The Nation-State Law rises again

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Five years since its initial introduction by MK Avi Dichter, the Nation State Bill is being hotly debated in the Knesset once again.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence announced the creation of “A Jewish state in Eretz-Israel,” and added,

The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

These principles are generally referred to by saying that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state. The democratic part is further explicated by several Basic Laws including those that describe the details of Israel’s political democracy, and which guarantee individual rights, liberty, and dignity.

(That isn’t to say that the state always lives up to these commitments. For example, two recent serious lapses have been the treatment of the young suspects in the Duma arson/murder case, who were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the persistent leakage of transcripts from the police investigations of PM Netanyahu and Sara Netanyahu, both of which appear to violate the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty).

Basic Laws serve the function of a constitution in Israel, and because they serve as touchstones for court decisions (especially the Supreme Court), have great influence. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty is especially frequently cited by the Supreme Court.

The concept of the state’s Jewishness, however, is not elucidated any further by existing Basic Laws. Many Israelis (I among them) feel that there is an imbalance in the Basic Laws, such that the Jewish nature of the state is often in practice subordinated to its democratic nature. This feeling could be expressed by saying that there is more to a Jewish state than just a Jewish majority. Or, to put it another way, a Jewish majority is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a Jewish state. This is addressed by the attempt to pass a new Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.

The reason the bill is so controversial – despite the present version being highly watered down – is that there are competing visions of what the State of Israel should be. One view, which is preferred by Arab citizens and the Jewish Left, is that it should be a liberal democracy, period. Many Arabs would also like to see ethnically-neutral national symbols. Some would even prefer a binational state, with the Arab minority given a veto power over laws passed by the Knesset, a Law of Return for Arabs, and more (the Haifa Declaration of a committee of Israeli Arab academics is an extreme example).

As long as there is a Jewish majority, that isn’t likely to happen. But there is also a view that the Jewishness of the state is simply a function of its Jewish majority, and the only special benefit provided to Jews is the Law of Return. The Jewish character of the state, by this view, comes from the fact that Jews are in the majority and will naturally determine the symbols, holidays, language, and culture of the state.

Finally there is the position, reflected by those that favor the passage of a nation-state law, that Israel should explicitly define herself as a Jewish state. Having basic principles anchored in law could be practically important. For example, the current version of the nation-state bill in the Knesset includes the statement that “The State will act to ingather the exiles of Israel and to promote Jewish settlement in its territory and it shall allocate resources for these purposes.” In a case involving a conflict between claims of individual property rights and a settlement in Judea/Samaria, the courts would have to give weight to the need to promote Jewish settlement, and perhaps find a solution short of demolition.

Or, for example, consider that someone might petition the Supreme Court to improve access to the Temple Mount for Jews on the basis that “The holy sites shall be protected against desecration and all other damage and against anything that would interfere with freedom of access of religious groups to places holy to them or to their sensibilities regarding said holy sites,” one of the clauses in the law.

There is also the more abstract value of making explicit Israel’s primary function as a vehicle for Jewish self-determination, as well as the responsibilities of the state to the Jewish people as a homeland and a refuge. It might seem obvious to some Israelis, but not to others and certainly not to the rest of the world.

Parts of the bill are very controversial, like one that gives the right to a “community” (without defining that, except to say that ethnic and religious categories are included) to establish a “separate community settlement” where members of a different “community” would not be accepted. Yesterday’s Knesset debate about this was highly acrimonious, with several members being removed for bad behavior. President Rivlin, in a rare foray into politics, wrote a letter strongly opposing this clause, and my guess is that it will be significantly changed or removed from the final law.

In the next week or so, the bill will have its final two readings in the Knesset, and proponents say that they have the votes to pass it even in its present form (which I doubt, given the storm produced by the President’s letter).

Some who object to the law ask “Who needs it? We know who we are. It will damage the state among the peoples of the world.”

Israel is a special kind of state, in fact the only one of its kind. It is not only an ethnic nation-state, it is probably the only one established by the return of a nation to its homeland after a prolonged exile, and one whose first principles include the necessity of being a refuge for a persecuted people.

It is presently weathering an intensely hostile political climate in a world where ethnic nationalism is considered evil, both in the abstract and in particular for the Jewish people.

Rather than hide who we are, we should broadcast it. It might not make the world like us any more, but at least they will better understand what we are fighting for.

Posted in Israeli Politics, The Jewish people, Zionism | 5 Comments

Restraint, the strategy of defeat

Posted on July 9, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others. – Niccolo Machiavelli

It’s been reported that indirect negotiations are underway with Hamas for the release of two Israelis and the bodies of two soldiers that they are holding. Germany and Egypt are said to be involved in the negotiations. Needless to add, part of the price for their release will be the freeing of murderers associated with Hamas who are now in Israeli jails.

Some say that one reason the IDF is not taking stronger action (read: any action at all) against the terrorists that are launching incendiary devices that have burned thousands of acres in southern Israel is the sensitivity of these negotiations. Another reason is that officials are worried about tension of the northern borders and would prefer to avoid a two-front war. And the IDF also wants to finish the enormously expensive anti-tunnel barrier they are building along the frontier.

I understand the arguments for this policy. But it is wrong in every way.

Deterrence is created by conditioning the enemy to expect a painful response to aggressive behavior. If we train them to expect a minimal or no response, then they escalate their aggression, and it becomes the status quo. Today it has become normal that Hamas is burning our land. It has become normal for them to hold on to any Israeli, dead or alive, that they can get their hands on.

We have things backwards. We are the stronger power, and thus Hamas should be the ones begging for negotiations. Instead of using our power to force them to release hostages and stop setting fires, we deliberately restrain ourselves and thus allow them to control our behavior.

We are not deterring them. They are deterring us.

I can imagine the anguish of the families involved, both those of the soldiers whose bodies are in the hands of the ghouls of Hamas, and those whose apparently mentally disturbed family members wandered across the border. But Israel is full of families who will never stop feeling the pain of their loss, including some, like the families of Ron Arad, Zechariah Baumel, Tzvi Feldman, Yehuda Katz, and Guy Hever, who will never even have the (small) comfort of knowing where their sons are buried or even the certainty that they are dead.

I wonder how many prisoners Hamas wants in return for our four. The Gilad Shalit affair set a precedent of roughly 1000 to 1. I wonder what else they are demanding.

In the north, the situation in Lebanon is a direct result of our restraint. Hezbollah built up its strike force over a period of 12 years, from 2006. What were we doing during those 12 years? Did we notice what was happening? Of course we did. But we allowed the buildup to become normal. Even our “right-wing” Prime Minister from 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has both military experience and an understanding of history superior to most of his contemporaries, didn’t appear to worry about it – until, it seems, one day he woke up and realized that in the event of war Hezbollah could fire thousands of rockets and longer range missiles every day at almost every point in Israel (to his credit, Netanyahu seems determined not to allow the same situation to take hold in Syria).

There are external forces that always work to prevent us from taking action. The UN, the EU, and the US prefer restraint to action. During the Obama years, enormous pressure was put on us to prevent Israel from striking Iran’s atomic bomb project, until Obama got his nuclear deal to lock us down. So now, if we have to use force in any event, Iran’s facilities are more hardened and better dispersed and defended.

There is another lockdown on the horizon. Details about the so-called “deal of the century” of the Trump Administration are beginning to surface. It seems that it will involve Israel accepting a hudna (a temporary truce) with Hamas, while international aid is used to rehabilitate Gaza, including building port facilities in Cyprus. There are many problems, starting with the fact that Hamas will not be required to disarm. Once the deal is in place, there will be no more “mowing the grass,” as our periodic conflicts in Gaza have been called, and a massive buildup like Hezbollah’s in Lebanon will become a possibility. Perhaps pressure from the US to not upset the nascent deal is already one of the factors preventing us from responding to Hamas’ provocations.

Restraint as a policy is seductive. Nobody wants war, and there is always the risk that responding to aggression will bring about escalation, which will lead to all-out war. Calculations are made: we can become better at putting out fires, and we can afford to let some land burn, we can develop more effective ways to intercept firebombs. Better than dealing with a massive rocket attack on our towns, we think. Restraint, in the short term, is cheaper and more comfortable than maintaining deterrence.

But in addition to the obvious problems, like the military buildup of Hezbollah and Hamas or the progress of Iranian nuclear and missile programs, there are the psychological effects, both on us and our enemies. Every new rocket launcher and every burned field, every unbalanced prisoner exchange, encourages our enemies to believe that with perseverance they will achieve victory. From our point of view, every successful act of terrorism reduces our confidence that our leadership is capable of protecting us.

The policy of restraint does not send a message of strength, but rather of weakness. It buys a degree of peace and comfort in the short term for the price of insecurity and possibly war in the long term. It weakens deterrence and provides openings for “lockdowns” which can make it impossible to respond when provocations become intolerable. It invites conflict rather than deterring it. It is often an excuse for politicians to “kick the can down the road” rather than dealing with aggression.

Restraint is portrayed as the wiser, more mature policy than confrontation. It has a better reputation than its sister, appeasement, but in the end the result is the same: more violence, not less.

Posted in War | 7 Comments

What is it about us?

Posted on July 6, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Today I read a very interesting piece by Times of Israel editor David Horovitz, an interview with David Brog, who runs Sheldon Adelson’s Macabee Task Force. The objective is to fight delegitimization of Israel and BDS on college campuses; but rather than applying a predetermined formula, the group cooperates with local pro-Israel students and community members to determine what works, in a very practical way. It was fascinating to me, as someone who spent years trying to counteract anti-Israel incitement in my own small community – and to a great extent, failed to do so.

One paragraph that stuck in my mind was this:

…when it comes to demonizing Israel on campus, there is no comparable effort focused on any other country. No remotely comparable effort. There’s intensive, relentless bashing of Israel… and of no other nation on earth. Not Syria, where President Bashar Assad has massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people. Not North Korea, which runs re-education and concentration camps. Not Venezuela, Cambodia or Afghanistan, which head the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index. Not China or Russia, singled out in the latest US State Department report on human rights practices. Not Yemen, Turkey or Saudi Arabia, prominently criticized in Amnesty International’s latest human rights audit. Just Israel. Israel. And Israel.

What is true on American campuses is true for Western society as a whole. As Brog notes, here and there one finds demonstrations or campaigns for one cause or another, but anti-Israel agitation and propaganda is everywhere, despite the fact that the relative number of people hurt or killed in our little conflict is minuscule. Bashar al-Assad has killed half a million Syrians and turned his country into a bloody shambles, and yet he gets less media coverage than Israel killing a few dozen Palestinians trying to penetrate our border and murder our citizens.

This almost cries out for a conspiracy theory. Who is behind it? Who pays the bills and gives the orders? The answer is “quite a lot of people,” and while some of them are secretive, it is not exactly a conspiracy. Financing comes from governments of disparate nations like Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (despite our new-found common cause), Germany, Norway and Sweden; from the EU and the UN; from Oxfam, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the multiple charitable enterprises associated with George Soros; from the Danish National Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Mennonite Central Committee, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Presbyterian Church USA; and from the pockets of millions of liberal Americans, mostly Jewish, who give to the New Israel Fund or J Street.

That’s just a small sample, which doesn’t begin to cover all of the sources of funding for anti-Israel causes. Did you participate in one of the US-wide CROP Hunger Walks sponsored by Church World Service? Then you, too, became part of the worldwide demonization-of-Israel project. Many other charitable organizations support the Palestinian Cause (the end of the Jewish state) in one way or another. Are you a college student in the US or the parent of one? Then the student activities fee that you or your child pays supports Students for Justice in Palestine, which has almost 200 active chapters in American universities.

It made news when Black Lives Matter (now called The Movement for Black Lives) published its platform which accuses Israel of “genocide” against the Palestinians and calls it an “apartheid state.” But virtually every progressive or left-wing group – including the left wing of the US Democratic Party and the British Labor Party – shares its point of view. The leaders of South Africa’s ruling ANC party called Israel a “blight on humanity,” compared it to Nazi Germany, and recalled its ambassador over the Gaza crisis. The Swedish Foreign Minister recently promised Palestinians at a PLO-sponsored event that Sweden would “fight with you and for you.”

And these are countries and organizations associated with the West. It isn’t necessary for me to add what officials and media in Iran, Turkey, and Arab countries (including those that have signed peace treaties with Israel) have to say about us every day.

Perhaps we are too close to it to recognize the historical uniqueness of the massive tsunami of anti-Israel sentiment that has washed over the world since it began, possibly aided by the Soviet KGB, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I certainly can’t think of anything comparable.

It becomes even more difficult to understand both the extent and viciousness of worldwide Israel-hate when one looks at the dimensions of the Israel-Arab conflict. Casualties in all the major and minor wars and terrorism from the 19th century to today amount to about 115,000 on both sides, about the number of Syrians killed by Bashar al-Assad in one year. The “mistreatment” of Palestinians by Israel, which is said to be so heinous, still leaves the Palestinian Arabs – at least, those in areas under Israeli control – among the healthiest and most prosperous Arabs in the Middle East. The Arab population between the river and the sea has tripled since 1970 (so much for “genocide”).

The Palestinians themselves are not so lovable. Their main contributions to modern society seem to be the popularization of airline hijacking, suicide bombing, and vehicular attacks. They glorify terrorism – Yasser Arafat once addressed the UN wearing a pistol. The father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer who broadcast propaganda from Berlin and raised a Muslim division for the SS. Israel, on the other hand, has been responsible for countless innovations in medical and agricultural technology, and sends delegations of medical personnel and aid to disaster sites around the world, including its Syrian border.

And yet, it continues. Irrational and vicious, it even grows. Palestinian terrorism is excused as a legitimate response to “occupation,” while Israeli medical aid is dismissed as an attempt to distract from its oppression of Palestinians. Palestinian violence against gays is explained as an unfortunate cultural artifact, while Israeli tolerance is called “pinkwashing.”

Maybe there is a reader who can explain it to me. Explain how Israel is so villainous that the good that Israelis do can be dismissed. Explain why it is so important that its conflict overshadows all the other disputes in our contentious world. Explain why they support “solutions” that imply the replacement of Israel by a Palestinian Arab state.

I can come up with only one explanation: Israel is the Jewish state, and the imperative to despise the Jewish people is so deeply ingrained in Christian and Muslim traditions, that the embodiment of Jewish sovereignty, the State of Israel, has become the Devil for them.

Posted in Jew Hatred | 5 Comments

A few words about Gideon Levy

Posted on July 3, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I’m a political writer. I put words together into arguments, structures that I hope will be persuasive, or at least encouraging to people who already share my point of view. I often wonder if my skills could be put to work for the other side, like Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz, about whom I’ve written that he gets up every morning and asks “how can I hurt the state of Israel?”

Oh, he claims that this isn’t what he does. He claims that he is objectively documenting the abuse and oppression of the Palestinians, which he attributes to our moral depravity.

He and his admirers, including his publisher Amos Schocken, see him as courageous, a hero fighting against an evil machine on behalf of its powerless victims. They believe that he is a force for good. They believe that his enterprise is to make ordinary Israelis (and foreigners who read Ha’aretz’s English edition on the web) understand what is being done in their name, and that once this happens they will take the appropriate steps to end “the occupation,” the Palestinians will be freed from their oppression, and there will be peace and justice in the land.

Levy is a wonderful rationalizer. He has an answer for everything. He only wants justice for everyone in “Palestine,” not just Jews. He even believes in Zionism, meaning “the Jewish people having the right to live in Palestine side by side with the Palestinians, doing anything possible to compensate the Palestinians for the terrible tragedy that they went through in 1948.” Levy’s Palestinians never have choices to make that could change their situation, they never initiate anything, they only respond. He fails to detect any moral failings on their part; if they display cruelty or viciousness, it is in reaction to the abuse they receive from us. Nothing is their fault.

He even wrote a column in 2013 explicitly calling for a violent Arab uprising to overthrow the state, which would then become “an Israel that isn’t an occupier, that is just and egalitarian … a different and infinitely better place to live.”

But I wonder about the last part. I suspect Levy understands quite well what Palestinians think ending “the occupation” is, and that if they get their – and his – wish, the 70-year experiment with Jewish sovereignty will be over. He cannot fail to understand this.

He calls himself “an Israeli patriot,” and says that he “wants to be proud of [his] country,” but his bitterness and revulsion for the Jewish people spills out of his writing. He says they are stupid, selfish, and cruel, over and over.

He is lying about his motivation. Levy does not write what he writes because he cares about the Jewish state and wants to make it better. He writes out of hate. He is unable to hide the truth that he wants to see the Jewish state destroyed, because he hates the Jewish people.

Technically, I could do what Gideon Levy does and even get paid for it. There is a market, a big one, for Jewish writers that are prepared to join the crusade against the Jewish state. The Jewish crusaders are the ones that write with the most venom. They are the ones that hate the most, as much or more than Arabs and Muslims. And they are the ones that are published in the mainstream media or are interviewed on television.

But temperamentally, I could never do it, for any amount of money. I get up and look out the window at the same country that Gideon Levy sees, and I wonder how I have been lucky enough to live in this place, the homeland of the Jewish people. I see my people with all their faults, and unlike Levy, I feel close to them.

Levy would tell me that the problem is that I am “brainwashed” so I don’t see Palestinians as human beings. But I do – I see them as human beings who, as a result of a complicated political and psychological process, falsely believe that this is their homeland and nobody else’s. I see them as human beings who want to kill me, and although (believe it or not) I can empathize with their unhappiness and put myself in their place, I also am certain that I have the right to defend myself, with deadly force if necessary. While I appreciate that they have their “narrative,” I have mine, and I believe that mine is true and theirs is false. While I would like them to be happy, I do not prioritize their happiness over that of my own people.

Just because they are human, I am not required to submit to them and give them whatever they want, especially when what they want is my life and property.

This is really pretty simple. Of course I realize that the State of Israel isn’t perfect, and not just because of its poor postal service. But I do not believe that we are morally depraved or incapable of empathy. The opposite is true: we are often obsessed with moral questions to the point of being incapable of acting, and we sometimes neglect our own people because of an excess of empathy for others.

Who is the brainwashed one here?

Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist and historian, described a psychological state which he called the “Oslo Syndrome” (in a book by that name, which I reviewed here) that can explain the irrational inversion of loyalty that characterizes Jews like Levy. Levin argues that the pressure of continuing persecution in historical times, and terrorism and war today, produces a sense of loss of agency. No matter what we, as Jews, do, the Hitlers or Arafats of the day continue to hate and try to kill us. How to respond? The normal human response is anger and aggression, but in many Jews, products of centuries of diasporic powerlessness, this reaction is blocked. Frustrated by the futility of trying to change the behavior of the antisemites, they respond by trying to change themselves. Having internalized the antisemitic attitudes of their tormentors, they try to become different, to make themselves over into creatures that will not be hated.

So the Levys of the world become warriors against Zionism, saying in effect, look at me, I am on your side, don’t hurt me. Levy himself proudly claims that he never experiences hostility from the Palestinians he meets on his forays into the territories, proof that he is succeeding.

Unfortunately the strategy – either for individuals like Levy, or collectively as in the Oslo Accords – doesn’t work in the long run, because the real cause of Jew-hatred isn’t found in the Jew, or in Israeli society. There is nothing that Levy could do to make him anything more than a useful tool for the Palestinian leadership, whose goal is not to improve relations with the Jews, but to expel or kill them.

Gideon Levy is an unhappy man, something which again is obvious from his writing. “I would never leave [Israel],” he says. But maybe he realizes that he’s gone too far, and it’s not possible any more to continue pretending that he is a loyal, although critical, Israeli.

Maybe he’s facing the cognitive dissonance that is part and parcel of treason.

Posted in Israeli Society, Jew Hatred, Media, Post-Zionism | 2 Comments

What drives anti-Israel politics?

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Erdoğan and his party obtained a solid victory in the election this week, guaranteeing that relations between Turkey and Israel will get even worse. This is because the Turkish president has a history of anti-Israel rhetoric and actions whenever he wants to stir up his Islamist base or promote himself in the wider Islamic world. It’s not all talk, either, as he provides support for Hamas and is behind anti-Israel subversion in eastern Jerusalem.

Israel had good relations with Turkey before the advent of Erdoğan, just as it did with the other major non-Arab power in the region, Iran, before the 1979 Islamic revolution. But the Islamist ideology does not leave room for a Jewish sovereign state in the region, so neither of the new regimes can treat this “abomination,” in their terms, with anything but hostility. And hating Jews and Israel still plays well in the Muslim Middle East.

Today Israel has better relations with some of its traditional Arab enemies, including actual peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, as well as a lessening of tension with some others, like Saudi Arabia. But even the long-standing peace with Egypt, despite the active security cooperation between Israel and the al-Sisi regime, does not come close to the promises made in the peace treaty, which calls for “cultural exchanges in all fields” and for both sides to “abstain from hostile propaganda.” Egyptians who visit Israel are harassed by security forces, Egyptian artists and academics boycott Israel, and the Egyptian media are full of government-sponsored libels and conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews.

The 1994 “peace” with Jordan is even less “peaceful,” including several violent incidents over the years, including the horrific 1997 murder of seven Israeli schoolgirls by a Jordanian soldier, who is unrepentant to this day. Cultural exchange and Jordanian tourism also do not exist. One of the family members of the murdered girls said that “peace with Jordan is between us [Israelis] and the royal family — not the people or the parliament.”

Saudi Arabia has softened its formerly tough rejectionist policy against Israel in many ways in the past 10 years or so; it has allowed one airline to overfly its airspace on its way to Israel (but not an Israeli airline); it has participated in secret discussions with Israel, Jordan, and the US concerning Iran; and would probably quietly cooperate in an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear project. There have even been a few voices in Saudi media criticizing antisemitism. But as yet there is no reason to see the slight thaw in relations as anything but a very narrow expression of Saudi geopolitical interests.

The Palestinian Arabs are another story. Thanks to several generations of hate education since Oslo, relations with the Palestinians, both in Gaza and Judea/Samaria, have only gotten worse. The recent “knife and car intifada” and the incendiary kite attacks illustrate the degree to which the Palestinian in the street has internalized the hate propaganda that flows unabated from Hamas and the PLO. A young Palestinian man can get up in the morning, go out on the street, and look a Jewish girl in the eye before stabbing her in the heart. Palestinians hate Zionism, they hate Israel, and many of them deeply hate Jews.

But Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and some other Mideastern nations not already irrevocably under Iranian domination can work with us on practical matters, up to and including military cooperation. So why can’t they put aside the antisemitism? I think the answer is the idea, fundamental to Islam, that Jews must be subservient to Muslims. A moderate Muslim may tolerate Jews and treat them well, but Jews ruling over Muslims (or defeating them in war) – well, that’s going too far. So when they see Israel with its powerful army, dominating Arabs, it infuriates them, and reenergizes the traditional “apes and pigs” form of Muslim antisemitism.

What about Europe: why have the advanced nations of Western Europe, supposedly the most socially advanced countries in the world, been so hostile to the Jewish state? Why do they support our Palestinian enemies in so many ways – money, propaganda, lawfare, funding anti-Israel NGOs, UN resolutions, enabling boycotts by requiring labeling of our products? Why do they try to maintain the laughable distinction between antisemitism, which they claim to abhor, and “criticism of Israel” that invariably includes demonization, delegitimization, and double standards? What forces them to take this position?

Is it just fear of terrorism or fear of retaliation by Mideastern oil producers? Is it the desire by officials to gain domestic political advantage with their increasing Muslim populations? All these are true to some extent, but they are not adequate to explain the spitefulness of the public expressions of anti-Israel sentiment that we see in demonstrations or hear from public officials. There is something deeply personal in their dislike of the Jewish state.

There are multiple explanations for Europe’s animus toward Israel. It is an ethnic nation-state, and they hate nationalism. They are embarrassed that many Europeans were complicit with Hitler, and the Jewish state makes it hard to forget. They are still feeling the vestiges of two thousand years of Christian antisemitism. Finally, my favorite: if Israel, the state of the Jews, is as evil as the Reich, then Europeans needn’t feel so guilty about having stood by (or helped) while the Jews were murdered.

Turning to the United States, the political divide is deeper and more painful than it has ever been in my lifetime. Much of the Democratic Party has chosen to carry the Palestinian flag as part of its core ideology, and its potential candidates are competing over who will be more anti-Israel. The present administration is quite pro-Israel, but if and when the other side takes over, I expect that American policy toward Israel will be even more negative than that of the Obama Administration.

Bernie Sanders, one of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, has taken some of the most extreme anti-Israel positions of any major candidate, more or less adopting the Hamas narrative of the “March of Return,” demonizing Israel for shooting “unarmed protestors,” and even treating the “right of return” for the descendants of Arab refugees to Israel – a call for the end of the Jewish state – as a legitimate demand.

In the US there is no large Muslim population (yet) and no dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Palestinian terrorists have killed Americans, and no country has worked harder to be a good American ally than Israel. And yet, the American Left focuses on Israel as its greatest enemy, going to ridiculous lengths to try to connect Israel with every issue for which they can find resonance. Did an American policeman shoot an unarmed black man? American police officers have attended training programs in Israel, so Israel is responsible!

This is an interesting example. My son teaches use of firearms to Israeli security personnel. Naturally, great emphasis is placed on distinguishing between armed terrorists or criminals and innocent civilians. What could be more important? One assumes that if an American police officer trained here, he would receive the same training. But according to the Left, the American comes here to learn to be racist, to shoot blacks first, and ask questions later. The accusation is monstrous, but it is commonly made. And believed.

In all of these cases, in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the US as well, antisemitism – or extreme anti-Israelism (essentially the same thing) – is a primary, entrenched motivator for anti-Israel politics (even when the politician in question, like Bernie Sanders, is Jewish).

A consequence of this is that appeals to rational self-interest on the part of our enemies will never bring peace, because they are not rationally motivated. We can relax and just concentrate on being strong enough, militarily, diplomatically, cybernetically, and economically to beat back their attacks. Forever.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Jew Hatred, Middle East politics, US-Israel Relations | 2 Comments

Abolish the Rabbinut!

Posted on June 24, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I have expended billions, perhaps hundreds of billions, of electrons attacking liberal strains of Judaism, particularly in the US but also in Israel, for what I perceive as a conflation of Judaism and Jewish ethics with liberal politics.

Today it’s time to turn my critical keyboard in the opposite direction, at the cult-like extremist Haredi factions and their institutional arm, the Israeli Chief Rabbinate (the Rabbinut).

Recently, an El Al plane with hundreds of passengers aboard was delayed for 75 minutes while four Haredim refused to sit in their assigned seats because this would place them next to women. One of them reportedly tried to keep his eyes closed during the boarding process, apparently so that he would not have to see any women.

There is also vandalism of likenesses of women in advertisements in public places, as well as rudeness and even assault of women (and young girls!) who find themselves in Haredi neighborhoods dressed in ways that the local residents find immodest.

These actions do not conform to normative Orthodox Judaism. Even many who would classify themselves as Haredim (often called “ultra-Orthodox”) do not sympathize with this misogyny. Yes, it is woman-hatred, no matter how it is explained.

It should be clearly understood that the perpetrators are not somehow “better Jews” than anyone else because of their extreme and arguably distorted interpretations of Jewish law. Indeed, they violate basic principles of derech eretz, which are essential to living an observant Jewish life.

This behavior does not have to be tolerated, and should not be. Not unlike the case of the Muslims on the Temple Mount, or Hamas at the border with Gaza, when illegal or otherwise unacceptable behavior is allowed to continue, a message is sent that we will allow even more of the same. It should be made clear that misogyny will not fly (so to speak) on Israel’s national airline, and prospective passengers may be required to sit next to women. If that’s a problem, they can fly on another airline. Or swim.

The quasi-governmental Rabbinut also has a strict Haredi viewpoint. Although it doesn’t usually take positions on issues like whom to sit next to on airplanes, it presents its own problems, probably more damaging to the State of Israel than the outrages of Haredi zealots.

By a process of political blackmail, the Rabbinut maintains a stranglehold on one of the most important institutions of communal life, marriage (and of course, divorce as well), as well as holding a monopoly on conversions to Judaism, kashrut supervision, and Jewish burial. The horror stories about the Rabbinut could fill more than one blog, and I’m not going to repeat them. Suffice to say that it acts in an arbitrary and sometimes cruel way, and takes a long time to do it. There have been numerous cases in which officials were found to have received bribes, including a recent high-profile one involving the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi.

Many of the 2 million Russian immigrants have been unable to marry in Israel because their status as Jews is questionable, since documentation was destroyed or never existed in the Soviet Union. They can’t be married in a Jewish ceremony without approval from the Rabbinut, and conversion to Judaism under its auspices is long, difficult, often demeaning, and sometimes revoked after the fact. And of course, some people are simply not religious and do not want a religious ceremony. Some 20,000 Israelis a year circumvent the law by getting married in another country (usually nearby Cyprus)!

The Rabbinut’s power is based on laws which have been passed because religious parties almost always are an essential part of coalition governments. This has been true for coalitions of the Left and Right since the founding of the state (I believe there has only been one coalition that did not include religious parties). As a result, there is no civil marriage in Israel, it is illegal for a restaurant to say that it is a kosher establishment unless it has a paid-up certificate from the Rabbinut, and there is no public transport in most of Israel on Shabbat. Every few years the “Who is a Jew?” controversy flares up, in which the Haredi parties want to make the criteria for application of the Law of Return stricter. Recently there has even been an attempt to bring rabbinical courts in the Diaspora under the control of the Israeli Rabbinut.

There is a simple solution to the problems created by the Rabbinut: abolish it. It serves no useful function and does significant damage. The state should offer civil marriage and divorce for those who want it, and individual rabbis could perform Jewish marriages (actually, in Jewish law, a rabbi is not even required for a marriage to be legal). Groups of rabbis and religious organizations could constitute rabbinical courts which could issue conversions and religious divorces, just as is done today in the Diaspora.

Kashrut supervision could be offered by any rabbi or organization that wanted to. The certificate granted would be required to be placed in a visible location and anyone who wanted to could inspect it and decide for himself whether that rabbi or agency was known and trustworthy.

The argument is made that without a central agency that has governmental authority, it would be impossible to maintain the integrity of the Jewish people. They point to the Reform Movement in the US, which allows patrilineal descent and which espouses the view that an individual can decide what parts, if any, of Jewish law he or she is obligated to follow. Look at what has happened there, it is argued, where the majority of Reform Jews are intermarried. Who can tell who is a Jew and who isn’t?

But Jews in the US make up less than 2% of the population, and most are ignorant of the Hebrew language, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and Judaism. An outsider coming into Jewish Israel (I am putting it this way because there are parallel societies in Israel of Jews and Arabs who mostly do not mix socially) will absorb these things even without formal study, and certainly his or her children will learn about them from their earliest days. In ancient times, new blood (like the biblical Tziporah or Ruth) came into the Jewish people on a regular basis, by assimilation since there was no such thing as religious “conversion.” Perhaps the ancient Jewish kingdoms are more analogous to today’s Israel than the Diaspora.

The present “system,” if you can call it that, is a failure by Orthodox principles. I lived on a kibbutz in the 1980s, and there were a number of non-Jewish women who came to the kibbutz as volunteers and ended up marrying a kibbutznik. They went through an Orthodox conversion, which required them to live for some months in a seminary, where they learned the principles of keeping a Jewish home, family purity, kashrut, Shabbat, modest dress – everything that a frum young woman should know. When they returned to the kibbutz they immediately assimilated to the kibbutz culture and did not practice any of what they had learned (OK, I don’t know about the family purity). Had they married Orthodox men, I presume they would have assimilated differently. One effect of the process, however, was to create in them a strong dislike for anything that smacked of traditional Judaism. I wonder how the young people forced to marry in Cyprus feel about Judaism, and about their state.

Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and I think most Israelis – even some who live a secular life – will agree that Judaism (and for Israelis, that means Orthodox Judaism) has a central place in Israeli culture.

But most will probably also say that we would be far better off without the Rabbinut.

Posted in Israeli Politics, Israeli Society, The Jewish people | 2 Comments

The Fires

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

It’s impossible to write about anything except the fires.

Foreign media are concerned with other things, but in Israel only the arrest of a former government minister charged with spying for Iran has come close to dislodging the fires from the forefront of our consciousness.

The Arabs of Gaza, with the encouragement of Hamas and the other terrorist factions, are burning our country. They are doing with impunity, launching kites and helium balloons carrying flaming payloads, from far enough back from the border that they are difficult to stop with nonlethal means. Naturally they are doing it from civilian areas in the company of children, so that the IDF believes that the casualties from attacking them from the air would be unacceptable. Various countermeasures using drones have been tried, but they have only been partially effective.

For Israel it is an economic, environmental, and even spiritual catastrophe. Thousands of acres of farmland and nature preserves, crops, plants, and animals have gone up in smoke. Dozens of new fires are set every day, faster than firefighters can put them out. The area is choked from the smoke of the fires and the burning tires that the Arabs ignite in order to hide the operatives who approach the border fence to plant explosives or try to cut through it. It will take decades for the land to return to its previous condition. Some of the wildlife may be gone forever.

Israelis love agriculture and they love nature. These loves are deeply embedded in our culture; look at Israeli music, art, and poetry if you doubt it. Perhaps the only thing we love more is our children. To burn the land is to thrust a dagger into our hearts (something that Palestinians also do regularly in a more literal sense). The damage done by the fires is greater than the cost of the crops that are being destroyed, and even more than the irreparable environmental damage. It is a prolonged assault on the soul of the Jewish state, its reason for being – the love of the land.

The enemy knows this. That’s why they do it. The burning of southern Israel has zero strategic significance, but it is a massive psychological blow. It’s a tribute to their understanding of us and also to their endless hatred that they chose this tactic. Frustrated by their minimal success in killing Jews with rockets and mortars, and unable to overrun the border fence, they have been wildly successful with this low-tech weapon.

The IDF fears the legal consequences of taking serious action against the “civilians” launching kites and balloons, and so far has retaliated by bombing military targets belonging to Hamas. I haven’t heard of any casualties from these attacks, so it’s reasonable to assume that they are being evacuated each night. This seems to be fine with the army, which thinks it can pressure Hamas into stopping the incendiary attacks this way, but does not want to be drawn into a wider confrontation. This tactic was met with a barrage of 45 rockets and mortar shells fired at us from Gaza last night, so it may need rethinking.

Israel’s decision-makers are considering the economic and strategic costs, not the spiritual damage and psychological cost. They know that a wider war would be expensive, and would take our attention away from the objectively greater danger from Hezbollah and Iran in Lebanon and Syria. They don’t want to be accused of fighting another war without intending to win, but they also don’t want to conquer Gaza and become responsible for it. So they do nothing and look for a technological answer.

But if you always ignore provocations, if you allow them to turn into attrition, if you time and time repress your natural desire to retaliate, if you allow the enemy to take greater and greater liberties, eventually you find that you have allowed your honor, and more practically, your deterrence, to dribble away. Sometimes restraint is not a viable option.

This is one of those times. We should not be afraid to admit that they have wounded us. But on the other hand, we must not – we can’t afford to – allow them to deepen the wound.

So here is what we do. We issue an ultimatum to Hamas that the arson attacks must stop within 24 hours, or we will destroy every Hamas installation, we will turn their tunnel city into an inferno with bunker busters, and we’ll personally target their leadership and as many officials as we have Hellfire missiles for. For good measure, we’ll do the same to Islamic Jihad and any other terrorist faction there.

At the same time, we send a copy to the UN and the European Union. We explain to them that we will not allow the Gaza Arabs to burn any more of our country. We explain that we recognize that the UN and EU have made major investments – directly and via UNRWA – in creating and nurturing an entity that will hate and oppose the Jewish state, and that therefore we expect that they will be able to influence it to change its behavior. But if not, and if we have to crush it, we expect that the UN and EU will pick up the pieces, because we certainly won’t.

We publicize our offer in multiple languages, throughout the world. We emphasize that the outcome is up to Hamas, and the responsibility for casualties if they don’t comply is entirely theirs.

Would they take our offer? I have no idea.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Society, War | 3 Comments

Why don’t we defend ourselves?

Posted on June 18, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Great swaths of land in the Negev desert near the Gaza strip, agricultural land and nature preserves formerly the habitats of numerous endangered plant and animal species, have been reduced to ash and smoke by Palestinian fire-kites and balloon-borne incendiary devices during the past few weeks. The entire area is blackened with the smoke from fires that are being set faster than Israeli firefighters can put them out.

Our powerful army dithers, ever pursuing its apparent goal of fighting wars without hurting anyone. Today I understand that a car belonging to one of the leaders of the bombing campaign was destroyed by an “airstrike,” probably a drone-launched missile. The car was parked and empty. That’ll teach him.

Israeli officials are afraid of the legal consequences of taking effective action against those who are launching the kites and balloons. They are afraid that they will be dragged into the International Criminal Court (even though Israel did not sign the treaty creating it and does not consider itself bound by its decisions), if the army kills any of the “civilians” that are burning our country. Those under the age of 18 are counted as “children,” and as you know one of the themes of anti-IDF propaganda is the false claim that we deliberately target children.

Purposely burning agricultural land is a war crime. Attacking from heavily populated civilian areas and employing child soldiers are war crimes. Hamas and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) don’t care, of course. Their whole strategic plan is to take advantage of the fact that Israel considers herself bound by the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, while they permit themselves to do anything that will kill Jews.

They don’t do it by themselves. They have help.

Israel is always required to fight an n+1 front war, with n representing the enemies that are shooting at us, Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, and the rest. The additional one is the international diplomatic and legal system, led by our “friends” in the European Union.

In the past week, two Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria have been partly demolished, because homes have been found to be built on “private Palestinian land.” This means that – regardless of whether the land was considered state land when the homes were built – a Palestinian claim, sometimes not even by an individual owner, that the land was at one time used for agricultural purposes by Palestinians, has been accepted by Israel’s Supreme Court. The remedy is invariably that any structure that encroaches on such land will be demolished in toto.

Recently, the Knesset passed a law (the “Regulation Law”) that allows the state to financially compensate the Palestinian “owners” when the land was not considered private at the time the structures were built, instead of bulldozing the buildings (this can be tricky, since there usually are no records that might prove ownership in the sense familiar to those living in normal countries). This law didn’t apply in these cases, because the Supreme Court had ordered the demolitions some months ago, before the law was passed. The Court has now frozen the law awaiting its decision on various petitions against it.

Naturally, our European friends and home-grown champions of Palestinian rights were scandalized by this law. “It’s legalized land theft,” they say. This is quite an exaggeration, since the law calls for the Palestinians to be paid above-market value for the land, which they are not using and may not have used for decades (if ever). Eminent domain proceedings in the US, in which an owner can be evicted from property where he is living or using for business, are far harsher. But my guess is that despite this, when the Supreme Court rules on the petitions filed against it, they will overthrow the law.

Now you may wonder who files these petitions, the ones against the Regulation Law and the ones claiming that Israeli structures have been built on “private Palestinian land.” The answer is that there is a whole industry in Israel of “human rights” non-governmental organizations that employs a battery of expensive and dedicated lawyers to fight the State of Israel. Thanks to Israel’s extraordinary system in which any citizen may petition the Supreme Court on almost any matter, regardless of whether he or she is affected by it, left-wing groups like Peace Now, Yesh Din, and others can and do involve themselves in these matters.

But who supports the organizations, pays their staffs and their lawyers? Probably no more than a few percent of Israelis support what most see as their extremist ideology. And yet left-wing NGOs are everywhere, filming and trying to provoke IDF soldiers doing their duty, finding Palestinians who will testify that their grandfathers worked the land on such-and-such a hill where today an Israeli settlement stands, and filing petition after petition in the Israeli courts, particularly the Supreme Court.

The money does not come from Israel. It doesn’t even come from the Palestinians, whose leaders are happy to skim millions from the aid they get from the US and Europe, primarily to live well or put into their Swiss bank accounts. It comes, unsurprisingly, mostly from European governments, where millions of Euros are funneled into organizations like Peace Now, Yesh Din, B’tselem, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, and many others. Somewhat less important donors include the American New Israel Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

These foreign-funded NGOs are active in the Israeli and international legal arenas, as well as the international propaganda campaign to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel. Some explicitly support BDS, despite the official positions of their donors. For example, several of them recently sent a letter to the American Secretary of State calling for an arms embargo against Israel because of its actions to defend its border.

Today the NGO Monitor organization, which keeps track of anti-Israel NGOs and their funding, released a report showing that the European Union has given large grants (hundreds of thousands of Euros) to several NGOs to press war crimes accusations against IDF officers and soldiers and other Israeli officials in foreign courts. This sort of thing may in part explain the timidity of the IDF to take effective action against the arsonists of Gaza.

While our Arab and Iranian enemies have had little success in damaging our Jewish state with wars and terrorism, our European ones have succeeded with their Euros to roll back settlement activities in Judea/Samaria, resulting in the expulsion of Jews from their homes. They have fought tooth and nail against our government’s efforts to deport illegal migrants, whom it rightly considers a demographic and social threat. They have hamstrung the IDF’s response to arson terrorism from Gaza, and turned the main concern of the IDF from defeating our enemies to avoiding legal entanglements.

The message this sends to the terrorists of Hamas, the PLO, and the PIJ is simple: you have a green light – the Jews are too weak to fight back.

There are solutions to these problems. Two years ago, the Knesset passed a relatively weak transparency law requiring some NGOs to report contributions from foreign governments. It needs to be strengthened – in fact, there is no reason for Israel to permit foreign governments to intervene in our domestic affairs at all. Opponents will tell you, precisely inverting the truth, that limiting the influence of foreign-funded NGOs is “anti-democratic,” as if democracy requires subverting the will of Israeli voters! But there is only one reason that such legislation is opposed in the Knesset, and that is because some members are themselves treasonously sucking at the European teat. That has to stop.

The Supreme Court has far too much power and zero accountability. No other democratic country has such a situation. The balance of power between the branches of government must be restored.

The other necessary change is a change of attitude. The more Israel refrains from self-defense because of fear of the legal consequences, the more she will be threatened with such consequences. The cycle must be broken, both because it prevents us from acting and because it broadcasts weakness to our enemies. The arson kites need to be met with deadly force, not endless debate. Jewish residents of the territories should have at least equal rights as Arabs, and not be evicted from their homes as a result of legal catch-22s. Illegal migrants should be deported (see here and here).

The legal and diplomatic decks are stacked against us today, partly because of our own actions. We need to get over it and defend ourselves. Nobody else will.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Politics, Terrorism | 2 Comments