Jewish peoplehood in Israel and America

Posted on June 14, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I am an American-Israeli, an American-born Jew who has lived about 17% of his life in Israel. I made aliyah back in 1979, lived on a kibbutz for nine years, and then returned to the US for 26 years, before coming back to stay four years ago. Unsurprisingly, I am interested in the relationship between American Jews and the Jewish state.

I was born in 1942, and I grew up in non-Jewish neighborhoods. The Jews I did know were mostly secular. I had what was supposed to be a bar mitzvah in a Reform Temple (my grandfather insisted), but since I stubbornly refused to learn anything in the obligatory religious school, it was embarrassingly pointless. Later, during summer jobs at Jewish camps, I came to know some Orthodox Jews who finally taught me a little about Judaism.

Nevertheless I always had a very strong sense, from my earliest days, of belonging to the Jewish people, though I would not have expressed it that way for some years. We lived with my grandparents for the first 8 years of my life, and after that nearby, and although they were not “religious” at all, they understood Jewish peoplehood in a way that only those who had lived as Jews in pre-revolutionary Russia (or perhaps an Arab country) could. I interacted with them more than with my parents, who were born in the US, and whose formative experiences were the Depression and WWII. They were Jewish and their friends were Jewish, but their “peoplehood,” if this makes sense, was American.

My grandparents lost siblings and cousins in the Holocaust. I was just old enough to begin to understand what had happened when they received the final confirmation of their fears. They had lived in the part of the Pale of Settlement where the Germans simply shot every Jew they could get their hands on, and as far as I know, my only living relatives are descended from those who left Europe long before the war. It was very clear to me, even as a child, that this happened to them because they were members of an extended family, a family that the evil Nazis hated. My family.

So it was natural for me to strongly identify with the new Jewish state, a place of refuge for my extended Jewish family. It was also the country that allowed my people to regain their self-respect after being treated like vermin in Europe and the Arab world. My people. I cheered when Israel won wars and when it hanged Eichmann. And I have a feeling of admiration and identification when I see the flag of the state of Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people. Nothing made me more proud than the opportunity to wear the uniform of the IDF, unless it was seeing my children wearing it.

I am representative of an older generation of American Jews, a generation that is now stepping back from active participation in the institutions of society in favor of playing with their grandchildren. We remember when there wasn’t a Jewish state, and some of us remember what that actually meant in terms of Jewish blood.

But younger American Jews have different experiences. The Holocaust recedes and they are less likely to meet survivors or know anyone who lost close relatives or friends. They know about Israel’s wars as one-sided victories, and they don’t remember when her continued existence was in doubt. They don’t know about the weeks before the outbreak of the 1967 war, when Nasser and other Arabs were bragging about the massacre they planned to perpetrate, and volunteers were preemptively digging graves in Tel Aviv parks. They don’t remember the early days of the Yom Kippur war, when massive Syrian and Egyptian forces were on the verge of breaking through.

What they do know is the story they see in the media and on the net, which is almost all contrived to present Israel as a colonial superpower which oppresses the “native” Palestinians. In its mildest form, they are told that there is a “cycle of violence” which only a “two-state solution” can end. This served the interests of several US administrations and the oil companies, which were concerned to force Israel back to pre-1967 lines in order to mollify the Arab countries that controlled the world’s oil supply. At worst (and most recently) they are presented with propaganda intended to delegitimize and demonize Israel in order to set the stage for her destruction.

The millennial generation (born in the 1980s and 1990s) walked into a fusillade of vicious anti-Israel hatred in the universities from groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. Today they face the “intersectional” Left which associates opposition to Israel with support for every kind of minority rights, and demands compliance as the price of social acceptance. Those who do not comply are ostracized as “racists” or “fascists.”

Many American Jews, especially younger ones, are not able to withstand the assault – or don’t even recognize it as such – on their sense of peoplehood. It’s not surprising, because this identification has been suppressed by the American educational system and media from their earliest years. Although certain minority groups are encouraged to feel pride in their heritage and their cultures, Jews are not included as one of these groups – they are considered “white,” which is to say, colorless. Therefore they are required to appreciate the minority cultures (and to feel guilty for their oppression by the majority of “whites”), but not to express their own pride in their culture or of their homeland.

Indeed, if they do so, they may be accused of having “dual loyalty.”

The Israeli experience has been significantly different. There are more Holocaust survivors around. Everyone knows veterans of Israel’s wars, most have served in the IDF, and while there may be a lesser sense of vulnerability among younger people, most people understand that the Jewish state’s continued existence isn’t guaranteed. The hierarchy of victimhood of minorities and the concept of intersectionality that have so damaged intergroup relations in America haven’t appeared in Israel. Although there is much room for improvement, the teaching of Jewish and Israeli history to Israelis is better than what most American Jews get.

Jewish Israelis know they are living in the state of the Jewish people. There is no existential contradiction, no continuous reminder that you are a guest in somebody else’s state. They are Jews in the Jewish state.

A new survey of American and Israeli Jews by the American Jewish Committee confirms that Americans are far less Jewishly identified than Israelis. Only 40% said that being Jewish is “very” or “most” important in their lives, while 81% of the Israelis felt this way.

I don’t like the question about “being Jewish” because it is ambiguous between peoplehood and religion. I would have asked a question about “being part of the Jewish people.” I know that at any time in my life after about the age of 15, I would have answered that being a member of the Jewish people is the most important part of my identity. And this is why it turned out that I feel more comfortable and secure here than I did in the US.

Unfortunately, no age breakdown was included in the results as published. But other surveys have consistently showed that their Jewish identity is less important to younger Jews than older ones, for the reasons above.

The survey showed that there are various other divergences, particularly over the chances for a peace agreement with the Palestinians (Americans think it’s possible and Israelis are doubtful), and Donald Trump (Israeli Jews approve of him; American Jews overwhelmingly don’t). There are disagreements about the role of religion and state in Israel, about which the Reform movement in the US has chosen to stir the pot. But these are minor matters that can be worked out. Identity is the big thing.

American Jews are losing the connection with the Jewish people. America has been good to them and they are happy being Americans. If the situation changes – and historically, that’s a good bet – then they may yet be reminded of who they are.

Posted in American Jews, The Jewish people | 1 Comment

On Palestinians

Posted on June 10, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I’m only going to write this post once, so pay attention.

I use the word “Palestinian” a lot. It refers to those Arabs who call themselves that. It does not refer to Jews, who do not live in Palestine, because Palestine ceased to exist with the end of the British Mandate, and despite the wishes of the Arabs, there is no such place today.

Every so often somebody criticizes me for using the word, and thus granting the Palestinians an identity. So I decided to explain what I mean by it.

It does not imply that the Palestinians are a people that have existed for millennia, as idiots like Saeb Erekat like to say. The truth is that the Palestinians are Arabs with multiple origins who at some time came to live in the land that we call Eretz Yisrael. Maybe some of them say they can trace their origins back to the Arab conquest in the 7th century, but I doubt it. Most of them are descended from migrants that came in the latter part of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

But whenever their ancestors arrived, they are here now; and yes, they are a people now.

I hear the roar of outrage. But as I said, pay attention. They are not an ancient people with their own language, culture, and religion (unless their hatred and sense of victimhood counts as a religion), like the Jewish people. Their self-identification as a people goes back perhaps to the mid-1960s, when they were encouraged by the Arab nations and their Soviet mentors to think of themselves as such. They shared one fundamental experience and one aspiration for the future: the experience of dispossession and dishonor, and the aspiration to regain what they believe was taken from them.

I am not doing them a special favor by granting them peoplehood. I am simply recognizing a fact. They behave like Amalek, but we don’t insist that the Amalekites weren’t a “real people.”

The Palestinians became a people when they accepted the Palestinian narrative, just as the Jewish people accepted the Torah at Sinai. Who knows, maybe in another thousand years they will have their own language and religion. They already have a whole collection of holidays marking days on which something bad happened to them. Nakba Day can be their Tisha B’Av.

They have a culture that is unique among Arabs. It is all about their historic sense of injustice, their alcoholic-like obsessive certainty that all of their misfortunes are somebody else’s (usually our) fault, and their endless creative pursuit of strategies, tactics, and weapons that they hope will finally bring them to their judenrein promised land.

Look what they have contributed to the world: they popularized airline hijacking, suicide bombing, attacks on children, “popular resistance” in which every Palestinian is a possible stabber or car rammer, the Qassam rocket, the terror tunnel, and now the flaming kite. That is Palestinian culture, and they are proud of it, all of it.

Most importantly, although they are an indigenous culture – the Palestinian narrative was created here, in Eretz Yisrael – they cannot be compared to the oldest extant culture that is tied to this land, the one people that practically is the paradigm case for understanding what a “people” is, the one truly native culture that possesses aboriginal rights to the land, the Jewish people.

You can’t understand something if you can’t name it, and you can’t fight what you don’t understand. So I’ll continue to use the word “Palestinian,” even if the right-wing version of political correctness forbids it.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, The Jewish people | 2 Comments

What to do about the kites?

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

As you probably know, Gaza Arabs have been launching kites and helium balloons across the border with fiery payloads, and they have set huge blazes in nearby agricultural fields, nature reserves, and even the campus of Sapir College (just south of Sderot and 4.5 km from the border of the Gaza strip). Large areas have already burned, and new fires are being started all the time. Farmers have lost millions, and plant and animal life in the region will not recover for years. Nobody has died in the fires yet, but firefighters imperil themselves regularly trying to put them out.

There is a debate about how to stop these attacks. Shoot them, some say. Well, it seems that there is a legal problem. You can’t just shoot civilians for possession of a kite or a balloon. And after it is in the air, the terrorist that released it is a criminal that has to be apprehended, not summarily executed. So the only way you can shoot them is to catch them precisely at the moment that they are about to launch the incendiary device, so as to stop them from doing it. And best shoot at their legs. Good luck with this.

So the talk turns to technology. Drones to cut the kite strings and similar ideas. Some model airplane hobbyists already took down a few of them with fishhooks attached to their planes. But hundreds have still gotten through.

Recently Israel sent a shipment of Tamir interceptors, the projectiles used by the Iron Dome system, south to the Gaza envelope area. The Iron Dome not only intercepts the Hamas-produced Qassam rockets, but it can even take out a tiny mortar shell. The Tamirs are expensive (though it can be argued that the true marginal cost of a Tamir, after spreading the development costs over a large number of units, is more like $5,000 than the oft-quoted $50,000) and usually two are fired to intercept a Qassam, which costs Hamas a few hundred dollars to build. Mortar shells can be had for as little as $6 each!

All this has a familiar ring. As Bret Stephens said, “Why is nothing expected of Palestinians, and everything forgiven, while everything is expected of Israelis, and nothing forgiven?”

We have built a multi-tiered missile defense system which includes Iron Dome, but also several other components designed to intercept medium and long-range missiles. The complete system is fabulously expensive, but will provide a level of defense that no other country in the world can match. Of course we need this. Israel’s small size and concentrated population make it vulnerable to missile attacks, and our enemies know it and have invested heavily in this area.

That doesn’t mean that we can sit back and let our enemies throw everything they have at us. None of these systems promises 100% success, any defensive system that doesn’t involve science-fiction technology can be overwhelmed by a massive enough attack, and the economic imbalance inherent in using a Tamir – no matter how low we make the marginal cost – to kill a $6 mortar round becomes painful.

But there is another issue here, which is surfacing in connection with the incendiary kites, and in general with the “great march of return” and our response to it. Israel loves technology, because it makes it possible to win wars without hurting anyone. We love defensive technology that enables us to bat away enemy rockets, and we love offensive technology that allows us to precisely take out a military target with no collateral damage. Nothing is cooler than sending a missile through a window to kill a bunch of terrorists without upsetting their wives and children on the next floor.

This kind of warfare supposedly protects us in today’s hyper-litigious world where we are attacked by brigades of lawyers working for “human rights” NGOs, paid by our sophisticated European enemies – the descendants of the pogromists who murdered our ancestors, and now, in the name of humanity, try to prevent us from defending ourselves.

Except that it doesn’t protect us. The exquisite care with which the IDF repelled the popular invasion from Gaza did not prevent us from being accused of war crimes by the media and by the NGOs. If Hezbollah should launch its tens of thousands of rockets from South Lebanon, and we are forced to destroy the launchers embedded in civilian houses, all of our warnings and all of our precision strikes will not prevent the accusations and attempts to impose international sanctions against us.

There are two reasons for this. One is that the international deck is stacked against us, either because the players don’t think Jews should be sovereign anywhere in the Middle East (the position of most Muslim nations) or because – like French President Macron – they cynically pursue their economic or political interests, even if it should be obvious to them that their actions make war or even genocide more likely.

That isn’t news, and it isn’t likely to change. The other reason is that Israel’s policies over the last few years have taught our enemies that appeals to “morality” and international law (real or imagined) actually affect Israel’s behavior and limit our defensive responses, even to murderous attacks directed at us.

With our Iron Domes, our “roof knocks,” our exaggerated care when authorizing snipers to shoot at Arabs trying to breach our borders, our use of low-yield weapons in targeted killings, our tolerance for continued low-level terrorism like rock-throwing, and our bombing of empty military installations, we are training our enemies. We are teaching them one basic principle: it’s normal for you to try to kill Jews.

Do Gazans hate us? Let’s build them an artificial island. Could anything be crazier?

Oh, we’ll defend ourselves, either passively or with minimal offensive force. But we won’t get mad and really try to hurt you. These are not the Jews of Kishinev or of Hebron c. 1929. We will fight back if necessary. But we understand your need to kill us.

As a result of our restraint, demands are placed on us to restrain ourselves further. And as a result of the message of “understanding” that we send to our enemies, they keep devising and trying out new ways to kill us. Why shouldn’t they? In the Middle East, being good to your enemies is perceived as weakness, which invites attack.

The final answer to the kites won’t come from technology, because if we could push a button and bring them all down, Hamas would just come up with a new weapon, a new delivery system for their boundless hate.

No, the solution to this and other problems requires a fundamental change in our way of thinking. I believe that the present defensive mentality is based on cowardice and the internalization of the pervasive antisemitism of our enemies, both the “hot” ones in Gaza and the “cool” ones in Europe. To some extent, we ourselves believe that it is acceptable to shoot at Jews.

The question shouldn’t be “how can we stop incendiary kites?” Rather, we should ask “how we can hurt the Gazans – both the Hamas leadership and the people that support them and share their hatred – so badly, so disproportionally, that they will be very sorry that they tried to burn our country.

Deterrence doesn’t only come from threats, Mr. Lieberman. The enemy has to believe that you will carry them out. A truly brutal response to the kite attacks could be a place to start.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, War | 3 Comments

Thank you, Mr. & Mrs. Bloomgarten

Posted on June 4, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

When we moved to our new home in Rehovot, one of the first things we noticed was how often we heard sirens. It turned out that we live down the block from a facility shared by the ambulance services Magen David Adom and Ichud Hatzalah. Considering what their dedicated workers and volunteers do, we aren’t complaining.

Almost every morning we pass it on our way to pick up our free Israel Hayom newspaper (thank you, Sheldon Adelson). You can’t help but notice that on virtually all of the ambulances, mobile intensive care units, and motorcycles – the quickest way to get a trained EMT and lifesaving equipment to an accident in the middle of one of Israel’s massive traffic jams – are the names of donors who bought it for us. You can buy us one online if you like; one of the mobile ICUs costs $125,000, but you can fund a motorcycle for only $36,000.

The donor’s home towns are also painted on the vehicles. I recall seeing them from all over the US and Canada, France, Australia, the UK, South Africa, and more places that I don’t remember. Most of the names are Jewish, although I’m sure there are non-Jews that have helped in this way as well. Thank you all.

I got to thinking about the help that Israel received from the Diaspora and non-Jewish friends during its early years. There were, for example, the 3500 or so machal volunteers from 55 countries, many of whom were WWII veterans who came to help defend the Jewish state or to assist with the illegal immigration prior to the founding of the state. More than a hundred of them gave their lives (the first machal casualty was an American named Bill Bernstein, who was beaten to death by British soldiers on the deck of the Exodus). I was surprised to read that during the war more than two-thirds of the personnel in the new Israel Air Force were volunteers from outside the country, and that English was “the operational working language!” Arguably, we wouldn’t have won the war without them. There aren’t many of them left; a twenty-year old in 1948 would be 90 today. We are grateful to them too.

There are other ways that the young country got help from its relatives and friends outside. Many years ago, my grandparents had a blue pushka, a little charity box, on their kitchen table. The money went to the Jewish National Fund to plant trees and develop the land in Israel. The ORT network of schools (one of which my daughters attended), Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and countless other institutions throughout the country, were all built with overseas contributions – many raised by Jewish women’s organizations, as the ubiquitous bronze plaques testify. I can’t count the Hadassah fundraising events that I accompanied my very active wife to.

I think the days of mass support for Israel from overseas Jewish communities are over. For one thing, these communities are smaller and weaker than in the past, as assimilation in North America and the pressure of antisemitism in Europe have taken their toll. The large organizations in the US like Hadassah and the Jewish Federations grew too large, hired expensive professional non-profit managers, and focused more and more on domestic causes and less on Israel, in part because the increasingly controversial nature in the liberal Jewish sector of anything connected with Israel. Orthodox Jews in North America are increasingly stressed financially by the very high cost of Jewish education for their children. In both groups, a decrease in support of all kinds for Israel among the younger people implies that there will be less support overall in the future.

There are various causes of friction between Israel and the Diaspora. Diaspora Jews are annoyed when Israelis tell them that their communities are doomed (although the Israelis are right about this) and that they should make aliyah immediately, even though they will have a difficult time getting jobs in their professions in Israel because of dense Israeli bureaucracy. They are infuriated when the Israeli Chief Rabbinate tries to appoint itself the arbiter of who is Jewish and who is a legitimate rabbi. Their upset about matters of state and religion is to a certain extent stimulated by groups with political axes to grind, but despite this, it is not unreasonable.

Israelis, on the other hand, are irritated by the arrogance of Diaspora Jews who pontificate about what policies Israel should follow – particularly with respect to the conflict with the Palestinians – without any real understanding of the facts and without the personal stake in the outcome that Israelis have.

The good news, of course, is that Israel doesn’t need the kind of help it needed to win the War of Independence or to integrate the immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s. With its strong economy, Israel can afford to build its own hospitals, and there are plenty of Israeli pilots to staff our Air Force. There are still “lone soldiers,” volunteers from various countries that come to Israel to serve in the IDF, but they are no longer essential to the survival of the country.

The relationship of Israel and the Diaspora is changing rapidly, and both sides need to adapt. Jews outside of Israel should understand that Israel is an independent nation, not an extension of the Diaspora. And Israelis should understand that we can’t go to the Diaspora for help if we get into trouble.

Because the truth is that Diaspora communities will not survive as such. In North America, the liberal Jewish community is fading rapidly in every dimension of “Jewishness” except the most trivial cultural sense. Orthodox communities seem to be more cohesive, but they are comparatively tiny and have their own concerns. In Europe, disintegration in the face of increasing antisemitism both from Muslim immigrants and “old-fashioned” native Jew-haters is already under way, with Jews increasingly making plans to flee (from France, Britain, Germany, and even Russia).

Israel, despite the efforts of some extreme Diaspora secularists, is now the center of Jewish culture in the world. And it will become more so as time passes.

I still get a warm feeling when I walk by the yard where the ambulance donated by “Mr. & Mrs. Irving Bloomgarten, Peoria, IL” is parked. Israel is grateful to the Bloomgartens who contributed their hard-earned money, the machal-niks who fought and sometimes died for us, the Hadassah ladies who baked and held silent auctions to build our hospital, and to everyone else without whom there would not be a Jewish state.

Someday it may be their grandchildren who need our help.

Posted in Israeli or Jewish History | 2 Comments

A predicament or an opportunity?

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Here it is Wednesday midday, and some 180 mortar shells and rockets have been fired at Israel from Gaza in the last 48 hours, including rockets that reached farther north than any since 2014. The IDF responded in the usual way, bombarding military targets in the Strip that Hamas and Islamic Jihad personnel had evacuated. At this moment, there seems to be an informal cease-fire in effect. It may or may not hold; we could be on the verge of yet another “grass-cutting” operation in Gaza, or the whole thing could just be a minor blip. Meanwhile, a lot of people who would rather have been somewhere else spent their mornings sitting in bomb shelters.

The usual suspects in the Western media are committing their usual crimes against the truth. Yesterday, NPR ran a story entitled “What Has The Unrest In Gaza Meant For Palestinians?” Really. I won’t bother to link to it, but I thought about writing a piece about what the unrest at Pearl Harbor meant for the Japanese.

The objective of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), is to conquer the land now occupied by the Jews, preferably killing as many of them as possible. It is a religious imperative, an obligatory jihad, and so will not end until one or the other side overcomes its enemy. It’s been a long war, and our enemies have taken different political forms over the last 100 years; but the motive has always been the same. Some periods are more violent than others, but there has never been peace.

When the battle goes against our enemies, they offer a hudna modeled after Mohammed’s treaty of Hudaybiyyah with the Meccans, a temporary truce to give them chance to prepare for the next round. That is the closest they can get to a peace offer.

Our enemies aren’t stupid, and they understand the overriding importance of cognitive warfare for the physically weaker side in an asymmetric struggle. The recent attempt to invade Israel through the border fence with Gaza was, on its surface, a failure. They did not succeed to breach the fence in great numbers and “tear out the hearts” of Jews in nearby communities, as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar exhorted them to do. But in the cognitive war, it achieved more than one goal.

The main target is popular opinion, in the world and even in Israel. Liberal Western media like NPR are not exactly pro-Hamas. But they are anti-Israel. And Hamas orchestrated the “March of Return” to induce these media to cover the events in a way that portrayed Israel in the worst possible light. NPR jumped to attention and followed the script perfectly. They referred to the attempted invasion as a “protest,” claimed that “thousands” of people were wounded in their legs by Israeli snipers, and referred to this production as a “Palestinian cry for help,” as they “[try] to break out of an area that people inside often regard as an open-air prison.”

It also brought the Palestinian struggle and in particular the demand for a “right of return” to the forefront of international consciousness, at a time when other concerns had pushed it out of view. In recent years the idea that this issue is at the center of the problems of the Middle East had receded to some extent, replaced by the conflicts created by Iranian expansionist ambitions on the one hand, and Sunni extremism on the other. Hamas wants it center stage so that its allies in Europe will continue applying pressure to Israel and supporting the various NGOs and other groups gnawing away at her.

Finally, it gave them an opportunity to suffer what they can present as civilian casualties, so they can accuse Israel of war crimes, or even try to bring her to the International Criminal Court (for internal political reasons, Hamas admitted that most of the dead “protestors” were its military operatives, so this may not work as well this time).

Hamas, PIJ and the PLO understand the West quite well. They know that their propaganda will find fertile places to grow in Europe and even the US, where they have been preparing the ground for an abandonment of Israel for years. And they also know that the last thing that Israel wants is a ground war in Gaza, which will create even more opportunities for propaganda while our society is torn apart with grief for the young men and women who would be killed or injured, and which will end indecisively like all the others.

So we continue trying to tamp down escalation, while allowing the terrorist leaders of the Gaza Arabs the freedom to continue to plan new marches, launch rocket and mortar barrages, set our fields on fire, and who knows what else that grows out of their implacable hatred.

This is the status quo that is considered acceptable, or at least less unacceptable than the alternatives. But the status quo is not static. Hamas is now supported primarily by Iran, like PIJ and Hezbollah. Someday perhaps they will join in a coordinated attack with Hezbollah in the north. Perhaps at the same time there will be an American Administration with an outlook more like that of the Europeans, and which – like the Obama Administration – will act to restrain us from defending ourselves. And thanks to the cognitive warfare that our enemies have been successfully waging, we won’t find support among the American people or their Congress. At that point, the status quo won’t look so good, but there will be little that we can do about it.

Right now, this moment, is one of the most dangerous times in recent history, at least for folks that live in the Middle East. Nevertheless there are positive factors. The final days of ISIS seem to be at hand, and maybe the map of post-war Syria will shortly take shape. Iran is being pushed back in Syria and losing influence in Iraq. The economic bonanza of the nuclear deal is coming to an end for Iran. Russia seems to be uncomfortable with an Iranian Shiite crescent in the region. And for the first time in many years, there is an American administration that seems fully supportive of Israel (but which also appears politically unstable).

It’s impossible to predict what will happen when there are so many players, each with their own interlocking interests and concerns, but there may be an opportunity for Israel here that will not reoccur in the near future. There are two ways to approach a chaotic situation: you can hunker down and try to keep from getting hurt, or you can try to exploit it and achieve objectives that are impossible in normal times.

I think we have grown too comfortable with what we allow to exist next door to us, in Gaza and also in Judea/Samaria. Would we be so comfortable if they wore Nazi uniforms? Probably not, but their ideology is no better; worse, perhaps, because of its religious underpinnings.

Now could be the moment to crush Hamas in Gaza for good.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, War | 5 Comments

How multicultural, intersectional postcolonialism is taking us back to the Middle Ages

Posted on May 27, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Identity politics demands special status not by virtue of fundamental human rights (which necessarily must be based on something other than distinct national, racial, sexual, or other identities) but of grievances. And it constricts its ethical claims by refusing to make harsh criticism of certain behaviors no matter who originates them.

But perhaps the greatest irony is that people who play identity politics count on others to respond in a humanistic way – with concern for individual welfare based on a shared humanity. – Daphne Patai, What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, p. 8

Identity politics is the scourge of democratic aspirations wherever it is found. When the political choices of individuals are based on their group identity – and every society at some level divides into groups, if not on racial lines then by class, gender and other distinctions – then the “democratic process” doesn’t work to promote the overall welfare of the nation, but the relative advantage of particular groups.

Without an effective democratic process, which includes a commitment to free speech, the rights of minorities, and the rule of law, conflicts between the groups develop and escalate, often into great violence.

Tribal and religious conflicts have served to prevent the development of free societies and abetted kleptocratic dictatorships in the developing world, especially in Africa and the Middle East. The permanent instability of many countries, like Iraq and Lebanon, is for the most part a result of the embrace of identity politics by the various groups.

One solution is to prevent group conflict from developing by maintaining a homogeneous population. This is one of the reasons that the Scandinavian countries topped the lists of countries with the highest quality of life for years (but the arrival of many immigrants belonging to diverse groups has recently upset the applecart in Sweden, for example).

In the US and some other countries where there was a large amount of diverse immigration, the idea of the “melting pot” was intended to reduce group conflict. Every immigrant to the US was expected to learn English and a bit of American history, and to do his or her best to become like the rest of the population, particularly the (then) white Anglo-Saxon majority. This worked for some groups, mostly immigrants from Europe. It did not work for the descendants of African slaves, primarily because the majority did not want to accept them.

The ideal of multiculturalism is supposed to reduce conflict by recognizing the diversity of the different groups in a society, but by (somehow) introducing tolerance between groups. So rather than trying to integrate with the majority, rather than becoming Swedish or American, group members are encouraged to keep their special characters, but at the same time to understand and accept the differences between them and other groups.

At the same time that multiculturalism became current in the West, another belief system took hold, especially in the academic world: “postcolonialism,” in which nations are divided into colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed. According to postcolonialism, racism is racial prejudice combined with power – only a colonizer or oppressor can be racist.

Postcolonial analysis has been generalized from nations to minority groups in a majority society, with such groups as African-Americans, women, recent immigrants, and LGBTQ people defined as oppressed, while white males are oppressors. Another important related concept is “intersectionality,” which establishes a hierarchy of oppression – a black woman is more oppressed than a black man – and which implies that oppressed groups should support each other’s struggles since they have a common oppressor.

An important contributor to postcolonial thought was Edward Said, who argued that colonizers were not capable of understanding the experience of the people they colonized. An attempt to do so was called “Orientalism,” a form of racism. According to Said, a true explanation of the condition of an oppressed group can only come from a member of the group itself.

The combination of these ideas is lethal. Tolerance has come to mean that it is forbidden to criticize another group for practices that one’s own group finds objectionable. Criticism of – or even commentary about – another group by members of a “privileged” group is condemned as racism (or, in the case of gender groups, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.) and is punished by ostracism or worse.

It’s obvious that this leads directly to identity politics. If a nonmember of a group cannot even understand the concerns of the group, then – for example – no male politician can properly represent women, and no white one can represent blacks. Intergroup conflicts are exacerbated, because by definition there is an unbridgeable gulf between oppressors and oppressed.

Thus the same force that has prevented liberal (in the sense of free) democratic politics from taking hold in the developing world has been introduced into the West.

Freedom of expression is one of the casualties. “Oppressors,” whether Israelis – I forgot to mention that Israelis and Jews, despite actually being oppressed minorities, always count as oppressors in the postcolonial worldview – white professors of psychology, Christians, former Muslims, and many others are simply not allowed to speak. Everyone’s speech is severely limited by rules of political correctness.

Tolerance is demanded for groups that are profoundly intolerant themselves. Muslim taxi drivers must be tolerated when they intolerantly refuse to take passengers carrying alcohol or blind people with dogs. And truly horrible practices, like female genital mutilation, honor killings, rape grooming gangs, and the continuing effort to expel or exterminate the Jews of Israel are considered immune to criticism.

The academic world, ground zero for the epidemic, has gone entirely insane, with barely intelligible political rants replacing scholarship in many fields, and political activism replacing teaching and research.

Understandably, those defined as oppressors have lashed back, with the same ideological weapons. Old fashioned white racists and male misogynists now justify their activities as expressions of their identity, and demand the same freedom from criticism that blacks and women are insisting upon.

As Daphne Patai noted, the whole enterprise is contradictory. The recognition of oppressed groups – and there truly are such in the world – depends upon a liberal humanism which recognizes basic human rights including free expression, equal treatment under law, and rights to protect life and property. But the identity politics that supposedly grew out of concern for human rights then turns around and negates those rights.

This isn’t just an intellectual fashion. It’s an assault on the edifice of western political thought that has developed since the Enlightenment, symbolized by the Magna Carta, and implemented in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution.

Are we truly stupid enough to throw this all away?

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments

How an ignorant blogger became a pro-Palestinian activist

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Jaspreet Oberoi is a blogger who recently had an article published in Ha’aretz, entitled “From Punjab to Palestine: Why young Sikhs like me are becoming pro-Palestinian activists.” I read it with interest, because I would like to know too.

I met some Sikhs in California, and had some in classes that I taught in the prehistoric 1970s. They were distinguished by being extremely hard workers who wanted to get along with everyone. The Sikh religion has a strong tradition of self-defense. They didn’t strike me as the type of folks that would be pro-Palestinian activists.

Oberoi’s photo shows a young man, probably in his 20s. He says in the article that he has lived in Canada for 8 years, having been born and raised in Punjab. He works as “a research scientist for a quantum computing company,” but his recent Twitter feed is peppered with links to his Ha’aretz article; he is clearly very pleased to have been published in what he calls “Israel’s longest running newspaper.” Maybe he has a future as a journalist, and not just a blogger with a day job?

So why is he becoming a pro-Palestinian activist? In his words,

Sikhs know what it feels to be effectively shooed out of your homeland and be forced to live in exile; what it’s like to be shot at “just for fun,” as target practice; what it’s like to be harassed daily by state security forces; what it’s like to have a seven year-old arrested on charges of “terrorism”; and what it’s like when the world simply ignores your plight.

One would think that such an experience would be precisely what would make someone a Zionist! But apparently that isn’t how it works.

When someone like Jaspreet Oberoi hears that some 59 “Palestinian protestors” were killed by Israeli snipers on May 14, he suffers “anguish, pain, remorse and disgust.” And later, his feelings were further assaulted by the lack of popular outcry over the “massacre” in Canada:

But after pacifying myself, when I peeked around, there was a stoic silence. At least nobody in Canada was celebrating or justifying the massacre, unlike many right-wingers across the globe, but there wasn’t a strong rebuke either.

Mr. Oberoi is immediately reminded of the horrific violence in India between Sikhs and the majority Hindus that began with Operation Blue Star in 1984 and the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi. He tells a story of a minority’s violent persecution, and how its complaints are ignored by the majority government and the rest of the world. And he keeps asking: does this sound familiar?

I admit that I am not competent to judge whether his account of the plight of the Sikhs in India is accurate. I’m sure there are facts and interpretations that he doesn’t mention, things I would hear about if I asked a supporter of Indian PM Modi. In any event, I am not about to write an article for an Indian newspaper about the Sikhs.

And of course there are things that Jaspreet Oberoi does not know about the Israeli-Arab conflict in general and recent events in Gaza in particular. For example, he doesn’t know that 53 of the 62 dead Gazans were operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, according to spokespersons for those organizations, and that Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, announced that “We will take down the border and we will tear out their hearts from their bodies.”

He does not understand that the “protest” was actually an attempted invasion, and that the IDF was defending Israel’s border and the people that live just a few minutes’ walk away from it, with what was actually the minimum force necessary.

Ha’aretz editors knew all this (it was in their own newspaper), even if Mr. Oberoi did not. They published his article anyway. But this post isn’t about Ha’aretz.

So we come back to the initial question: why does a young Sikh become a pro-Palestinian activist?

The cynical answer is that there is a demand for it. It is an easy way to get published in a prestigious venue, even if your writing isn’t of professional quality. Many Jews have taken this path with great success. A Jew attacking Israel has an authority that say, an Arab or European, doesn’t. But a Sikh presents an interesting, diverse, perspective too.

But I will give Mr. Oberoi the benefit of the doubt, and say that he simply doesn’t know any better. He is so deeply immersed in and affected by the real struggle of his own people, that he was triggered to write on a subject that he knew less than nothing about.

It’s a common psychological phenomenon. Each of us has his own story, and we impose it on chaotic reality that we don’t understand. To a woman who had an unpleasant divorce, every man looks like her jerk of an ex-husband. It’s not an accident that the idea of calling Israel an “apartheid state” arose in South Africa, or that Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, and the Movement for Black Lives have all drawn highly misleading parallels between Palestinian Arabs and African-Americans.

And why did he choose the Palestinians to identify with? Why not the Jews? Why indeed did he not end up a Zionist? Probably because he studied in Canada and that was the prevailing opinion. The easy, obvious choice.

It’s easier to apply a familiar pattern to a situation about which you are ignorant than to make the effort to learn about it. A good journalist or political analyst learns to avoid this trap. Mr. Oberoi hasn’t.

Posted in Information war, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 1 Comment

Israel’s media problem

Posted on May 22, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

If endemic irrational hatred of Israel is viewed as a disease, then its primary vector is the Western mainstream media. Although social media have been gaining in importance recently, the traditional media organizations are still the Xenopsylla cheopis spreading this plague.

They had begun to become less and less sympathetic to Israel after the oil shock of the mid-1970s. I started noticing it in 1982, during the First Lebanon War. Never mind that we went into Lebanon because our people in northern Israel were being pounded by rockets, katyushot, fired from Lebanese territory by Yasser Arafat’s PLO. We were blamed for starting the war and sharply criticized for every civilian casualty. And then we were vilified because we didn’t prevent our Christian Phalangist allies from taking (well-deserved, in my opinion) murderous revenge on the PLO.

In 2000, we saw one of the most damaging incidents of fraudulent atrocity reporting, one which was used as an excuse for countless terror attacks, the al-Durrah affair. 12-year old Mohammed al-Durrah was not shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, and probably was not shot at all by anyone, but a Palestinian-produced “news” event, recorded by a Palestinian cameraman, legitimized and transmitted around the world by a (Jewish) French reporter and TV network, ignited a worldwide conflagration of hatred. It was one of the sparks for the Second Intifada, and al-Durrah’s “death” remains a staple of anti-Israel discourse today, despite the ample evidence that it was faked.

In 2002, Israeli forces fought Palestinian terrorists in the Jenin refugee camp, a battle in which 23 IDF soldiers and 53 Arabs, only five of whom were noncombatants, died. The media again – in this case the BBC was the prime villain – accepted fabricated Palestinian accounts as the truth, reporting 500 to 1000 deaths, the deliberate massacre of hundreds of civilians and their burial in mass graves, the destruction of part of a hospital, and more. None of it happened, but that didn’t stop the media from reporting it as if it had. And like al-Durrah, it is still an article of faith in much of the world that there was a massacre in Jenin.

It continued in 2006, during the Second Lebanon War. Social media was in its infancy – Twitter had been around for only a few months and Facebook was two years old and limited to colleges and a few corporations – but already there was communication and coordinated incitement via email, newsgroups, and blogs. Still, the mainstream media outdid itself, sucking up and spewing out Hezbollah propaganda, like the famous “Red Cross ambulance incident,” dissected by the intrepid blogger called “Zombie.”

The phenomenon has only increased since then, through our various Gaza conflicts. The media repeatedly ignored the provocations, the thousands of rockets fired into Israeli communities and the kidnappings and murders carried out by terrorists associated with Hamas; and they consistently accepted Hamas’ atrocity stories and casualty figures.

Most recently, Hamas’ attempted invasion at the Gaza fence has been presented as a “peaceful demonstration” at which Israel’s shooting terrorist operatives (53 out of the 62 dead have been identified as members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad) is described in the media as an “indiscriminate massacre of unarmed protestors.” Today, social media has come into its own, creating multiple echo chambers for anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish expression; but the “real” media continues to legitimize some of the worst narratives.

Naturally there is a close relationship between hating Israel and hating Jews, because Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. It’s instructive to recall the “3-D” criteria for determining when criticism of Israel crosses over into antisemitism – I prefer the expression “Jew hatred” – suggested in 2004 by Natan Sharansky: Demonization, Double standards, and Delegitimization.

The mainstream media, with a few exceptions (e.g., the Wall St. Journal and Fox News) is regularly guilty of at least the first two “D’s.” They are notorious for their double standards, especially including a double standard for credulity: almost any claims of Israeli misbehavior, cruelty, or criminality are repeated with little attempt at verification, even when the claim is made by a terrorist organization like Hamas or its sympathizers.

These claims – such as that Israel steals organs from dead Palestinians, a story first promulgated by Aftonbladet, a very “mainstream” Swedish newspaper – are often so outrageous as to be comparable to medieval blood libels, and clearly constitute demonization.

Prime examples of anti-Israel media somewhat more sophisticated than Aftonbladet are the New York Times and – what else? – the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Day in and day out they provide “coverage” of Israel and her conflicts according to the principle that “for Palestinians everything is permitted; while for Israel nothing is excused.” (I apologize for not remembering who said this first).

The New York Times has a history of hostility to Jewish concerns, which according to one book on the subject are a result of the assimilationist ideology of its Jewish publisher. Just as it minimized the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, today it minimizes the anti-Jewish roots of irrational hatred of Israel.

Ha’aretz is interesting in that it isn’t really a newspaper for Israelis. Its Hebrew print edition and website have a negligible circulation in Israel, while its English-language website ranks about 2,300th among all websites in the US – not up with the Times, whose rank is about 30 (for comparison, Abuyehuda’s rank is about 4.9 million), but not bad at all.

Ha’aretz is the home of Gideon Levy, who writes a column almost every day viciously attacking the Netanyahu government, the IDF, or the 90% or more of Jewish Israeli society that does not live in North Tel Aviv and belong to the academic, media, or “creative” Left. Levy has enormous sympathy for Palestinians and illegal migrants, but none for IDF soldiers, Mizrachi Jews who still remember who their enemies are, or residents of South Tel Aviv whose neighborhoods have been destroyed by said migrants.

Can the mainstream media be fixed? I doubt it. Reporters and editors come from universities where anti-Israel activities are prominent, and tend to study liberal arts, “communications,” or journalism rather than history. Then they join a pool of like-minded individuals who encourage each other to engage in activist journalism. Correspondents in the field are manipulated by very media-savvy operatives from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLO who use a combination of threats and inducements to turn coverage in their direction. By contrast, Israel’s efforts are sporadic, poorly funded, and often poorly conceived. The major news organizations use Arab stringers in places like Gaza and southern Lebanon, who are ideologically anti-Israel, susceptible to threats, or both.

Could social media replace it as a reliable source for news? This is even less likely. Social media does have a role to play in keeping the mainstream honest, as illustrated by the Red Cross ambulance incident mentioned above. But if mainstream standards are eroding, social media has no standards at all. It is very subject to manipulation, as was demonstrated during the last election in the US. And efforts to clean it up, such as Facebook’s proposal to measure “trust” in various news sources are likely to make things worse.

There is no overall solution to her media problem, but there are things that Israel could do. One is to increase the available resources and professionalism of her various spokespersons, such as those of the Foreign Ministry and the IDF. Another is to establish worldwide satellite news channels – like Al-Jazeera – broadcasting in multiple languages, which would present accurate news together with entertaining content. This would be extremely expensive, but a drop in the bucket compared with the military budget.

Although Israel’s commitment to free expression prevents us from silencing our “Gideon Levites,” we can at least speak louder and more clearly, in order to ensure that the real story is accessible to anyone who cares to listen.

Posted in Information war, Media | 5 Comments