Question Time

Here are some answers to real questions that I’ve been asked. No, I am not an authority on anything, but my views are at least as considered (and probably more so) than those of celebrities and politicians that are often interviewed in the media.

Yes, this will be on the test.

The Palestinians

Q: What is the “Palestinian problem?”
A: The Palestinian Arabs will not accept Jewish sovereignty anywhere between the river and the sea. That’s a problem.

Q: Why will solutions that involve Israel evacuating Jews from some of the land and establishing a Palestinian state always fail?
A: See the answer to the first question.

Q: Why won’t they accept any Jewish state in the land of Israel?
A: For pious Muslims, it is against their religion. For all Palestinian Arabs, it is because they firmly believe that all the land belongs to them and it was stolen by the Jews. Therefore, it would dishonor them to give it up.

Q: Why are they so violent?
A: Because the Quran commands it, and because they believe that violence is necessary to regain their honor.

Q: Can we convince the Palestinians that compromise would be to their advantage?
A: No. We can only convince them that violence will result in painful reprisals and push them farther away from their goals.

Q: Who pointed this out long before the founding of the Jewish state?
A: Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Q: But don’t they care about economic welfare, peace, a good life for their children, and so on?
A: Sure. But it doesn’t override their religion and their concern for honor (this is a fact of great importance that Westerners rarely understand).

Q: Wouldn’t there be less terrorism if the economic conditions of the Palestinians were improved?
A: No, because terrorism is driven by religion and honor-shame dynamics.

Q: But certainly there are moderate Palestinians!
A: There are, but the nature of Palestinian political consciousness is that the popularity of a leader is directly proportional to his extremism.

Q: What about Arab citizens of Israel?
A: In a practical sense most of them accept the existence of the Jewish state and benefit from it. But ideologically most are opposed to it. Look who they elect to the Knesset.

Q: Why do most “peace” plans involve Jews moving, but never Arabs?
A: Because history shows that Jews can be forced to move far more easily than Arabs. And because most of the world, including many Israelis, have been convinced by anti-Jewish propaganda that we don’t belong here.

Q: Will Trump’s “peace” plan be any different?
A: No. See the answer to the first question.

Q: Why does Israel’s government never push back hard enough against terrorism?
A: Because there is an unelected elite that dominates the legal establishment and doesn’t allow it to.

Q: Why do they do that?
A: Because they want to look good to “enlightened” circles in Europe and America, because they themselves are insecure about Israel’s right to exist, or both.

Iran

Q: Why is Iran so hostile to Israel?
A: Iran’s leaders want to establish a Shiite caliphate in the Middle East and they want to become a world power. They see America as their most important opponent and Israel as an American outpost. They are also motivated by Islamic ideology, which tells them that Jewish sovereignty over “Muslim land” is an abomination.

Q: What will stop Iran’s expansionism?
A: Either the Iranian people will overthrow the repressive regime or Iran will be defeated militarily. There’s no other option.

Q: Will there be war between Israel and Iran?
A: Unless something unforeseen happens – like a counter-revolution in Iran or an attack by the US – it is inevitable. Iran is constantly making strategic moves against Israel, such as Hezbollah’s rocket buildup, introducing Iraqi Shiite militias into Syria, digging attack tunnels under the Lebanese border, building precision missile factories in Lebanon, and – last but not least – the clandestine nuclear program. Israel is trying to blunt these initiatives as much as possible, but at some point it will be impossible to avoid a confrontation.

Q: When will war break out?
A: It’s hard to say. PM Netanyahu has been doing his utmost to combat the threat without opening full-scale hostilities. But as I wrote last week, there could be changes to the leadership in the UK and the US that would make it much harder for Israel to prevail, which could bring about a preemptive war sooner rather than later.

American Jews

Q: What’s the matter with liberal American Jews?
A: American liberals in general simply do not hear the truth about Israel. The information available to them is strained through a very biased filter of liberal media like NPR, the NY Times, and similar print and broadcast media, which are all committed to a 2-state paradigm that was created in the early 1990s with the Oslo accords. The Israeli public moved beyond this as a result of the Second Intifada and the consequences of the withdrawal from Gaza, but the American media never changed its slant.

Q: Why is this?
A: In the past, the US State Department, the oil companies, and others followed the Saudi line established in 1973 that called for the reversal of the results of the wars of 1967/73. The media dutifully followed along.

Q: And more recently?
A: During the fight over the Iran deal, the Obama Administration associated PM Netanyahu with its Republican opposition. Support for Israel became a partisan issue. The administration (which was close to the Israeli Left) and its friendly media strongly pushed the idea that Netanyahu is a right-wing extremist, that Israel is becoming undemocratic and theocratic, and similar themes. The leadership of the Reform movement, with which many liberal Jews are aligned, also took this line. Liberal Jews have no trusted source of information about Israel that presents any other point of view than that of the Israeli Left.

Jew-hatred

Q: Please compare antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
A: Antisemitism is irrational, unjustifiable, hatred of Jews. It involves fantasizing conspiracies, blaming Jews for everything bad that happens in the world, and believing any accusation made against Jews, no matter how fantastic, without proof. It associates Jews with evil forces in the world, be they the Devil, Bolshevism, or capitalism. Anti-Zionism is all that stuff, except its target is the Jewish state. Scratch one and you will usually find the other.

Q: Is antisemitism getting worse throughout the world?
A: Definitely. There are more violent incidents in both Europe and America. There are also many more relatively non-violent expressions of antisemitic and anti-Zionist ideas.

Q: Who’s responsible?
A: The old-fashioned extreme Right, the more modern “intersectional” Left, and Muslims. The violence in Europe seems to be primarily from Muslims, while in America the extreme Right has perpetrated most of the violent incidents. On American campuses, the Left and Muslims have been responsible for increasingly strident anti-Zionist expression.

Q: Will it get worse in America?
A: Politics in America have become polarized to a degree that is unprecedented in my lifetime. A sharp reaction to Trump’s presidency could bring the left wing of the Democratic Party to power, which is characterized by strongly anti-Zionist views. At the same time, the internet and social media have empowered the extreme Right, who now see themselves free to express ideas that were formerly taboo.

Q: What are the most relevant lessons from the Holocaust for today’s situation?
A: First, it is quite possible that they really do want to kill us. And second, we only have ourselves to rely on.

Q: What is the best response to antisemitism?
A: A powerful Jewish state. Not only is it a refuge for Jews facing persecution elsewhere, it can serve as an example of Jewish strength and self-defense.

Summing up

Q: What is the single most unappreciated gift Hashem has given to the Jewish people in two millennia?
A: Sovereignty in our own land.

Q: In addition to being thankful to Hashem, what is the appropriate response to this gift?
A: To treasure and protect it. To never let it slip away.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, American Jews, Europe, Iran, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Arabs, Jew Hatred, War | 4 Comments

Our fragile strategic paradise

Caroline Glick is famous for viewing developments with alarm. But this time there is no doubt that her worries are justified.

If Jeremy Corbyn is elected British Prime Minister, it will not only be bad for the Jews of Britain, it will be very bad for Israel. While not the military and economic powerhouse it was in Queen Victoria’s day, Britain still has enormous influence in the world, including a veto in the Security Council. As Glick notes, it is Israel’s biggest European trading partner, including as a supplier of arms and components for American weapons systems. It has nuclear weapons, and the Royal Navy is still not to be sneezed at.

Corbyn has called for a boycott of Israel, accused her of war crimes, and promised to recognize a state of “Palestine” as soon as he takes office. He has laid wreaths at the graves of terrorists (and denied it) as well as expressing sympathy for Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

And Corbyn might make it. Theresa May’s government is hanging by a thread, and she has said that she will not stand for reelection in 2022, the latest possible date for elections. There are serious divisions in the Conservative Party over Brexit and other issues. Recent polling shows the parties within a percent or two. One juicy crisis could precipitate elections at any time.

Glick only discussed Corbyn. But the UK is not the only place that could experience a change in government for the worse, from an Israeli point of view.

Across the pond, the Trump Administration has so far proved itself one of the best allies of Israel in recent times. Trump, Pence, Bolton, and Pompeo are squarely in our corner. But support for Israel has become a partisan issue in recent years. While a large majority of Americans say they support Israel, only 49% of Democrats sympathize with her more than with the Palestinians. And the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is much more anti-Israel, has grown stronger lately, with several outspoken opponents of Israel elected to Congress.

The last presidential election was very close, with Donald Trump squeaking by a lackluster opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump is currently being assailed with accusations of criminal behavior, which – even if they can’t be made to stick – make it difficult for him to expand support beyond his loyal base. It is certainly possible that he will choose not to run again in 2020, or that he will be defeated. Even if he is reelected, he will be gone after 2024. The chance that the next administration will exemplify the values of the left wing – the Obama wing – of the Democratic party is significant.

President Obama already abstained on a Security Council resolution condemning Israel. It is not a stretch to imagine a future Democratic president of like mind voting to sanction Israel for acts of self-defense, or acting against her in wartime. You may remember John Kerry’s acceptance of Hamas’ narrative of during the 2014 Gaza war, the administration’s holding up a shipment of Hellfire missiles during the war, or the unnecessary FAA ban on flights to Israel’s international airport, which some observers attribute to a quiet order from the administration.

The US and Britain are considered Israel’s allies today, although there can be friction or differences of opinion. Vladimir Putin is in a different category. Putin’s Russia is not exactly an ally, but has cooperated with Israel to an unprecedented degree. Without speculating about the reasons for Putin’s attitude, it’s well known that there are highly anti-Zionist and antisemitic circles in Russia, and her policy toward Israel would most likely be considerably worse without Putin in the driver’s seat.

But Vladimir Putin is only human, and humans can die or be overthrown. They certainly get old and tired at some point. Putin is 66, and he will not be in power forever.

All this leads me to speculate about a reasonably probable scenario within the next four years or so, in which Jeremy Corbyn is Prime Minister of the UK, a left-wing Democrat is President of the US, and perhaps even a more “traditional” (i.e., anti-Israel) Russian leader sits in the Kremlin. What would Israel’s situation look like?

We could expect that Corbyn would encourage economic and other boycotts of Israel, which – unlike today’s impotent BDS movement – could have damaging effects on our economy. At the same time, he would provide both concrete aid to our enemies as well as diplomatic support in the UN. In the event of war, he would call for disadvantageous cease-fires or settlements that would erase Israel’s battlefield gains. Even military intervention is imaginable, given the fanatical anti-Zionism of many of his supporters and associates.

The US administration would no longer be a reliable veto for anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council. That means that – with the support of Corbyn’s Britain – the Security Council could apply economic or even military sanctions against Israel in order to force her to make concessions to her enemies.

One would expect such an administration to follow the precedent of the Obama Administration in intervening in Israel’s domestic affairs, preventing her from building in the territories, forcing her to release terrorist prisoners, and in case of war, using its leverage as arms supplier to prevent a clear-cut Israeli victory. An unfriendly administration could leak information about Israeli plans and operations to her enemies and the media – as the US did in connection with Israeli raids against Iranian arms shipments in Syria. It could prevent Israel from carrying out preventative strikes, as Obama did in 2012 when PM Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Barak wanted to bomb the Iranian nuclear project.

Russia, from her base in Syria, could effectively choke off Israeli air operations with her advanced air defense systems that cover almost all of the area of Israel. She could spread her protective umbrella over Iranian forces in Syria. She could even intervene militarily in a war between Israel and Iran, or Iranian proxies.

This is truly a nightmare scenario, with three nations that today are at worst pragmatic players (Russia) and at best (the US) supportive allies of the Jewish state, becoming hostile to her in a short space of time. In particular, even if this scenario is only partially realized, Israel will face great difficulties if she finds herself at war. And today it is hard to imagine that the conflict between Israel and Iran – the “head of the snake” that animates her multifarious enemies – will be resolved without military conflict.

Israel’s leaders must realize that today we are living in a temporary strategic paradise, which can end at any time. If Theresa May, Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin (or worse, all three) should be supplanted by their likely replacements, our freedom of action – diplomatic, economic, and military – would be severely circumscribed.

There are two conclusions that can be drawn from this. One is that we must prepare for the possibility by reducing our dependence on the US and the UK. That’s worth doing in any event.

The second is that we should act within the short time frame available to fundamentally transform our strategic situation. At the very least, that means ending the threat from Iran herself and her proxies by preemptive military action.

We’ve already wasted two years. It’s time to act.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Jew Hatred, US-Israel Relations, War | 3 Comments

Jordan can be Palestine

It turns out that I agree with Yair Netanyahu, the 27-year old son of the Prime Minister. Yair was sharply criticized after he posted the following on his Facebook page:

There will not be peace here until:
1. All the Jews leave the land of Israel.
2. All the Muslims leave the land of Israel.
I prefer the second option.

I am not sure what prompted him to say this, but perhaps it was the same thing that prompted me to write “I want to see us make the Palestinian Arabs disappear”: the continuing efforts of Palestinian Arabs to murder Jews.

Everyone has their breaking point. Mine was the decision made last week by a Palestinian Arab murderer to shoot at a pregnant woman when there were plenty of uniformed soldiers around. Not that it’s acceptable to shoot soldiers standing at a bus stop, as another Palestinian Arab murderer did the next day, but at least it’s possible to claim that you are at war and they are military targets.

Of course that would mean that the Palestinian Arab murderers are also enemy combatants and should be treated as military targets, not “criminals” who are arrested and sent to probably the most comfortable prison in the world outside of Scandinavia, where they study and watch TV with their friends.

Anyway, Yair and I have reached our breaking points. There are murders and attempted murders almost every day. We try to make agreements, to improve their living conditions, to use the minimum amount of force necessary to protect ourselves. We knock on roofs, shoot rubber bullets, issue work permits, dismantle communities because there is a claim of Palestinian ownership, approve the same building plans over and over without building. They kill Jews.

I read a very interesting article today, by Abe Haak, about the possible scenarios when the Palestinian Authority falls apart – which it certainly will do shortly, when Mahmoud Abbas dies or otherwise lets go of the reins. Haak expects that Areas A and B will dissolve into chaos as the various Palestinian factions fight it out. Fatah will see a struggle between several strongmen, who will also face off against the PFLP, Hamas, ISIS, and who knows what other groups. For some of the same reasons she does not wish to reconquer Gaza, Israel will not try to move in and retake day-to-day control of all of Judea and Samaria.

After the collapse of the PA, conditions will quickly go from bad to worse, leading to a massive flight of refugees to Jordan which Haak expects will reach into the hundreds of thousands. He writes,

As critical supplies dwindle and living conditions worsen, the most desperate armed groups will begin taking risks by attacking those boxing them in. However, the violence that will inevitably erupt will not lead to a clear victory for any faction, as it did for Hamas in Gaza in 2006. Any victories will be local and limited. This is because Areas A and B possess neither the territorial contiguity nor the binary politics of Gaza. Instead, one town will go to Hamas, and the next will remain with Fatah. In one neighborhood, the PFLP will stay dominant; in another, the ISIS loyalists will keep watch.

Haak believes that Jordan will be forced to take control of Areas A and B, with the cooperation of Israel, in order to stanch the flow of refugees. A kind of “Jordanian option” will come into being by default. Haak and certainly many in our government and the IDF would welcome this. What could be better? There would be no Palestinian state, and we could continue our uneasy but relatively stable “peace” with Jordan. Jordan would provide the stable governance that the PA never did.

Unfortunately, regardless of who controls the pockets of heavy Arab population that comprise Areas A and B – and the continued stability of the Jordanian monarchy is by no means a given – this still means that there are massive numbers of hostile Palestinian Arabs quite close to our highly populated areas. And it means that Jews who live in our historic homeland of Judea and Samaria will be no less exposed to terrorism than they are today – possibly more so, because IDF entry into areas A and B would then become international incidents.

Judea and Samaria, showing areas A and B in green.

The map of Areas A, B, and C is fragmented. Areas A and B (green on the map) are Palestinian cities and towns, and Area C (white) is Jewish communities, roads, military reservations, small Arab settlements and empty lands. There is little contiguity. It would be difficult or impossible to fence off Area C from A and B. It’s hard to see how Jordan could exercise control over A and B in a practical sense, especially since the present border between Israel and Jordan is in the Jordan Valley, a natural barrier that absolutely must be under Israeli control in order to defend the country against attack from the east. Finally, it is almost certain that the violent factions would resist the imposition of control.

There is, however, another “Jordanian option.” And the almost certain flight of refugees predicted by Haak presents an opportunity to actualize it. This, of course, is to encourage – with both positive rewards and negative sanctions – the movement of the majority of the Arab population of Judea and Samaria into Jordan.

Before expressing indignation at the suggestion to engage in “ethnic cleansing,” note that most “two-state” plans involve the involuntary removal of between tens and hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria. Note also that the refugees will be fleeing an unlivable situation, in which supplies of food and fuel will be uncertain, and firefights between factions will be common.

Jordan will need massive international help in order to resettle the refugees, but considering that this represents a long-sought solution to a great part of the Palestinian problem (Gaza remains), and the end of the millions that are currently being spent annually to maintain the fiction of an independent “Palestine” – a fiction, incidentally, that is nothing more than an excuse to justify a continuous war against the Jewish state – it will be cheap at the price.

There is also the possibility that the Hashemite monarchy will not be able to stay in power after an influx of Palestinian Arabs. It’s not clear why this would be more likely than it was between 1948 and 1967 when those Arabs were under (illegal) Jordanian sovereignty while residing in Judea and Samaria, or more likely than it would be if a “Jordanian option” that did not include the movement of the population, such as Haak proposes, were to be implemented. The Hashemites are a minority and instability is a way of life in the region.

Political analyst Dr. Martin Sherman has discussed at great length the idea of providing cash incentives for Arabs to leave the territories. He calls his plan “The Humanitarian Paradigm,” because he sees the alternative as the very un-humanitarian institution of war. I like his choice of the word “paradigm” because taking it seriously requires a paradigm shift.

What has happened is that those who believe that there should never have been a Jewish state – the Arab world, other Muslim nations, much of Europe, the Soviet Union – managed to create an atmosphere in which the only possible “solutions” to the conflict over Israel’s existence were those by which Israel would cease to exist. So the Arab refugees in 1948 were not absorbed, UNRWA was created to increase the refugee population and maintain their irredentist fervor, massive pressure was put on Israel to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war, and the Oslo Accords and “Peace Process” were embraced by the world.

But the Palestinian Arabs have consistently proven by their actions that Meir Kahane, Yair Netanyahu, Martin Sherman, and I are correct. Coexistence in the same land is impossible, and Israel cannot survive inside what Abba Eban called “Auschwitz borders” – nor should she (but that’s another story).

Today the nature of Palestinian politics, along with the Iranian threat to the Arab world, and the iconoclasm of the Trump Administration, have finally given us an opportunity to bring about the needed paradigm shift. The opportunity may not come again. We should grasp it.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 3 Comments

Nishbar li

The history of nation-building — of human nation building — is this: we are in America. What happened? There were some Indians. Then some white people came and they killed the Indians, and they took over. That’s what happens with countries. If I get your territory, if I win a war, I either kill you, I subjugate you, or I expel you. In rare cases I would make you citizens, on my terms. That’s the way the world works.

The Jews were survivors of [the] Holocaust and of pogroms, and did not have a state for 2000 years. So they can re-invent the wheel. ’67 war? They decided not to annex, and not to kill the people. Not to expel them, but to do some kind of — God knows what it is — a very complicated Talmudic thing, nobody knows, even the Jews cannot figure it out. —Tuvia Tenenbom

Nishbar li. It’s not easy to translate: I’ve had enough, I won’t take it anymore.

Back in 2011, Young Palestinian Arabs butchered five members of the Fogel family, including almost cutting the head off of a 3-month old baby. Two years ago, a Palestinian Arab climbed in a window and stabbed 13-year old Hallel Yaffa Ariel to death in her bed. And this week Palestinian Arabs shot and critically wounded a 30-week pregnant woman, Shira Ish-Ran, and her her unborn child in a drive-by shooting.

In between there have been too many murders for me to count, too many stabbings, car-rammings, shootings. There was Rabbi Raziel Shevach, volunteer medic and father of six. There was Ezra Schwartz, a student from the US after whom a new youth baseball field is named. There was Ari Fuld, whose last act was to save a woman being chased by the terrorist that had just stabbed him. There were so many more. So many more.

So ma pitom? Why, suddenly, do I say that I’ve had enough? Surely I’m used to the daily yes daily — attempted and successful murders of Jews by Palestinian Arabs?

Believe it or not, there is something special about this case, something in addition to the beautiful young family that has been so horribly wounded.

Here it is: security footage shows that there were a number of uniformed soldiers there, who rushed to the aid of the victims of the shooting, and even fired at the car containing the fleeing terrorists. They were nearby, but the terrorists aimed and fired at the pregnant woman.

Uniformed soldiers were nearby, but they aimed and fired at the pregnant woman.

Do I need to add anything? This is who (or what) the Palestinian Arabs are. They will brag about the successful “military operation” they carried out, but it was not a military operation. It was simply an act of sadism, because violent sadism is the way to establish that, despite the nakba and the other humiliations they believe have been inflicted on them, they are “men.”

They are not men, the ones who did this. They are not even human beings. I pray that when the IDF or the police come for them, they will not go quietly, that they will be destroyed.

By the way, I don’t buy the argument that terrorism is a strategy intended to make us abandon the land, and “go back to Europe.” Most Israelis were born here, and about half of them have roots in the Middle East or Africa. But none of us are going back anywhere. And I believe that the terrorists know this. They don’t care; they like to kill, especially children and young women, religious Jews and “settlers” (but they see every Jew in the Land of Israel as a “settler”).

I don’t want to hear about “peace plans” anymore. I don’t want to hear that we should improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, where the creatures are still throwing themselves at the border fence in what reminds me of a scene from World War Z (video). I don’t want to hear about the “international community” or “civil society.” I don’t want to hear about another “Talmudic thing.” It’s too late for any of that for for me.

No, I want to see the traditional human solution to the classic problem of two tribes fighting over the same piece of land, the solution in which one of them wins and the other disappears. I want to see us make the Palestinian Arabs disappear.

Nishbar li.

[Update: 13 Dec 2018] The child has died.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 3 Comments

Was Kahane right?

This is not a post that I wanted to write. I don’t want to face a very troubling reality. But reality, by definition, is the thing you can’t escape.

Recently Israel held municipal elections, for mayors and city council members. In Haifa, the Labor Party candidate (it insists that it’s now called the “Zionist Union,” but as you will see, that is a misnomer), Dr. Einat Kalisch-Rotem was elected.

Kalisch-Rotem (48) is an architect with a doctorate in urban planning. She owns an architectural firm and also lectures at major universities in Israel. She is the first female mayor of one of Israel’s major cities. For what it’s worth, her Wikipedia entry claims that she has a black belt in karate.

She must not be a stupid person. And yet she appointed Raja Za’atara, an Arab citizen of Israel representing the Hadash (communist) party as one of two Deputy Mayors.

Za’atara said that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, because “An occupied nation has the right to resist the occupation.”  He said in an interview that “he would rather forfeit his salary than condemn Hamas,” and that he would not take part in memorial ceremonies for IDF soldiers. He said (Hebrew video) that ISIS had learned its crimes from the Zionist movement, which engaged in “Rape, looting, murder and massacres” in 1948. He has “expressed support on his social media pages for Hezbollah, Syrian president Bashar Assad and North Korea.” In 2012, he founded (Hebrew link) an organization to promote boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel (BDS), and worked to prevent Arab youth signing up for military or national service.

Of course all of Za’atara’s statements fall into the category of permitted speech. It is not a criminal offense in Israel to call for the end of the Jewish state or even to express support for organizations or countries with whom the state is at war. But nevertheless, he certainly should not hold political office, elected or appointed.

He’s not alone. Many of the Arab members of the Knesset share similar opinions. One of them, Basel Ghattas, is currently serving a two-year sentence for smuggling cellular telephones to security prisoners in an Israeli prison. Haneen Zoabi, who participated in the 2010 flotilla to Gaza which ended with the violent conflict on the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara, will tell anyone who listens that Jews do not have a right of self-determination, but Palestinians do.

In 1988, Rabbi Meir Kahane was prevented from running for the Knesset by an amendment to Israel’s Basic Law: The Knesset, which bans anyone guilty of one of the following, explicitly or implicitly by his or her words or actions:

  1. negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state;
  2. incitement to racism;
  3. support of armed struggle, by a hostile state or a terrorist organization, against the State of Israel.

This clause has never been applied to anyone else, not even Zoabi (although numerous MKs have argued that it should be).

Kahane believed and said that there was no possibility of coexistence between Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority, and that Jewish survival required that the Arabs leave. He believed that the Arabs would never accept the idea of a Jewish state, and that they would eventually overwhelm the Jews demographically. Although the latter scenario seems much less likely today, as the Jewish birthrate increases and that of the Arabs declines, the political estrangement between them is today no better than in Kahane’s day.

I would like to believe that as time passes, Israel’s Arab citizens will become more accepting of the Jewish state, and more prepared to live as a minority – an extremely pampered one, by world standards – in it. But the opposite seems to be happening. Their demand for a “secular, democratic state” which always includes a right of return for millions of “Palestinian refugees” is equivalent to a demand to turn Israel into another Muslim Arab state. And if the 22 existing Muslim Arab states plus the Palestinian Authority and Gaza are any example, it would not long be secular or democratic, and would soon contain few if any Jews.

One wants to ask them, if they so much want to live in an Arab state, why aren’t they emigrating to one of the those? The answer is obvious: it’s much better here.

This illustrates the cognitive dissonance inherent in their position. Israeli Arab intellectuals know that the Arab states in the region are by and large failures. Their economies are poor, health and educational systems are sub-par, they are unstable and violent, and they are mostly dictatorships, even if they pretend to be democratic. They know all this, but still they find living as a minority in a Jewish state intolerable.

But what about the supposed majority of Arabs, who just want to work hard, raise their kids, and retire to sit on the porch of one of those massive castles one sees in Israeli Arab towns? Unfortunately, they vote for the parties of Haneen Zoabi, Basel Ghattas, Jamal Zahalka, Azmi Bishara (who fled the country to avoid prosecution for aiding Hezbollah during the 2006 war), and other militant anti-Zionists. Keep in mind that we are talking about Israel here, not the territories. In Israel there is a secret ballot, and PLO or Hamas operatives will not punish an Israeli Arab for voting “incorrectly.” If moderation doesn’t sell in Israeli Arab politics, it’s because nobody’s buying.

You will not find any Israeli Arab politicians – nor Arab citizens on the street – who do not insist that the creation of Israel was a historic wrong, a nakba for them for which the Arabs bore absolutely no responsibility. You will not find one who does not believe that all 5 million Palestinians with refugee status have a right of return. And you won’t find one that doesn’t think that if they try hard enough for long enough, they can get their “stolen” land back.

In 2006, a coalition of mostly “moderate” Israeli Arab intellectuals put together a document called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” It calls for the state  to “acknowledge responsibility for the nakba,” for the Arabs to be treated as an indigenous national group in accordance with international conventions, for them to have equal representation in the Knesset with a veto power. Resources such as land and money must be distributed equally. All forms of “ethnic superiority” – that is, all aspects of the state that make it a Jewish state must be eliminated, such as the flag, national anthem, and so forth. The “Islamic holy sites” – that is, all the Jewish holy sites that the Arabs claim are Islamic – should be under Muslim control. Israel must “acknowledge the right of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel of social, religious, cultural and national continuity with the rest of the Palestinian people and the Arab and Islamic Nation.” There’s much more.

Needless to say, Israel is not prepared to volunteer to give up the idea of a Jewish state in favor of a binational one. And these are the “moderates.”

Nobody in Jewish Israel wants to say that the ideal of coexistence with the 20% of our population that are Arabs is unobtainable, that we are getting farther away from it as time goes by rather than closer. But that’s how it seems today.

This brings me to the following question: was Kahane right when he said that coexistence was impossible? And if he was right, is there a way to keep a Jewish state other than by encouraging the Arabs to leave – by whatever means necessary?

Posted in Israeli Arabs | 7 Comments

Blame the Jews

“Ahed Tamimi is the Palestinian Rosa Parks” – Aljazeera headline for an article by David A. Love

One of the most illogical – indeed, embarrassingly stupid – ways to criticize Israel is to make an analogy between the “plight of the Palestinians” and the condition of blacks in America, to equate the “Palestinian struggle” to the US movement for civil rights.

And yet it has been highly effective among minorities and on college campuses. It has been used by intelligent and (sometimes) well-informed individuals like Condoleezza Rice, by dog-whistlers like Barack Obama, and by rabble-rousers like Jeremiah Wright. In the age of intersectionality, it is taken as a given that racism against blacks in the US and “oppression” of Palestinians by Israel are similar phenomena, and that opposition to one kind of oppression demands opposition to all.

Progressive ideology insists that racial strife in the US and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have similar root causes, like capitalism (somehow), colonialism, and racism (defined as racial animosity plus power). Progressives like to put the conflict under a microscope with a very narrow field of view, but by doing that they exclude the broader context in which the narrower struggle takes place. The Palestinian struggle is just a subset of the much larger Arab and Muslim struggle to rid the region of Jews and extinguish Jewish sovereignty. Israel has a degree of military power that has so far enabled her to defend herself, but the balance of power – in terms of numbers, financial clout, and even international support – clearly rests with the anti-Israel side.

There is certainly racial/ethnic animosity on both sides, but the hatred that drives Arabs to stab or run down random Jews is only rarely seen among Jews. Colonialism? Who is indigenous, the Jew whose ancestral culture, language, and religion developed thousands of years ago here in the Land of Israel, or the Palestinian whose ancestors most likely came to the land in the late 19th or early 20th century (even as late as 1946), who speaks Arabic like an Egyptian or Syrian, whose religion is the Islam brought to the region by Muslim colonialists from Arabia, and who didn’t even call themselves “Palestinians” until the late 1960s? If there is a “root cause” of the conflict, it is Arab rejectionism, deeply embedded in ideology and religion, and amplified by every input they receive from their media and educational system.

So now consider the black Americans, who were brought to the country as slaves in the most horrible fashion imaginable, and then when slavery was finally abolished, faced systematic oppression ranging from legal apartheid in the segregated South to multifaceted informal discrimination elsewhere. Unlike Palestinians, they are not part of a coordinated effort to ethnically cleanse white Americans from their homeland. Most of their families have been in America longer than many (most?) other Americans. Their struggle against discrimination has been mostly nonviolent.

Both struggles ostensibly aim to obtain human and civil rights for a particular minority group, and both struggles have been adopted by progressives as part of the intersectional framework that they live and breathe. That is the entirety of what they have in common. In reality, the aim of the Palestinian movement is the replacement of the Jewish state with an Arab state, and the ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population. And to a great extent progressive activists understand this, although many would not admit it even to themselves, and prefer to try to maintain the fiction that it is about rights.

The proposition that “all forms of oppression are interrelated” is on the face of it ridiculous, so the effort to convince people that it is true takes interesting forms. One of the most ugly arguments they present is that disproportionate police violence against black people is encouraged by exchange programs for American police officers to learn counterterrorism techniques from Israeli security agencies. Jonathan Tobin called it “an updated version of medieval blood libels.”

There is presently a campaign led by the anti-Israel group “Jewish Voice for Peace” called “Deadly Exchange” which has succeeded in getting several American police departments to cancel cooperative training in Israel. Tobin writes,

The conceit of Deadly Exchange is that such training is both inappropriate for Americans as well as indirectly responsible for outrages like “police murders,” “shoot to kill policies,” “extrajudicial executions” as well as “spying” and “deportation and detention.” The claim here is that Israeli police are a force that is primarily interested in repression and violence and those U.S. personnel that learn from them are more likely to kill Americans…

Treating Israel as a pariah state is both unjust and counter-productive to peace efforts. But by linking Israel and its supporters to disputes about American law enforcement, JVP is seeking to smear them as being ultimately responsible for the murders of African Americans. As crazy as that sounds, it should be eerily familiar to students of history. Blaming Jews for crimes, especially the murder of innocents, even though they had nothing to do with them, is a classic trope of anti-Semitism. In that sense, even though JVP presents itself as defending Jewish values, its campaign is merely an updated version of medieval blood libels, where Jews became the scapegoats for problems that were not of their making.

Blaming the Jews for everything has been a popular pastime since the days of the Black Death, when it was assumed that since no other explanation was forthcoming, the Jews must have been poisoning wells. In 2004, several politicians, retired military officers, and journalists asserted that Jews and Israel were responsible for pushing the Bush Administration into the Iraq War (although it is true that some of the Jewish so-called “neoconservative” officials and journalists supported the war, the primary responsibility has to fall on President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, none of whom are Jewish).

Even some politicians who are generally pro-Israel in their actions find it useful to attribute possibly unpopular decisions to considerations related to Israel. For example, President Trump said last week that “one reason [to keep US troops in the Middle East] is Israel.” Defending his decision not to punish Saudi Arabia for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he said that “Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia.”

As I’m sure you know, Israel does not expect or want Americans to fight for her, although she is very happy to have an uninterrupted supply of weapons, and appreciates US diplomatic support in the UN. And Israel has no connection to the Khashoggi affair and wants none. President Trump’s decisions are made in line with American interests, not Israel’s. To say otherwise is “not helpful,” in diplomat-speak.

In case anyone needs a refresher, the Jews didn’t kill Jesus, we didn’t poison wells, we didn’t start all the wars of the 19th century, we didn’t stab Germany in the back, we didn’t cause the Bolshevik Revolution, we didn’t poison Arafat, we didn’t knock down the Twin Towers, we didn’t make Bush invade Iraq, we didn’t create ISIS, the PLO is not the NAACP, we aren’t responsible for the actions of American police – and certainly not for the choices made by Donald Trump.

And Ahed Tamimi, who has publicly called for stabbings and suicide bombings (video), is decidedly no Rosa Parks.

Posted in American society, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Jew Hatred | 3 Comments

The Marc Lamont Hill affair

Marc Lamont Hill, a CNN political analyst, went to the UN on Nov. 29, its annual “Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which just happens to be the anniversary of the partition resolution which could have created a state of Palestine – but didn’t, because the Arabs couldn’t accept a Jewish state next door. Hill called for (video) “a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” accused Israel of “settler colonialism,” and spoke approvingly of Palestinian Arab terrorism:

If we are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must recognize the right of an occupied people to defend itself. We must prioritize peace, but we must not romanticize or fetishize it. We must advocate and promote nonviolence at every opportunity, but we cannot endorse a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing.

He also endorsed the program of the BDS movement, “the need to return to the pre-1967 borders, to give full rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to allow right of return.”

I was planning to write about the history and meaning of the slogan “from the river to the sea…” and refute for the thousandth time the idea that Israel is a “colonialist” enterprise. I was going to explain yet again that “Palestinian” citizens of Israel do have full rights, and that “right of return” means converting Israel into an Arab-majority state. I was planning to present Hill’s explanation of why he didn’t really mean that Israel should be replaced by a Jew-free Arab state like the Jordanians created in the territory they occupied in 1948, and argue that he should have known better.

Well, screw  it. I’m going to stop right here. I am tired of swimming in the sewers with people like Marc Lamont Hill. Either he understood the connotations of the words and phrases that he used, and knew that he was participating in an ugly annual ritual to whip up enthusiasm for uprooting the Jewish people from their homeland by terrorism and murder, or he didn’t know what he was saying. Is he in favor of terrorism and ethnic cleansing or just incredibly ignorant?

I think the most generous possible explanation is that he identifies with the Palestinian Arabs, who claim to be oppressed, because as a black American he sees himself as oppressed. So he learned the Palestinian vocabulary to give himself credibility to speak about the conflict. But everything that he believes about it he learned from the Palestinian side, so like them he doesn’t relate to the Jews as people, and surely not as a people with a legitimate claim to the land.

He knows how to talk the talk, like so many others who live far from the conflict, but his repetition of clichéd Palestinian talking points makes one feel that that is as far as it goes.

It’s his job to wear a nice suit and speak well, a “radio voice” with just a trace of African-American burr to it to give him credibility as an oppressed person. He uses all the correct words to give the impression of a scholar who carefully takes into account moral and humanitarian considerations, who operates in a modern anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist anti-racist, anti-patriarchal framework.

But his talk was full of lies, exaggerations, facts presented without context, attribution of the worst possible motives, and inversions of the victim-perpetrator relationship. He made tendentious analogies between the struggle of black Americans and Palestinian Arabs, and even blamed violence by American police officers on their “training by Israeli soldiers.” There was not a single word about Palestinian terrorism or rejectionism, nothing (except barely disguised support) for the campaign of murder that is going on today in our streets, incited and supported by the PLO and Hamas.

In short, he presented 21 minutes of unrelieved hateful propaganda. There was nothing scholarly or considered about it. His later explanatory tweets, for example,

I believe in full rights for all citizens. I believe in safety for all citizens. I believe in self-determination for all citizens. This is not an anti-Semitic position.

and

I concluded my remarks with a call to free Palestine from river to sea. This means that all areas of historic Palestine —e.g., West Bank, Gaza, Israel— must be spaces of freedom, safety, and peace for Palestinians.

are disingenuous and not consistent with his words in his speech. He did not even hint that he cared at all for the rights, the safety, indeed even the lives, of the Jewish inhabitants.

In response to the outrage generated by his comments – and I hope also by the obvious insincerity of his explanations afterwards – CNN terminated his contract. Naturally this was interpreted by many as the network “surrendering to Jewish/Israeli pressure.”

It might be controversial to fire a news analyst for taking an unpopular position on his own time. One could even argue that it’s his own business if he calls for the destruction of a state and the death or dispersal of its people, and supports violent terrorism. After all, it was said at the UN, where such ideas are commonplace.

But his uncritical acceptance and regurgitation of the most blatantly false and misleading propaganda makes it clear that he is not competent in the role of political analyst for any media outlet that has the slightest regard for truth.

Maybe Aljazeera will give him a job.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Media, The UN | Comments Off on The Marc Lamont Hill affair

Be Harrison Ford, not Woody Allen

I just googled “combating antisemitism” and got 7.5 million results. Apparently a lot of people are thinking about this. And well they should, given that Jew-hatred is rising sharply everywhere in the world, especially in the West. The old-style “paleo” antisemitism is going strong almost everywhere, Muslims have added some of the older European themes to their Koranic and anti-Israel narratives, and the Left is taking its obsessive anti-Zionism to new heights. Meanwhile, Right and Left are coming full circle to tell neo-Nazi stories about Rothschild and Soros (as if Soros is a friend of the Jews!)

So while all this is happening, everyone is in a tizzy about “combating” it. For example, the European Union has a basketful of programs to do so, led by a “coordinator on combating antisemitism,” and including a working definition, Holocaust remembrance observances, a program to monitor and report on it, special legislation making it illegal, and of course above all, education. At the same time they are pumping Euros into subversive NGOs in Israel and financing illegal Palestinian construction in Judea and Samaria, but that is another story.

Everybody wants to get into the act. The US Department of State (the one that still refuses to put “Israel” on the American passports of people born in Jerusalem) has a “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism” to, er, monitor and combat it. Jewish federations, Hadassah, Chabad, B’nai B’rith, the Union for Reform Judaism, Germany, the UK Labour Party, and countless other rights organizations, religious groups, political parties, and national governments are doing it. Even some people at the UN have joined in.

How do you combat Jew-hatred? Most of those fighting it seem to think that the answer is education: the theory seems to be that if you teach people about the horrors of the Holocaust and the moral evil of bigotry, they will stop hating Jews. A great deal of resources are expended on doing this, but antisemitic incidents keep increasing.

Which is not surprising, since the theory is ridiculous. Jew-haters love to hear about the Holocaust. For one thing, it reinforces their beliefs to know that they are not alone. It gives them a warm feeling to think that a major nation led by a charismatic figure actually tried to carry out a genocide they would heartily approve of. Ridding the world of Jews isn’t just an impossible dream, they realize; someone almost succeeded! It also provides ammunition for demonstrations and Twitter campaigns: without Holocaust education, who would know to shout “Jews to the gas” at football/soccer games? And how better to exacerbate hatred of Jews than by accusing them of fabricating the Holocaust for financial gain?

Of course it is absolutely essential to preserve the historical memory of the Holocaust out of respect for the victims, as well as to teach Jews or other peoples threatened with genocide to take the threats seriously. But while Holocaust education is necessary for these reasons, it doesn’t reduce Jew-hatred – it facilitates it.

Telling people “not to hate,” and explaining that bigotry is wrong is of very marginal utility. Nobody in the West thinks that hating an ethnic group is morally good, but that doesn’t change their feelings. And in the Muslim world, hating Jews is an indispensable part of their culture. Even if people can be conditioned to reject prejudice against individuals, there seems to be no moral stricture against irrational hatred of the Jewish state, which is both a form of Jew-hatred itself and an excuse for other forms of it.

Probably the least helpful kind of “education” is that which lists the accomplishments of Jews: so many Nobel Prizes, great composers, performers, artists, scientists, writers. Look how good they have been for society, runs the argument. It should be clear that this simply feeds the envy of the Jew-hater, something that is almost always part of his psyche. It also is evidence (not that evidence is needed in the mind of the Jew-hater) for the correctness of the theory that there is an massive Jewish conspiracy, even a secret ruling class. Of course the Jews can control the world, they are so smart!

So how do we “combat antisemitism?” We can’t, directly. But we can combat antisemites. This is especially clear for the kind of Jew-hatred that expresses itself as hatred of Israel. Recently Israel allowed herself to be humiliated by Hamas, which burned thousands of acres of her fields and forests, and then launched the most intense rocket bombardment in Israel’s history. Our response, bombing unoccupied military targets, was tactically significant but psychologically impotent. The Jew-haters were gratified, because the Jews lived up to the stereotype: powerful and controlling, and yet at the same time weaklings who are afraid to fight.

Suppose Israel had mounted a massive, “disproportionate” response. Perhaps we would have had to deal with legal and diplomatic attacks, as we have after previous conflicts. Perhaps there would have been strategic concerns, such as the possibility of a multi-front war. But from the psychological point of view, it would be a victory. The Jew strikes back! The Jew-haters wouldn’t stop hating us, but they would be the losers. Jew-hatred would be less attractive, because nobody wants to be a loser.

Everyone, as bin Laden said, wants to bet on the strong horse. We need to be the strong horse. If that means that we can’t live up to the moral standards proposed by the “morally enlightened” Europeans (who themselves are even less able to live up to them), so be it. People like winners. The way to make people like us is not to try to be kind to our enemies – by sending food and fuel to Gaza while they incinerate the southern part of our country and make our children scuttle into shelters – but to crush them. Probably we can’t make them “like” us, no matter what we do. But we can make them fear and respect us.

I often write about the importance of maintaining respect and honor as a part of creating deterrence. They are important in fighting Jew-hatred as well, because they neutralize the contempt that is a key part of Jew-hatred. But let’s face it; the usual programs to “combat antisemitism” are useless at best, and either feed it or are used as cover by those (e.g., the UK Labour Party and the UN) who in truth don’t see antisemitism as a problem.

It’s easy to see what Israel’s strategy in the psychological struggle against Jew-hatred should be, if not the tactical means of implementing it. But for Jews in the diaspora, who are a small minority surrounded by a large non-Jewish population, a significant portion of which hates them, the difficulties are greater. The nature of diaspora existence is that the Jews are dependent on the good will of their hosts – a fact that strengthens the antisemitic stereotype of the parasitic Jew with great influence although physically weak, and makes an aggressive posture difficult.

One solution is aliyah. Short of that, it doesn’t hurt for diaspora Jews to align themselves with a strong, potent Israel. Standing up for your homeland makes you stronger, even outside of it. Hint: attacking Israel won’t make the Jew-haters like you any better.

Diaspora Jews can fight the stereotype by developing an image of self-reliance and self-protection, of physical power that must be respected. The Jewish Defense League had mixed results, but ultimately failed for various reasons, in particular its rejection by the self-appointed “responsible” (liberal) Jewish community. Perhaps a revitalized JDL could renew its appeal in today’s more dangerous climate? I don’t know if it’s possible, and I am sure liberal Jews would fight it tooth and nail.

But if I have one piece of advice for the diaspora, it’s this: be Harrison Ford, not Woody Allen.

Posted in Jew Hatred | 2 Comments