for events.

At this point, the hard part begins. We have eliminated the regime – who will be the new regime? Probably the civilian infrastructure will have collapsed. It is already collapsing economically and ecologically, public health is a disaster, and drug abuse is rampant. The educational system is a training camp for jihadists.

Should we dump it in the lap of the UN? If they agreed, they would be ineffective at best. At worst, they would invite operatives from hostile countries who would establish a beachhead. I am sure Erdoğan would love to help!

I think there is only one acceptable long-term solution: to depopulate Gaza. That is, to provide an exit for most of the Gazan population to emigrate to various parts of the world, including but not limited to Arab countries, Europe, Australia, and North and South America. Emigration would be financed by the UN with funds normally provided to Gaza by UNRWA. If cooperation of host nations could be arranged, this would probably cost less in the long run than continuing the international support for Gaza as at present. There would probably have to be a temporary Israeli administration set up to assure security during the process. At some point, Israel would officially annex the territory, and the remaining population – who would be vetted to ensure that they didn’t present a risk of terrorism – would be offered Israeli citizenship in a way similar to what was done in Jerusalem.

It’s doubtful that there would be many votes for this idea in the UN, if it were put to a vote. But there are probably two groups of people that would love it: Israelis, especially those that live in the southern part of the country – and Gazans.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, War | 1 Comment

Why do Gays Side with Cultures that Murder them?

Posted on June 9, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

You may have heard of the “paradox of gay anti-Zionism.” How can it be that a large part of the LGBTQ community (the vocal part, anyway) is so anti-Israel? Yes, I know there are numerous exceptions, but how can any person of non-traditional gender or sexual orientation oppose a country that is one of the most comfortable and safest places in the world for them to live, in favor of its enemies – who would persecute, murder, torture, or execute them?

It’s actually not so hard to understand.

LGBTQ people in the West often find their political homes on the Left, because it makes a concerted effort to include them. Today’s intersectionalist ideology is all about oppression and discrimination, and certainly LGBTQs are victims of discrimination in most Western societies. The Left wants to absorb everyone with a grievance against the society as a whole, and that includes the most politically active members of the LGBTQ community. They are invited into the warm embrace of the Left, which tells them that they are among friends who, unlike the rest of society, will never mistreat them.

Indeed, as an “oppressed minority,” they are given a higher rank on the intersectionality ladder than straight people. The Movement will fight for their agenda just as it fights for “people of color,” disabled people, and anyone else they see as disadvantaged, oppressed, or colonized.

The Right and the Center don’t offer anything comparable. At best, they will say that sexual/gender issues are a private matter and call for fairness. And at worst, socially and religiously conservative people will oppose them on issues like gay marriage, condemn them for their behavior, and sometimes even behave abusively toward them.

It’s no contest. But in order to be truly at home with the Left, there is some baggage that one is required to acquire. One of these items is a commitment to the Palestinian Narrative, which always brings with it a vicious hatred of Israel. This isn’t accidental or likely to change. To understand why, we need to understand the deep Soviet roots of today’s leftist ideology, and note that it contained a current of strongly antisemitic anti-Zionism.

The millennial generation of the Left, who never knew the Soviet Union, may not be aware of the way its doctrine was broadcast to the world’s communists in the form of the “Party line.” The international Left was never independent. In every country where there was a leftist movement, including the US and Israel, there were strings connecting it to Moscow. Indeed it could almost be humorous the way the “rational policies” of the Left could flip 180 degrees whenever Soviet policy demanded it (for example, the Communist Party of the USA was strongly isolationist in the late 1930s while the Nazi-Soviet pact was in force, suddenly becoming interventionist the day Hitler turned on his former ally).

And as explained here by Izabella Tabarovsky,  a “massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign” had been going on since shortly after the founding of the state of Israel, as soon as Stalin realized that the new state would not fall into his orbit after all:

In the course of the campaign, hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles were published in the USSR, with millions of copies entering circulation in the country. Many were translated into foreign languages – English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and numerous others. In 1970 alone, the comparison between alleged Zionist and Nazi racism – just one of the campaign’s numerous memes – merited 96 mentions (Pinkus 1989:256). Demonisation of Zionism continued in films, lectures, and radio broadcasts. Anti-Zionist cartoons, many of an obvious antisemitic nature, were a regular feature of Soviet publications.

The campaign used the significant Soviet broadcasting and publishing capacity abroad, as well as front organisations and friendly communist and other radical left organisations in the West and third world countries to transmit its messages to foreign audiences. …

The ideological basis of today’s Left was forged in the furnace of the Cold War, and could no more avoid anti-Zionism than it could eschew anti-Americanism. But the idea that this campaign was somehow “just” anti-Zionist and not anti-Jewish is ludicrous. Tabarovsky continues,

The antisemitic nature of this campaign was appalling. The main authors contributing content– many of whom had direct links with the KGB and top party leadership – relied heavily on antisemitic tropes borrowed directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some in the group were closet admirers of Hitler and Nazism and used Mein Kampf as both a source of ‘information’ about Zionism and inspiration for their own interpretations.

This vicious campaign, born of traditional Russian Jew-hatred and Stalin’s paranoia, was instrumental in the proxy wars in the Middle East between Israel as the champion of the US, and the Arabs (including Arafat’s PLO) on behalf of the Soviet Union. Communists and fellow-travelers in the West received a steady diet of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda for four decades, roughly from 1950 through 1990.

Today’s young leftists on university campuses do not remember the Soviet Union. But their faculty advisors and the institutional memory of their movement certainly do, which is why they choose, for example, to view the Palestinian Arabs and not the Jews as the true aboriginal inhabitants of the land of Israel, when there is so much historical and archaeological evidence to the contrary. It is why they choose the intellectually gymnastic option that makes the Jews of Israel, with their diverse origins in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, into “European colonialists.” It is why they insist against all logic that terrorism against the Jewish population of Israel is not oppression, while the actions of Israel to defend herself against terrorism and warfare are.

It’s hard to blame the LGBTQ community for choosing the “tolerant” Left over the conservative Right, although perhaps a closer examination might expose the Left as far less tolerant than it pretends to be. But as time goes by, one hopes that it will become clear to all that the strict fairness advocated by the Right rather than the compensatory privilege offered by the Left will prove to be the best approach to creating a truly just society. And – for Jewish leftists – that it is monumentally stupid for a community faced with racial/ethnic hatred to associate itself with an ideology that is itself one of its greatest enemies.

Whether the Left will at some point wake up and see that its behavior directly contradicts its own principle that oppression based on race or religion is one of the great evils in the world, is another question. I am not holding my breath.

Posted in Israeli Society, Jew Hatred | 3 Comments