Independence Day

Posted on April 19, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Independence Day in Israel is a lot like Independence day in America. There are barbecues, fireworks, weekend camping trips, street fairs, concerts of patriotic music and boring speeches by government officials. Both nations gained independence from the British Empire, and neither felt warm enough toward their former imperial rulers to join the Commonwealth.

But there are significant differences. Possibly because the nation is young enough that there are still people around who remember when the state did not exist and who remember the price that was paid to create it, there is still a feeling – at least, in some quarters – that independence is not a normal condition. For thousands of years there was no sovereign Jewish state, and the Jewish people were the paradigm case of the outsiders living, with various degrees of toleration, in other people’s countries. That changed suddenly on May 14, 1948, the 5th of Iyar on the Jewish calendar.

America had her Tories who would have preferred to remain colonies of Great Britain (including the son of Benjamin Franklin, who had been the Royal Governor of New Jersey), but I suspect that after some 242 years, very few Americans continue to believe that the US should return to colonial status. Israel had (and still has) her anti-Zionists: those who oppose a Jewish state for religious reasons, and those who oppose it for various political reasons. I doubt this will change even when the state reaches (with God’s help) its 242nd birthday.

Some Americans complain that many of their countrymen (and women) don’t appreciate the sacrifices required to create and maintain an independent nation. This is less of a problem in Israel, whose people are under constant threat, both individually and collectively, by the enemies of the state and the Jewish people. Israel’s memorial day for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism (yom hazikaron) takes place the day before Independence Day. When the siren sounds to mark the beginning of yom hazikaron, almost all Israelis stop what they are doing and stand at attention for the duration of the siren. Autos stop in the middle of the highways , and their drivers get out and stand beside them. I admit that no matter how many times I’ve experienced this, it’s always emotionally powerful. Except for the siren (and perhaps a few barking dogs) there is absolute silence; and it happens at the same precise moment all over the country.

I said “almost all Israelis” because there are some Arab citizens, some Haredim, and even a few extreme leftists who oppose the Jewish state and make a point of showing their contempt for it and for the soldiers who died for it. If I could afford to, I would happily buy them all one-way tickets to the Arab or Diaspora countries that they appear to yearn for.

When America gained independence, its population was composed of Europeans mostly of British descent, African slaves and Native Americans. It was some time before the “non-white” inhabitants achieved equal rights. Israel also had a minority population made up of Arabs who, while citizens from the start, were under military rule until 1966. Since independence, both countries absorbed immigrants from numerous cultures, although almost all of those absorbed by Israel were Jewish.

Some Arab citizens of Israel see themselves as Israelis, while others embrace their “Palestinian” identity and reject “Israeli-ness.” Most Jews feel that they are part of a Jewish people that encompasses Jews of different national origins. The divisions between Jews of European and Middle Eastern or North African origin are becoming less important as time and intermarriage blur them. Russians, Ethiopians and others are also blending into the Jewish population.

In America until recently the concept of the “melting pot” which would turn immigrants (but never African Americans!) into members of a homogeneous American People was popular, and immigrants aspired to assimilate into “American” culture. More recently, many immigrant groups strongly reject the melting pot, and insist on maintaining their original cultures. I don’t believe this tendency is strong among non-Haredi Israeli immigrants, who do appear to be assimilating to “Israeli” culture. There are various reasons for this: army service, shared stresses (terrorism, bureaucracy, etc.) and the comparative openness of Israeli society. In Israel, at least among the Jewish population, it seems that identity politics is declining; while in America, it is gaining importance.

American society seems – from my admittedly distant vantage point – to be more divided than ever in my memory. The delivery of health care and other social services appears to be worse than I can remember, the primary, secondary, and higher educational systems are failing in their purposes, and the long-term decrease in violent crime seems to be ending. There are many other troubling social indicators. Time will tell if the decline that I perceive is real, and if so, if it will be overcome.

70 years after independence, Israeli society has overall never been better off economically, although the high price of housing is a problem. There are still pockets of deep poverty. The benefits of the success of the high-tech sector and the natural gas discoveries have not filtered down to the lower rungs of the ladder. Politically there is the ongoing struggle between the right-of-center majority and the left-of-center establishment that includes the Supreme Court, the media, academic class, the arts, and so forth. There is growing conflict between Haredi extremists and everyone else. But on balance it is a happy, optimistic society. One indication is the high birthrate, over three children per woman for the Jewish and Arab sectors.

Despite this, there is a cloud over our optimism, which is the almost certainty of war with Iran and its proxies in the near future. Israel is not expansionist and does not desire war. We have absolutely nothing against the Iranian people, but unfortunately their radical regime has an obsession with destroying our state and ourselves.

We’ll prevail. It will be terrible for us, but more terrible for our enemies. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was not reconstituted after thousands of years to be lost after only 70.

There are flags everywhere, hanging from windowsills, on cars, on both of the antennas on our roof. Our bank is giving out free flags, made in Israel by handicapped people.

Happy Independence Day!

Posted in American society, Israeli Society | Comments Off on Independence Day

The Devil is in the implementation

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Yossi Klein Halevi is a wonderful writer. I recommend his book Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation to anyone who wants to appreciate the nuances of Israel’s political tribes.

But like many wonderful Israeli writers on such subjects, his brain is stuck.

It is stuck on the horns of the dilemma Micah Goodman calls Catch-67: if Israel tries to absorb all of Judea and Samaria, it will either have to undemocratically deny the franchise to the Arab population or become an unstable binational state (or both). But on the other hand, if Israel gives up Judea and Samaria, it will have to deal with a security nightmare in which terrorists will be in easy shooting range of Israel’s most populated regions. A Gaza times ten. Neither choice is acceptable. Stuck.

So how does he get unstuck? Like many Jewish intellectuals, he sees the demographic problem as worse than the security problem, and opts for partition. In a recent Wall Street Journal article (unfortunately behind a paywall) he argues that both sides have legitimate aspirations to possess all of the land; but although partition is unjust for both, it is the only practical solution.

I strongly disagree with him about the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations (so does Yisrael Medad, here), but that isn’t what I want to discuss in this post. I want to look at one small piece of the issue that is a show-stopper for everyone that takes a similar pro-partition line: the question of implementation.

Halevi writes,

Like a majority of Israelis—though the numbers are dropping, according to the polls—I support the principle of a two-state solution, for Israel’s sake no less than for the Palestinians. Extricating ourselves from ruling over another people is a moral, political and demographic imperative. It is the only way to save Israel in the long term as both a Jewish and a democratic state—the two essential elements of our being. Partition is the only real alternative to a Yugoslavia-like single state in which two rival peoples devour each other.

But in order to take that frightening leap of territorial contraction—pulling back to the pre-1967 borders, when Israel was barely 9 miles wide at its narrowest point—we need some indication that a Palestinian state would be a peaceful neighbor, and not one more enemy on our doorstep. The practical expression of that goodwill would be Palestinian agreement that the descendants of the refugees of 1948 return to a Palestinian state and not to Israel, where they would threaten its Jewish majority.

We know, and Halevi notes, the depth of Palestinian hatred for Israel and that “the relentless message, conveyed to a new generation by media and schools and mosques, is that the Jews are thieves, with no historical roots in this land.” We know, from our experience with Gaza and South Lebanon, how easy it is for a terrorist organization like Hamas or Hezbollah to establish itself in areas from which Israel withdraws. We know that the geography of the Land of Israel, with the commanding high ground of Judea and Samaria makes a pre-1967 sized Israel almost indefensible.

No Palestinian leadership has ever indicated that it is prepared to give up the “right of return.” Indeed, this idea – that all of the land from the river to the sea has been unfairly taken from them – is the single essential ideological principle of Palestinian identity. Any Palestinian agreement to two-state plans has always been hedged as temporary, as in the PLO’s “phased plan” or Hamas’ proposal of a temporary truce. Palestinian leaders deny that there is a Jewish people, or that it has a historical connection to the land. This implies that there is a strong possibility that the Palestinian side will not negotiate in good faith or keep its side of the bargain.

There are perhaps 400,000 Israeli Jews residing in Judea and Samaria (excluding Jerusalem). Even with land swaps enabling the Jewish communities with the largest populations to remain in Israel, a partition which required Jews to leave the Palestinian parts of the country would require tens of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand Jews to be resettled elsewhere. Leaving aside the manifest injustice of this, it’s clear that once done it is very difficult to undo.

When a concrete concession by one side – the withdrawal of soldiers and civilians, perhaps (as in the Sinai and Gaza) the physical destruction of communities – which is hard or impossible to undo is balanced against a paper commitment to be peaceful by the other, there is little cost to the latter side to renege on the agreement.

But let’s assume that there have been negotiations and both sides have signed an agreement to give up what they consider their historic rights: Israel’s right to settlement in all the Land of Israel, and the Palestinians’ right of return to Israel for the descendents of the refugees of 1948. Now here are a few questions:

  1. Once the IDF has withdrawn from Judea and Samaria and given control to the Palestinians, what happens if they violate their agreement to be a peaceful neighbor? Our experience during the Oslo period argues that they will not keep their word. How will the agreement be enforced? Will we be asked to depend on the UN or foreign powers? Or will Israel need to invade and retake the areas in yet another war? Neither of this options is acceptable.
  2. Sometimes even democratic Western nations don’t live up to agreements after administrations change (for example, consider the Obama Administration’s reneging on the promises in the Bush letters to Ariel Sharon). Autocratic leaders are even less likely to maintain commitments made by their predecessors. What guarantees that the next Palestinian “President” will observe the agreement? And what if, for example, a Fatah administration is replaced by a Hamas one, or even one aligned with the Islamic State or Iran? All of these things are possible.

So we have a one-sided agreement which is almost impossible to undo, with a party that historically does not negotiate in good faith or keep its commitments, whose basic identity opposes such an agreement, which has an unstable autocratic leadership, and which is prone to being overthrown by extremists.

One of the good things about Halevi’s piece is that he understands that any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is not in the cards for the near future. There is too much extremism (“on both sides,” he says, but I think it is mostly on the Arab side). And he doesn’t think that “the status quo is not sustainable.” We’ve been sustaining it for 50 (or 70, if you prefer) years, and we can sustain it a bit longer. He seems to agree with Micah Goodman that there is no “solution” that can be implemented next week:

A deepening Israeli-Sunni strategic relationship could evolve into a political relationship, encouraging regional involvement in tempering if not yet solving the Palestinian conflict. One possible interim deal would be gradual Israeli concessions to the Palestinians—reversing the momentum of settlement expansion and strengthening the Palestinian economy—in exchange for gradual normalization with the Sunni world.

Unfortunately, this too is wishful thinking. Regardless of what the Sunni leaders would prefer, the Palestinians are moving in the direction of more extremism, not less. If they don’t get support from Saudi Arabia, they are happy to take it from Iran or Turkey. The Death Factory set in motion by Yasser Arafat maintains itself, and concessions by Israel just encourage it.

I believe that the Jewish state has a legal, moral and historical right to all of the Land of Israel that the Palestinians do not have (although they do have human rights and ought to have at least a limited right of self-determination). I have argued this at length elsewhere. But that’s not the point.

The point is that implementing partition of the Land of Israel would risk national suicide. There’s no rush. Perhaps the best “solution” is not to look for a political agreement, but just to keep the status quo with small modifications as needed. If you must have a program, there are other options than partition for an end game. So could we stop insisting on this one?

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 1 Comment

The case for regime change in Iran

Posted on April 13, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

What can or should be done in response to the continuing Syrian bloodbath? And who, if anyone, should do it?

In a NY Times column, Max Fisher has described “America’s Three Bad Options in Syria” (he leaves out the fourth bad one, which is doing nothing).

His argument is simple: 1) Limited, punitive strikes are ineffectual;  2) escalating aid to Assad’s enemies can easily be matched and exceeded by Iran and Russia; and 3) an intervention that actually collapsed Assad’s government would throw the region into chaos, costing even millions more lives, and risk a military confrontation with Russia.

He doesn’t discuss the consequences of doing nothing. I suspect this might actually shorten the active conflict, since it would result in Assad reasserting control over much of the country, and Iran and Russia becoming the de facto ruling powers in the region. But this is also a bad option, because while it might reduce the bloodletting in the very short term, it would set the stage for future very severe conflicts, which could include Europe and the US (and definitely would include Israel).

There is another option that needs to be considered. It’s based on the understanding that today there is one source of most of the conflict in the Middle East (and it is not the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which has always been only a proxy for the ambitions of Israel’s larger neighbors or the struggle between the US and Russia).

That source is the Iranian ambition to export its revolutionary Shiite Islamism to the world, and to establish a caliphate in the Middle East. Iran is well on her way to doing so. She has effective control of Lebanon through her Hezbollah subsidiary, she controls the central government and much of the territory of Iraq, and she is able to do almost whatever she wants in Syria (the ‘almost’ is thanks to Israel). Iran also threatens the vital Bab al-Mandeb strait, through her influence on the Houthi regime in Yemen (almost all trade between the EU and Asia passes through Bab al-Mandeb, as does as much as 30% of the oil produced in the Gulf).

The Iranian regime has done all this relatively cheaply and with conventional means. When it obtains a nuclear umbrella, we can expect it to be an order of magnitude more dangerous. It is presently developing missiles that will place Europe under threat of nuclear attack. ICBMs that can reach the US will be the next step.

ISIS, al-Qaeda and similar groups are far less dangerous. They are at most terrorist militias which could easily be crushed by the West (which instead has allowed Iran to use them as an excuse to gain control of parts of Iraq and Syria).

The option that I am proposing is what former King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia advised the US to do back in 2008: to “cut off the head the snake.”

Abdullah may have meant only to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, but I am suggesting that in addition, the present regime should be overthrown and opposition elements helped to take over.

With Iran out of the equation, the Syrian problem is not solved, but at least simplified. The best solution at this point would be a partition that would keep the various religious and ethnic groups away from each other’s throats. Clearly the present situation in Syria in which a Sunni majority is ruled by a small Alawi minority has shown itself to be unworkable.

While Russia can project power there with its air force, it cannot afford to send a large number of ground troops – until now, the cannon fodder has been provided by Iran’s Hezbollah ally and its Iraqi Shiite militias, which will lose their support when the snake is dead. Both Russia and Assad would find themselves much more prepared to compromise when the Iranian muscle has been taken away.

Other conflicts would also lose impetus. Hezbollah, Israel’s most dangerous enemy in the short term, would waste away. Hamas would lose its major source of financial support. Although the Palestinian desire to destroy Israel won’t disappear, the loss of Iranian support will mean fewer hot wars, which may pave the way for eventual reconciliation. The conflict in Yemen also will become amenable to solution without Iranian support for the Houthis.

Iran’s fingerprints have been found on terrorist attacks all over the world, including Latin America and Europe. Hezbollah is heavily involved in illegal drug and weapons trafficking. No other single country is responsible for as much mischief and violence around the world as Iran, and it is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power.

The example of Iraq is often used to argue that attempts at regime change can have unexpected and sometimes unpleasant consequences. There is no doubt that this is true, and that such an enterprise is very risky. But there were clear mistakes made in Iraq: the “de-Baathification” purge of the armed forces, government and civil service, which left no one competent to run essential services; the lack of planning for a temporary occupation regime and police force; the belief that if a tyranny was removed and elections held, democracy would automatically take hold; and of course the biggie – the failure to understand that Iran would walk into the vacuum created by overthrowing Saddam.

The Iranian people are relatively well-educated and cultured. Iran does have home-grown opposition factions that could replace the mullahs that rule the country. The difficult problem would be dealing with the Revolutionary Guard and its paramilitary Basij, who are loyal to the present regime and would resist its overthrow.

Any successful regime change would have to be accomplished by empowering the opposition and supporting its takeover from the present regime. It would need to be accomplished with as little damage to non-military infrastructure as possible. Nevertheless, there would certainly be some military confrontations with the Revolutionary Guard. But the approach taken in Iraq – smashing the country to smithereens and then trying to rebuild it from the ground up – failed there and would fail here as well.

The Western powers that would need to do this would have to push over the old regime, and stand aside – even if what replaces it is not entirely to their liking.

Yes, it would be a risky endeavor. The mullahs could be replaced by something worse (but at least it wouldn’t have an advanced nuclear weapons program). I think, though, that the potential benefits – for the region, for the Iranian people, and for the civilized world – make it a risk worth taking.

Posted in Iran | 3 Comments

No, it isn’t Kent State on the Mediterranean*

Posted on April 9, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

I talked to an American friend yesterday. She is well-educated and interested in current events, and she was concerned about what was going on at the border with Gaza. She read me an AP news account that was in her local paper (probably this one) which explained in the second paragraph that

Israeli troops opened fire from across the border, killing at least nine Palestinians and wounding 491 others in the second mass border protest in eight days. The deaths brought to at least 31 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since last week.

What is the picture that this evokes?

If I didn’t know better, I would see a bunch of people peacefully holding signs, singing “we shall overcome,” when suddenly a machine gun opens up and mows them down at random, men women and children. The article mentions that “the area was engulfed by thick black smoke from protesters setting tires on fire,” but it is only in the ninth paragraph that we are told that “the [Israeli] military said” that the “protesters” threw firebombs and explosive devices under cover of the smoke,  and that “several attempts to cross the fence were thwarted.”

Let’s analyze some of this.

Are they “protesters” and if so, what are they protesting? Some of them are civilians who are sympathetic with Hamas, or who are young people with nothing more exciting to do, who have taken the free buses provided by Hamas to eat the free lunch provided there. Participants are encouraged to try to break through the border fence, and Hamas is paying them from $200 to $500 if they are injured, and $3000 to families of anyone who is killed.

The civilians  are generally not the ones who are getting shot. Most of those who did are members of the al-Qassam brigades or other military organizations associated with Hamas or other terrorist factions, who a trying to damage or penetrate the border fence, or injure or kill Israeli troops on the other side.

Here is a description from an article by Nahum Barnea, an Israeli journalist who is a bitter enemy of Israel’s present government, and anything but a right-winger:

[IDF officer at the scene:] “There were armed cells among the protestors that wanted to break through the fence to set it on fire, to kidnap soldiers and perhaps break into one of the kibbutzim. There are several people within the crowd, members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force, who are hiding guns, knives, explosives under their clothes. Their intention was to turn into a fighting force.”

Nineteen or 20 Palestinians were killed on the first Friday, I said.

“One-third of the dead are armed terrorists,” one of the officers said. “Another 40 percent are members of the organizations, including a Nukhba company commander. Most of the others were identified as key instigators. The first person who was killed was a farmer. It was a misidentification by a tank.”

The orders received from the General Staff are clear. A soldier is allowed to fire in three cases: If he is in a life-threatening situation, if he detects damage to state infrastructure [the border fence] and if he spots key instigators. In the last case, he must receive approval from a commander. First, he fires into the air, and only then he shoots towards the person’s body.

“Let’s assume that 400 people had broken through the border fence,” one of the officers said. “We would have had to stop them with fire. At least 50 of them would have been killed. It would have been a strategic event. They would have had to retaliate. We would have had to retaliate. In fact, we are preventing war through our surgical activity.

People in Gaza have much to be unhappy about. Media sympathetic to Hamas usually blame Israel, citing its “blockade” of Gaza. But the blockade is very selective, and does not prevent Gaza from importing food, medical supplies and even construction materials intended to rebuild homes and infrastructure damaged in recent wars. Hamas taxes all imports heavily, and appropriates what it wants for its own purposes. Cement and rebar imported for construction of buildings, for example, is diverted to use in attack tunnels dug under the border to Israel, which are intended to infiltrate terrorists and to kidnap Israelis.

The biggest problems for Gaza residents today are the lack of electricity, mostly because of a dispute with the Palestinian Authority, and the availability of clean water and sewage treatment facilities. International donors have provided money and equipment, but resources are consistently diverted to Hamas for military purposes.

But these are not the things they are protesting. The protest is called “The Great March of Return,” and it is on behalf of a “right of return” of the descendents of Arab refugees from the 1948 war to land that has been under Israel’s control since then. Rhetoric is very aggressive. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said that the event marks the beginning of their return to “all of Palestine,” especially Jerusalem, which they say US President Trump had no business recognizing as the capital of Israel.

As everyone knows, the “return” of the millions who claim refugee status would be the end of the Jewish state (and probably the start of a civil war that would rival the one in Syria). In other words, what they are protesting is the very existence of Israel on land that they want for themselves.

I told my friend that Israel had few options. Could they fail to defend the border, close to Israeli communities (as close as 100 meters in some cases)? Palestinian terrorists have on countless occasions showed that they are capable of horrific violence, even slitting the throats of babies in their cribs.

Some commentators have gone as far as to accuse Israel of deliberately “massacring” Palestinians. What they don’t explain is what advantage Israel would gain by doing so. Israel is extremely conscious (too much so, in my opinion) of maintaining an image of a progressive, humane society, and would consider mass or indiscriminate killing of Palestinians a public relations disaster as well as a moral one. The view that IDF soldiers in general would seize an opportunity to kill Palestinians out of sheer hatred – which is apparently assumed by those who suggest that there has been a “massacre” – is a manifestation of the campaign of demonization that Israel and the IDF have been subjected to, and even of a pervasive anti-Jewish worldview.

Hamas, on the other hand, benefits greatly from civilian casualties, which support its narrative of victimization and provide its supporters with fodder for “lawfare” against the IDF and diplomatic sanctions against Israel.

I have recently read several articles which argue that the situation is very complicated and we shouldn’t place all the responsibility on either side. I agree that it is complicated. There are numerous players with influence here, including Israel and Hamas of course, but also the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and notably Iran, which is financing Hamas and sees violence in Gaza as in its interest.

But it isn’t complicated in a moral sense. I have no problem saying that one side is defending itself against invasion, and the other is committing an act of aggression while at the same time victimizing its own people.

It’s a shame that important parts of the American media don’t get this – or don’t want its consumers to get it.

______________

* For those too young to remember, see Kent State Massacre.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Terrorism, War | Comments Off on No, it isn’t Kent State on the Mediterranean*

The political storm over African migrants

Posted on April 6, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Before you can discuss solutions to the problem of the African infiltrators, migrants, asylum seekers or refugees in Israel – call them what you want – you should know the facts. You are strongly encouraged to read about them here; but in summary there are about 38,000 people from various countries in Africa who crossed our Egyptian border illegally and want to stay in Israel. The government has tried to find a way to deport them that will be both effective and humane, but so far has been stymied at every turn.

The position of the government is that only a small number deserve refugee status, and the rest are illegal immigrants who should leave the country one way or another. The majority of Israelis (66% of Jews and 50% of Arabs) agree.

Initially, illegal migrants faced detention (they were allowed to work during the day, but required to return to a detention facility in the evening) or even imprisonment, in order to encourage them to leave. But Israel’s Supreme Court declared this policy illegal.

Since the majority of them cannot be deported to their home countries – for example, because they will be prosecuted for draft evasion (Eritrea) or for travelling to Israel with which a state of war exists (Sudan) – an agreement was reached with “third countries” (Rwanda and possibly Uganda) to accept them. The migrants and the destination countries would both receive payments, and the migrants’ exit would be “of their own free will,” even though both carrots and sticks would be deployed to encourage them.

Naturally, the migrants would prefer to stay in Israel. Their case was taken up by the Israeli Left, along with numerous international and foreign organizations such as Amnesty International, the European Union, the New Israel Fund, the Union for Reform Judaism (in the USA) and others. The Supreme Court froze the plan, and massive international pressure was applied to the government of Rwanda, which – embarrassed by what was portrayed as “enabling anti-black racism” – backed out.

PM Netanyahu blamed the New Israel Fund (NIF), an organization primarily based in the US but with an Israeli branch. According to the very reliable NGO Monitor, the NIF gives millions of dollars annually to groups promoting BDS, and engaging in incitement and demonization of Israel. In a Facebook post (Hebrew), Netanyahu wrote,

The central factor behind the European pressure on the government of Rwanda to withdraw from the agreement to take the infiltrators from Israel was the New Israel Fund.

The Fund is a foreign organization funded by foreign governments and forces hostile to Israel, such as the funds linked to George Soros. The primary objective of the Fund is to erase the Jewish character of Israel and turn it into a state of its citizens, on 1967 lines, next to a Jew-free Palestinian nation-state whose capital is Jerusalem…

I don’t know of any Western democracy, in particular the US, that would suffer for very long hostile activities financed by foreign powers, like those that have been going on here in Israel with the New Israel Fund for decades… [my tr.]

The PM then negotiated a deal with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The plan was that over five years some 16,000 migrants would be resettled in Western nations, while another 16,000 would get temporary residency in Israel. The ones that stayed would get job training and be dispersed around the country to relieve the pressure on South Tel Aviv. This time it was the Right that objected, and not just the extreme Right. For one thing, the resettlement of the migrants would take five years, and given the involvement of the UN, there are serious doubts that it would take place at all, or that more than a very few of them would actually go.

The remaining 16,000 would have a temporary status which, with the passage of time would certainly become permanent. Once people have established families and have Hebrew-speaking children that know no other home, it becomes extremely painful (for everyone involved) to relocate them. Finally – and I think this is the most important consideration – such an arrangement makes Israel a desirable destination again for migrants.

Israel stopped the flow of migrants in part by building a fence along the Egyptian border, but also by making it difficult for them to get work, benefits and residency here. If that were not the case, no fence would keep them out. The new arrangement would make Israel a magnet again for migrants who knew that if they could get in they could stay or move on to Europe or North America.

As I write this (Wednesday), the PM has declared that the deal is off, and everything is being “rethought from the beginning.” The Left and the various foreign organizations that favored the deal are furious. Netanyahu is talking about passing a law permitting the imprisonment of those who have entered the country illegally (until they agree to leave “voluntarily”), with a clause saying that the Supreme Court cannot overturn it. I have no idea how this would play out, but it’s clear that the political storm won’t be over for a while.

So why is this so important? Why can’t a country with 8.5 million people fit some 38,000 new ones in somewhere?

First of all, there is the “magnet” argument. If Israel becomes a desirable destination, we will not be able to put limits on the flow. And 8 million is still a small country, with a housing shortage and a labor market that is getting increasingly sophisticated every day. The migrants are from cultures very different from the Jewish and Arab cultures that (uneasily) coexist in Israel. One can expect conflict, and that is borne out by the experience of South Tel Aviv.

Second, there is the problem of South Tel Aviv. 90% of the migrants have congregated there and have trapped the residents in what they call a living hell of crime, dirt and stress that they cannot escape. They can’t afford to move since their property is almost worthless. They can’t sleep at night because of noise or walk the streets without encountering human waste. The area has always been neglected, but the advent of the migrants has made it ten times worse. It is the obligation of the government to take care of its own people – first.

Third, and very important, is the struggle for a Zionist majority. Some will read this and immediately accuse me of racism. This is a misunderstanding of Zionism, which is not a belief in the superiority of Jews, or that they have some kind of special status in the world. It is fundamentally the idea that in order for the Jewish people to survive and thrive they must have a state of their own. Zionism asserts that living as a Diaspora  minority has been tried and it doesn’t work.

It should be obvious that in order for there to be a state of the Jewish people, it must have a Jewish majority. And if it is also a democracy, it must have a Zionist majority, because if it does not, then its elected representatives can decide that it will not be a state that exists for the Jewish people anymore, but rather a state like Canada or the US which is a state belonging to its inhabitants. The Left, and organizations like the New Israel Fund – as PM Netanyahu quite accurately points out – at least in theory believe that this is the only kind of state that is truly legitimate, and that a nation-state that exists on behalf of a specific people does not belong in the 21st century.

In practice, they look past all the dictatorships and monarchies, and the countries where people of the wrong religion or ethnicity (or sex!) are persecuted. They welcome the creation of yet another such state in “Palestine” while they focus all of their moral condemnations  on Israel.

And the controversy about the African migrants is an absolutely perfect vehicle for it. The migrants are black, so they can accuse Israel of racism, while ignoring the airlifts that have brought more than 125,000 black Ethiopian Jews to Israel as part of the realization of the Zionist dream of the Ingathering of the Exiles.

The government and a majority of Israeli citizens believe that absorbing the migrants and inviting more will strain the fabric of their society dangerously. At the end of the day, they are the ones  that live and work here, defend their nation, and pay the price of whatever happens in this tiny country.

They are the ones who get to decide – and not the representatives of the EU, Amnesty International, the Union for Reform Judaism, or the New Israel Fund’s donors.

Posted in Israeli Society, Zionism | Comments Off on The political storm over African migrants

Must all our residents be citizens?

Posted on April 2, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Someone asked me a question on Facebook. Social media demands that all answers be given while standing on one foot, and since I’m not Hillel, I’m going to present my answer here, using both feet.

So here is the question (I’m paraphrasing): Isn’t the only just and practical solution to your conflict with the Palestinians to create one state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and give everybody equal rights? Make all the Arabs in the region citizens. The fellow added something about a right of return for “refugees” living elsewhere; I’ll get back to that later.

There could be an acceptable one-state solution. But it could not be created by simply making all the inhabitants citizens with equal rights in every respect.

First, there is an assumption here that every country must be like Canada or the United States, a state of its citizens. But Israel is not that. It is the nation-state of the Jewish people. That implies that there must be a difference between the status of Jews and other citizens. We go to great lengths to insist that Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel have exactly equal rights, and that is true – up to a point. But in some important respects it is not. I can call my Jewish cousin in America and invite him to come and live in Israel, and the government will allow him to do so and even give him special benefits. An Arab citizen cannot do this. This is a fundamental point, an explication of what it means to say that the state belongs to the Jewish people and not merely to everyone who lives here, even if everyone has the right to be represented in the Knesset.

The nation-state of the Jewish people, if it allows all of its citizens to vote must have a Jewish – no, a Zionist – majority. If it did not, then the Knesset could vote to remove the special status of the Jewish people. There is a dispute about the how many Arabs there actually are in the region, although it is relatively certain that Jews would still be a majority, especially if Gaza weren’t included. But the Arabs would have the support of left-wing Jews and maybe political opportunists a well. There would be massive campaigns (paid for by European governments and the New Israel Fund, no doubt) to promote reducing the Jewish majority, changing the symbols of the state, or even weakening or repealing the Law of Return. It could happen.

The Jewish state is a refuge for Diaspora Jews who are persecuted, but it is also a reservoir and an incubator of Jewish culture. Today, given the degree of assimilation in the Diaspora, it is possible to imagine the Jewish people disappearing from history if there were not a Jewish state to nurture and nourish it. The Jewish character of the state is, even today, under attack, and it is imperative to protect it.

Does this mean that Israel must never consider annexing Judea and Samaria, land that arguably (and there are many arguments) belongs to Israel and must remain under our control for strategic reasons, out of fear of losing its Zionist majority? Not necessarily.

In some countries, the great majority of the inhabitants are citizens. But this is not true in general, especially in the Middle East. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, only about 70% are citizens, in Lebanon 75%, and in Bahrain, 48%. An extreme example is Qatar, where less than 15% of the residents are citizens.

But, you say, most of these countries aren’t democratic. Well, in ancient Athens, where the word ‘democracy’ originated, only 10-20% were citizens. But I get the point. It is more democratic when a greater percentage of the population shares the rights and duties of citizenship. Nevertheless, in the fractious Middle East, where ethnic conflicts are the rule rather than the exception, real democracy is often theoretical rather than real. Both Lebanon and Iraq are theoretically democratic republics, but their elections play out along strict ethnic lines, and it would be hard to say that “democracy” greatly benefits their inhabitants.

Democracy is not an absolute. What it means and how it is implemented varies from place to place and from time to time. Even the most democratic of countries place limitations on immigration, on suffrage (consider that in most states of the US, convicted felons have restrictions placed on their right to vote, some of them permanent), and on eligibility for naturalization of non-citizens. In my opinion, given the stresses placed on Israel by the hostility of its neighbors – indeed, the hostility of much of the world – it is miraculous that it is as democratic as it is, particularly in respect to the full civil rights enjoyed by its 1.5 million Arab citizens.

One of the most liberal policies associated with citizenship is the practice of automatically granting it to any child born on national soil. Interestingly, even in the developed world, citizenship by birthright is uncommon: only 30 countries (out of 194 UN member nations) automatically grant citizenship to children born on their soil, with the most prominent among them being the US and Canada. None are in the Middle East. Pakistan is the only country in Asia which grants this right (but there is an exception if the father is considered an “enemy of the state”).

My Facebook acquaintance mentioned a “right of return for ‘refugees’ living elsewhere.” This demand, repeated ad infinitum by anti-Zionists, is legally indefensible and practically unacceptable. It is not supported in international law. In addition, the unsustainable definition of Palestinian refugee status as a hereditary property is not applied to any other refugee population. It was invented – along with policies of preventing the resettlement of the refugees or their descendants anywhere but Israel, encouraging the growth of this population (today more than 5 million), and indoctrinating them with the idea that some day they would “return to their homes,” as a cruel exploitation of innocent people as weapons in the continuing war against the Jews.

At this point, what is supposed to be “just and practical” becomes the elimination of the Jewish state and its replacement by yet another Arab-dominated state added to the 22 already existing in the region. It seems reasonable to assume that the Jews of Israel would not sit still for this, and so it should be clear that this plan, supposedly a peaceful solution, would actually lead to war.

While an argument can be made that the Arab population of Judea and Samaria has some kind of right of self-determination that is not actualized – although it can also be said that today the rule of the autonomous Palestinian Authority does constitute self-determination – a full actualization of what Palestinians see as their rights would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That is, self-determination for the newly-created “Palestinian people” would come at the expense of Jewish self-determination, and possibly of the survival of the Jewish people.

And I admit that I’m biased. I admit that I care more for my people than for the Palestinians. A lot more, and not just for the obvious reason that the Palestinian Arabs have been particularly unkind to us for the past 100 years or so. There is a human drive for cultural self-preservation just as there is for individual self-preservation, although it may be suppressed in unhealthy cultures – just as unhealthy individuals sometimes lose the will to survive, or even commit suicide.

So let’s assume that at some point in the future Israel were to annex Judea and Samaria. I can find no legal, moral or practical reason for automatically granting citizenship to all the Arab residents, as my interlocutor suggests, and plenty of reasons not to. Indeed, it only seems reasonable in view of the extreme and violent hostility of much of the Arab population of the area to Israel and Jews, that Israel should follow Pakistan’s example and exclude “enemies of the state” from citizenship.

The Left argues that either we accept a partition of our country according to the 1949 armistice lines or something close to them – and lose our ability to defend the country – or we will get their disastrous version of a one-state solution. But there are numerous other possibilities, and one of the keys to developing them is the understanding that not every resident must be a citizen.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Zionism | Comments Off on Must all our residents be citizens?

Jew-hatred and conspiracy theories

Posted on March 30, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Western Jew-hatred is making a major comeback today on both sides of the Atlantic.

Muslim antisemitism, which is written into the Qu’ran, has always been there, has always expressed itself violently, and is only attracting particular attention today because of the increasing number of Muslims in Western countries.

But non-Muslims in greater and greater numbers, in Europe and North America, have recently been discovering the joy of hating Jews. There are various reasons for this. One is contagion from Muslims. This particularly applies to the political Left, which is rushing to embrace what they see as the oppressed, colonized Muslim world, despite the clear evidence that its culture is generally violent, anti-democratic, misogynistic, homophobic, and almost everything they purport to despise. Muslims, for their part, have been quick to pick up anti-Jewish themes that first developed in Christian Europe – and  then these ideas get fed back to post-Christian progressives, who lap it up.

The documented horrors of the Holocaust for a time served to immunize the West against traditional Jew-hatred (this is why Gen. Eisenhower went out of his way to publicize the atrocities of the Holocaust). But constantly repeated descriptions of horrible events caused those descriptions to lose their impact; and even had the opposite of the desired effect, causing recipients – especially in Europe where there are residual guilt feelings – to say “shut up, we’re tired of hearing about it.”

This is the paradox of “Holocaust education” and why there can be too much of it. On the one hand, it’s important to know the historical facts and to understand how genocide develops from popular hatred plus governmental, connivance (South African whites should pay attention to this dynamic). On the other hand, it can dull the feeling of horror evoked by those facts and even produce more hatred of targeted groups like Jews. Look at the veneration of Hitler by some Muslim students, or the prevalence of Holocaust denial in both traditional “right-wing” Jew hatred and the Islamic variety.

In recent years, the memes of Jew-hatred mutated into anti-Zionism. Instead of hating individual Jews, which is taboo, it’s possible to hate their collective expression of identity in the form of the Jewish state. This mutation did not trigger the same immune response, and anti-Zionism became the most common expression of Jew-hatred by progressives who wouldn’t be caught dead on the Stormfront website. But an interesting thing happened: hating Israel led to hating Zionists, and what is a Zionist but a Jew? Some of the old themes came back, like the blood libel – only instead of making matzot from the blood of Christian children, the IDF was accused of stealing organs from dead Palestinians, or deliberately targeting Palestinian children.

On the right, the themes are reminiscent of the 19th century political antisemitism that Hitler adopted. It features hook-nosed Jewish financiers (“Rothschilds”) running the world, financing wars and revolutions, Jews controlling media, the arts and education, “polluting” the culture with sexual deviance, atheism, and of course communism. Tying it all together is an overarching conspiracy.

Today’s proponents of this theory blame the Jewish conspiracy for trying to destroy “white” culture by importing Muslims into Europe and the US, and empowering racial minorities (exemplified by the Movement for Black Lives in the US). They point to the over-representation of Jews in finance, media, academics, and – importantly – leftist political movements. As the taboos against individual Jew-hatred have weakened for Muslims and the Left, they have also been lifted for the extreme Right.

The explosive growth of social media has been accompanied by an ideology that nothing is out of bounds anymore. The internet’s filter bubble effect has driven both Left and Right to greater extremism, and the widespread reach of the net, augmented by Twitter and Facebook, has resulted in a perfect storm of Jew-hatred in the developed world.

An interesting example is the controversy over an article by the conservative psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, in which he tackles the question of whether the theory of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy makes sense. Peterson grants the over-representation of Jews in critical areas, but argues that the explanation lies in the higher average intelligence and prevalence of the personality trait of “openness to experience” (in part, creativity and intellectual curiosity – here is a test for this trait*) in Ashkenazi Jews. Combined with the principle that one should favor the simplest explanation for a given phenomenon (“Occam’s razor”), he concludes,

So, what’s the story? No conspiracy. Get it? No conspiracy. Jewish people are over-represented in positions of competence and authority because, as a group, they have a higher mean IQ. The effect of this group difference (approximately the difference between the typical high school student and the typical state college student) is magnified for occupations/interests that require high general cognitive ability. Equal over-representation may also occur in political movements associated with the left, because high IQ is associated with Openness to Experience, which is in turn associated with liberal/left-leaning political proclivities.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Ashkenazi Jews are over-represented in any occupations/interests for reasons other than intelligence and the associated effects of intelligence on personality and political belief. Thus, no conspiratorial claims based on ethnic identity need to be given credence. [emphasis in original]

As you can read in the comments to Peterson’s article, many of his readers (and almost all those who commented aren’t buying it). Some of them argue that the over-representation of Jews is a result of “cultural nepotism,” the propensity to hire or appoint people that are like yourself. There is a great deal of offensive antisemitism in the comments, but cultural nepotism is real and can’t be discounted. I have noticed that Hispanics are over-represented in non-academic staff at Fresno State University, and Yemenite Jews among municipal employees here in Rehovot. These are not exactly conspiracies, but they didn’t happen by accident either.

However, regardless of the way the over-representation developed, it is not proof of a conspiracy. As Peterson implies in the second paragraph above, a conspiracy is collusion for a purpose, and there is zero real evidence for such collusion. In addition, there is one very important personality trait that characterizes Jews which both Peterson and the conspiracy theorists ignore.

That is what I call, for lack of a better word, the fractious nature of the Jewish people. Everyone knows the joke about the two Jews marooned on a desert Island who immediately build three synagogues: one Ashkenazi, one Sephardic (a variation has Orthodox and Reform), and one that neither will set foot in. Jews tend to violently disagree about almost anything – a visit to Israel’s Knesset will establish this – and especially politics.

In particular, they disagree about Israel. The greatest anti-Zionists are always Jews: two newspapers that attack the Jewish state on a daily basis, the New York Times and Ha’aretz, are both owned by Jews and have numerous Jews on their staffs. Jewish anti-Israel organizations include J Street, If Not Now, Jewish Voice for Peace, and more. Anti-Israel Jews in more mainstream organizations like university Hillel Foundations and Jewish Community Relations Councils work to subvert previously pro-Israel groups.

Virtually all the Jewish Hollywood moguls that are often cited by conspiracy theorists supported the presidency of Barack Obama, the US president least friendly to Israel since its establishment.

Even inside Israel, there is an active contingent of Jews who work for Israeli NGOs that accept funding from hostile foreign governments to produce propaganda against the state and to promote “lawfare” against  the government and the IDF.

The state is just one of the subjects that Jews bitterly disagree upon, but it is central to the conspiracy theories. One of Israel’s greatest enemies, the financier George Soros, is of Jewish extraction (although he is not a practicing Jew in any sense). Conspiracy theorists who almost always include Soros as one of the leaders of the conspiracy also believe that the conspiracy influences the US to provide military aid to Israel. Believe me, no conspiracy that included Soros would do that!

The Jew-hating Right and Left are often in violent opposition, but they came together in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which I was surprised to find was supported by the American Nazi Party and David Duke, as well as leftist groups, Hezbollah and the Council on American-Islamic relations.

Similar conspiracy theories have been around since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were forged in the 19th century, and probably before that. The Protocols themselves, although known to be fiction, are still popular, especially in the Arab world but also in the West.

There have certainly been conspiracies in history, but the idea of a massive, worldwide cabal with great power that would have to include hundreds of members, and yet about which there is no real, documented evidence – although plenty of made-up stories – is so unlikely as to be considered impossible.

Peterson notes that “It hardly needs to be said that although conspiracies do occasionally occur, conspiracy theories are the lowest form of intellectual enterprise.”  He’s right.

_________________

* I took the test and came out “average,” because my high intellectual curiosity was balanced by my preference for routine and my conservative politics! So I am not sure about the utility of this concept.

Posted in Jew Hatred | 2 Comments

The Narrative

Posted on March 26, 2018 by Victor Rosenthal

Maybe arguments are not important. Maybe, as Jonathan Haidt (video, 1 hr. 32 m.) says, logical arguments are window dressing used to justify conclusions forced upon us by deep-seated emotional motivations. Maybe those who demand that we “free Palestine” on US campuses and UK streets simply disdain the Jewish people and their state. Maybe we should just tell them to go to hell and maintain our military deterrent capability.

Maybe. But the arguments against Israel all rest on the foundation of the Palestinian Narrative. Just in case there is anyone left who can be persuaded by facts and logical reasoning, it’s important to refute the Narrative. And in case the concept of international law hasn’t been so perverted by the perfidious UN and our enemies in Europe and the Mideast as to be completely worthless, it’s important to do so in order to provide a basis for legal rulings and diplomatic resolutions by international bodies.

Most importantly, in order to dispel the doubts planted in the minds of our remaining friends (few as they might be) by the propaganda pervading all kinds of media, educational institutions, churches and liberal synagogues, charities, and so many other institutions, it is imperative to refute the Narrative.

The Narrative has various forms and incarnations, which may be more or less persuasive. But they all make several main false claims:

Claim: The Palestinians were here first. They are natives; we are colonists. They have aboriginal rights. Sometimes they even claim to be descendants of Canaanites or Philistines who predated the Exodus from Egypt.
Claim: European Jews came to Palestine as a result of the Holocaust and stole the land belonging to Palestinians.
Claim: The actions of Israel amount to ethnic cleansing or even genocide against the Palestinians.
Claim: The definition of Israel as a Jewish state constitutes apartheid.
Claim: There is a “right of return” in international law that entitles the descendants of Arabs that fled in 1948 to “return to their homes” and/or receive compensation.
Claim: There is a “right of resistance to Israeli occupation” that justifies everything from rock-throwing to bombing buses and pizza parlors.

There is much more, but I think these are the most essential claims of the Narrative. It provides the basis for international legal and diplomatic attacks against Israel, as well as support for a Palestinian state on the grounds of aboriginal rights and self-determination.

***

The claim to aboriginal rights – which implies the right to live in one’s historic homeland as well as some degree of self-government and title to ancestral lands – is made by both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples (yes, there is a “Palestinian people” – I’ll get to that). Both peoples claim to be the extant people with the longest connection to the land. In order to decide between them we need to ask 1) how long have these peoples existed, and 2) to what extent are they connected to the land?

In the case of the Jewish people, there is evidence of the existence of a people with a unique language and religion who self-identified as yehudim (Jews) for at least several thousand years. The Bible tells about  their migration to the land of Israel and tells a story whose protagonists are God, the Jewish people, and the Land of Israel. Their religious rituals express the yearning of those exiled to return to the land, and have done so for hundreds of years. Even the Qu’ran refers to a Jewish homeland in the land of Israel.

There is a large amount archaeological evidence for the Jewish presence in the land of Israel back to the First Temple period (before 587 BCE), and even as far back as 1200 BCE. There is also genetic evidence that most of those today calling themselves “Jews” have a common origin. The strong taboo against intermarriage with non-Jews testifies to their belief that they are not just a religious group, but a nation. Their common origin, language, religion, customs, and – very importantly – self-identification establishes them as a people or nation.

What about the Palestinians? The fantasies about Canaanites and Philistines are just that, with those peoples gone centuries before the Common Era. Before the mid-1960s, the Arabs of Palestine did not even identify as a separate people, considering themselves part of the greater Arab nation. After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Palestinian Arab leadership argued that those parts of the empire which were to become the Palestine Mandate were actually “southern Syria,” with no unique political identity. The Palestinian Arabs themselves did not have a unique language or religion, and their origins were multiple. Although some were probably descended from native Jews or from the original 7th century Arab conquerors of Palestine, many Arab clans came much, much later.

Allen Hertz notes that disease, war and famines had greatly reduced the population in Palestine by the early 19th century, but

…from time to time, there have also been repeated waves of fresh migrants drawn from various ethno-religious groups, whether from adjacent regions or further afield. …

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, regional rulers like Zahir al-Umar (Bedouin), Ahmet al-Jazzar (Bosnian), and Mehmet Ali (Albanian) invited farmers and other Muslim migrants from Egypt, the Balkans, and elsewhere to help repopulate the land. In addition, there were always newcomers who arrived without authorization. For example, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Bedouin from neighboring regions significantly migrated to the Holy Land, where some became sedentary, as encouraged by the Ottomans.

In the second half of the 19th century, the Ottoman government from time to time sponsored settlement in the Holy Land by Muslim refugees — such as Tatars, Circassians, and Chechens who had to flee their homelands due to widespread Russian persecution. Thus, we can readily understand why the detailed article on greater “Palestine” in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (though egregiously omitting the Druze) refers to no fewer than twenty ethnic groups. Namely, listed among the locals are Arabs, Bedouin, Jews, Persians, Afghans, Nawar, Turks, Turkomans, Armenians, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Bosnians, Motawila, Kurds, Circassians, Egyptians, Sudanese, Algerians, and Samaritans. …

The 1930 Hope Simpson Report, the 1937 Peel Commission, and the local administration’s 1946 Survey of Palestine all agreed that there was not much effective control of land frontiers which, during the interwar period, remained mostly open to undocumented Arab migrants seeking opportunities in Western Palestine. The attraction there was the Jew-driven local economy which was famously rising faster than in the neighboring Arab countries. …

It is probably true that with a few exceptions, most of today’s Palestinian Arabs are descended from people who migrated into the region no earlier than 1830.

What finally melded the disparate collection of “Palestinians” into a Palestinian nation was opposition to the Jewish state. But even after 1948, Palestinian Arabs still saw themselves as part of a greater pan-Arab nation, and only after 1967 – under the tutelage of the KGB, which explained the public relations value of becoming a movement of national liberation – did they begin to refer to themselves as a nation.

***

The claim that the Jews colonized Palestine as a result of the Holocaust is popular, because it is usually followed by the argument that “native” Palestinians ought not to suffer as a result of the crimes of Nazi Germany. There is some irony inherent in this, when one considers that the leader of the pre-state Palestinian opposition to Jewish sovereignty, Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, aided Hitler by recruiting Muslims to serve in the SS and broadcasting Nazi propaganda in Arabic from Berlin for much of the war.

But not only were Jews present in Palestine since biblical times and more appropriately called “native” than the Arabs, but the idea and implementation of Jewish sovereignty began long before the Holocaust. Indeed, the pre-state yishuv had most of the institutions necessary for a sovereign state that could properly provide protection and services for its citizens in place by the 1920s and 1930s.

It should also be pointed out that the Jews did not take control of Palestine from the Arabs. There was never a Palestinian administration; the Ottoman Turks were supplanted by the British colonialists, and it was the British that were thrown out by the Zionists. One way to describe the events in Palestine in the first half of the 20th Century is as a struggle by the Jews to reestablish sovereignty and the Arabs to prevent them from doing so.

Land was not stolen from the Arabs by the Zionist settlers. It was purchased, at exorbitant prices, from landlords who were either absentees or rich local Arabs. It is true that after the War of Independence, land that had been abandoned by Arabs who fled was appropriated by the new government and became state land, which was then often leased to Jews. This was to some extent morally problematic, but it is hard to see what else the state could have done – especially considering the hostility of much of the Arab population, which had just been defeated in a war that would probably had ended in another genocide of the Jews if it had gone the other way.

***

The claim that Israel is guilty of ethnic cleansing or genocide is an important part of the Narrative. The accusation of genocide is easily refuted: in 1960 there were about 1.3 million Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean; by 2015 this number had grown to about 5.1 million. By contrast, the real genocide of the Jewish population in Europe by the Nazis reduced it from 9.5 to 3.8 million between 1939 and 1945. The “evidence” given for genocide consists of anecdotes about individual Palestinians who were killed – almost all of these in conflict with police or IDF forces – or casualties in war. In neither case was an effort made to kill Palestinians simply because they are Palestinian, and indeed, the IDF takes unprecedented measures to protect enemy civilians in wartime.

Entire books have been written about the 550,000 – 700,000 Arab refugees who fled their homes before or during the 1948 war (about 160,000 remained and ultimately became citizens of Israel). However, it seems clear that only a minority of the refugees were expelled by Israeli soldiers; the majority left out of fear of the fighting, especially as a result of false rumors of Jewish brutality (I would call it psychological projection: they expected the Jews to do what they would have done in similar circumstances). By contrast, every single Jew in those parts of Palestine that were captured by Jordan and Egypt in 1948 was either killed, driven out at gunpoint, or forced to flee.

***

The claim that Israel is an apartheid state also does violence to the language, and to the history of South Africa where actual apartheid existed. Palestinians and their supporters say that the fact that Arabs in Judea and Samaria do not live under the normal Israeli legal system and do not have the right to vote constitutes apartheid. Some even say there is “apartheid” inside the Green Line because of discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel.

In Judea and Samaria, at least 95% of the Arab population lives in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Theoretically they can vote in PA elections, although the PA hasn’t held one in 9 years, for reasons of its own. But although the PA is something less than a state, without an army or control of its borders or airspace, it does control the economic, social and cultural life of its population. It is responsible for policing, education, media, public health, and more. The PA is another country for all practical purposes. No Jews live in those areas. Indeed, Jews are forbidden by Israel to enter PA-controlled areas for their own good, since they are likely to be lynched.

Real apartheid, as it was practiced in South Africa, consisted of parallel societies for whites and “coloreds.” Every aspect of life was regulated according to skin color. Within the Green Line, Arabs and Jews have the same rights, including the right to vote and hold political office. There are no segregated drinking fountains or beaches as in apartheid South Africa. Jews and Arabs are not forbidden to marry or have relationships. There is a certain degree of social separation which is not legally mandated, but is a result of cultural differences, and some discrimination. But as those who lived in apartheid South Africa will testify, there is simply no comparison.

Israel is a Jewish state, which means several things. One of the most important is the Law of Return, which allows a Jew anywhere in the world to come to Israel and acquire citizenship. Yes, there is no “law of return” for Palestinians. But this is not apartheid. Any country has the right to establish rules for immigration, and it can use any criteria it wants to. All Israeli citizens have equal rights, but not everyone in the world has an equal right to become a citizen.

“Jewish state” also means that Israel has a state religion, Judaism. There are numerous countries that have state religions, including all Arab countries, the UK, Finland, Italy, and numerous others. Judaism has a special status in Israel, with a government funded Ministry of Religious Services that provides financial assistance to Jewish institutions. However, there is little or no interference with the practice of other religions.

***

The claim that there is a “right of return” for Arab refugees is one of the most contentious claims in the Narrative. There is no such general right in international law; although the Geneva Conventions call for humane treatment of refugees, there is no requirement that they be returned to their place of origin. Further, the UN treats Palestinian refugees differently from any other refugees in the world, by allowing refugee status to be hereditary. The original 550,000 – 700,000 Arab refugees of 1948 have thus grown to 5 or 6 million today (depending on whom you ask). The Arab countries in which the refugees reside – including the PA – refuse to countenance any solution for these people other than “return” to “their homes” in Israel.

The right of return (or compensation, for those who prefer not to return) is sometimes said to be guaranteed by UN General Assembly resolution 194. But the resolution is non-binding, and applies equally to Jewish refugees. It says that refugees “wishing to … live in peace with their neighbors” should be allowed to return “home,” and certainly was not intended for grandchildren yet unborn to do so. It also calls for Jerusalem “to be placed under international control.”

***

The claim that there is a “right to resist Israeli occupation,” and that such a right justifies Palestinian terrorism against Israel, is a perverse and entirely bogus claim. One formulation argues that the “right” comes from the UN’s 1960 decolonization declaration, and the 4th Geneva Convention. The argument is that because of the illegality of the occupation under the 4th Geneva Convention, Palestinians are subjected to “subjugation, domination and exploitation,” a violation of their human rights forbidden by the decolonization declaration. But together with “the basic right of all human beings to resist their being killed and harmed, and a society to take armed actions to protect itself”  this supposedly implies that “all Palestinian attempts to lift the yoke of Israeli oppression” are legitimate.

This is sheer nonsense, from start to finish. Judea and Samaria are not colonies, they are disputed territories that are arguably legitimate parts of Israel. Even if you believe that they are “occupied territories,” the 4th Geneva convention does not make the occupation illegal. And we mustn’t forget that at least 95% of the Arab population there is ruled directly by the PA, not by Israel. The so-called “resistance” is a murderously violent campaign whose objective is to cause the Jewish state to collapse so it can be replaced by an Arab-dominated one.

But supposedly this argument is strong enough to legitimize murder, even mass murder as has been committed multiple times by Palestinian terrorists!

***

The Narrative is seductive to the uninformed, especially if they are predisposed to support the underdog, whom they believe to be the Palestinians.

Perhaps that’s the final falsehood of the Narrative. The poor, oppressed Palestinians vs. mighty Israel. But of course for all these years they had the entire Arab world with its seemingly infinite oil money behind them. And of course the Europeans, who never met a Jew they didn’t (openly or covertly) dislike.

But now the geopolitical situation is changing, and the Arab nations have bigger problems than the pesky Jews (who never really were a threat to them anyway). The Europeans may not have noticed it yet, but they do too. Much bigger problems.

Maybe now is the time to deploy facts and logic against the Narrative?

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