Two foolish youths and a Jewish Palestinian

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Young people are naïve. They pop out of their mothers’ wombs as little fresh-faced tabulae rasae with a huge amount of energy. By the time they approach draft age, Israeli culture treats them as adults. They look like adults, and they are given adult responsibilities; but because they have until then lived in a bubble of people that care about them, some of them have not learned about the reality outside it. They are unable to internalize that there are people out there who do not care about them, indeed who would rip their throats out to steal their bicycles. Or for nothing at all except their Jewish identity.

The bubbles that protected the young Luhar Altman and Hillel Garmi, who feature in this Ha’aretz story by Jewish Palestinian Amira Hass, must have been warm and soft beyond compare, because the degree of naïveté that they still display at age 19 is mind-boggling. Luhar and Hillel have decided that they would prefer not to serve in the IDF. Instead of taking the usual paths to avoid service that are available to a young Israeli – what to say to an army psychologist to mark you as undesirable is common knowledge – these two have chosen to refuse to serve on political grounds and will go to prison, to the great admiration of Jewish Palestinian Hass.

They are doing this to inspire other young Israelis to also avoid service. This is their way of fighting “the regime’s immorality.” I can’t imagine what they think the success of their campaign would look like, although we don’t have to look very far to see examples of how the folks that the IDF defends us against treat the people under their control.

So far they have merely shown that they are part of the anti-Zionist Left. But what is remarkable is the utter counterfactual idiocy of their reasons, the degree of blindness to reality they display. I wish they had said simply that they hated the Jewish state and wanted it replaced with an Arab state, the way Jewish Palestinian Hass does. At least then their position would make sense. But no. Let me quote Hass quoting them:

[Garmi’s] declaration opens: “This year, during the wave of unarmed demonstrations which took place near the Gaza Strip fence, I read what Ahmed Abu Artema, who organized the demonstrations, wrote, and I was impressed to discover people who take on the situation between the sea and the Jordan without using a gun. Like them, I too believe in civil disobedience – a tactic aimed at using unarmed force to underscore the regime’s immorality.”

Like them? I mean, seriously, Hillel Garmi, do you think that the riots and attempted incursions at the fence are about nonviolence and civil disobedience? Suppose the IDF left their posts at the fence and went to the beach in Tel Aviv. What do you think would happen? You do know that when Hamas operatives are not “using a gun” they are using a knife, or a car, as a weapon? You do know that they want to kill you, personally, because you are a Jew and the Quran tells them to?

Altman, in her declaration, spoke of the fear that Israelis grow up on, which she knows very well. As a child, she was unable to fall asleep because of “the terrorist under the bed.” The army gives Israelis a feeling of security, she wrote.

“We embrace and celebrate military service as part of our personal and social identity, and rely on the army like a drug addict who longs for another hit so he’ll finally feel sane,” she wrote. “As a society, we don’t know anything else; all our lives, we’ve relied on the army. This is a normal situation for us. It’s absurd, isn’t it? In my view, a reality in which we familiarize our children with war before peace is crazy.”

A “feeling of security?” How about actual security? You live in Katzir, in northern Israel. There are 130,000 rockets aimed at you, Luhar Altman, and your family and friends. No wonder you had a hard time sleeping, and no wonder you found yourself addicted to the army. Take away the army, and you and your family are dead! That’s one hell of a withdrawal symptom. I’m so sorry you find the current reality to be “crazy,” but it would be much crazier without the IDF to defend you.

Hass continues,

Despite the differences between them (he writes “Palestinians,” while she writes “the other”; he speaks of the value of equality, which is being destroyed, and of the occupation, while she fears the cycle of violence that has persisted for 70 years), they decided to refuse to serve on the same day, and to hold a festive refusal event together at the induction center, along with their supporters and their families.

A “festive refusal event!” You two are so cute, living on Mars and in Israel at the same time. I hope you enjoy the festivities. Afterwards you’ll have a few months in prison, not a picnic (it’s not a party prison like Ahed Tamimi’s), but not a Midnight Express kind of experience either. When you get out, the army that you hate will continue to protect you, so you can go to university and be rewarded as artists, lawyers, or media personalities. Believe me, it will look good on your résumé.

Just a word about the Jewish Palestinian, Amira Hass. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she has chosen to throw in her lot with the enemies of the Jewish people. She is a latter-day Tokyo Rose, broadcasting anti-Israel propaganda from Ramallah. But unlike Tokyo Rose, she is paid well, and the Jewish state and people that she betrays daily will do nothing to her.

Everything in this story is surreal. Imagine: Hillel Garmi believes that Hamas is nonviolent, and Luhar Altman thinks that Israel should not have an army. And a Jewish Palestinian wishes for “many more like them.”

Worse, all agree that spitting in the face of the young Israelis who give several years of their lives to military service to defend the state that they live in, is an event worthy of celebration.

Posted in Israeli Society, Zionism | 5 Comments

But what about the Druze?

Posted on August 5, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I didn’t intend to write about the Nation-State Law again. I thought that I had explained my position that the law is an expression of what it means to be a Jewish state, and is essential to protect our Zionist heritage, which is being assaulted by the post-Zionist Israeli Left, by anti-nationalist (and anti-Jewish!) Europe, by politically “progressive” American Jewish groups, and – needless to add – by our Arab representatives in the Knesset.

I argued, as have numerous others (see here and here, for example), that there is an important distinction between individual civil and political rights, which are guaranteed to all Israeli citizens, and the national rights of the Jewish people. Those who think that ethnic nationalism and nation-states are outdated atavisms that should be removed from the world obviously don’t recognize the latter (although it’s interesting that their complaints seem to invariably target only Israel and not any of the dozens of other nation-states).

But anyway, I thought I was done. And then there was the demonstration in Tel Aviv yesterday, led by representatives of Israel’s Druze community, in which they made it clear that they believe that the law makes them “second-class citizens.” While I can argue all day that in fact the law does not damage their rights as citizens in any way, I can’t deny their feelings. It is clear that they mean this from their hearts.

If there could be such a thing as a model minority in an ethnic state, the Druze are it. They bear far more than a proportional burden of the defense of the state, they don’t embrace separatism, and they don’t ask for special treatment. If the Jewish state can’t get along with its Druze citizens, it can’t get along with any minority. And that would be disastrous indeed.

So what happened?

It started with long-standing, legitimate grievances about things like the availability of building permits in Druze towns, the allocation of funds for infrastructure and schools, and so on. Yes, their right to equal treatment was guaranteed by law, but somehow they didn’t get what they thought they were entitled to. They got promises that problems would be corrected, but it didn’t happen. Other groups – Haredim, the disabled, and LGBT activists – blocked main roads to press their cases, but the Druze confined their demonstrations to the areas near where they lived. Other groups used very strong language toward the government or went on strike, but the Druze were polite and kept doing their jobs in the army and the police, at the bleeding edge of the conflict with Arab terrorism.

Now the law was passed, and along came the Israeli Left and the representatives of the European-payrolled NGOs, and various politicians who saw an opportunity to embarrass the hated Netanyahu government, and they said to the Druze: “Look, you are second-class citizens. They have been screwing you all along because they don’t give your people the honor or respect they deserve, and now they are making a law to justify it.” Can you blame the Druze for agreeing? I can’t. If the state truly respected them, it wouldn’t ignore their grievances.

In this part of the world, nothing is more important than honor and respect. So it wasn’t enough for Bibi to promise that all of their practical concerns would finally be taken care of. Now it is a matter of honor, and that is a more complicated problem than building permits.

It’s ironic that the Left, which doesn’t understand or care about Jewish honor and self-respect, was able to understand that this was the way to drive a wedge between the state and the Druze. The same people that think that the way to stop Hamas from burning down our country is to remove restrictions on imports to Gaza or build them a port, who agree to exchange murderers for hostages at a ratio of 1000:1, who don’t get it that self-respect is important to Jews too, do understand that the Druze want to be respected.

Regardless, the anti-Zionist coalition played it smart, and we let it go by. We allowed them to define the narrative in terms of a racist majority systematically oppressing minorities. We gave them the ammunition to use against us with the Druze.

What can we do now?

I don’t have a good answer. I see the law as absolutely necessary to protect the Jewish state against the post-Zionist elite and the European-funded NGOs that have been using our legal system, and especially the left-leaning Supreme Court, as a weapon to replace Zionism with a form of social democracy as the basis of our state – and in the process replace the Jewish state with a “state of its citizens” that would soon become another Arab state.

But I also see the reaction of the Druze to the law as a major failure of our leadership. Had they addressed the real concerns of the Druze when they should have, maybe the appeal from the enemies of Zionism wouldn’t have found fertile ground. And obviously the first thing that has to happen now is that discrimination of any kind against Druze communities and individuals has to end. Immediately. I’m sure there are countless bureaucratic reasons why change takes time, but time is up for this particular change. There has to be visible action on the ground, not more promises.

The injury to the honor of the Druze people also has to be addressed. But at the same time, it is not possible to weaken the basic principles of the Nation-State Law. The distinction between individual rights and national rights is the key to making this possible, as well as making sure that in all practical matters, there is equality of treatment of Jews and minorities. Perhaps one thing that could be done would be to add a clause about equality of all citizens to the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which has already been interpreted by the Supreme Court to imply it.

I think we can get this fixed, but it will take some time.

Finally, it would behoove us as residents of the Middle East to once and for all internalize that fact, in particular the importance here of such concepts as honor, respect, and narrative. It would help us to better understand both our friends and our enemies – and to avoid errors like this in the future.

Posted in Israeli Politics, Israeli Society, Post-Zionism, The Jewish people, Zionism | 1 Comment

Our cognitive enemies

Posted on August 3, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

The missiles are falling all over Israel, their multi-ton payloads blasting the Jewish state, built at such great cost in human effort and blood over the past 70 years, to bits.

I am not talking about physical missiles. They are infrequent today, as we experience a slow period in the long, traditional war that our regional enemies have been waging against the Jews of the land of Israel since the days of the British Mandate. No, I am referring to blows being struck in the cognitive war that has been going on since the 1960s. In this arena, there is no intermission. The cognitive war is raging today at white heat.

In cogwar world the enemies are not precisely the same as in the kinetic war. Here we are also fighting Arabs and Iranians, but our most serious enemies are Western European governments, forces based in the USA, like the New Israel Fund and the Union for Reform Judaism, and post-Zionist intellectuals here in Israel.

One of the central battles is over the Nation-State Law just passed by the Knesset. If you haven’t read it, you must, in order to understand the paradox of how a law with almost no practical effect can create so much fury in its opponents. What happened is that the law blew open the uneasy truce between those who aspire to fulfil the vision of Herzl to create a democratic and free state that will nevertheless be a state of and for the Jewish people, and those who want Israel to be nothing more than a modern, democratic state that happens to have (at least for a while) a Jewish majority.

This is a legitimate conversation that can and should be had. For myself, I believe that it is possible for Israel to be, in a significant and fundamental sense, the nation-state of the Jewish people, while still providing equal rights for members of minority groups. This new law, which explicates the meaning of “the nation-state of the Jewish people” is part of the answer that the majority of Israel’s Jews have given to the question.

The opposition to the Nation-State Law is couched in the most inflammatory language possible, including epithets like “racist” and “apartheid.” This is nonsense and is part of a larger campaign to paint the Likud government as made up of right-wing extremists. According to PM Netanyahu and others, the New Israel Fund (NIF) is actively encouraging members of Israel’s minority groups to oppose the law.

Many other issues are brought up for the same purpose and in the same exaggerated way. For example, the controversies about the recognition of non-Orthodox forms of Judaism in Israel have no relevance for any but a tiny fraction of Israelis; yet the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) in America has established a lobbying and activism arm in Israel which seems to exist mainly to provoke crises that can be used to vilify the government. It also is doing its best to introduce an American-style obsession with race and racism into Israeli discourse.

Attempts by the government to deport illegal African migrants also received the same treatment, by the same players. Again the accusation of racism was deployed, despite the very real damage that this population continues to do to the residents of South Tel Aviv, and despite the fact that Israel went to great lengths to bring black African Jews to Israel. Again, various NGOs, the NIF, and the URJ vehemently attacked the government for its policy.

Another more recent issue to explode in this way is the the law that regulates how the health funds can pay for surrogate mothers in Israel. Although the PM promised that this benefit would be extended to include gay male couples, he gave in to pressure from religious elements in the coalition and opposed it. There was a massive demonstration and even a nationwide strike in protest. The PM was denounced as illiberal, anti-democratic, and homophobic, but at worst he was pragmatically keeping his coalition intact.

Everything negative that happens in Israel is blown up and appears in the New York Times, CNN, and other liberal/progressive media as an example of Israeli depravity. The stupid arrest of a rabbi for violating a stupid law forbidding anyone from performing a Jewish marriage without approval from the Rabbinate was a top news item (Israel’s Attorney General immediately ordered the rabbi’s release, and even ultra-observant Haredi rabbis criticized the arrest).

The pattern is always the same. In each case, a coalition of the Israeli and foreign left-leaning media, foreign-funded Israeli NGOs, outside players like the URJ, J Street, and the NIF, attack Israel, her government, and the Prime Minister. Even Trump’s move of the American Embassy to Jerusalem was criticized by these groups. Going back further, many of them supported Obama’s Iran deal, which in hindsight has been exposed to be as bad as opponents said it was.

This is a coordinated assault whose objective is to convince those who think of themselves as liberal and pro-democracy that Israel is a backward, undemocratic, racist theocracy.

You say this is just rough-and-tumble Israeli politics as usual?

I disagree. Traditionally, opposition politicians criticized the government and the Prime Minister (and when speaking for foreign consumption, they rarely even did that). Sometimes they threw water on other members (video here), but they did not attack the country itself. They did not conspire with foreign elements to disseminate anti-Israel propaganda.

The media, especially Ha’aretz, are even worse than the politicians. Reading the Ha’aretz English edition – very popular among foreign government officials – one could as well be reading Al Jazeera’s website (in fact, Ha’aretz writers are far more contemptuous of Israel and Israelis than Al Jazeera’s).

The Knesset passed a law two years ago that Israeli NGOs that receive more than half of their financing from foreign governments have to report it. The law was passed against strong opposition in a form far weaker than what was originally proposed. It was in reaction to the more and more outrageous actions of several dozen Israeli NGOs that function as subversive, anti-state agents (for example, Breaking the Silence, which travels the world spreading lies about the IDF). Their money comes mostly from European governments and charities, but also from the US, particularly the Rockefeller Brothers fund and the NIF. There is also money coming into this shadowy enterprise from charities linked to George Soros, whose anti-Zionism is well-known.

Together, the foreign-funded NGOs, the NIF and URJ, the anti-Zionist media in Israel and overseas, and much of Israel’s academic and cultural elite join the anti-Zionist Arab members of the Knesset in waging cognitive warfare against the state.

Time and again polls show that the majority of Jewish Israelis support the supposedly “hard line” government, which is actually very centrist and not at all extreme. But, ironically, that doesn’t seem to matter to these champions of “democracy!”

To re-engineer an old antisemitic phrase, as a Zionist, some of my worst enemies are Jews.

Posted in Information war, Israeli Politics, Post-Zionism | 2 Comments

On democracy

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

The favorite complaint made by the Israeli Left and the American liberal Jewish establishment against anything the supposedly “right-wing” government of Israel does is that it is “undemocratic.”

They do not usually define the concept of democracy, but they are certain that the nation-state law, and the NGO transparency law, and the campaign to rectify the imbalance between the Supreme Court and the Knesset, and the surrogacy law, are “undemocratic.”

So what is democracy, anyway? It seems to me that there is one basic idea along with several conditions that are necessary for it to be realized. The basic idea is something like this:

The citizens of a state express their will through free and fair elections, and the government governs according to this will.

No country has a pure democracy, in which all or even most decisions are taken by referendum. Therefore every democracy has some kind of arrangement for representative government. In Israel this is implemented by a system in which the citizens vote for a party, which puts up a national list of candidates for the Knesset. Members of the Knesset are then elected from each list in proportion to the vote their party received. In the US and UK, members of governing bodies represent geographical entities. There are countless ways of doing this, each with advantages and disadvantages.

In order for the government to behave in a way that reflects the will of the people, it isn’t enough to simply have a representative structure. There are some other conditions that need to be met in order for elections to be free and fair, and in order to ensure that the government, once established, does reflect the will of the people. Some of these conditions are:

Participation in elections. If only a small percentage votes, the result will not express the general will of the citizens.

Secret and secure ballots. Citizens must not face pressures to vote one way or another, and their votes must be honestly counted.

A free press and free flow of information in society. Citizens must have the opportunity to understand the issues in order to vote sensibly.

Civil rights. The government has an obligation to protect its citizens and must not interfere with their normal lives any more than is absolutely necessary. Freedom of speech and assembly are essential. The government must be for the people, not against them.

Rule of law. The government itself must act according to the laws of the state, particularly when it acts to take away property or freedom from its citizens. There should always be avenues of appeal or redress for citizens against illegal behavior by the state.

Checks and balances. Mechanisms should be provided to ensure that corrupt or incompetent officials can be removed. The government is expected to carry out the general will of the citizens, which is understood as the will of the majority, as long as this doesn’t contradict the basic principles of the state. So, for example, it must not be possible for the majority to vote to deny civil rights that are constitutionally guaranteed to minority citizens. Democracy doesn’t imply a tyranny of the majority.

There are other requirements for a decent society to be sure, but it seems to me that the above are the requirements for a state to be called democratic.

The nation-state law does not violate any of the above principles. It doesn’t even come close. Yes, Israel’s Arab minority dislikes the national anthem, Hatikva, and the flag. It would like Arabic to have the same status as Hebrew. It would like a lot of things to be different, but none of the things they dislike detract from their civil rights. Their rights to vote and hold office, to earn a living, to have their children educated, to receive benefits from Israel’s National Insurance Institute, and to participate in Israel’s health care system have not been abridged. Government forms and road signs that are in Arabic as well as Hebrew will continue to be.

The law asserts that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. But it does not say that only Jews can vote. It does not prevent Arabs from expressing their opinions. Whether you believe that it is racist, unnecessary, or absolutely vital, it does not affect the democratic nature of the state one way or the other.

The NGO transparency law that was passed two years ago is another bête noire of the Israeli Left. Like the nation-state law, the bill that was finally passed was much weaker than the initial version. It requires NGOs that receive more than half of their funding from foreign governments to report that; failure to do so incurs a fine that is much smaller than said foreign funds.

The claim that this law is undemocratic is exactly the opposite of the truth. Here we have hostile European countries financing organizations that are working to subvert the democratically elected government of Israel, and quite frankly to aid Israel’s deadly enemies. Clearly, this very enterprise is opposed to the democratic principle that Israel’s citizens that should determine policy in this country, not citizens of Germany and Norway. True democracy demands more than disclosure; foreign interference should be prohibited.

The powers of the Israeli Supreme Court have expanded – the Court itself expanded them – to the point that it has become impossible for the Knesset to pass any law that the Left (and the left-leaning Court) doesn’t approve of (the nation-state law has already been challenged, and will present interesting legal issues since it is a Basic Law). The Court has become far more than a legitimate check on the legislature – it has become a political actor in its own right.

Attempts to change the process for selecting justices of the Court to provide more balance, and proposals to allow for a super-majority of the Knesset to override Court decisions, have been attacked as – you guessed it – undemocratic. In truth, what hurts democracy is an unelected elite that can and does stymie the legislative process that is supposed to realize the will of the citizens.

Finally, another example of misunderstanding the concept of democracy can be found in the controversy over the surrogacy law. Since 1996, the Israeli health system has paid for surrogate mothers in Israel for heterosexual couples in which the woman is unable to carry a child. Recently the law was expanded to include single women; but despite promises from the PM and others, gay men were not included. This gave rise to a huge outcry, traffic-stopping demonstrations, and the claim that the law was undemocratic.

The law itself is not undemocratic. It is possibly unfairly discriminatory, and reprehensible for other reasons, but it has nothing to do with democracy. Gay men can still vote, hold political office, and make their opinions known. Their civil and human rights are not impacted by the government’s refusal to extend this particular benefit to them (it is not a right to have the government pay for a surrogate).

On the other hand, what may well be undemocratic is the religious parties’ use of their power to upset the coalition in order to defeat the will of the majority of Israeli citizens, which probably supports the extension of surrogacy benefits to gay men. The process by which the decision was made may have been undemocratic, but the decision itself is not. Israel is not a perfect democracy, and the ability of minority parties in a coalition to hold the government hostage is one of its most serious imperfections.

True democracy is difficult to obtain, and difficult to keep. We are fortunate in Israel to have the degree of democracy that we have – most of the world’s peoples live with far less. Nevertheless, we must struggle to keep and improve it. Words have meanings, and misusing them only makes it harder to have the necessary conversations.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 2 Comments

The root of our conflict goes deeper than you thought

Posted on July 27, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

If you read a history book or today’s newspaper, you will see certain kinds of conflicts that repeat themselves, time and again. There are economic conflicts, situations in which one group wants something – land or property – that another group has. And there are ethnic/religious/racial conflicts, conflicts based on the perception of members of a different group as an enemy, simply because they belong to that group.

Very often there is a conflict in which both kinds of motivations are mixed, but it seems to me that the ethnic part brings a special kind of viciousness and persistence that is not found in purely economic conflicts. A purely economic conflict can operate on a rational level, where benefits are weighed against costs, while an ethnic one can escalate through a kind of feedback mechanism so that even suicidal actions can seem justified if they hurt the enemy. And they can go on forever.

Sometimes the leaders of a group will encourage ethnic hatred in order to motivate their people to fight for primarily economic objectives. It’s an effective technique, but sometimes the inter-group hatred gets out of control and conflict continues long after the economic motive is gone.

Ethnic conflicts are found throughout history. I think of the Hebrews and Amalek, the Armenians and the Turks, and of course the Jews and the Arabs in the land of Israel. In fact, it seems to me that nothing is more characteristic of humans than inter-group suspicion, hatred, and aggression.

Human attempts to change this fundamental behavior have consistently failed. The South African reconciliation process was intended to short-circuit the continuation of conflict associated with the end of apartheid by rehabilitating the victims, exposing the abuses, and punishing or in some cases giving amnesty to the perpetrators. While it seemed to have had a certain degree of success, recent events suggest that racial animosity is welling up there again.

In the US, 50 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the last major legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, feelings of animosity between blacks and whites are as strong or stronger than they were in 1968.

Need I add that antisemitism has reached levels throughout the world unmatched since the period prior to WWII? Or that conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims have broken out almost everywhere there is an interface between them?

It’s time to stop treating this kind of behavior as an aberration and to realize that ethnic, religious, and racial hatred and aggression is normal human behavior, probably biologically based. So how can we act to minimize the damage it does?

The liberal and social-democratic establishment in the world thinks it has a solution: it is to increase diversity; that is, to mix ethnic, religious, and racial groups in every possible environment so that the members of the various groups will get to know each other and understand that they are all humans. Once they understand each other (the theory says), animosity and mistrust will dissipate. At the same time, the economic status of all groups should be improved so that none will be worse off than the others. If people understand each other and don’t envy other groups, the argument goes, there will be no room for conflict.

Unfortunately, this same establishment has also been at pains to promulgate a world-view in which certain groups are defined as oppressed by other groups. They believe that “oppressed” groups should be compensated by being given special advantages over the “oppressors,” or even (as in South Africa) by being given property confiscated from “oppressors.” Naturally, any improvement in relations brought about by diversity is immediately overwhelmed by the resentment this creates – among both the “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups).

There’s a fundamental problem with diversity itself. In a diverse environment, each group tries to maximize its power and ownership of common resources. This expresses itself as political divisiveness along ethnic lines, the situation so familiar to us in the Middle East. These political groups then provide a focus for conflict. Thus the presence of Arab members in Israel’s Knesset doesn’t serve to improve relations between Jews and Arabs, but rather brings about political conflict as those representatives look for issues with which to set themselves apart from the Jewish Knesset members – and become even more extreme in order to distinguish themselves from the other Arabs.

Promoting diversity, in other words, increases tensions, which leads to conflict. But there is an opposite approach, which is to move in the opposite direction from diversity, and reduce conflict by separating antagonistic groups.

How does this apply to the situation of Israel and the Palestinians?

Ze’ev Jabotinsky understood the inescapability of ethnic conflict between Jews and Arabs. His solution was that the creation of a Jewish majority and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty should be carried out despite Arab opposition, by force if necessary. Once those things were obtained and it was clear to the Arabs that they would not be given up, it might become possible to reach a modus vivendi with them.

Meir Kahane also understood. But he believed that it was impossible for a sovereign Jewish state to contain a sizeable Arab minority and survive. According to Kahane, coexistence is not an option.

Both Jabotinsky and Kahane disagreed with the liberal conventional wisdom that diversity, dialogue, and economic improvements could end ethnic/religious/racial hatred. Recent history, in Israel and other places, has borne them out.

We must understand that we will never make the Palestinians like us, or even stop wanting to kill us. Understanding won’t help, and neither will generous aid. Separation from them is the best way to reduce conflict.

What that would mean in practice is a hard question. The Left wants us to chop off part of our homeland, find some unspecified magic solution to the security nightmare that this would create, and everything would be fine. Except there is no magic solution, and the nightmare would be a deadly reality.

Martin Sherman has suggested (Part I and Part II, also FAQ I and FAQ II) that we incentivize emigration of the Arabs from the territories to third countries, financially and otherwise. Perhaps the only truly rational answer, and one which would probably produce the least misery for everyone involved, Sherman’s ideas have not gotten any traction among decision-makers in Israel or the US, and certainly not among the Palestinians.

Why do they hate us? It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth arguing about who started it and who’s right or wrong, except as an academic exercise. What is important is that the conflict is not amenable to solutions that don’t involve one or the other party stepping aside.

Let it be them.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 2 Comments

Why they hate the Nation-State Law

Posted on July 23, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

The Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People was finally passed a few days ago.

The practical, concrete consequences are minimal. There will be neither more nor fewer Arabic road signs. Nobody will lose their right to vote or serve in the Knesset or as a judge as a result of this law. Nobody will be expelled or imprisoned. No religion will be banned, no newspapers closed. As Eugene Kontorovich said, there is nothing in it that is more aggressively ethnically nationalist than any number of national constitutions, including the constitution of the proposed state of “Palestine,” which states that Palestine is an Arab nation, the national religion is Islam, the source of legislation is shari’a, and the national language is Arabic.

The most controversial part of it declares that “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation,” something that Kontorovich notes is simply a restatement of the commitment to “close [Jewish] settlement on the land” made in the British Mandate. Much of the law is a reprise of ideas that appeared in the Declaration of Independence.

If you don’t believe me, read it. Then tell me exactly how it is “the death of democracy” in Israel.

If you listen to Arab members of the Knesset, representatives of the EU and numerous governments in the Middle East, the Israeli Left, the ADL, and the Union for Reform Judaism in the US, you will hear that the new law is Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws and the Confederate Declaration of Independence rolled into one. But there is nothing racist in it.

The hysteria is remarkable, but it is not because the law says anything new. Some of the opposition is simply politics, because it was passed by a Likud government whose head is Benjamin Netanyahu. Tzipi Livni declared that the sole purpose of the law was to help Netanyahu in the next election (indeed, it should). The final version that was passed by the Knesset was much weaker in many respects than older versions; but this did not in general defuse the anger it created.

To understand what is going on, you don’t need to look harder at the law; you need to look at its opponents. Their problem is not with the law’s (minimal) practical consequences or because of the possible interpretation of one clause or another. Their problem is with the whole idea.

The law is like a powerful X-ray beam that exposes the presence or absence of Zionist bones in those it shines upon.

Of course the Arab members of the Knesset disliked it enough to tear it up. Their belief, as Avi Dichter, one of the original writers of the law, said, is that this land is their homeland alone. This isn’t surprising. It’s probably true that the Arab MKs are more extreme than most of their constituents, but it’s also true that there is a strong current of nationalism in Israel’s Arab citizens, and this naturally conflicts with Zionism. This conflict isn’t going to go away by pretending that it isn’t there. Either we will give up the idea of a Jewish state, or the Arabs will get used to it, or we’ll fight another war with them over it. There aren’t any other alternatives.

The Europeans and American Reform Jews have always been uncomfortable with the idea of a Jewish state. They dislike nationalism and conflate it with racism. But Zionism was born as a reaction to European racist Jew-hatred, and is the only answer to it (and, it turns out, to Muslim Jew-hatred as well). This isn’t just Herzl’s theory or mine; it is a fact that has been and is being empirically demonstrated by history and current events. The American Reform solution, to assimilate culturally while trying to maintain some connection to Jewish tradition, has failed. Their movement is a dead man walking, and even if it does survive in some form, it will not be recognizably Jewish. The Jewish people can only survive as a distinct people in a Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-majority nation – although even here, there are no guarantees.

One way we could lose our Jewish national identity, even in Israel, would be if we gave up the idea of a Jewish state. It’s tempting to some to try to end the discord between Arab and Jewish citizens by changing Israel into a “state of its citizens,” like the US and other Western democracies. It would make so many things easier. We could stop worrying about maintaining a Jewish majority, since we would all be “Israelis.” The African migrants in South Tel Aviv would not be a threat, just another population to absorb and integrate into our society (and I’m sure we could do that successfully, given time). We could replace our Law of Return with a system of legal immigration, as they have in other democracies, like Canada. We could even absorb some Palestinian “refugees.”

I’m sure Gideon Levy and his publisher at Ha’aretz would applaud. But do you doubt that this would be the beginning of the end of a distinct Jewish people in history? Do you think that Europeans would shed their antisemitism? Would Muslims in the new “Israel” be happy with a Western-style democracy, or would they try to turn it into a shari’a-compliant state? I think you know the answers.

Zionism and the Jewish state came into being for a reason: to preserve and protect the Jewish people. It is still the only way to do that. This law was passed because there are those who would prefer a non-Zionist state (although not all of them would describe their position that way) and they are trying, little by little, to transform Israel into one. There is a Supreme Court which consistently values individual rights over the collective good of the Jewish majority, and which apparently sees no value at all in Jewish settlement. The law is intended to set a bottom line, to build a fence around the fundamental Zionist principles of the state and keep them from eroding. It also makes an explicit statement about what kind of state we are and aspire to be.

So in a way, while the immediate consequences on the ground are few, the importance of the new law in the long run is great. And that is why the anti-Zionist opposition to it is so strident.

Posted in Israeli Politics, The Jewish people, Zionism | 3 Comments

The perverse and vicious Palestinian “refugee” weapon

Posted on July 20, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Suppose someone told you that they wanted to take a billion and a half dollars of American and European taxpayer money each year, and use it to raise an army.

It would feed and house more than five million people, and educate the children to prepare them for the future role as soldiers to overrun a particular country. The teachers would in many (or most) cases be members of organizations recognized in your country as terrorist groups.

This army would be required to live in camps in various countries. But its soldiers would not be allowed to become citizens of those countries.

Membership in the army would be hereditary, and child allowances would be calibrated to incentivize reproduction. There would be no need for members to work, since they would receive a dole regardless of employment. In any case, there are few options for work in the camps.

The members do not have passports. They are not allowed to settle anywhere else in the world. They are told that the only way to change their status is to overrun the target country and take “back” their homes from the current residents. But only 0.4% of them ever lived in the target country, and this was more than 70 years ago.

Of course I am talking about “Palestinian refugees” and the organization that supports and nurtures them is called UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.

In the sad history of the 20th century, millions of people became refugees. After WWII, Jews could not return to Europe, and ethnic Germans were kicked out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In 1948, about 650,000 Arabs fled from what became the new state of Israel; and immediately afterwards some 800,000 Jews escaped unfriendly Arab countries. Many of these refugees lost all of their property and were forced to flee with just the clothes on their backs.

Most of these refugees found new places to live, and in many cases had to start over from nothing. Most of the Germans went to Germany, although some ended up in the Soviet Gulag. The Jews of Europe went to Israel, America, and other places. The Jews from the Arab world were mostly absorbed by the new state of Israel. By the mid-1950s, most of these refugees had new homes – all but the Palestinian Arabs.

The Arab nations were unhappy that they lost the war they launched against Israel in 1948. So they came up with a brilliant plan to create a weapon that could be used to destroy Israel, a weapon that would automatically grow stronger with the passage of time, which would be a military, psychological, and diplomatic weapon all at the same time. Best of all, someone else would pay for it.

They invented the Palestinian refugee, a creature like no other refugee, because Palestinian refugee status in hereditary. They established UNRWA, an agency whose charter – unlike all other refugee relief agencies ever – was not to resettle refugees, but rather to increase their number. And the West, which pays almost all of the bills of the UN, bought into it out of cowardice and lack of will to oppose the Arabs, who had all that oil, after all.

And so the “refugee camps,” which more and more became to resemble permanent neighborhoods, came into being in several nations and became breeding grounds for recruits to the multiplicity of Palestinian terror organizations – Fatah, Hamas, PFLP, DFLP, PFLP-GC, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Abu Nidal group, etc. Unemployed young Palestinian men flocked to these groups in order to lend purpose to their lives. The growth of anti-Israel and international terrorism since 1960 was caused to a great degree by the activities of these groups. Palestinian terrorists popularized airline hijacking and suicide bombing, leading directly to 9/11 and other atrocities. Thus was the West paid back for its investment.

But the Malthusian logic of the Palestinian refugee system has finally caught up with it. There are about 5.2 million Arabs with Palestinian refugee status today, and the West can’t afford any more to feed, house, clothe, and “educate” them. The power of Arab oil is diminishing. The US is sharply cutting what it gives UNRWA.

The system is wrong in multiple ways. Hereditary and permanent refugee status is fiscally unsustainable for the Western donors, cruel to the “refugees,” destabilizing to the host countries, and a threat to the targeted country, Israel. There is no legal justification for it: despite Arab claims, there is no “right of return” for refugees in international law, and even less so a “right of return” for the descendants of refugees.

If you wonder why the Arab nations have allowed this system to continue, there is a simple reason, which I call the First Principle of Arab Leadership: it is always more important to hurt Jews than to help Arabs.

The US State Department produced a report on the Palestinian refugee situation during the Obama Administration which supposedly (it is classified) says that the actual number of true refugees – when counted by the criteria used for non-Palestinians – is actually closer to 30,000 than the 5.2 million that UNRWA claims today. Apparently the State Department believes that if the details in it were released, US contributions to UNRWA would be cut even further.

Which is what should happen. In fact, they should be cut to zero, and the terrorist-ridden organization disbanded. The Arab clients of UNRWA should be granted citizenship in their host countries, and funds for their absorption and integration into society transferred to these countries for a limited period of time. Hereditary refugee status should be abolished. The 30,000 who are actually refugees should be assisted by the normal UN refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which has been successful in resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees since 1950.

The system could be changed tomorrow, and it would not be too soon.

The fact that the Western countries have tolerated this perverse and vicious system for so long is a massive moral failure on their part. The UN, the European Union, and the US State Department share in the blame. Israel, the target of this infernal mechanism, has suffered wars and terrorism for decades because of it. And generations of “refugees” have had their chances for a normal life foreclosed.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Middle East politics, Terrorism | 1 Comment

New thinking required to defeat Hamas

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Back when music came on Bakelite discs that spun at 78 rpm, the very fragile records would crack easily. When you tried to play a cracked disc, often the stylus (what everyone called the “needle”) would strike the crack and slip back into the groove it had just played, causing the last few seconds of the music to repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

This is the genesis of the expression “like a broken record.” And I am like a broken record.

Friday night Israel was hit with about 174 rockets and mortar shells fired from Gaza by our enemies in Hamas and other factions, whose credo is that for reasons having to do with religion and a narrative of lies, the Jews of Israel should be dead. Several Israelis were injured when rockets hit a synagogue and a private home in the city of Sderot.

Those of you who are thinking “but occupation, blockade, cycle of violence, open-air prison, blah blah” and so on can stop reading. I have nothing to say to you. Go read Gideon Levy in Ha’aretz. If you don’t know by now that this conflict is about killing Jews because they are Jews, you aren’t going to learn, at least not from me. You are part of the problem.

The recent escalation comes after a 15-year old child soldier was shot trying to climb the border fence to kill Jews, and an IDF officer was seriously injured by a grenade thrown over the fence. And in the background is several months of arson by firebombs attached to kites and balloons sent over the fence, which have burned thousands of acres of farmland and nature reserves, destroying plants and animals that will take decades to return.

Israel retaliated by bombing Hamas installations and tunnels in Gaza. “The IDF hit Hamas with the harshest blow since Operation Protective Edge and we will intensify our reaction as much as necessary,” said PM Netanyahu Saturday. A crushing blow, supposedly. We heard the planes on their way Saturday morning, and thought “that’s it, now we are finally going to teach them that they can’t burn our country and get away with it.” But that isn’t what happened.

The “harshest blow” was delivered according to the doctrine apparently invented by the IDF, our political echelon, and 10,000 lawyers, called “War Fighting Without Hurting (Practically) Anybody” (WFWHPA). Thanks to WFWHPA, only two Gazans were killed by all of Israel’s retaliatory strikes, teenagers who apparently ignored warnings delivered an hour before a structure used by Hamas was destroyed.

A ceasefire agreement was reached Saturday night with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, broken only by a few mortar shells. But Islamic Jihad says the ceasefire doesn’t include incendiary devices, which was one of Israel’s main demands, and as I write this they have been trying to prove that it is their God-given right to burn our country.

So here is my (rhetorical) question: why and how did it happen that they got to set the rules?

The world allows them to hurt us as much as they are able. Most of the media, international organizations, and many governments appear to accept their point of view that “resistance to occupation” permits them to do whatever they want. We are forbidden to shoot the launchers of incendiary bombs, especially since some of them may be “children.” But they are permitted – or at least, excused – the use of child soldiers. They use human shields, shoot randomly at civilians, take hostages, burn our crops, and deliberately destroy our environment, all violations of international humanitarian law. But the champions of humanitarianism in Europe call for arresting Israeli officials for war crimes.

Unfortunately, even in Israel we have gotten used to it. We fight according to a technocratic cost-benefit principle. The IDF calculates that the cost of the arson campaign is less than the cost of a war. They calculate that it’s better to destroy Hamas’ property than its soldiers, because they have plenty of soldiers and limited money, and because of the propaganda value of dead Arabs (who can be called “civilians” or “children,” as was done effectively in previous wars). Our leaders say “so what if they keep trying to kill us, because we are strong enough to stop them.” We can sit underneath our Iron Domes and improve our ability to locate and put out fires, and we won’t even notice that our enemies are trying to kill us and turn our land into smoke and ashes.

There are two problems with this. One is that it doesn’t work. We won’t let Hamas fall, because we are afraid of the alternatives, which are even more extreme groups or anarchy. We are afraid of a humanitarian disaster, which would be blamed on us. So in any event the cost-benefit warfare won’t be carried to a natural conclusion, the end of the Hamas regime. In addition, our declared enemies in Iran and our undeclared ones in Europe will always find a way to prop it up. This kind of war will go on forever.

The second problem is that it is a recipe for losing the cognitive war against the broader coalition of our enemies, which stretches far beyond the Middle East. It damages our own morale: our PM brags about how someone said we are the 8th most powerful country in the world, but try explaining that to the people sitting in shelters in Sderot or the kibbutzniks in the “Gaza envelope” racing to put out the fires breaking out everywhere. But more than that, what picture does it present throughout the world: the cowering, victimized Jews, brought to their knees by the low-tech (but courageous!) youth of Gaza.

It is as if we are saying “go ahead, hit me again.” We Jews must deserve it, because we never hit back. Our strategy announces that we are weaklings, cowards, and evil oppressors all at the same time. Goebbels couldn’t have expressed it better.

We need to win both the kinetic and the cognitive wars. We can do both by actually confronting and defeating our enemy. That requires certain changes in our attitudes.

First, we have to stop worrying about the poor, victimized population of Gaza. They supported Hamas (it won a relatively fair election there), or the Islamic Jihad or the PLO, all of which are officially dedicated to killing Jews. Yes, it’s wrong to deliberately target civilians – and you Brits and Americans who criticize us should look into what the US Army’s bombers and the RAF did to Germany in WWII (google “strategic bombing”) – but the primary goal is to win the war.

Second, we need to understand and act on the proposition that Gaza is not our responsibility. Hamas and friends have been making war against us since they got power in 2007, and it’s time to destroy their ability to do so any more. What happens after that is the responsibility of the international community, which nurtured the nest of vipers with billions from UNRWA and other aid.

And third, we must start realizing that we have a right to be here. For decades, we have been acting as though we too accept the anti-Zionist propaganda that flows from Muslim countries and Europe, and their tool, the UN. We are the oldest indigenous inhabitants of the land, the natives. Nothing epitomizes our failure to assert our aboriginal rights to the land more than the way we have clung to the disastrous Oslo accords, long after it became clear that the Palestinians do not accept those rights.

We don’t need to feel guilty for establishing a sovereign state in our historic homeland – and we don’t owe the local Arabs any of it.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, War | 3 Comments